Inside a Silver Box (3 page)

But there was nothing. The man who came from this car had said that there was a young man threatening an older gentleman. There they were, right in front of him, but there was no threat.

“You just watch it, Bottoms,” the cop said.

“Watch what?” Ronnie asked, wishing he hadn’t.

“You gettin’ smart with me, man?” Tressman threatened.

“No,” Ronnie said, looking down while raising his fingers, leaving the heels of his hands on his knees.

The hand gesture reminded the paralyzed-but-still-conscious Ma Lin of the wings of an osprey rising up from its body.

“Okay, then,” Tressman asserted. He waited for a breath and a half before moving on to the opposite end of the subway car.

“You see?” Lorraine said to Ronnie. “All I have to do is tell somebody about what you did and they will put you in jail forever.”

*   *   *

T
HE OLD MAN
and the young one had to change trains from the uptown A to the downtown C.

When they climbed out of the subway station, Lorraine decided to partially release her hold on the ex–military policeman. She got somewhat fatigued, keeping his will locked away from voluntary motion. At some point along the way, she realized that all she had to do was think about where she wanted him to go and he would do so without having to be completely dominated.

“Where are we going?” Ma Lin asked Ronnie Bottoms when they entered the park.

“I thought you knew?” the thug replied.

“She does,” Ma said. “But now it is me talking.”

Ronnie stopped and stared at the smaller man. “She?”

“The spirit,” Ma said. “I was sitting there thinking about my lottery number and then she was in my mind, making me talk to you.”

“You sure it’s a woman?” Ronnie asked.

“Yes.”

The two gazed at each other and then they were walking again.

“It don’t matter where we goin’,” Ronnie said, and they were silent until they reached the big rocks that hid the jury-rigged tomb.

With a gentle nudge in the old man’s mind, Lorraine was able to get him to climb with Ronnie up the side of the boulder and into the crevice. When Ma Lin began to get nervous, Lorraine dominated the older man’s mind again, temporarily blocking out his consciousness completely.… That was how she came upon the memory brought up by his fear:

*   *   *

I
T WAS A
long time ago, before Lorraine was born. It was hot and very humid in Saigon, but young Ma Lin wasn’t bothered by the heat. He was walking through a back alley doorway that was covered by a hanging cloth curtain. He had a pistol in his hand.

The child was no more than fourteen, and small for her age at that; but in her eyes was experience well beyond adolescent years. She looked up at the military policeman, knowing what was going to happen next.

Two American GIs had been assassinated by a child throwing a paper bag bomb into their open-topped jeep. U.S. Army Intelligence had identified the girl, and it was Ma Lin’s job to mete out justice.

Her eyes widened just a bit. Lin held his pistol up and shot her in the forehead. In his mind at the time, he felt that he was doing her a favor. After all, she had no life, no future, and if he took her back to the Americans, they would have tortured her, justifying their actions by saying she was part of a secret Vietcong cabal. If he let her go, she’d just throw another bomb. This execution was the best possible answer for all concerned.

There were many deaths like this in Ma Lin’s memory. They had lain there passively, like eggs in a carton, until he crawled into the space between the boulders and realized how perishable that child’s life was; how easily he could die without even the mildest concern in his killer’s heart.

*   *   *

U
P FROM UNDER
stone and earth, partially wrapped in Ronnie’s plastic sleeping tarp, they pulled the bloated, stinking corpse that had been Lorraine Fell. Of the three of them, Ma Lin was the only one used to the company of cadavers. His indifference to the fact of death somehow girded Lorraine’s spirit.

“This man is going to leave now,” she said through the medium of her temporary slave. “When he is gone, put your hand on the body’s head.”

“Why?” Ronnie wanted to know.

“To undo what you’ve done.”

“She’s dead,” he replied. “Very, very dead.”

“And do you want to leave her like that?” Lorraine asked with Ma Lin’s mouth.

Lorraine accompanied her captive up over the boulder and down to the tarmac path in Central Park. Then, she disappeared for a while, only to come back into existence when Ronnie put his palm against her dead body’s forehead.

*   *   *

I
N HER ABSENCE,
Ronnie lost his appetites—all of them. Maybe it was the smell of the corpse, but he didn’t think so. The dead girl’s gray face was sad and slack and he felt sorry that he’d killed her; not guilty, not yet. He felt remorse for the dead girl through the emotions he had for his mother. He wished that someone would take him to his mother’s grave and say that he could bring her back by touching her head.

He wished they would.

FIVE

R
ONNIE FELT AN
oily, slithering shock travel up his arm like a living thing burrowing under the skin. It was a frightening sensation but at the same time so powerful that he bowed his head as his mother used to make him do in church when the minister was saying the prayer.

He could see Lorraine clearly but not the space she was in. He was sorry that he killed her. He wanted to say that he’d only done it because she was screaming, but this seemed to him like a poor excuse.

“How are you doin’ this?” he asked.

“The Silver Box,” Lorraine said.

“Huh?”

“I need you to resurrect me, Ronnie.”

“Like Jesus?”

“No,” she said, “like a man making up for his mistake, like Ma Lin will never be able to do for all those poor people he killed.”

“The chink?”

“He is from Vietnam,” Lorraine said. “He was a soldier who murdered his own people because he thought it was his duty.”

Ronnie felt the truth of her words without images or specific details. He knew that the little old man had crossed the same lines he had. This made him think that he wasn’t alone.

“You had no right to do to me what you did,” Lorraine said. “I didn’t do anything to you. You had no right.”

“No,” Ronnie said.

“No?” the spirit screamed.

“I did not have the right to take your life.”

“Give it back to me.” Lorraine’s words echoed in his mind.

Ronnie closed his eyes and then opened them again. He found himself alone on his knees with his left hand on the stinking corpse head. On the ground next to the body lay a white stone about the size of a softball. He gripped the stone with his right hand and …

*   *   *

T
HE STINGING, OILY,
writhing feeling that had been traveling up his left arm changed directions. Instead of flowing into him, it was tugging at his insides, wanting him to give in and release.

“You killed me,” Lorraine said. She was standing somewhere out of sight.

“So what you want?”

“Life.”

The word set off a series of connections in Ronnie’s mind. He saw himself raging and lashing out with a dispassionate eye. He didn’t understand why the man he was had been so angry and violent and just plain mad.

The metaphysical snake pulled at his arm like a playful dog wanting the ball to be thrown.

Ronnie saw his mother sitting in her chair in front of the TV. Her low-cut blouse revealed the tattoo of the name
Missy
on the upper part of her left breast. Grandmama Missy, his mother’s mother.

Ronnie’s mind’s eye settled on that word tattooed over a red heart on dark brown skin. He would place his cheek next to there and listen to the deep pounding of Big Mama’s real heart. She would put her hand on his side and hum some song she’d forgotten the words to. And he was so happy.…

The snake that was devouring and pulling on his arm was blind and writhing. The motion of its body was both language spoken and language heard.

Listening to Big Mama’s heart; that was life. And it was so beautiful and wonderful and safe that Ronnie would dream of that beat all through the night. If he woke up without her there, he would scream until she came and gathered him into the deep drumbeat of her embrace.

Then, from a place in the pit of his gut, Ronnie Bottoms felt the surge of passion, love, and freedom. It was like the magma flow of volcanoes that Miss Peters talked about in third grade science. The hot surging energy rose up through his chest past the left shoulder and down his arm into the incorporeal snake’s maw. Ronnie’s right hand gripped the white stone and it hummed in response. His bones vibrated as the whole history of his rage and anger turned miraculously into the humming love of his mother and the desire of the woman he’d killed.

It was like an orgasm that wouldn’t stop, an outpouring of love and rage and power and, and, and with God holding his shoulders so that he didn’t spiral off that perfect pussy pushing up against his unrelenting thrust.

At some point Ronnie realized that he was dying, that a man cannot come so long and hard without giving up his life. But he didn’t care about dying, because Lorraine had come into view like a green island after many years on the open sea. She was vast and beautiful and full of strange music that blared and insinuated, sang and laughed.

He felt his bones cracking and theoretical venom flowing into his veins. He squeezed that rock so hard that he thought his fingers might break. He opened his eyes and saw an endless plane of scarlet. Lorraine was singing crazily somewhere to his left while the stone purred like a sleepy tiger to the right.

The last thing Ronnie thought before losing consciousness was that he might get ripped apart between the python and tiger. Instead of fear, this notion called up the anticipation of ecstasy. If he were torn open, his essence could work its way back toward all the drifting souls in the universe, into outer space that really, he realized, was not empty at all.

*   *   *

T
HE SILVER BOX
was enthralled with the passage of energy between Ronnie and the murdered woman. Lorraine Fell’s extracted and reconstituted consciousness hollered while the young man poured out his matter and his soul for her. The sympathy, the music between them was a perfect counterweight to the ignorance and hatred that formed these two frail entities. So much power was released that the Box had to erect a barrier between them and the rest of the park.

The understanding occurring, there under the pebble moon, in an almost forgotten corner of the universe, was a synchronicity so complex that Silver Box would have had to snuff out an entire galaxy to generate enough power to equal it. The divine machine’s perception units turned one after the other toward this deific phenomenon. So intent was Silver Box on Ronnie and Lorraine that for an infinitesimal fraction of a nanosecond, it forgot all else.

SIX

R
ONNIE BOTTOMS WAS
wrapped in sleep that was both deep and innocent. When he awoke he could not remember ever experiencing such peace and revitalization. He smiled at the morning sun that lit his face, warmed his skin. Everything was different but he couldn’t remember how his life had changed. He had been in jail and then was out again, he was going to rob a man and then decided not to rob him … no. The man spoke to him … no. The girl …

Ronnie sat up and stared down upon the woman sleeping a few feet away. She was wearing a soiled jogger’s suit. She looked familiar … and not.

“It is what you would call a miracle,” a voice said.

Ronnie turned to look behind him and saw an elderly and tall black man wearing a white suit and a red shirt. This man was barefoot and his smile beatific.

“What is?” Ronnie asked, marveling at the musical tone of his own voice.

“What happened before—” The man stopped to consider his next words. “I mean what happened last night.”

“I don’t exactly remember,” Ronnie said. “I did somethin’ bad, right?”

“We all have,” the tall and elegant and very dark man said.

“Who are you?” Ronnie asked.

“I used to be Claude Festerling from South Carolina,” the man said, and then he squatted down, sinking his fingers into the hard stone beneath his haunches. “But I drank too much wine and crawled up in here one day, fell asleep, and never woke up. You know a man gets so old and drunk that one day he’s just got to lay his burden down.”

Ronnie didn’t remember the man’s body being there before. He didn’t understand how a man could dig his fingers into solid stone.

“When was that?” the younger man asked.

“Time’s a funny thing but that were 1969, the way people around here see it. July nineteen, Claude Festerling’s last day on Earth.”

“So you’re like a ghost?”

“Like that.”

“You say you used to be Claude whatever, who are you now?”

The black man smiled once more, as if Ronnie were a student who gave the right answer without being asked a question.

“Should we wake her up?” Used-to-be-Claude asked, gesturing toward Lorraine’s prone figure.

Ronnie turned to look at the somewhat familiar young woman and she sat up as if the men’s attention had beckoned her. The first thing she did was to look down at her hands. She gasped and caressed one with the other. Then she bounded toward Ronnie and wrapped her arms around his neck.

“You did it!” she cried. “You brought me back!”

“I guess I did,” Ronnie said, hardly believing his own words.

“I’m so happy that you’re alive,” Lorraine said with both sadness and gratitude in her gaze.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Ronnie asked.

Without answering, Lorraine released him, moving back a step. Ronnie got to look at her. The chain of events of the past few weeks came back to him. He remembered with clarity he never had before about killing the girl and leaving her body in a hole in the ground.