Walter Mosley
Blue Light
This history is dedicated to
Thucydides,
the father of memory
Prologue
The Radiance
I didn’t use a tape recorder back then, but I remember every word. Our teacher stood on a simple flat rock and told us about the blue light. What it meant — at least, as much as we could understand. Here is what he said:
I was once simple flesh like you, a man filled with meaningless words. But I was also a sleeping streak of blue light, scant seconds in length, jarred to consciousness after an age of silence. In the din of radiance rising from Neptune, I awoke and found myself leaning toward the cold gravity of that titan, rushing toward the small star it orbited. Ahead lay oblivion or the seed left on Earth eons before and, hopefully, grown to stature.
Between the graceful dance of gravities, that needle of light, no wider than a meteorite, traveled forth. Other lights — exactly the same hue — at my side, each one a perfect array unwavering in its relationship to the rest. Each one made up of a flawless matrix of thought repeated again and again in a swirl of equations that held the secrets of your deepest dreams.
As perfect and timeless as diamonds, a thousand thousand thousand brothers and sisters ignited in the silent and unfelt anticipation of breath, death, or oblivion.
Our entrance into the solar band of energies caused friction, squeals of false consciousness. Many lights drew away toward barren celestial bodies. Most of us died in the ecstasy you call the sun. The survivors passed through clouds of helium and hydrogen. The poisonous atoms turned millions of blue lights to green. Those matrices faded, as did their tainted lights upon reaching Earth’s atmosphere.
Still, nearly ten thousand blue needles were destined to break the skin of air, their divine messages still intact. Hundreds sliced the ocean, cerulean knives leaving wide-eyed mackerel and barracuda with the desire to swim up onto shore.
But the rain of light moved quickly to land. Imagine a beetle contemplating infinity in his small brain, flipping forward and back trying to escape the inkling. Finally he leaps into the air, blue fire alive all around him. Then comes the merciful bat; a hiss of leathery wings, and the fire is out. Cathedrals in Rome would mourn this passing for a thousand years if they knew.
Dozens of small creatures died in the path of light that night. Each one in a terrible ecstasy of blue notions. Each one more sacred than the history of prayer. But not all died. The sleeping mosquito struck by light might have stayed at rest because the blue light has no heat. The small weed would hear the call through the slow process of photosynthesis, her roots becoming sorcerous fingers exhorting Earth to live.
The prophet always seemed smaller, weak after his sermons. But we felt elated and strong.
There were other transformations on the night that Ordé, the prophet, saw blue light. These I have gleaned from conversations, newspaper articles, interviews, obituaries, and a peculiar facility that Ordé endowed upon me — the ability to read blood.
Reggie Brown was pushing the baby carriage down Easter Street toward the Broward shelter that evening. Their uncle Barnes was drunk again and Reggie’s mother was still at work, so he bundled up the twins, intending to take them to Nurse Edwards’s station until their mother came home. Nurse Edwards had Fly Comics in her drawer and Baby Ruth candy bars too. She’d been their father’s friend; she was at their house when the letter came from the State Department telling how Mr. Brown was missing in the police action in Vietnam. Now she helped Mrs. Brown with the children when she could.
Reggie stopped at a red light on the corner of Orchard and Easter. He peered inside the ragged double stroller to check on his two-and-a-half-year-old sisters. Brown girls, but not as dark as him, with fat faces that almost always smiled when he looked at them. Babies out of his momma like magic come to love them. Him and his mother, but not Uncle Barnes, not when he was drinking anyway.
“Hey, hey,” Reggie sang. Wanita giggled but Luwanda just stared. She saw it coming.
Reggie turned his head to see the flash of blue, and then he was walking again. Up a steep path in the woods. Beneath his feet was a stream filled with blue fish. The stream was shallow and the fish were big, but they had no problem swimming and diving. The sky was bright, but it was nighttime in his vision, night with no stars. Trees grew up the side of the valley, and the bright eyes of animals watched him move along. There were whispers. Terrible things. Gouts of blood, severed limbs in the mud. And beauty beyond Reggie’s poor words to say.
He traveled upward for days, it seemed. Blue smoke rose from his bare feet on the wet rocks.
A madman, who wore clothes fashioned from skins and bark decorated with bone and stone fasteners and buttons, was laughing at him. Beyond the man there was a valley. He could make out every detail — trees, leaves, and insects crawling in between. He could see single strands of spiderwebs waving lazily in the breeze. He could see the breeze too.
The trees were singing, some in a sweet alto and others in a bellowing bass.
Reggie started to run. It was a thousand miles away, but he knew that he could make it without ever stopping. He knew he could.
“Honey?” the woman said. “Honey, you okay?” It was an older brown lady with a Spanish lilt.
“Huh?” Reggie didn’t remember her. He didn’t remember standing there at Orchard and Easter.
The lady wasn’t tall but was very round. Her glasses were framed in metal. Her teeth were edged in gold. There were big silver hoops hanging from her ears. She smiled at him the way women smile at small children.
“Are these your little sisters?” she asked. She bent over to get a closer look under the tattered hood of the stroller.
Even before she started screaming, Reggie understood that Luwanda was dead. He didn’t know how he knew, but that didn’t matter. His sister had passed into blue. She was in that faraway valley.
Winch Fargo had watched them all afternoon. The old couple was selling lottery tickets at the outer edge of the church bazaar. The tickets were for a drawing to help out some kind of summer camp for needy children. Propped up on a little poster card in the center of the table was a picture of a smiling blond-haired boy who needed to get away for the summer.
Mrs. and Mr. Martel were having a great time greeting their fellow churchgoers at Palm Park in South San Francisco. They didn’t know that the long-haired, self-tattooed, and dangerous Winch Fargo had been watching them from behind a succession of beer bottles, hidden by the pink stucco maintenance hut, secreted between two shiny aluminum trash cans.
“If they stay till sunset,” Winch whispered, “then they’re mine.” The other tables began folding up at six-fifteen. The reading table. The events committee. Everybody waved, said good-bye. They offered to drive Philip and Eileen to the steering committee dinner. But the old couple was happy sitting in red nylon chairs, holding hands above the metal cashbox between them, watching the sun go down.
“... one hundred and forty-four dollars,” Eileen Martel was telling Philip. The last of the bazaar vendors were more than a hundred yards away, loading empty brownie pans, dirty dishes, and bags of trash into the back of the church van.
“And that’s just how much I wan’,” Fargo said.
Philip looked up with a smile on his face. The long blond hair on the man didn’t bother him. It was dirty and down past his shoulders, but that was the new style, the hippie look. And so was the scruffy facial hair; you couldn’t really call it a beard. Bad teeth, but rotting and discolored teeth weren’t a sin — not everybody had medical and dental insurance from Hogarth’s Encyclopedia and International Publishing after forty-five years without a sick day.