Blue Light (7 page)

“Do you feel nausea? Headache?”

“Why?”

“Do you have any history of blood disease?”

“No.”

“Any problems?” He was trying to sound nonchalant.

“Am I sick?”

“There seems to be something wrong with your blood. Not wrong really, but odd. It’s not acting like we expect it to.”

“So what’s wrong?”

“I don’t know.” The doctor ran his hand over his short salt-and-pepper hair. “We’ve sent it out for tests.”

He took my blood pressure and peered into my eyes, throat, and ears. While he examined me, I learned that I had been in the sanitarium for three and a half months.

“A fellow named Portman had you brought here,” the doctor told me. “He calls every week to see how you’re doing.”

“I’d like to talk to him the next time he calls,” I said.

“When you’re strong enough to walk.” Colby gave me a friendly smile. “We don’t have phones in the rooms.”

He gave me a dark green pill and left the room after he’d made sure that I swallowed it. I fell near to sleep, into a kind of half-dreaming, pensive state.

I was aware of new possibilities in life. Like an amoebic cell drifting in the ocean, dreaming of becoming a whale. Like a bag of cement waiting to become a part of a highway or bridge. There was anticipation in every sound and sensation.

Light flittered across my eyelids. A wooden flute played softly.

Ordé was sitting next to my bed, wearing that secondhand brown suit. He’d added an almost shapeless gray fedora to the ensemble — long blond hair flowed out from under the back brim. He smiled. It was a pleasant smile, a smile that a parent has for another man’s child. But I could no longer have the innocent love I once felt for the prophet. I was a worker now. An adult meant for lifting and toting, building and protecting.

“I’m sorry I have to wake you up, Chance. It’s almost Christmas and we have to get on with our work.” Ordé smiled again and I sat up.

I was still weak, though, and fell back into the pillows of my sanitarium bed.

“You have to get back your strength, cousin. You’ll need a few weeks to eat and exercise. Then you’ll be ready to come back and teach us how to do the blood ritual right.”

I wanted to speak but passed out instead.

When I woke up again it was night and I was alone.

The room I was in was large with a high domed ceiling. There was a big white door that must’ve led to some hallway, and then there were double glass doors, covered in white lace, that went outside.

The moon was shining through the curtains. I forced myself to stand up and walk to the glass doors. I didn’t feel strong enough to pull them open, but I moved the curtains to the side and gazed up at the moon. I can’t express the joy that I felt looking up, being filled with light. Even the comparatively sterile light of the moon is filled with wonderful truths. With my heightened senses, I could actually feel the light against my skin. The tactile sensation caused slight frictions along my nerves. It was like the diminishing strain of a classical composition that had gotten so soft a breeze could have erased it.

The music spoke of that spinning celestial body and of the sun’s heat. There was a long-ago cry of free-forming gases and a yearning for silence. The universe, I knew then, was alive. Alive but still awakening. And that awakening was occurring inside my mind. I was a conduit. We were all conduits. With my mind I could reach out to the radiance that embraced me.

But I didn’t understand. I wasn’t blessed by light. The potion Ordé gave me opened my senses but gave me precious little knowledge. I was like the tinfoil put on a jury-rigged coat-hanger antenna — merely a convenience, an afterthought with few ideas of my own.

The universe spoke to me in a language that was beyond my comprehension. But even to hear the words, just to feel them, filled me with a sense of being so large that I couldn’t imagine containing any more.

Then there came a yipping like pinching at the back of my neck. I put my hand back there but found nothing. I saw a dark blur outside the window. Two night eyes, four, six, eight.

The coyotes came slowly toward the window. I wasn’t afraid. They exuded a music like the moon did, but theirs was a quartet of fast drums and a thrumming of blood.

From behind them came a larger coyote. This one, when she came into the light that carpeted the lawn, showed herself to be one-eyed. The young canines moved to their mother as she stared up at me.

I opened the doors and they all rushed in, jumping around me. In my weakened state I fell to the floor. The young coyotes pushed their forepaws against me and yipped. They nuzzled their wet snouts against my face and rubbed their bony ribs against me. They smelled of things wild and feral, but I wasn’t afraid. I felt them the same way I could feel the moon. It was as if I had been a fifth cub with them in the den where they were born, as if I had run with them and suckled on my own special teat. I felt the yip in my throat and a growl too.

That’s when Coyote stood before me. The cubs moved away and I looked at their mother. She whined, wanting to tell me something, I was sure. But I didn’t understand. She pawed the pine floor and licked my bare feet to no avail.

At that moment the door to the hallway opened. All six faces in the room turned toward the light. A small Asian woman stood there. She threw her hands up above her head and tried to turn and run at the same time; instead, she fell to the floor, screaming.

I felt a searing pain between my left shoulder and my neck. I turned to see five coyote tails moving fast across the moonlit lawn. The nurse was hollering for all she was worth. A deep dread settled in on me and I lost consciousness again.

I was unconscious for five days. The rabies shots they administered weakened me so much that the doctors thought I might die. But Ordé said that he was never worried about that.

“You’re a blue blood now,” he told me. “Pale but still blue enough.”

In two more weeks I was strong enough to leave Santa Teresa’s. My body was strong, but my mind was full of dread.

“They were like Claudia’s friend, the dog? You’re sure?” Ordé asked on the bus back to Berkeley.

“I could … could, like, hear them, you know?”

“You mean, you felt it like that?” Ordé said rubbing the thumb and forefinger of both hands lightly together.

Somehow the gesture made sense, and I nodded.

“And so when she bit you, she was trying to communicate,” Ordé said. “She was telling you something.”

It was a truth waiting to come to me.

“Yeah,” I said. “Ever since she bit me I’ve been just about ready to cry. I mean real sad crying too. Like my best friend just died in my arms.”

Ordé touched the wounds on my shoulder. I turned to give him a better view of the injury and found myself looking out the bus window at the large white stones that led down to the ocean. The Pacific was singing a sonorous dirge. It was a great moving beast with flecks of life glimmering within its folds.

It was hard to control my new powers of perception. Everything I saw — grass growing, breezes darting through leafy boughs, maggots swimming in death — everything set my senses to translating. That’s what Ordé called it. Reading the meaning of myself in the world and, therefore, he claimed, changing the world.

Ordé had already explained in one of his sermons that the purpose of light was to combine with the DNA molecule, to unite matter and energy into a perfect state of thought and being. The blue god, who has the only ability to know, was in me. His brilliant eyes and keen ears making and remaking the world in my particular perceptions.

I felt a sharp pain in my neck. I yanked my head around to see my teacher digging his fingernails into the half-healed wounds inflicted by Coyote. There was sympathy in his powerful gaze, sympathy and command. The blood felt as if it were mobilizing in my veins. The cells felt particular, like tiny soldiers marching toward the breech. I was shaking. Ordé touched the reopened wound with his other hand. He then brought the bloody fingers to his lips. Shock registered in his eyes, and the grip on my shoulder and neck eased.

As the pressure lessened, the despair I had felt dissipated. I was exhausted and slumped forward, putting my elbows on my knees. When I sat up I noticed a small black boy sitting across the aisle from me. He was looking fearfully at my wounded neck.

Ordé had his face buried in his hands by then. The forgotten blood on his fingers smeared the top of his forehead.

He cried all the way back to Berkeley, red drying to black across his forehead.

When we returned from Santa Teresa, Ordé went straight home. He locked himself in his house and didn’t come out, as far as I knew, for days.

That was Friday.

On Wednesday he didn’t show up for his sermon to the Close Congregation. The congregation was there, although smaller.

Phyllis Yamauchi was already missing. She hadn’t been seen for more than two weeks, but no one in the Close Congregation was worried. It wasn’t required that Blues report to anyone. Phyllis studied her charts and telescopes and every once in a while came by to let Ordé see what she theorized. Often his prophecy complemented her studies. I had been transcribing their notes into my book.

Claudia Heart had taken more than fifty of Ordé’s followers to her own communal residence, not far from the People’s Warehouse, in Haight-Ashbury. She would take them one by one, men and women, into her van and make love to them just as she had done with me. Most came crawling back, begging to be with her, swearing to do anything for her kiss and company.

I would have gone on my knees to her without the blood ritual. Now I felt no desire for her.

I got a ride from Feldman, Ordé’s bodyguard, and went down to our teacher’s house. He came to the door but didn’t open up.

“Who is it?”

“It’s Chance, teacher.”

“Go away.”

“The congregation is waiting for you.”

“Tell them to go home. Tell them to go home and to say their prayers.”

“What’s wrong, teacher?”

“Go away, Lester.”

Up until that moment, no matter how hard or frustrating life had become, I still had faith in Ordé and his Blues. I believed in the unity, perfection, and grace of the universe. I believed in what Ordé called the grand hierarchy. I was a brick in the cathedral of existence meant to support the feet of gods.

My confidence was bruised when I heard the fear in Ordé’s voice, but I knew my job. I went back up to the congregation and told them that Ordé had been faced with a great mystery. I told them about the coyotes who performed their own kind of blood ritual on me, how our teacher tasted their knowledge in my blood.

I didn’t tell them of my blood ritual with Ordé. I didn’t trust that everyone would understand the purity of his motives.

It was a new experience for me. I had never spoken to a crowd before. But with my new powers of perception, I could read the needs of the assembly.

“You want to know something?” I asked one young acolyte.

“How did you manage to keep from going with Claudia Heart?”

“Ordé sang to me,” I said.

“Will he sing to me?” There were tears in her eyes. Later I found out that her husband had tied her up when she tried to follow Claudia, that he’d drugged her for two weeks until her desire to run had changed to a deep sadness at the loss of love.

“Yes,” I said.

I answered questions and soothed the nervous congregation. They accepted me as Ordé’s substitute, at least for one meeting. I didn’t have his power. I could perceive but could not project. What I had to offer them was passive understanding.

A
FTER THE WEDNESDAY MEETING
I went back to Ordé’s house, but he wouldn’t even answer the door. His windows were blocked by sheets of tinfoil, and junk mail was already spilling out of the small mailbox.

I went home after that.

Ordé had paid the rent while I was in the sanitarium.

My one-room studio cost seventeen dollars a week, which I usually got in the mail from my mother even though I never answered the letters she enclosed with the checks.

Actually, I never even read those letters.

I was thinking about that on Sunday night. How I cut off my mother, and all the rest of my life. How I blamed her for bearing a black child and rearing him in a white world.

It seemed silly to be worried about race then. I had come just a few steps from something beyond race or species or life, even. Not only would I have met the maker in the coming of blue light, I would have seen myself in his radiance.

But now I was back in the mundane world. My teacher, who had been like a god to me, had become just a frightened man.

I wondered again how long it would be before I killed myself. I plugged in my radio and picked up a blues station on FM. Robert Johnson wailed that the blue light was his blues while the red one was his mind. As I fell asleep, his blues mingled with mine.

I felt a clicking around my ears and imagined that small insects were making last-minute plans before they prepared to climb into my brain. I woke up suddenly, slapping all around my head. The knock came right after that.

“Who is it?”

“It’s Reggie.”

“What do you want, Reggie? It’s late.” The windup alarm clock on the floor next to my mattress said 3:16.

“Open up, Chance, we got a problem.”

I was still a member of the Close Congregation. Reggie was still one of the Blues. Even if he was only thirteen, I had to at least talk to him.

I got to my feet and opened the door. Reggie was short for his age. Five two. He had a flattop haircut and wore jeans and a buttoned-up white dress shirt with the tails out.

We just stood there because I had no chairs.

“You got to come with me, Chance.”

“What’s goin’ on?”

“Just come on, man.”

Even in Berkeley the streets were more or less empty at that time of morning. There were a few hippies around. A few drug deals going down. But on the whole, there was no one. We went down Shattuck to Cedar and over to La Loma; from there we got to Buena Vista, Phyllis’s street. The block was lined with two- and three-story brick houses that had deep lawns and big, dark trees.