She would have gone back to the dorms alone except that he took her to the small stream up above the tower and washed her. It was summer and the moon was three-quarters full. “The water was cold,” she told me years later in the woods of Treaty. “But he was so sure of every stroke against my skin.”
For once he didn’t say a word, just led her, undressed her, used her T-shirt as his rag. Somewhere between the moon shimmering in the water on her skin and the fading echoes of Moses, she forgot to leave Ordé.
On the walk through the trees and then onto Derby, toward Telegraph and her dormitory, Adelaide began to think of a life with a man who lied about everything and then, in turn, believed his own lies. Maybe that wasn’t so bad.
On the same walk Ordé saw great stone bodies, larger than the sun, floating in absolute darkness. These titans were dreaming, before the world, about Ordé and what he would say.
Adelaide lived with him for two weeks before they made love again. But when they did, the wild man’s love had become too much for her. It burned and rasped against her insides. He slept for three days after his clawing, screaming orgasm, stretched out right there on her small dormitory cot. When he came out of his hibernation she was gone, back home to Pomona and her family.
Hundreds of lights struck that night. Most of them collapsed into inert earth. Most insects, birds, and fish that witnessed the Radiance died immediately — not because the light was poisonous but because they were so close to death as a matter of everyday existence that, blinded for the moment, they fell prey to the world around them. Claudia’s dog, Max, survived the experience. A pregnant coyote in Tilden Park glimpsed blue wisdom and moved north. I know of only sixteen souls who survived the night — zygotes of the blue impregnation, children of the primal cell of life — but there may have been more.
While God’s tears fell I lay in a small candlelit storage closet in a place we called the People’s Warehouse, bleeding from both wrists. That was August 8, 1965. Still loaded on reds, I barely felt the blood that soaked through my jeans and spread across the floor. When Joseph Warren came in looking for paper towels, he slipped on the slick gore and fell on top of me. I saw him coming. I tried to say, “Watch it, Joe,” but the words wouldn’t form on my numb lips.
The impact of his weight didn’t hurt. All I felt was my bones shifting. Sack of bones, I thought. Just a numb sack of bones.
In Tilden Park the blue-risen coyote lifted her head toward the heavens and caught the foul scent of death, which she followed like some alien explorer who had just discovered the existence of evil. At the same time Reggie Brown held his mother’s head against his breast, feeling no loss at the death of his sister, and Eileen Martel identified Winch Fargo in his hospital bed. I was in the ambulance, then in my own hospital bed, under arrest for the crime of attempted suicide.
While I was recovering, Claudia Zimmerman’s husband shot himself in the head. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that he was despondent over his wife’s leaving him for life on a hippie commune somewhere.
In the days that followed I lost my job at the Berkeley library because I didn’t come in to work for two weeks. I was asked to leave the Ph.D. program in Ancient Studies because I failed to make any progress in my thesis on the Peloponnesian War. My girlfriend, Althea, went back down to LA for the weekend and never returned.
They let me stay at the People’s Warehouse in the Haight, though. They said it was because my blood had claim.
I spent the next few months wandering the streets of San Francisco and Berkeley. At any other time I might have looked like a maniac. A big black man in his twenties with a mane of matted and kinky hair. I carried a large homemade book, bound in unfinished oak and leather, that I wrote in while standing on street corners or sitting on the sidewalk. I was, at that time, writing a history that I’d given the temporary title The History of Love.
It was a chronicle of the Bay Area at that time. Everyone back then felt the change in the air. It was the first time since the ancient city-states that a city was the center of change for the whole world. I was going to document that change. With eyewitness accounts, torn-out newspaper articles, lyrics from songs, and impressions of political speeches, I hoped to capture the sense of change from a citizen of the Haight. I attended rallies and love-ins as if I were part of the press. I experimented with a wider variety of the drugs I felt were changing the mind of the future. Instead of studying history in books, I was writing history about the real world.
That was during the day.
At night I’d curl up into a ball in my small corner and dream about my mother (her white skin somehow denying the love she claimed) and my father — his absence even blacker than me.
I’d get the night shakes. I’d wish that I were dead. It was on one such bad night that I had tried to kill myself. The head doctors told me it was the drugs that made me crazy — not my mother. They said that I was smart and that too much pressure in the Ph.D. program along with the downers and mushrooms had pushed me over the edge.
But they didn’t understand. They fit inside their clothes and behind their desks. They came from places where they were recognized as members and relatives and citizens. They were never stopped on their front lawns and arrested for stealing their own bicycles the way I had been. And when my mother came to the police station, she was turned away because I was too black to have come from her.
I spoke the white man’s language. I dreamed his dreams. But when I woke up, no one recognized me. No one but my mother, and I hated her for that.
All of this is why, Ordé said, I was open to the promise of blue light. My life was free from the identity half-life had made for itself. I was ready, the prophet said, to go further than man and his pathetic telos.
But I knew nothing of blue light as I wandered the streets scribbling and waiting for the right time to die. I had no idea that there would be a grander history for me to witness and document. I had no glimmer that I had a part to play in the future of life and in the ultimate demise of humanity.
The social worker assigned to my case was Dan Hurston. I saw him on Tuesdays on a bench at the entrance of Golden Gate Park. We met in the park because I couldn’t seem to breathe right in his office.
“How’s it going today?” he had asked me at our last meeting.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I mean, I don’t feel bad or anything.”
Dan had almost jet black skin, a shade or two darker than mine, and a thick mustache that reminded me of a bristle brush.
“What do you feel?” he asked.
I wanted to say that there was no difference between me and the air we breathed, that I was mostly dead, but instead I just shook my head.
“Have you been looking for a job?” His question seemed to be a rebuke.
“I’ve been walking around a lot,” I said.
“How about school? Have you tried to get yourself reinstated?”
Suddenly I was exhausted. I inhaled deeply but felt little satisfaction in my lungs.
“What are you going to do?” the social worker asked.
“You know, I keep thinking,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“I keep thinking that it was my father’s blood on the bathroom floor. It was his blood. You know what I mean?”
Mr. Hurston shook his head at me. He looked at his watch. There were children playing on the small lawn behind our bench. I watched them scream and laugh. Their mothers were sitting on another bench, talking to each other and looking up to check on their babies now and then.