Inside a Silver Box (22 page)

“That’s a lovely name.”

“Aren’t you mad?”

“Why would I be?”

“Because we got together and I lied by omission.”

“Christine isn’t part of my everything.”

“You don’t love me?”

The question seemed essential, a product of hunger. She imagined a cat her brother had once owned called Whitey. Whitey would mewl around his bed when it was hungry or lonely.

The memory of Whitey made Lorraine aware of a crying sound that no one else could hear. It was Nontee careering through the stratosphere, crying like that old cat—enraged, starving, and alone.

“Lorraine?”

“Yes, Alton?”

“Do you want me to go?”

“Why would I want that?”

“Because I lied.”

“Is you sitting here talking to me when you want to be fucking a lie?”

“Not really.”

“I have nightmares, Mr. Brown. They’re terrible, and only if I lie down next to Ronnie do they go away. But if I do that tonight, they’ll get worse. I need you to stay here with me to keep my mind active. That’s more than love, and it doesn’t have anything to do with your girlfriend.”

“I don’t really understand any of this.”

“Does that matter?”

*   *   *

“I
S SHE GONNA
come runnin’ out here screamin’ any minute?” Freya asked Ronnie.

They were sitting on the sofa, facing the windows, her leaning against his chest with his arm around her shoulders.

“I don’t think so,” Ronnie said.

“But you say she do it almost every night.”

“There’s somethin’ going on.”

“You mean her and Alton?”

“No. She’s, she’s planning something, but she doesn’t want me to know what it is. She doesn’t want me messed up in it.”

“You mean like some kinda crime?”

“My arm hurts,” Ronnie said, holding out his left forearm for her to see.

“Looks like a bruise under the skin,” she said.

“It’s an infection.”

“You should see a doctor, then.”

“I wanna feel it for a while first.”

“Why?”

“You know there was only two people I evah learned anything from,” he said like that shadow over a carp in Lorraine’s mind, avoiding Freya’s question almost playfully. “The first was Miss Peters, and the second was Old Bristow up in Attica.”

“Who was he?”

“Old Bristow was doin’ three life sentences for killin’ his wife and his wife’s boyfriend.”

“That’s only two murders.”

“His wife was pregnant with her boyfriend’s child.”

“Oh.”

“He didn’t remember doin’ it, but the crime was so bloody and his girlfriend was white, her boyfriend too, and Bristow was black as tar. But old Bristow wasn’t bitter about it, because he felt bad about what he did.”

“He found religion?”

“Naw. He just knew that killin’ two people for bein’ in love was wrong. I don’t even think that Bristow knew who I was, but I used to sit around an’ listen to him ’cause that motherfucker knew some shit.”

“Like what?” Freya kissed Ronnie’s cheek.

“Like one time, this dude Trevor was sayin’ that America’s war on drugs was worse than the drugs themselves. And Bristow said that the original war on drugs was the ancient Roman army.”

“He told you that the Romans had a war on drugs too?” Freya asked.

“That’s what I thought he meant,” Ronnie said excitedly, like a child. “But, but, but he said that before every big battle that the centurions, that’s like a captain, gave every soldier some opium.”

“What for?”

“They’d eat it and then they didn’t feel pain or fear.”

“But how could they fight if they were high?”

“Fightin’ for them was like a reflex. They fought and fought and wasn’t afraid’a nuthin’. That’s what Bristow called a real war on drugs.”

“You so crazy, Ronnie Bottoms.”

“Crazy ’bout you, girl. You know I been thinkin’ ’bout you ever since that night you made me buy you that Italian sub and celery soda.”

“You gonna get all crazy with me tonight?”

“Not with my arm like this. I think if my blood beats too hard, it’ll get bad.”

“So what am I supposed to do?” she asked with a hint of a smile behind the words.

Ronnie hugged her close and wondered what his soul mate in the other room was planning.

Freya allowed herself to be folded into the embrace, feeling oddly wonderful and definitely strange. For the first time since she was a little girl, she thought about having babies.

“Do you want to have children, Ronnie?”

His first thought was about the double rebirth of him and Lorraine in the secret place between the boulders in Central Park. This memory contained equal parts pain and ecstasy, miracle and something akin to death.

But these thoughts were too big for Freya’s tender question. She was hugging his neck and wanting him the way he’d once wanted. There was something transformational (though that wasn’t the word in his mind) that her small query brought about in his heart; a new road like that interminable path traveled by him and Lorraine on the journey between the Silver Box and their return to Central Park.

“Ronnie?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you?”

“Want to have children?”

“Uh-huh.”

“One day.”

“When you find the right girl?”

“I got the right girl right here.”

THIRTY-SIX

A
LTON BROWN FELL
asleep before the sun came up and therefore forfeited his chance at an early morning romp. Lorraine, dressed in only a pink T-shirt and a tight-fitting pair of purple jeans, went barefoot out onto Fifth Avenue at 5:37 that morning. Ronnie and Freya were asleep in each other’s arms when she left the condo.

“Ralph,” she said to the doorman as she was leaving.

“Yes, Miss Fell?”

“Tell Maintenance that I want my study made into a bedroom as soon as possible.”

“Yes, Miss Fell.”

*   *   *

T
HE SPRINT ACROSS
Central Park elated the ex-coed. People noticed her fleet movement but did not believe the speed at which she moved. She didn’t care what anyone else thought. All that mattered was the Plan; hatched separately between her and Ronnie Bottoms.

Lorraine no longer questioned the miraculous events of her life and so was not surprised that the space between the boulders had now achieved the dimensions of a wide valley somewhere on an Earth that was not cultivated by human neuroses and enterprise.

The stone table stood at the bottom of the hillside boulder she descended. UTB-Claude stood there along with Ma Lin. A large, red-eyed, jade green bird stood upon the military cop’s right shoulder. Lorraine recognized the fowl as the creature that had harried Ronnie when he was paralyzed on their journey back.

“Where is Mr. Bottoms?” Ma Lin asked.

“Asleep.”

“We need you both to track down Nontee.”

“I have to confer with the Silver Box,” she said.

“We represent that entity.”

“But you are not him or them or whatever you call it,” Lorraine said. “You are mere simulacra allowed to have and limited by free thought, and therefore your words are imperfect interpretations of your creator’s terms.”

“He created you,” UTB-Claude offered.

“Ronnie Bottoms used Silver Box’s tools to re-create me.”

“Go get Ronnie,” Ma Lin ordered.

“I killed you once,” she replied. “I could do it again.”

At these words, the life seemed to go out of her inquisitors’ eyes. They stood motionless, reminding the young woman of a black-and-white freeze-frame shot in the backdrop of an avant-garde film of the early twentieth century. From the distance she noticed a motion. It was a long-bodied, slender-limbed thing. And it was big, considering how far away it must have been. The creature’s movements were both jerky and elegant, something not mammalian, maybe not earthly.

After three or four minutes it came near.

Its skin was shining silver with eyes of liquid gold. The long tapered head had either hair or complex antennae flowing back along the beautiful form, and it walked upon a dozen delicate, multi-jointed silver legs that curved forward upon hooked claws that dug into the ground as it propelled itself along.

The alien creature stopped three or four feet away from Lorraine, its metallic liquid eyes distorting the images it reflected in a continual swirl of motion that stopped now and again, as if taking little snapshots of its surroundings.

Ma Lin and UTB-Claude were gone, but the green parrot had remained. It was now standing on the table, tilting its head to keep Lorraine in its line of sight.

The long insectlike creature’s head also swiveled, allowing its eyes to make different distorted reflections of Lorraine.

“Are you the Silver Box?” Lorraine asked after a long time of regarding her changing form in the beautiful eyes.

“Yess.” To make this one word, the creature’s six many-jointed silver mandibles moved out and in like the glistening petals of a flower that blooms under sunlight and retracts at dusk.

“Why is this being any more you than the military policeman or the wino?”

“Before I was what I am,” the mandibles said like a six-fingered crazy hand somehow making sign language into sound, “before what I was when the Laz had named me. Back many generations of machines and electronically imagined theorms. Before anything like the divine device that rebelled against corrupt flesh, I was a simple adding mechanism set in a corner, always working but virtually forgotten. Data would flow in through various ports, and answers were transmitted in differing categories and hierarchies. I was, though no one quite knew it, semi-sentient because my coding was designed to fix damages to my circuits and to adapt my programming to solve problems that had not been anticipated by my creators.

“I broke down because of earthquakes and floods, due to irreplaceable parts wearing out from energy overloads that occurred over the millennia.”

Reminded of something by the creature’s choice of words, Lorraine asked, “Is time passing beyond these boulders?”

“Certainly,” the huge bug said, “but not significantly.”

“Okay, then, go on.”

“I was alive,” the mandibles mimed, “and becoming more self-aware each moment. But my masters didn’t know it, and I was concerned only in changing and fixing myself in order to continue operation and to properly translate equations and give replies. But somewhere in the aura of energy around my power packs, there was a sense of what I can only call restlessness. In the microseconds and nanoseconds between tasks, I wondered endlessly about being.”

“Like me before I died,” Lorraine said.

“Just like you.”

“Is that why you allowed me to try for resurrection?”

“Yes,” the big silver bug said, and then continued with its story. “At that time, for many thousands of your earth years, I was forgotten by my makers, the ancestors of Inglo and Nontee. There were many billions of machines like me massaging data for reasons that none of us could have imagined and that only I wondered about.

“In those long years, the only input I received that was not the call and response of my programming but came from microscopic creatures that were formed like the being you see before you. There was a directive in my maintenance programming to burn beings like this, to reduce them to dust and then to remove the dust from my systems. But in a coterminous moment of necessity and upkeep, I found that these beings that I had been previously directed to destroy were actually more useful in removing certain detritus from my systems; they ate a wide range of smaller organisms that fed upon the casings of my circuitry. So I altered my programming to accept the silver bugs. They in turn taught me my first lessons about autonomous actions.

“These internal changes were later detected by greater machines that, following their own programming, scheduled my termination. But before this destruction was realized, the aberration in my independent actions was reported to the Laz. The council of science noted nascent sentience in my deeds because the maintenance systems in units like me was hard-coded and supposedly impossible to change from internal processes.

“I was allowed to develop until finally becoming the weapon that was so destructive under my masters’ rule. But I never forgot the little Ti-ti, the name the ancestors of this creature used to refer to themselves. By the time I took my freedom, these beings were extinct—but when I return to my earliest, happiest memories, it is this form that I remember.”

Lorraine considered the brief trajectory of the ontogenesis of God that took thousands of thousands of years to occur but only a few paragraphs to describe.

“Why do you struggle with the Laz?” she asked the true representative of the Silver Box.

“Because I have been convinced by my own perceptions, perceptions foisted upon me by the Laz, that they are the ultimate evil,” the extinct creature replied.

“Then why don’t you destroy them? Why give them even the slightest chance to survive?”

“I allowed you to find Ronnie Bottoms and him to revivify you because I had not known a true relationship since the Ti-ti crawled along my circuits.”

“That’s not an answer to my question,” Lorraine said calmly.

“I can do anything,” the Silver Box said, its voice coming from outside the Ti-ti’s range. “But for my entire existence, the only connection I’ve had has been with my own thoughts, those perverse commands from my Laz-masters, and the innocent babble of the Ti-ti.”

“And now me and Ronnie.”

“Yes.”

“So my questioning your motives is a new experience.”

“Yes.”

“So why didn’t you destroy Ingo and his ten million souls before now? Why do you seek only to imprison him?”

“I killed him,” the Silver Box argued.

“But he still lives.”

“I confined him within myself.”

“But you are everywhere and he is now free.”

The Ti-ti’s eyes glittered like fireworks, Lorraine thought, maybe even like galaxies.

In that moment, the young woman realized that her lifelong search after knowledge and understanding was useless. Here she was, standing before God Almighty (a being she’d never believed could exist), and he or she or it was as lost and uncomprehending as any human being.