Уолтер Мосли - Blue Light

“Mr. Needham didn’t feel it,” I said.

Needham was the camp handyman. He was an older white gentleman who didn’t mind having an interracial family on the grounds. It was late in the fall and we were the only paying customers. Maybe he would have felt differently if it were the height of summer.

“We can’t hear it either,” Alacrity added. “We just said we could ’cause we were so happy.”

“Uh-huh,” Reggie said. “It’s like I know it’s there, but I can’t really hear it.”

“Probably because it wasn’t meant for normal people or the Blues,” Addy responded, opening her eyes. “This is probably meant for people like Chance and me. It’s like a beacon for the half blind. Reggie probably figured it out because he was looking for someplace safe but it just happens to be where that call comes from.”

“How far away do you think it’s coming from?” I asked.

Addy closed her eyes and held up her face again. After a few moments she shook her head and frowned.

“We gotta go there,” Reggie said.

“Uh-huh,” Alacrity agreed.

“What do you think, Wanita?” I asked our round-faced dreamer.

“ ’Kay,” she answered, as if I had been trying to force her to go.

“I don’t mean you have to go, honey,” I said.

“But we do,” she said softly while fingering her pink sweater. “Like them fishes.”

“What fish?” asked Alacrity.

“The blue ones,” Wanita replied.

Alacrity nodded, making a rare serious frown.

“Then we better get some more campin’ stuff,” Reggie said. “ ’Cause we gotta go way up in the woods an’ I don’t think the road will go all that far.”

We spent the week buying nylon tents and rugged shoes, powdered packets of food and sleeping bags. We had gloves and bug repellent, a shortwave radio, hard candy and chocolate bars to energize little girls. Ordé’s account felt the drain.

We were all happy at the prospect of refuge. But the morning we were to leave, the signal — brass horns, the liquid air, whatever it was — was gone. Reggie was disoriented and uncertain; Addy and I couldn’t hear a thing. We waited for another week for the sensation to return. It came while we were sleeping on a Tuesday night, late. I got everybody up and hustled them into the van, and we drove without stopping except for gas stations and food stores. Addy and I alternated driving and sleeping. We traveled for eighteen hours on highways and secondary roads going south. Two hundred miles or so past San Francisco we hit dirt roads. For another two days we bumped along back roads.

The last drivable road finally came to an end on Friday afternoon. It didn’t end exactly; there was still a clearing there, but it had fallen into disrepair — recently, as far as I could tell. There were trees fallen across it and great upheavals in the ground. We decided to camouflage our VW van and explore. The feeling that came from that way was neither stronger nor weaker. None of us knew how long the trek would be.

Reggie had almost half our gear on his broad shoulders. The pack he carried was impossibly large. He was straining under the weight, but there was something about him when he got on the trail of an idea or imagined destination — he kept on going no matter what.

He mouthed soft drumlike sounds, pom pom pompom pom , as he went. Now and then he’d make verbal notes about our passage. “Heavy foot on the light turn. Slashing lines on the left.” Sometimes he’d stop and look around like a small child who has temporarily lost sight of his mother in a crowded supermarket.

“You okay, Reggie?” I asked once when he seemed a bit lost.

“Yeah, man,” he replied. “You know what, Chance?”

“What?”

“My sister’s been here?”

“Wanita?”

“No, uh-uh. Luwanda’s been here,” he said.

“You mean you were here with your sister before she died?” I asked.

“I was once, but she been here since then. She been here ’cause this the place where we come together.”

Alacrity carried a pack almost as big as she was. She didn’t seem to mind the weight, though. She moved playfully up and down the path, over fallen trees and down into woods to explore. She wasted more energy than the rest of us used, but she was never tired. Her blond hair knotted on itself, and dried mud clung to her boots and jeans.

As I watched the child of my teacher dart in and out between the trees, I got the first glimpse of her purpose among us.

I had begun to believe that there was purpose to each light that began these creatures. The visionary, the dreamer, the pathfinder, death. Alacrity I could see was simply a hero. She was brave and foolhardy and the best friend anybody could have.

As I watched her move so deftly between pines, I wondered whose hero she would become: mine or theirs?

It was the first time I’d realized that there would one day be sides drawn and a conflict ahead.

That night we made camp in a clearing of fallen pines. We set up two tents, one for Addy and the girls and one for Reggie and me. The moon was three-quarters full and the air was cold. I could hear Wanita and Alacrity laughing in the other tent while Reggie snored next to me. He was sleeping outside of his down bag, wearing only briefs. I could still feel the heat pouring off him from his exertions leading our journey.

Addy and I could see the change in the boy that day. Somehow the walk in the woods had made him into the man that he was destined to be. All along the walk he would turn to his sister and ask, “Do you remember this, Wanita? Do you remember when we were walking here before? It was the night that the light came, the night Luwanda died.”

The girl said nothing but kept close to her brother, touching him every now and then. When she tired he took her up in his arms and pressed forward with great concentration and force.

Reggie’s face became more angular, and his eyes lost their wandering and distracted air. It was as if he had been born to take this hike in these woods.

I loved those children. They seemed perfect together with Addy and me. Part of me, the part that was active and engaged, was only there for the children. But that night another part came alive. I was a link between natural enemies. I was the flotsam that Ordé preached about, but now I was partly aware, partly alive. I was spineless and mindless like a jellyfish, but still I had an instinct for survival. And survival, I knew, was the possibility of a bridge between these gods and my small race.

Maybe some pink crystal far away was dreaming of me, imagining the dignity of my partial awareness. The dignity of fungus stuck to a rock, depending upon the sun for life. At any moment we might be robbed of our single-note pleasure, procreation; a shadow could rise between us and the sun, could end our whole history. And even if that shadow never appeared, even if we did not meet annihilation, still, mindlessly, we would just multiply one on top of another until we covered the entire planet with our bones.

But now there was a different light, the blue light. It was, I believed, my job to conserve that light and to help my people feel its brilliance.

While Reggie snored and Wanita and Alacrity giggled in the tent next to ours, I found a direction for my life. I had been following the path for some years, since Ordé saved me from suicide, but now I was aware. Now it became my choice. I could feel it in my heart and lungs and liver. I knew that my duty was more powerful even than the visions I was allowed to see. Even the thought of Gray Man could not deter me. I would give everything to make my blood count for something beyond rutting and the piling of bones.

In the morning nothing seemed the same. I was lying next to a full-grown man who had been a child two days before. But as much as Reggie had changed, I had changed more.