“What are you going to do?” Dan Hurston asked again.
“I’m gonna kill myself,” I said. “I’m going to go over to Berkeley and kill myself in the school library.”
For a few moments the social worker stared at me. I realized that I knew nothing about the man. He wore a thick gold wedding band. I was thinking that it had to be thick because his hands were so large and powerful. There were small scars on his knuckles and on the fist flats of his fingers. His eyes were dark and remote. He smiled only when he talked about football.
He stood up, expecting, I think, for me to stand also.
“Come with me, son,” he said.
I made no move.
He pressed his lips out and then sucked them back in. Maybe he thought he could force me to go.
“Listen, brother,” he said. “I can’t stop you. And it really doesn’t matter to me, or to the people down at Social Services, what happens to you. I’m going back to the office now to inform the police. So if you mean it, you better do it quick.”
I never saw Mr. Hurston again. Just one of those hundreds of people who walk into your life and then walk out again. Like my father.
I got on a bus headed for Berkeley, wondering if someone might lend me a gun.
One
One
Ordé stood atop the flat stone in Garber Park — talking.
It had been four years since I’d cut my wrists. I still carried my woodbound book, but the title had changed to The History of the Coming of Light.
“You are but a base stock.” Ordé spoke in a commanding but intimate voice. It was drizzling on and off that day, so his audience was smaller than usual — fewer than eighty of his open-air congregation were there. Winos and unemployed clerks, dark-skinned nannies and their wealthy charges, the few blue novitiates (those who learned from the light but had not witnessed it), including me. And Miles Barber.
Miles was a homicide detective who dropped by about every other week or so. He usually came after the sermon. He didn’t seem to like hearing Ordé’s words.
Barber was investigating the deaths of Mary Klee, Carla MacIlvey, Janet Wong, and a man whom people in the park knew only as Bruce. They were all victims of a poisoner that the police had privately nicknamed Mack the Flask. They were also regulars at Ordé’s sermons, friends of mine. Among the first friends I’d ever known.
“You are but a base stock,” Ordé said again. “Vegetables cooked down in an earthen pot. Soup with only the slightest hint of flavor left. One after the other there is no difference in you. You live and die, come together and fall apart, you have children and give them empty names. You are barely there and fast dissipating; like the shit in a chamber pot spilled in the sea, you are flotsam having found your way to the edge of a decaying pier.”
Everyone stood close around Ordé’s stumplike rock. For all Ordé’s certainty, his voice was soft. His followers, acolytes, and devoted friends found that they had to push closely together to hear the words. Down in Berkeley, even in the city, they called us the Close Congregation.
We crowded together because the sermons he gave captivated us. There was something so true in his words that we clung to one another as if we were holding on to his voice. We were lulled and exalted because in some way the truth he told was him, not just some abstract idea.
“You’re way out from the heart of your origin, cut off from the bloodline that could provide the nutrients of true life. You are dying, unpollenated flowers.” Ordé looked around with a kindly expression. “Your death means nothing. Your lives are less important than spit on the sidewalk. I can’t even call you the seeds of something larger, better. You, who call yourselves living, are really nothing but the dead flakes of skin that some great shedding beast has left in his wake. The pattern of life is in you, but it is inert and decaying...”
It seemed true to me. I felt lifeless; I felt inconsequential.
Just months after his bout with the blue light, Ordé had come upon me in the quad at Berkeley. He saw my sadness, named it, and told me that it was true.
“You are born dying and so are your children. And even though your leaders claim that you are making advances through the generations, you know in your heart that it isn’t true. You get better at making mechanical things, chemical things, but you can’t make better art. You can’t understand the real in even a stone. The stone exists, but if I were to ask you what it was, what it really was, you wouldn’t even understand the question. And if you did understand, you would pull out pencil and paper, microscope and atom smasher to try and answer. You would attempt in words to explain that it would be impossible to know the nature of being stone.”
A breeze kicked up just then. Ordé raised his head and smiled.
“You would be better off putting your finger to the wind, my friends. Lick your fingers, everybody,” he said.
Most of us did. One old woman named Selma licked all four fingers from top to bottom.
I still remember the first time I did this exercise for Ordé. I held up my hand and felt that most familiar and exquisite sensation. The air cooling my finger, drying it and moving on into the sky with the moisture of my life.
I was desperate back then.
“It feels good, doesn’t it?” Ordé asked.
Many nodded.
“It’s like the cold kiss of a spirit beyond your ability to see. You can feel her only for a brief moment and then she’s off.”
We nodded some more.
“You are lost,” Ordé said.
He stepped off his rock, walked into the crowd, cleaving the congregation, and went up into the trees. Feldman and Alexander, two of Ordé’s larger acolytes, blocked the way to anybody who wanted to follow him. He would be gone for the rest of the day. He’d probably go down to San Francisco, in the secondhand brown suit I’d bought him, to look for a woman.
It was time to look for a mate again.
Many of the Close Congregation followed him up to the point of the large carob trees into which he disappeared. They pressed up against the large bodyguards and called out, “Ordé! Teacher!”
I didn’t go running after him.
I had been with Ordé for nearly four years by then. I’d left everything behind me and joined the Close Congregation. Ordé and his words were my only connection left to life. The day we met I’d intended to kill myself. I’d been with him ever since. I knew he’d be back. I was one of the few who knew where he lived in town. I collected donations from the Close Congregation, kept his bank accounts, and paid his bills.
Ordé had a lot of money in the bank, the large donations he collected himself in private interviews, but he spent very little of it. I controlled the checkbook, but all I craved was his truth.
Ordé’s words were the truth. You could see every image, feel every sensation he described. His metaphors (what we thought were metaphors) took on a palpable reality that hung in our nostrils, stuck in the back of our throats. Halfway through any sermon I would notice that I was no longer listening to his words but instead experiencing the phenomena he described.
“Hello, Chance,” Miles Barber said.
He had come up behind me while everyone else drifted after Ordé.
“Detective Barber.”
“Where’s your boss gone?” the policeman asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “He doesn’t check in with me every time he splits.”
“He go off like that often?”
“You know as well as I do,” I said. “You come up here enough.”