Уолтер Мосли - Blue Light

Winch Fargo, riding the space between the delicate vibrations of blue light, for a moment in time became a conduit for the soul. The soul: what Ordé had called that energy which binds the tiniest pieces of the universe, that force which seeks to unite and dissimulate. For those few hours Winch Fargo was the black hole of all feelings, beyond life and weight and space.

All he wanted was her, his queen. But so much bombarded him that he couldn’t recognize her signal or even remember what she looked like. He was a wild animal pacing in his cage, looking for a way out and ravenous to the point of rage.

Nesta and Trini had taken a room in a boardinghouse for women. They spent their days at the state building where the state detainment facility was housed. They asked about Claudia Heart/Zimmerman but were told that information about prisoners was private and confidential.

Nesta considered applying for a job in the building; she almost did it. She needed a job while waiting for the chance to see her blue sister. This curiosity about Claudia Heart was the most powerful urge she’d ever felt.

One day she left Trini in the room and went down to the state building to fill out a job application. She was walking up the broad granite stairway when she felt something.

Max the dog ran out from behind the shadows of a stone column, snarling and wagging his tail. Everything about him sang in her mind. The wave of vibrations going through her abdomen and breasts almost made her cry out. She bent down intending to pet Max but ended up sitting on a stair. The dog crawled up, laying his belly across her lap and whimpering. Nesta cried too.

“He was the first,” Nesta said about that meeting. “Like you’d been waiting on a deserted island for years, for your whole life, but you never knew it because you never knew that there was anywhere else. But then he crawled up on me and I held him. I felt his loss. He’d followed a scent there that then turned into a memory. He howled as I held him, and I held him for hours. With my eyes closed I was gone from here. I was out in space with millions just like me, singing the same song that Max did.”

“Were you still human?” I asked. “I mean, when you closed your eyes?”

“This body is like a uniform, Chance. I’m like a soldier. I’m proud of the colors and buttons, but they are only vestiges of the spirit that wears them.” Her amber eyes glowed in the cathedral we called home. I felt a strong anger because of the love she felt for a dog.

So while Miles Barber played the puppet master inside, the real story was elsewhere, in Claudia Heart’s womb and the streets of Sacramento.

Gray Man rose to his feet, shivering like a cold dog. He looked at himself in the mirror. His ungroomed hair looked wild. All the years that Horace LaFontaine had straightened it had killed most of the crinkling, but it was still coarse. When Gray Man brushed the clumps back his head resembled a dark brown porcupine whose quills were only half at rest.

He pulled on a T-shirt and a pair of jeans. He rubbed his hand against his chest, feeling for the pain of life that the redwood had cursed him with. Then he left the room.

He walked out the flophouse door and into the street. The sun grilled down on his bare head. He wore only one black-and-white tennis shoe, the other foot was bare.

“I am Death,” he chanted under his breath again and again. “I can kill. It makes me strong.” He uttered the words, only barely understanding them. This because the redwood’s life had taken root in the soil of his dead soul.

The moment Gray Man stepped out of his door, Winch Fargo was free. The emanations from the death god got clearer as he came closer to Fargo, and Winch knew that it was not his woman’s song. He walked out from the dream of everything, giving it up gladly for the mother of his grandchildren.

He stalked forward, dreaming now only of her feet where he could curl up and worship. Winch didn’t know that her music had dried up. He was following the scent and sound of the dog now. A dog who had also licked and whimpered at the feet of Heart.

Gray Man was walking fast. Two blocks away Winch Fargo broke into a hobbling run. They felt each other, hated each other. Gray Man despised the passion that drove Fargo, while Fargo knew that Death’s light wanted to burn his soul away.

Nesta felt their approach and dreaded it. Max jumped from her lap and began to pace in front of her, stopping now and again to sniff and growl.

Suddenly he grew still and stared down the concrete stairs.

Gray Man was there half barefoot in a T-shirt and jeans. He was looking at Nesta with a friendly smile, the smile of a hunter at the end of a long chase.

Max scooted behind his new protector as Winch Fargo turned the corner.

In his bulky coat and short pants Fargo looked like a cartoon sorcerer, down on his luck but still with a trick up his sleeve.

Gray Man, the pain of Redwood pulsing in his temples, turned again. He regarded this new creature with confusion and disdain.

“I’m not concerned with you, half-thing. Go away and suffer what little light you have.”

“Fuck you, man,” Fargo replied. “Fuck you two times. Mess wit’ me an’ I go to war on your butt.”

Nesta wanted to run but was transfixed with the rage and pain down below her. She had never imagined that the light in her eyes could be so twisted and ugly.

“I’ll kill you with just these hands,” Gray Man said on a slender breath. Then he ran at Fargo.

“Hey, you two, stop that,” said a man selling newspapers from a wooden crate on the street.

A woman wearing white pants and a fuzzy pink sweater let out a little scream.

No one but Nesta and Max knew the threat of those skinny arms and legs.

Gray Man, sitting astride his foe’s chest, tried to get his hands around Fargo’s throat, but the ex-con held those hands away while cursing and foaming at the mouth.

As people began to gather, the men, Evil and Death, struggled against each other. They looked like street denizens, prematurely aged and demented by wine. No one moved in to stop them, more from an unwillingness to touch them than from fear of being hurt.

“Die!” Gray Man screeched.

“Fuck you, nigger!” Winch Fargo spat back.

Max the dog paced behind Nesta and then sat back on his haunches, letting out a great howl.

Two policemen came running down the stairs toward the scuffle.

“Stop!” Nesta cried.

“All right, that’s enough of that now,” one of the officers said.

He was a large man with close-cut brown and gray hair that stood straight out from his head. He grabbed Gray Man by the shoulder. Gray Man shot out with his left hand, taking the policeman by his lapel, and yanked down hard, slamming the unsuspecting man into the concrete curb.

With one hand free Winch Fargo threw Gray Man off him and rose. He was panting, almost exhausted from the incredibly strong hands of Death. Winch Fargo planted one foot behind him and looked around for a weapon while he waited for the second attack.

Gray Man was on the ground, but he didn’t look tired. He rose smiling at his adversary. But before he could attack again he was struck from behind by a police stick. It was a hard blow that might have laid out a professional boxer. But Gray Man was only stung. He turned on the second policeman, and the woman in the pink sweater yelled louder.

A crowd had gathered now.

Gray Man broke the second policeman’s neck, but when he went for Winch Fargo again, he found the now barechested savant armed with a police stick.

Fargo used his weapon well. He struck again and again, going backward as he did. Men and women were shouting all around them, but no one tried to interfere.