Blue Light (5 page)

“It was like magic, Chance,” Mrs. Brown told me. “That old white lady stroked his forehead with her fingers, and just like that, he was my boy again. That white lady come straight from heaven.”

Ordé wanted to adopt the children, but Eileen told him no. She said that she would oversee the children’s well-being. It was the only time I saw Ordé back down to someone else’s will.

Winch felt them as soon as they came into the courtroom. For him it was a flood of light. The Blues told me that they all could feel the presence of others like themselves. Ordé called it a tinkling. Reggie said that it sounded like a roar.

“Whoa ho!” Winch shouted when he became aware of Eileen and her charges. He leaped for her, but the chains and guards stopped him.

“Please!” he cried loudly.

Eileen was there every day after that. She had come as a witness for the prosecution but returned out of charity. Winch would nod to her at the beginning of every day and then sit back peacefully.

Ordé said that Winch was soothed by the aura of someone who had imbibed the whole light. When Eileen and Reggie explained that they felt something like a jagged tear inside them when they came near Winch Fargo, Ordé knew, or said he knew, that Winch hadn’t seen enough of the light, that the presence of someone whole eased his pain.

“The composition of light is something like the schematic structure of a computer tape,” Phyllis Yamauchi explained to me one Wednesday before Ordé’s talk in the park. “Do you know anything about computers?”

I did not and said so. I was eager to hear whatever she had to say. I had already begun the
History of the Coming of Light
and wanted to hear about the blue light from someone other than Ordé. I wanted to be sure that my head wasn’t just fried from taking too many drugs and then brainwashed by the rantings of a fanatic.

“Every computer tape has a header,” Phyllis explained, “then unique information, and finally a trailer. The header gives you information on what you are about to receive. You read the unique information in light of what preceded on the header. The trailer, on a computer tape, controls routing, count information, and other statistics gathered while processing the unique data. Does that make sense?”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, it does.”

It was a joy to talk to Phyllis. She was so calm, and calming, compared with Ordé. She was sane but still believed in the blue light.

“Blue light, as I see it, is similar to the computer tape in many ways,” she said. “Only the header is repeated along the body of unique data. This header tells of our history, starting with an ancient planet and the origins of life in the universe —”

“But how did it tell you?” I asked. I felt completely comfortable interrupting her. “Didn’t you have to learn the language first?”

“The language of light is in our blood, Chance,” she said, smiling. “Once illuminated, we are fully aware. The middle part — our mission, our individual purpose — is most of the light, almost twelve light-seconds in length. This information is what makes us different from one another. But even if every light were exactly the same, it would become different because the information in living blood alters each one of us also.”

“So you mean if you and I saw the same light, we would get different information?” I asked, willing myself not to pick up my pencil and woodbound notebook.

Phyllis Yamauchi smiled and blinked, then she put her warm fingers on my writing hand.

“Even the way you think is based on the possibility of your blood, Chance.” While she waited for that truth to settle in, I noticed the Goodyear blimp floating in the sky behind her head. I thought that that flying machine would be as forgotten as some billion-year-old single-celled creature after blue light exerted its will.

“The last piece, the trailer,” Phyllis continued, “is the seat of power. It releases the potential in us. For the first time in the history of this world, life evolves without dying. Ordé thinks that this Winch Fargo person saw only the last piece, the trailer. He has all of our power and sight with no understanding or purpose. That’s what drives him mad.”

She was wearing a green blouse with white pants that had green stains at the knees because of the lawn we knelt upon. Her skin was the color of pale honey, and her frame was small and fragile. To some passing stranger she might have been a coed talking to some way-out hippie that intrigued her.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“Know what?”

“How do you know about the light? Is it because you’re a scientist?”

“I am the light,” she said.

“Didn’t God say that?” I asked.

Phyllis smiled at me. I had touched her somehow.

“On Earth,” she said, looking deeply into my eyes, “there is science in one place and God in another. In the church or temple or synagogue there is God up above and humanity down below, forever separate. But in truth, the universe is like a vast ocean teeming with life. All of that life is related. Science and God and man all meet there and find that each of us is one becoming the other.”

She came with me to my room that night and we made love. She seemed to like me, but in the morning she said that there was no possibility for me to make her pregnant. We were never together again, but I still cared for her.

Eileen’s calming presence allowed the jury to sentence Fargo to 135 years. He was craning his neck, smiling at Eileen, while the foreman of the jury delivered the verdict.

Eileen took the bus out to Represa every week. He was always haggard and weak when she arrived. But after fifteen minutes, even through bulletproof glass, he revived. He told her that it was like being taken up by the wind to see her, that always the night after he saw her he was visited by gods who told him all kinds of secrets. The gods would come for two more nights, and then he would sleep on the fourth.

But for the rest of the week monsters would come to drink his blood. He had cuts and scars along his arms, Eileen could see that. But she didn’t know what they meant.

The week after my fifth grilling by Miles Barber, Claudia Heart showed up. She was the last of the Blues to come to us. I didn’t know her real name, Zimmerman, at the time. But her real name didn’t matter, because she went by the name Heart and lived by that principle.

She was welcomed by Ordé on the first day she appeared. Like most of the Blues, she didn’t seem special at first. Five five with limp brown hair and smallish brown eyes. Her skin was neither pale nor dark. Her teeth were small. I felt the beginning of an erection coming on when I first saw her, but I figured that it came from my excitement at Ordé’s recognizing her as another of the Blues.

Ordé himself was overwhelmed because Claudia’s dog, he claimed, was also shot through with the first words. This was the first animal he’d seen that had been elevated above man.

Claudia accepted Ordé’s embraces and the accolades of the congregation. Then she stood quietly next to me and listened to the sermon.

She was quiet but intent.

While Ordé lectured on the qualities of light, Claudia was seducing me.

I felt her shoulder nudging my arm but didn’t think much of it at first. We were, after all, the Close Congregation. Even when she pressed up against me and put a finger through one of my belt loops, I thought she was just being friendly.

But then she pulled my T-shirt out at the back of my pants. Her hand found its way to the small of my back and down to the top of my buttocks. That hand was incredibly hot.

“… the light of creation is the salvation, and also the damnation, of man,” Ordé was saying. “It is the idea and the power of something beyond your notion of God. But that does not mean free will is abandoned. A scientist touched by the light will become a superscientist. That child will plumb the meaning of the universe. A craftsman …”

As Claudia’s fingernail scratched a circle at the small of my back, I felt that the breeze blowing over me was actually her breath. I caught a glance at her. She was staring at Ordé, but her smile was for me.

“… a craftsman will be Vulcan by earthly standards. He will make miracles with wood and stone. But not everyone who is of light can be trusted …”

Claudia chose that moment to shove her hand down to caress my buttocks, one finger cleaving its way through to my rectum. There were people standing behind us, and I am no exhibitionist, but I wouldn’t have moved her hand for anything. Not even for Ordé.

“… everyone that has received the light has a purpose in the divine plan but you cannot trust us all. What if a murderer looks up from his victim, into blue? A child molester, a thief, a liar, a con man? There is room for every kind of man or woman.” Ordé glanced in my direction then. I wanted to moan for him to forgive me and for the teasing pleasure of Claudia’s finger. But Ordé wasn’t looking at me. His gaze lowered to Claudia’s dog, Max. “Even a dog can ascend to the heights. …”

I’m a tall man. Six three and a little bit more. That’s why Claudia didn’t have to slouch much to get her hands down between my legs. She squeezed the hard vein below my scrotum. I could have closed my legs hard enough to stop her; I wanted to, but I couldn’t.

It was as if I were a teenager again, a boy who had always wanted and never known the touch of sex.

“… we are not here to answer your prayers,” Ordé was saying. “We are here to prepare the firmament for the unification of all things. We are here to create a newer and higher order. Each of us will use the tools we have. Each of us will do what is necessary. Your desires are meaningless. We only love you if it meets our needs —”

“Come on,” Claudia whispered to me. “Let’s go.”

She had to stand on her tiptoes and let go of my vein. I was listening closely to Ordé because that was his power. When he spoke prophecy we were enthralled. That’s how I knew that sex, or passion, or love, or whatever you want to call it, was Claudia Heart’s province.

No matter how much I wanted to stay and listen, I had to go with her, my erection tenting the loose work pants I wore.

She led me through the Close Congregation and down a path through the trees. We came to a small dirt road, and she stopped to kiss me.

Everything dimmed, like when lightning strikes and the electricity goes low. I could hardly see or breathe. Where our lips met became the center of a new being, that’s the only way to describe it. The kiss — not the flesh, but the act of kissing itself — became the origin of something beyond me but that I was still a part of. My arms moved to embrace her but too late, she moved back and studied my eyes. Whatever it is she saw must have satisfied her, because she smiled and said, “Come on.”

I didn’t understand how she could bear to disengage or how she could move so quickly. The kiss seemed to go on forever, but why I couldn’t get my arms around her I did not know.

We went a little ways from the park and into the street. She led me up a nameless alley, behind a machine shop. There we came to a Dodge van that was wedged between two small buildings.

She opened the back door. The carpeted back of the van was completely bare except for a canvas cot that stood against the far side.

“Get in quick,” she said.

The dog, Max, ran in with me.

“Take off the clothes,” she said.

She pulled off her one-piece black dress. Underneath she had well-formed small breasts and a flat stomach. Her pubic hair was plentiful and wild, like an untamed shrub. I moaned when I saw her and tore a fingernail on the knot of my bootlace.

When I had most of my clothes off she looked at me and smiled. My erection was pointing right at her.

“What do you want?” I asked. I knew that I couldn’t move without her telling me to.

I was hunched down because the van wasn’t big enough even for her to stand up straight.

She pulled the cot toward the center of the space.

“Here,” she said, indicating that I should sit on the edge toward the bottom.

I was naked except for one boot and the pant leg I couldn’t get over it.

She made me lie down and then she got herself astride my erection. I felt something so firm and warm and embracing that I gasped.

“Don’t move,” she said.

“But I have to.”

“Does it feel good like this?”

“Yeah, but —”

“Don’t move.”

I was looking up into her eyes. She seemed to be asking for something, and I was trying my best to give it to her. Every now and then I’d have a spasm and a shake.

“Don’t move” would be her response.

After a long time she began to move up and down slowly, leaning over a little so she could run her fingertips over my nipples. I tried to move with her, but she dug her nails into my chest and whispered, “Stop. If you feel like moving, just call out, just scream. Nobody’s gonna hear you. Scream.”

She started to move faster then.

I let out a yell.

The dog barked.

“Just lie there, Chance,” Claudia Heart said. I wondered where she’d learned my name.

I screamed.

“How does it feel?” she asked.

“Like cashmere and steel,” I said. I don’t know where I found the voice or the words.

“Do you like it?”

I couldn’t answer.

The dog let out a howl that echoed inside my chest and brain.

“Spread your legs,” Claudia commanded.

I heard her but somehow I didn’t think she was talking to me.

“Spread your legs,” she said again.

I did so and instantly felt the dog’s hot tongue lapping against my testicles. I tried to pull my knees together, but Claudia put her hand out to stop me.

“If you try it, Max’ll snap those balls right off.”

Scared as I was, I just got more excited.

“Just take it, baby,” Claudia said. And she began to move fast, moving me around like rock and roll.

When I came I thought my heart would explode. Claudia let her serious gaze break for a momentary smile.

“It’s just the beginning, Chance. It’s just the start.”

I tried to get up, but Max bit my thigh. He howled again; Claudia brought back the cashmere and steel. It was hours before she was through with me. I don’t know how long it was exactly because I wasn’t conscious the entire time.