Уолтер Мосли - Blue Light

I felt a searing pain between my left shoulder and my neck. I turned to see five coyote tails moving fast across the moonlit lawn. The nurse was hollering for all she was worth. A deep dread settled in on me and I lost consciousness again.

I was unconscious for five days. The rabies shots they administered weakened me so much that the doctors thought I might die. But Ordé said that he was never worried about that.

“You’re a blue blood now,” he told me. “Pale but still blue enough.”

In two more weeks I was strong enough to leave Santa Teresa’s. My body was strong, but my mind was full of dread.

“They were like Claudia’s friend, the dog? You’re sure?” Ordé asked on the bus back to Berkeley.

“I could... could, like, hear them, you know?”

“You mean, you felt it like that?” Ordé said rubbing the thumb and forefinger of both hands lightly together.

Somehow the gesture made sense, and I nodded.

“And so when she bit you, she was trying to communicate,” Ordé said. “She was telling you something.”

It was a truth waiting to come to me.

“Yeah,” I said. “Ever since she bit me I’ve been just about ready to cry. I mean real sad crying too. Like my best friend just died in my arms.”

Ordé touched the wounds on my shoulder. I turned to give him a better view of the injury and found myself looking out the bus window at the large white stones that led down to the ocean. The Pacific was singing a sonorous dirge. It was a great moving beast with flecks of life glimmering within its folds.

It was hard to control my new powers of perception. Everything I saw — grass growing, breezes darting through leafy boughs, maggots swimming in death — everything set my senses to translating. That’s what Ordé called it. Reading the meaning of myself in the world and, therefore, he claimed, changing the world.

Ordé had already explained in one of his sermons that the purpose of light was to combine with the DNA molecule, to unite matter and energy into a perfect state of thought and being. The blue god, who has the only ability to know, was in me. His brilliant eyes and keen ears making and remaking the world in my particular perceptions.

I felt a sharp pain in my neck. I yanked my head around to see my teacher digging his fingernails into the half-healed wounds inflicted by Coyote. There was sympathy in his powerful gaze, sympathy and command. The blood felt as if it were mobilizing in my veins. The cells felt particular, like tiny soldiers marching toward the breech. I was shaking. Ordé touched the reopened wound with his other hand. He then brought the bloody fingers to his lips. Shock registered in his eyes, and the grip on my shoulder and neck eased.

As the pressure lessened, the despair I had felt dissipated. I was exhausted and slumped forward, putting my elbows on my knees. When I sat up I noticed a small black boy sitting across the aisle from me. He was looking fearfully at my wounded neck.

Ordé had his face buried in his hands by then. The forgotten blood on his fingers smeared the top of his forehead.

He cried all the way back to Berkeley, red drying to black across his forehead.

When we returned from Santa Teresa, Ordé went straight home. He locked himself in his house and didn’t come out, as far as I knew, for days.

That was Friday.

On Wednesday he didn’t show up for his sermon to the Close Congregation. The congregation was there, although smaller.

Phyllis Yamauchi was already missing. She hadn’t been seen for more than two weeks, but no one in the Close Congregation was worried. It wasn’t required that Blues report to anyone. Phyllis studied her charts and telescopes and every once in a while came by to let Ordé see what she theorized. Often his prophecy complemented her studies. I had been transcribing their notes into my book.

Claudia Heart had taken more than fifty of Ordé’s followers to her own communal residence, not far from the People’s Warehouse, in Haight-Ashbury. She would take them one by one, men and women, into her van and make love to them just as she had done with me. Most came crawling back, begging to be with her, swearing to do anything for her kiss and company.

I would have gone on my knees to her without the blood ritual. Now I felt no desire for her.

I got a ride from Feldman, Ordé’s bodyguard, and went down to our teacher’s house. He came to the door but didn’t open up.

“Who is it?”

“It’s Chance, teacher.”

“Go away.”

“The congregation is waiting for you.”

“Tell them to go home. Tell them to go home and to say their prayers.”

“What’s wrong, teacher?”

“Go away, Lester.”

Up until that moment, no matter how hard or frustrating life had become, I still had faith in Ordé and his Blues. I believed in the unity, perfection, and grace of the universe. I believed in what Ordé called the grand hierarchy. I was a brick in the cathedral of existence meant to support the feet of gods.

My confidence was bruised when I heard the fear in Ordé’s voice, but I knew my job. I went back up to the congregation and told them that Ordé had been faced with a great mystery. I told them about the coyotes who performed their own kind of blood ritual on me, how our teacher tasted their knowledge in my blood.

I didn’t tell them of my blood ritual with Ordé. I didn’t trust that everyone would understand the purity of his motives.

It was a new experience for me. I had never spoken to a crowd before. But with my new powers of perception, I could read the needs of the assembly.

“You want to know something?” I asked one young acolyte.

“How did you manage to keep from going with Claudia Heart?”

“Ordé sang to me,” I said.

“Will he sing to me?” There were tears in her eyes. Later I found out that her husband had tied her up when she tried to follow Claudia, that he’d drugged her for two weeks until her desire to run had changed to a deep sadness at the loss of love.

“Yes,” I said.

I answered questions and soothed the nervous congregation. They accepted me as Ordé’s substitute, at least for one meeting. I didn’t have his power. I could perceive but could not project. What I had to offer them was passive understanding.

After the Wednesday meeting I went back to Ordé’s house, but he wouldn’t even answer the door. His windows were blocked by sheets of tinfoil, and junk mail was already spilling out of the small mailbox.

I went home after that.

Ordé had paid the rent while I was in the sanitarium.

My one-room studio cost seventeen dollars a week, which I usually got in the mail from my mother even though I never answered the letters she enclosed with the checks.

Actually, I never even read those letters.

I was thinking about that on Sunday night. How I cut off my mother, and all the rest of my life. How I blamed her for bearing a black child and rearing him in a white world.

It seemed silly to be worried about race then. I had come just a few steps from something beyond race or species or life, even. Not only would I have met the maker in the coming of blue light, I would have seen myself in his radiance.

But now I was back in the mundane world. My teacher, who had been like a god to me, had become just a frightened man.

I wondered again how long it would be before I killed myself. I plugged in my radio and picked up a blues station on FM. Robert Johnson wailed that the blue light was his blues while the red one was his mind. As I fell asleep, his blues mingled with mine.

I felt a clicking around my ears and imagined that small insects were making last-minute plans before they prepared to climb into my brain. I woke up suddenly, slapping all around my head. The knock came right after that.