It was the pistol that took away Philip Martel’s second-to-last mortal smile. Pitted chrome that still managed a dull shine even in the last glow of twilight.
Eileen uttered, “Oh my,” and squeezed her husband’s hand, her best friend’s hand.
“I warned you,” Winch said.
“You what?” asked Philip.
“You was fool to stay out here until dark in the park.”
It rhymed, Eileen thought uselessly, maybe everything will be all right.
“The money,” Winch said. “That’s all I want. Give it.”
Philip could feel his hemorrhoid throbbing, but the pain meant nothing, nothing at all. He nodded and made to reach down, but as his head moved he caught a glimpse of blue glinting off the silvery barrel of the gun. Helpless, he turned his eyes upward. Eileen, always with him, did the same.
“What the fuck...” Winch saw the sagging, pasty-faced old couple smiling, actually smiling, when he had the gun. And then Winch peeked. He caught only the last second — not the full equation, only the echo.
He guffawed, “Whoa ho!” And a blue snake the size of a python slid in through his eye socket. His head felt as if it were bulging with thoughts murmured in a foreign tongue, whispering ideas that had texture, smell, and the broken music of God.
This last thought struck Winch as odd. He had never believed in God. Where did that come from? And where was the light?
The blue light had faded and left the twilight darker than the closet in Winch’s childhood apartment. Darkness so lonely that he would have done anything for light, that blue light.
He looked down and saw the old folks still sitting there — smiling.
Eileen saw her husband for the first time, it seemed. Philip Martel. Soldier. Father. Son. Lover under the covers but never so beautiful as now. A blue sheen still hanging over him like the afterglow of sex. She relived hot summer evenings, like that evening, after long days of her cooking and cleaning and his cutting the grass. After all that sweat a glass of beer... But that was the first time she had ever really seen him. His smile so sad that she knew, somehow, why and what he had to do.
“It was like we were in a bubble,” she told me at the prophet’s park many months later. “Like we felt everything the same.”
Philip felt most of the blue radiance in his chest. The gun hovered somewhere beyond his sight. Sad for all those years before the light, he felt a sudden awareness in a place so far away that it was impossible to imagine. But he was there. Not him, Philip, but them — blue radiant spawn. Somehow their memories merged, and he was transported so far away and long ago that he saw the birth of Earth in a pinwheel of self-knowledge. He felt the long journey of his cells through eons of evolution. Crawling, rutting, flying, dying again and again. There was memory in his blood, quickened by the light. But also there was a call to death that formed around the weakness in his heart. His mind became part of the light as the light prepared to join the magnetic energy that flowed through the ground under his feet.
He was dying. Dying in Eileen’s sad smile. Dying like the fading blue butterflies around his head.
As his heart began its final wild sprint back to blackness, he spread his arms with the strength of death and rose, knocking down the flimsy card table, to embrace his dirty half brother — the man from an eon ago with the gun.
“Whoa ho!” Winch cried out again. The light was gone, but the python still writhed in his head.
From the parking lot the Martels’ fellow parishioners began yelling.
Philip was already up, hugging Winch as though he was congratulating an old army buddy back from the trenches.
The muffled shot was not intentional. It was the volatile blue light that chose Philip’s fate, not the slug from Winch’s gun.
“Stop! Stop!” from the parking lot.
Eileen, quickly, was up and off behind the trees.
Blue radiance rose from Philip’s corpse on the ground. Winch knew somewhere that he was witnessing a miracle. The light hovered, seemed almost to hesitate, and then rose, a hundred thousand glittering pins. They hovered for a moment more and then dove into the ground beneath his feet like a frightened school of fish disappearing at the first hint of danger.
“No!” Winch yelled and then ran. The gun was in his hand, but his arms dangled awkwardly at his sides.
“He’s dead,” Winch said to no one. “Blue snake.”
Mrs. MacMartin, the social director, screamed and threw up her hands. Winch shot her, hoping for more blue light — but none came. Roger Pliner, Felicity Burns, Bright Williams, Chas Twill — all dead by Winch’s gun.
“Old lady!” he yelled. “Come on out! I don’t wan’ the money! I wan’ the light is all!”
The snake had swallowed his mind by the time the police came. Winch knelt amid the corpses in the parking lot. It wasn’t yet fully night when the flashlights hit him.
“Put down the gun!”
Winch held out the pistol in submission, thinking the voice was his mother’s. But the police mistook the gesture. He didn’t hear the shots. The first bullet took him in the right lung. Then one in the ankle as he rose up on one leg. In his right thigh, through his ear, in the left hand, the right shoulder, the lower intestine. Every wound a blue ember burning hot and bright. Winch Fargo smiled at the fires only he could see. They burned long after his mind closed down.
At her rented house in the Oakland Hills, in the backyard, Claudia Zimmerman was on top of Marcus. His eyes closed, a big grin on his loose lips. She moved up and down, wondering what it would be like to feel as good as he did. Her dog, Max, poked his nose into the cleft of Claudia’s buttocks. It tickled. On the back porch her husband, Billy, was with Marcus’s wife in the hot tub. She heard Franny yelping, Yes, yes, yes.
Grabbing Claudia by the wrist, Marcus groaned, “Oh, yeah.”
It hurt and she swayed back against his fast thrusts, aware of Max’s cold nose and lapping tongue against her rectum and of the blue light as she looked up in the sky.
Suddenly all she wanted was Marcus.
“Fuck it harder!” she yelled at the pudgy paper salesman. Max began to howl.
Claudia dug her nails into Marcus’s fat shoulders and he screamed. She hunkered down on him and ground his hips into the grass.
“Harder!” she yelled.
He called out again, not from pleasure.
Lights came on in the house up the hill.
She didn’t remember Billy and Franny coming down to see why Marcus was screaming. She didn’t remember Marcus hitting her in the chest and face with his fists in a vain attempt to push her off. All she knew was Max’s howling. His yowl a clear blue note deep in her body — a promise of rapture that the fool Marcus couldn’t even imagine. There were explosions in her mind every time she thrust down on him. There was the taste of blood as she tore off his right nipple with her teeth. And then weightlessness as Billy and Franny pulled her off Marcus, and then the cold water of the unheated swimming pool. Blue water and blue cold — Marcus’s spongy nipple between her back molars.
Horace LaFontaine lived for eight months and then died on the top floor of his sister’s house on Laramie in West Oakland. His sister, Elza, had taken him in when he’d come down with lung cancer. She fed him and shaved him, cut his toenails, and teased the hard feces out of his rectum when he was too weak to move his own bowels. She read to him late at night in words that he had once understood. Now the words were merely sounds, unrecognizable except for the timbre of his sister’s voice. That commanding voice he’d known as a youth in the black slums of Houston.