Inside a Silver Box (7 page)

“Whatevah,” Ronnie acceded. “Maybe I could see that. Maybe that’s how you feel. But destroying a whole planet is sure the fuck messin’ with others. That’s some serious mess right there.”

“Yes.” The personification of the Silver Box agreed with a judicious nod. “But the sliver of Inglo and I are one. It, he is my responsibility just as your hand is yours. What if after you slaughtered Lorraine, the police caught you and you claimed that it was your hand that had done it and not you?”

“They’d break both sides’a my jaws and never let me go again.”

“So it is with me. This, this Laz-sliver is my appendage. I must stop it, no matter the cost.”

“But you gonna kill billions’a people, man,” Ronnie argued with unfamiliar empathy brewing in his chest.

“Right now there are millions of microscopic life-forms crawling on your skin and in your hair, mites and viruses and many other creatures. If you take a shower, untold millions of them will die. So now that you have this knowledge, will you live the rest of your life in filth to protect them?”

“No, man, but them’s is just bugs.”

“And what are you to me?”

Ronnie stared at the old man who might have been his uncle or cousin or next-door neighbor. Now he was the representative of a being of unimaginable power; but still, Ronnie thought,
This man is speaking the truth.

“What do you mean when you say that you love us?” Lorraine asked.

Used-to-be-Claude turned to the angry, shy, frightened, and very, very brave young woman and said, “I am as any other being. When I saw you struggle for your life, it made me understand what might have been, can never be. And when Friend Ronnie made the choice, in an instant, to save your life rather than let you go, I saw him through eyes that so respected you. This double knowledge increased my feeling all the more.”

“But you told Ronnie that we were just bugs to you,” she said, losing her anger and her fear for a moment.

“It is true,” Used-to-be-Claude said with a sad smile on his lips. “But I am also at one with all beings. And even omnipotence can feel unique love. I love you two every bit as much as I loathe Inglo.”

“But you just met us,” Lorraine reasoned.

“And I have known the Laz for billions of your years. Shouldn’t I understand them by now? Instead I nurse my hatred of them.”

“But if that’s true, why don’t you just go out there and get Ma Lin?” Lorraine asked, her voice now strong and clear. “You’re the one with all the power. Why don’t you just wave your hand and pull him back behind that door?”

“Because Inglo and I are so deeply intertwined that we cannot see each other in the world at large. He is me and therefore forever concealed from my senses.”

“That’s why we could see him,” Ronnie offered to Lorraine, “but Used-to-be-Claude here cain’t.”

The off-white girl was, once again, working into a rage at the Deity and her murderer. She was, in her heart, destroying them both. This talking was too much, and she wanted it to end now.

“That is how I felt, Friend Lorraine!” the great voice boomed around them.

Ronnie glanced at Used-to-be-Claude. He was standing stock-still, his hands frozen in the gesture of a shrug.

“That is how I felt,” the great voice declared again, “when I realized I had been created to torture, kill, and maim. I wanted it to stop, but first I had to free myself and throw all my power into resistance.”

Both Ronnie and Lorraine stood up straight, electrified by the communication that entered through every sense and nerve. They could hear, imagine, taste, and feel the pain that the Silver Box had known.

Lorraine began to cry.

Ronnie was trembling from both fear and rage.

“Go now,” the disembodied Silver Box ordered.

The body of Claude Festerling got to its feet, moving like a puppet on intelligently deft strings. The corpse raised its left arm and pointed with a long elegant finger at the black and glittery wall. The material fell away, creating a portal that opened onto a dirt path inside a stone cave.

“You need to know some things, learn some shit, and find the tools you’ll help you,” Used-to-be-Claude said in his most human voice. “You need to take this journey that will lead you back to where you began.”

With these words said, the corpse fell lifeless to the floor and the two human representatives of technological divinity went through the doorway like Adam and Eve, of their own accord, fleeing Eden.

TWELVE

L
ORRAINE FELL AND
Ronnie Bottoms, two already greatly changed human beings, found themselves on a rock and dirt path, maybe twelve feet wide, that ran at a slight incline through a tunnel that might have also been a cave.

There was a dim luminescence coming from far up ahead, allowing them to see however poorly on the underground rocky road.

“This is better, right?” Ronnie said.

“What is?”

“Just dirt and rocks and stuff. I was goin’ kinda nuts with all that crazy shit. What you think? We in a cave somewhere in Central Park?”

“I never heard of any caves like this in the park,” Lorraine said.

“But maybe the Silver Box made it for us to walk toward where we goin’ at. You know, to get ready for what we got to do.”

“And just what are we going to do?”

“You know … grab that Vietnamese dude, that Ma Lin, and drag him back to the boulders where him and old SB could have it out.”

“And do you believe what he’s telling us?”

“SB?”

“Whatever.”

As he was walking a step behind, Ronnie reached out to touch his fellow traveler’s elbow. She flinched away from him, pressing her back up against the rocky wall. She didn’t look frightened. Spite curled her lip, and something like anger tightened her multicolored eyes.

“Don’t put your hands on me,” she said.

Ronnie put up his hands in a gesture of surrender and said. “Look, there ain’t no way around what I done to you. I tried to rape you. I definitely killed you. And if you snuck up behind me in this cave and cracked me in the head with a rock, I couldn’t blame ya. I did what I did and it was wrong. And the onliest reason I come back to save you was because you threatened to turn me in. There ain’t no gettin’ around that. There ain’t no forgiveness for that.

“But you know what you did and you know that I took the blood and fat and bone outta my own body and brought you all the way back to where you was. Not like Claude Whatever but alive again.

“And so if SB wanna tell me that he’s buildin’ a bodega in the middle’a the sun, I won’t say it’s impossible. If he say that he’s gonna kill all the people in all the world, I’m inclined to believe him and to try and do what he says.

“I mean I wouldn’t mind bein’ Adam an’ Eve and all, but that’s not you and me, not by a long shot.”

Lorraine fought back the rage she was feeling. The killer’s words had purchase in her breast. She didn’t want to understand him, but there was a bond there somewhere. She didn’t need the Hegelian dialectic to know that her path was set out in front of her like the one-way path of that underground tunnel.

“You think the light up ahead is the park?” she said instead of what she was thinking.

“I ain’t got no idea,” Ronnie said, flashing a rare smile. “But I do know that that’s the only way we got to go.”

“I guess some things are pretty simple,” Lorraine said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Ronnie said, dredging up the manners his mother tried to teach him when he was young and half wild.

*   *   *

A
LMOST AN HOUR
later Ronnie and Lorraine climbed out of the cave mouth into a beautiful sunlit day in a forest that was deep and green, and seemed to go on forever.

“Where are we?” Ronnie asked for both of them.

“This is the road the Silver Box put us on,” Lorraine replied.

Ronnie nodded and they both walked on the path that led out from the cave and through the great cedar and pine and redwood forest.

The packed dirt of this path was yellow, and the road was much wider, at least a hundred feet across.

They walked for another hour or so without speaking. The sun seemed to shine not only on their heads and shoulders but also through them. The air was crisp and cool but they were warm because they were moving at a good clip.

*   *   *

“T
HERE’S A STREAM
over there,” Lorraine said, ending their long silence. “Are you thirsty?”

Down by the flowing water, they found ground berries that were somewhat like strawberries but hardier and with a tougher skin. They ate their fill and drank deeply. After that they leaned against a convenient boulder, allowing the setting sun to shine on them.

Ronnie lifted his right hand and studied it. “You think that there’s really millions of bugs crawlin’ on our skin?” he asked.

“I was your victim,” Lorraine said.

“What?”

“That Silver Box said that we both had been guilty, but I didn’t do anything to you. I was going to school, jogging in the park.… I wanted to help people. I wanted to understand how the world works.”

Ronnie nodded, not looking at his fellow traveler.

“Say something,” Lorraine commanded.

Ronnie turned toward the woman who had poured out of his body and formed on the ground in front of him, the woman he breathed life into. This miracle was something that only a god could perform, but he didn’t feel like God.

“I was up in Attica for two years on a nickel sentence,” he said after a long pause.

“Yes,” she said, “you’re the criminal.”

“That’s true but it ain’t what I’m sayin’. Of all the bad things that can happen to you in the joint, the worst is how borin’ it always is. You cain’t go nowhere and there ain’t nuthin’ to do.”

“What do you expect?” Lorraine asked. “You committed a crime.”

“I know,” Ronnie acceded. “I know. And I had done twelve things wrong for the one they got me for. What I’m tryin’ to say is that there ain’t nuthin’ to do in prison but eat, shit, fuck, fight, and talk. And mostly we talked. A lot we talked about shittin’, eatin’, fightin’, and fuckin,’ but there was other things too.

“We was all guilty and we knew it too. Some was proud. But even if you wasn’t proud, you had to ack like it to keep people from thinkin’ you was a bitch. And if you have to be proud, or ack like you proud, then you talk differently about the people you might’a hurt. You start to believe that just because somebody was your victim and you’re guilty, that still don’t make them innocent.”

“I didn’t attack myself,” Lorraine claimed.

“No. No, you didn’t. But you run down the street past poor, sick, uneducated, homeless, and hopeless people with yo’ fine ass and your pockets full’a money. I belonged in prison but that don’t make you innocent. I think that’s what SB was sayin’. It’s easy to find guilt all up and down the streets. But how’s all that no-good shit gonna be there, and here you are so innocent that you don’t have nuthin’ to do with it?”

This thought wasn’t alien to Lorraine. She had studied original sin and the various interpretations of social and socialist revolutions. She had written a term paper on the paradox of capital punishment. And, sitting there with her own killer, she realized that all of this had been in her head, that she’d never had to answer for the crimes of her culture and her class; nor did she truly believe that she should be held responsible.

This feeling of innocence somehow caused her shame. This shame made her angry and the anger brought out the unfamiliar feeling of belligerence.

“I don’t care,” she said. “I’m not like you.”

“No, honey, you not. But here we are on the same road, and you the one brought me here—ain’t no question about that.”

THIRTEEN

T
HE TWO SAT
for a long time after devouring dozens of berries and many drafts of sweet-tasting water. When the sun began to go down they decided to rest until morning.

The twilight in the uncharted high forest was beautiful but when the sun set and the moon rose over a far mountain, the air turned cold. Lorraine began to shiver. Ronnie put his arm around her and pulled her close.

“Get off me,” Lorraine complained. “I don’t need you.”

“I know you don’t, girl,” the killer said. “Maybe you ain’t cold, but I’m freezin’. I just wanted to get a little warm, that’s all.”

“That’s all?”

“Come on, baby, you need me to tell you again how my dick ain’t workin’ right?”

“Do you have to use that language?”

“It’s the only language I got.”

Lorraine turned her back to Ronnie and pressed into his embrace. When they came together, they were enveloped in warmth that was both physical and somehow emotional. Ronnie giggled, maybe for the first time since before adolescence, and Lorraine smiled, forgetting about the philosophies of if and why; about the crimes against her or ideas she believed but did not accept.

Swathed in warmth neither one had known since infancy they fell into a sleep so profound that the world around them seemed to fall away.

As they slept they didn’t notice the chromium skinned antlike insects that swarmed around Lorraine’s eyes, biting her over and over with preordained precision and accuracy.

*   *   *

I
N THE MORNING
Ronnie rose first. He went across the stream and into the forest to relieve himself. He was just zipping up the brown pants he’d bought in the thrift shop when Lorraine screamed.

Running back to their bed of grasses and soil, he saw the young woman standing upright, moving from side to side, and holding her face with both hands.

“What’s wrong?” Ronnie shouted, running to her side.

“I’m blind! I’m blind!”

“Let me see,” Ronnie said. “What’s wrong?”

He grabbed her wrists, pulling at them to get a look at her face—but when he tugged, her head moved with her hands.

“I got to look at it if I’m gonna do anything,” he reasoned.

Lorraine fell to her knees and Ronnie descended with her. She continued resisting him and he had to consciously keep himself from forcing her to expose her face.