Inside a Silver Box (23 page)

“There is a place beyond the comprehension of
Homo sapiens,
” the Silver Box said through its extinct friend.

Lorraine wondered if the deity had been reading her mind.

“It is that moment that you and Ronnie Bottoms saw as a red circlet attached to a tortured soul. A place that can be imagined, postulated, calculated but never attained.”

“It’s a place that’s impossible,” Lorraine intoned.

“But what is impossible can be brought into reality if two separate entities can imagine it exactly the same.”

“You and Inglo,” Lorraine stated.

“We are bound by a bond that cannot exist and so cannot be broken.”

“Anything that can be made can also be broken,” Lorraine said, feeling like a tiny virus invading the nervous system of a whale.

“I am connected to all things,” the Silver Box said clearly, as if arguing with a self-contradictory prayer.

“But all things go their own way despite what actions you take,” Lorraine pointed out.

“I have changed the nature of galaxies.”

“I have jumped into a stream, changing its course for a second, maybe two. Then the sun came and took the stream away and my action ceased to be.”

The insect manifestation of the machine blinked. “Why isn’t Ronnie here?” it asked.

“He’s doing what he has to do. I came here trying to keep up with him.”

“Maybe I should destroy this planet before it kills me,” the Silver Box wondered aloud.

“There will be other planets,” Lorraine said calmly. “Sooner or later, even God has to know when to give up the fight.”

THIRTY-SEVEN

T
HE SMELL OF
bacon and coffee filled the rooms of the condo, waking Ronnie and Freya and Alton Brown. One by one, they stumbled into the dining area off the kitchen, where Lorraine was serving the morning meal.

“Good morning,” the hostess said to each as they entered.

Ronnie smiled and rubbed his forearm. He sat down to a plate of scrambled eggs and bacon. Freya came in and sat next to him, touching the wounded arm.

“Sorry I got to eat and run, but I have to get to work,” Alton said as he dug into the meal.

“Where you work at?” Ronnie asked.

“City College library. I got a student intern job working in special collections. Right now they have me and some other students and professors going through a collection bequeathed to the school by the socialite Dorothy Laplum.”

“I went to school with her grandson Fox,” Lorraine said.

“Really?” Alton was impressed.

“Uh-huh. White or wheat toast?” Lorraine said.

“Wheat? Where’d you go this morning?”

“I went to see a friend of Ronnie’s and mine. A guy named UTB-Claude.”

“UTB?” Freya said.

“What he say?” Ronnie asked. He hadn’t touched his meal.

“How’s your arm?” was Lorraine’s answer.

“It’s gettin’ ripe.”

“Like cheese,” Lorraine said.

“What you talkin’ ’bout?” Freya asked Ronnie.

“Lorraine can get you and Alton a car to drive you guys up to Harlem,” Ronnie said, pushing the plate away.

“You need to eat,” Ronnie’s new girlfriend said.

“Will I ever see you again?” Lorraine asked Alton.

“I’ll, I’ll call you tonight,” the young man with the girlfriend named Christine said.

*   *   *

A
FTER FREYA AND
Alton left the unit, Ronnie and Lorraine sat side by side on the sofa with its back turned to the window. For long minutes they did not speak or touch.

*   *   *

“Y
OU THINK THEY
upstairs fuckin’ right now?” Freya asked Alton on the ride down in the elevator.

“I, I don’t know,” he replied. “They seem crazy close. It’s kinda like those people who live in Appalachia and speak a kind of dialect that nobody else can understand.”

“Yeah,” Freya agreed. “It’s just like that. But if they so much in love, how come they want us with ’em?”

“They’re more like brother and sister than boyfriend and girlfriend.”

“I don’t mean no insult, Alton, but Lorraine look like she might fuck her brother if the thought came in her head.”

“I don’t want to think that’s true.”

“Are you gonna see her again?”

“Why would you ask me that?”

“Because she aksed you if she was evah gonna see you again, and you didn’t say yeah.”

Just then the elevator stopped and two women, one younger and the other older, obviously related, got on. These women were dressed in expensive clothes and had a privileged air about them. They looked at the young pair, trying to figure out where they could have been coming from at that time of morning.

“I didn’t, because I got this girlfriend named Christine, and I only met Lorraine at a bus stop two days ago.”

“I haven’t seen Ronnie in years,” Freya said in sympathy. “He was up in jail most’a that time. I was only with him one night and a day before that, and still it feels like he’s the only man I evah knew.”

“Yeah,” Alton said, agreeing with something.

“Do you live here?” the older woman asked.

“Huh?” Freya said.

“I asked you if you lived here.”

“Why?”

“Excuse me?”

“Why you wanna get in our business?”

*   *   *

A
FTER FREYA AND
Alton got into the car Lorraine had called for them; just when the older woman was complaining to the doorman about the
young interracial couple
that had been so rude in the elevator car; when the older woman was saying, “My daughter and I were actually afraid for our safety”—at just that moment, Lorraine lightly touched Ronnie’s forearm with the fingertips of her left hand.

A jolt went through the two-soldier army of the mechanical God.

“It’s poison in so many different ways,” Lorraine groaned. “You should let me heal it.”

“It’s wild, right?” Ronnie said. “It’s like those crazy walking dead shows where the germs have a brain that they want to grow inside your head.”

“It’s also a beacon.”

“You mean like a lighthouse?”

“Just like that. But if you let me hold your arm, it will go away.”

“That dog in the junkyard was gonna tear out your throat.”

“I know. You saved me.”

“No, baby, I only put it off. You know that dog’s gonna be comin’ after you again and again until either him or Silver Box man is dead.”

“So? Isn’t that how all life is, living until one day you die?”

“Not if you spend most the time tryin’ to keep from gettin’ killed. Not if you sittin’ in some fancy restaurant with your girlfriend all the time, worried that some crazy motherfucker’s gonna come through the door, guns blazin’.”

Lorraine smiled and considered her other half’s words.

“Do you like your new job?” she asked at last.

“Love it. You know it’s just like keepin’ on movin’, but at the end of the day you go home instead’a back to your cell or your hole in the ground.”

“Then let me heal you enough so that you can have one more day on the job.”

*   *   *

F
REYA SPENT THE
day meeting with little girls in the counselor’s office. She had set up a program with the school through which every young child met with an aide of their gender to talk about anything they wanted to. She called the meeting Me-Time, and, unknown to her, her supervisors were thinking of making it a system-wide practice.

While Freya talked to little girls who wanted to become doctors and policewomen after a few years of being hip-hop singers, Alton Brown paged through old volumes looking for folded notes, bookmarks, and scribbling in the margins of books. It was a fairly mindless task that he was grateful for because his thoughts were about calling Christine and telling her what he’d done, certain he would leave her but wishing he would not. He loved his girlfriend, while the only definable emotions he had for Lorraine were lust and fear.

*   *   *

T
HAT MORNING AFTER
Freya and Alton had gone, Ronnie finally allowed Lorraine to wrap her hands around his bitten forearm.

“It’s tacky,” she said. “It feels like our skins are melding, like my flesh is moving into yours.”

“Is that like interracial?” he asked lightly.

“I can feel the infection,” she said. “It’s hot and, and, and angry.”

“Like a hippopotamus got to live on a postage stamp.”

“Like a bad dream still there after the dreamer has died,” Lorraine said.

“Your fingers is all the way down to the bone,” Ronnie noted.

“It will take an hour to kill the taint.”

“Do it for fifty-nine minutes and let me go to work. After that, we’ll get together and fight and maybe get killed … prob’ly die.”

“I can feel you,” Lorraine said though these words were unnecessary.

Ronnie shivered, thinking that if sex were like this, even prison would be a paradise.

“The whole human race would either die out or evolve if sex were like this,” Lorraine said to the ether.

“What Silver Box got to say?” Ronnie asked.

“I did the important talking.”

“What did you say?”

“Are you going to bring Nontee to him?” Lorraine asked.

“I’ma try.”

“Then you’ll know what he heard after that.”

Over the next fifty-four minutes, she and Ronnie listened to the music of each other’s souls. The experience reminded Lorraine of the first time she and her father went to hear a woodwind quartet at a friend’s apartment. The music seemed to make sense even though she knew that the subject would be different for anyone who heard it.

THIRTY-EIGHT

T
HE CONCRETE APRON
that made up the backyard of Farnham’s Pork House was Ronnie’s kingdom that morning. He cooked the meat and brought it in on big blue platters for the cooks to prepare according to the customers’ orders. He wore thick gloves that went up his forearms to protect him from getting burned, but he thought that they were probably unnecessary.

While he worked, he thought about people he’d hurt, robbed, and terrorized. He didn’t feel guilty, not exactly. Ronnie had never really been acquainted with the concept of guilt. His entire life, he felt like a victim of the bigger, stronger, richer, or better armed. But now none of that was true; now he was the strongest and the richest.

“You doin’ a great job out here, Ronnie Bottoms,” Roger Merryman said after the lunchtime rush. “You had that meat cooked and in the door as fast as I could do it.”

“I like it,” Ronnie said to the little boss. “You can think all you want and do the work at the same time.”

“You like to think?”

“I didn’t used to, but lately it makes me feel good to know that I know somethin’. You know what I mean?”

Roger smiled and said, “Maybe you should take a break and go walk around the block or somethin’. You know all this smoke can get to you.”

“Don’t bother me. I could work out here all day straight.”

“Go on anyway,” Roger said. “I don’t want your mother to come in here and say I asphyxiated her baby.”

Ronnie didn’t tell Merryman that his mother was dead. He didn’t want to shame the man.

*   *   *

“H
EY, YOU, RONNIE,”
a woman called.

He had made it down to Twenty-ninth Street on his aimless stroll.

The light brown woman had dark hair that was short and natural, not actually unruly but a little bit wild. She was shorter than Ronnie but tall for a woman.

“Hey, Nancy,” he said.

“I got lunch now too, and Roger wanted me to tell you about Bento Box Five Fifty-eight.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a Japanese restaurant up on Thirty-third. We give all their employees free lunch, and they do the same for us.”

“That’s pretty cool.”

“Uh-huh. You wanna go?”

*   *   *

O
N THE WALK,
Nancy was quiet at first and Ronnie didn’t feel much like talking. His forearm was once again festering with the intergalactic infection while his heart was roaming over the battlefield-like terrain of his rough and insignificant history.

“I got a boyfriend,” Nancy said when they were two blocks away from the Japanese restaurant.

“What’s his name?”

“Noli.”

“Where’s that from?”

“Mississippi.”

“I never heard no name like that before.”

“I’m just sayin’ that I’m not tryin’ to go out with you.”

“I know. Roger told you to show me where to get my lunch at. That’s all.”

*   *   *

R
ONNIE WAS INTRODUCED
to the manager named Hiro and they were seated at a booth in the back of the fast-food sushi and noodle restaurant. They didn’t order but were just served a large Styrofoam partitioned box with cold, pressed scrambled egg, raw mackerel and tuna, rice stewed with seaweed, and four teriyaki chicken thighs.

“We supposed to share?” Ronnie asked Nancy.

“Uh-huh. That’s what their waiters do.”

After they ate for a while, Nancy said, “I didn’t mean to insult you.”

“About what?”

“When I said I had a boyfriend.”

“That’s all right. I know. When a young woman come walk next to a man, she got to make it clear or the next thing you know, he got his hands all ovah her. I used to be like that. All a girl had to do was look at me and I was ready to take her upstairs.”

The barbecue waitress smiled and then laughed. “But you’re not like that anymore?”

“Naw.”

“How come? You don’t care about girls no more?”

“I got other stuff on my mind.”

“Like what?”

“People I knew … I mean I was around ’em but I’idn’t really know ’em. You know I was so busy fightin’ and gettin’ high, fuckin’ an’ stealin’ that I missed what was goin’ on around me wit’ people.”

“Your family?”

“Like that, yeah.”

“Roger says that you’re the strongest man he ever met.”

“Huh.”

“He says that he saw you press near about seven hundred pounds.”

“I guess.”

“You must’a busted some people up pretty bad if you that strong.”