“They been gettin’ worse. At first they was just sad, but now it got worse and they started to die.” Trini was a white girl. Nesta classified her accent as coming from Tennessee.
“Why aren’t you sad, Trini?”
“I am. Just not so sad. She balled all’a them. But she said that I was her special girl ’cause’a how it was when I was a girl back home. I crashed here with my boyfriend, Lloyd. He’s in there.” Trini looked at the six bare feet sticking out of the closet door. “But she liked me. Every morning she’d give me a French kiss and I’d follah her just like a dog. And when she left I was sad, but not like everybody else.”
Nesta was sure then that the woman who’d abandoned the commune was her sister in blue light. The notion disgusted her.
“Come with me, Trini.”
“Where to?”
“I’m not sure yet.”
“Okay.”
Miles Barber thought that he was pulling the strings when he was no more than a tick grasping on to a lion’s mane.
Eighteen
The deficient Blue, the dog, and Death all converged on the state capitol for their own special reasons.
Gray Man bit on a bath towel in the Transient Hotel, eleven blocks from the state building where the prisoners were being held. The fires still burned in him, pained him. Redwood had transferred into his fiber all her placid memories of water and light coming together — life. This light heightened the death god’s senses and his pain. Gray Man felt two Blues, maybe three, maybe four, barely a mile away. He had come to kill them, but somehow the perception of their strong blue light brought even more pain. Life was trying to grow in him even though Horace had finally dissipated and gone.
If he closed his eyes, he could see it like a brilliant red-and-blue tumor growing inside. He conjured up an army of maggots to eat away the fibrous heart. They set at it, gnawing and squirming, but then flew outward, having become crystal-winged butterflies. Gray Man sent sharp flying blades to lacerate the flesh and sinew. But the rich blood flowed out as flowers that fell to the ground and grew.
Gray Man opened his eyes and bit his towel. He took a step toward the door but fell to the floor, moaning.
Winch Fargo walked, on faltering feet, the length of the 700 block of Proctor. His body caught between the music of love and death. The closer Winch got to one, the other one seemed to wane. He’d get to the end of the block and then, feeling the fading of light at his back like the cool breeze from a dark closet, turn to follow that.
Back and forth Winch Fargo staggered, between love and death. His skin was rough and burned from the desert sun and wind. His found pants were too short, revealing thin ankles — one of which was bruised and bloody from its manacle. The overcoat he wore was too warm, with sleeves that went down well below his fingertips.
His senses were assailed by the murmurs of dreams that the people walking by had had in the past few days. Snatches of serene beaches on crisp, cold mornings, of rude rituals, and of sex — not the act of sex, but the feeling of it in their chests and arms and genitals. He eavesdropped not only on human dreams but also on the feral dreaming of cats and rats and dogs. His mind fluttered with the insanity of fleeing birds and the complex geometric flight patterns of flies. Winch Fargo’s perception surpassed animal life and went into the deep serenity of the granite beneath his feet and the confusion of bricks, seeking only dissolution.
Winch Fargo, riding the space between the delicate vibrations of blue light, for a moment in time became a conduit for the soul. The souclass="underline" 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.