“He always go alone?” Detective Barber asked.
“We’re never alone, Officer.”
Barber’s hair was thick and black, but his eyes were light gray. He wasn’t tall and he always wore an odd-colored suit. That day it was an iridescent gray-green two-piece suit with a single-button jacket.
He looked and sounded as if his entire life were just off the secondhand rack.
“I don’t care about your blue light bullshit, kid. I wanna know if your boss disappears with people from this group into the woods.”
“You asked me that before,” I said.
“I can arrest you anytime I want, kid.”
“Yes, you can, Officer.”
Barber took me in with his eyes. I had known many policemen. Ever since I was a child they’d been rousting me. I knew when a cop hated me — my big frame, my black skin. But Barber didn’t have time for that kind of hatred. He had a job to do, that was all.
I would have liked to help him. But I could not.
I couldn’t, because helping him would have condemned the dream. Barber was a cop, that’s all. He found out who did wrong, uncovered the evidence to prove it, and sent the wrongdoers to jail. He wasn’t concerned with the subtleties of truth and necessity. He couldn’t see above the small laws that he worked for.
I wondered, as he interrogated me for the fifth time, if he knew how close he stood to his precious truth. Did he know that three and a half years earlier I had been summoned from my Shattuck Avenue dive by Ordé?
A man, I forget his name, who lived two floors below knocked on my door a little after 11:00 P.M.
“Phone,” he said. Before I could get the door open he was already going back down the stairs.
There was a pay phone on the second floor that we all used to receive calls. I was surprised because no one ever called me. My mother never even knew the number.
“Chance?”
“Teacher?” I asked. I had never seen Ordé away from the park except for that first time we met. It had been only a short while since I’d been a member of the Close Congregation.
“Come to me,” he said and then he gave me the address.
I was flattered by the call. I didn’t ask why or if it could wait till morning. I just told him that it might take a while because I had no car or bike or money for the bus.
“Hurry” was his reply.
I found myself running down the nighttime streets of Berkeley.
Ordé lived in a small house about six blocks down from Telegraph. There was no path through the uncut lawn to his door. I could feel the wet blades of grass against the bare sides of my sandaled feet.
He opened the door before I reached it.
“Come in.”
The small entrance area had a doorway on either side. The room to the left was empty and dark except for a single flickering flame that I thought must have been a candle. The room to the right had an electric light burning behind a half-closed door. I turned toward the brighter light.
“No,” Ordé commanded. He gestured toward the flickering dark.
I obeyed him not because I felt I had to. I wanted to please him because when he spoke he seemed to understand all the pain of my life. He never blamed or made empty promises; he simply explained and left me to make my own choices.
We sat on the floor in the dark room on either side of a fat candle. He wore black slacks and a loose collarless shirt that was unbuttoned. The light played shadows on his shallow chest and gaunt face. His blond hair was in shadow, making his bronzed skin seem pale.
“You are half of a thing,” he said, speaking softly and with no particular emphasis. But I felt the words wrap tightly around my mind. “The lower half,” he continued. “The tripod, the foundation, the land below the stars.”
I wanted to get up and run. Not to escape, but to work off the elation I felt upon receiving his words.
“You are sleep before waking, like I was before blue light. I look upon you as you would see a man who used his head to hammer nails. Poor fool.”
The image was so clear in my mind, I worried that it might be a flashback to an old acid trip.
“Do you understand?” Ordé asked.
“I think so.”
“What?”
“The blue light is God,” I said.
“No. I don’t think so,” Ordé said with a little wonder in his voice. “No. Not God, but life. Not lies or hopes or dreams. Nothing that is to come later, but right now. Right now. Here.”
I had never experienced anything like sitting there receiving his words. The only thing even approaching it was an early memory I had of my mother’s trying to show me the San Bernardino mountain range. I was three or four, and she held me in one arm while pointing off into the distance. All I could make out was “far away” and colors. But as she kept explaining and pointing, I slowly made out the mountains she described. The elation I felt at realizing mountains for the first time was a weak emotion compared with what Ordé made me feel there in the darkness.
I’d heard him speak many times before, but it never had that kind of impact. It was as if I were transformed temporarily and for a brief moment I saw through his eyes, shared his expanded awareness.
“Do you understand?” Ordé asked again.
I nodded.
“Can you see what I’m saying?”
“It’s like the whole world,” I said meaninglessly. “Everything.”
“Everything must change,” he said, making sense out of my nonsense. “But in order for that to happen we must multiply. We must grow until every animal and fish, every rock and drop of water is one. Everything must merge.”
“Like an explosion?”
“Yes. But slowly. Over thousands of years. But it will never be unless we can mate.”
“Why can’t you?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I try,” he said. “But my blood is too strong. It devours the egg.”
My eyes had adjusted to the darkness by then. There was a wooden bench behind Ordé and a pile of clothes or rags on the floor.
He stood up and walked toward the door with the electric light shining behind it. I followed him into the light.
It was a small dinette separated from the kitchen by a waist-high wall of shelves. A large table, topped with red linoleum, dominated the room, but it was the small corpse slumped back in one of the chrome chairs that captured my attention. It was Mary Klee, one of the Close Congregation. Head thrown back, dark foam down her chin. One eye was wide-open while the other was mostly closed. She wore jeans and a T-shirt.
There was a bowl half filled with what looked like congealed blood on the table before her. I’m sure I would have been sick if I wasn’t still stunned by the power of Ordé’s words.
“I hoped that if we shared blood, her cells might have been strengthened.” There was no apology in Ordé’s voice. “But even just to drink some of it, she died.”
He stood for a long time then, pondering, I suppose, the future of his race — the generation of blue divinity. I sat down across from Mary, looking into her cockeyed stare. I’d never seen a corpse before, but then again, I’d never believed in God before Ordé told me that there was something higher than God.
The silence continued for half an hour or more.
“Can you drive a car?” he asked finally.
I must have nodded.
“Put her in the car in the backyard and take her somewhere,” he said.
There was a junkyard in Alameda I knew. No one patrolled it at night and there were no fences. All the way out I wondered why I obeyed him.
“It’s only words,” I said out loud. “Only words, but Mary’s really dead.”
But I knew the answer. Those words had transformed me, made me believe in something that I could be a part of. Ordé didn’t mourn Mary. How could he? People were, at best, coma victims in his eyes. He hadn’t murdered her; he had tried to elevate her life.