“You are neither worm nor butterfly,” Ordé said, “but only the dry husk left after the metamorphosis. If you die, it is of no consequence. Your life is only the blind bumbling of an abandoned newborn. Your pleasure is salt and sand. Your heat is tepid tea. Your life a short gust across stagnant water—”
The words came over me like a cool balm, a restorative love. The condemnation didn’t bother me. He was my teacher standing on a philosopher’s stone. His brutal words were only truth.
“—water that cannot flow. True life is in my veins. It is in my eyes and words. There are only two ways to become of the light. Either you see the true words or you are born of the blood of truth. You can never ascend. You have only the slight possibility of half knowledge. You may perceive that there is a truth beyond you, but you will never know it, you will never glide between the stars on webs of unity.”
Not only was there truth in his words, but somehow his words themselves were true. Like Claudia’s kiss, Ordé’s words brought me visions of a place between things. A space that is smaller than an atom but that still encompasses everything in existence. A place that is not yet here but that is coming.
“Do you want to see it, Chance?”
“Huh?”
“Will you risk your worthless life for an inkling of the truth?” His voice was kind and concerned.
There was no choice. He was a god and I, a blind mole.
We went down toward his small house. He wore a brightly colored tie-dyed monk’s cloak and habit, but nobody looked twice. This was the Bay Area in 1969 and a black man, a brother, walking with a white man who wore his hair like a woman didn’t turn heads.
In the light you could see that his home was made up of four small rooms with bare floors that were scarcely furnished. We went into the kitchen. I sat down at the table, remembering Mary sitting there dead. I wondered if my other friends had died at that table. While I wondered, he switched on a glaring electric light and put a white ceramic bowl in front of me. I noticed dark remnants splattered on the floor and walls. When I looked up, Ordé was approaching me with a sharp cork-hafted knife.
“If I speak to a crowd, they listen because they suspect the truth in my words,” he was saying. “One day I’ll run for office.”
I stared at the knife as he stood over me.
“But if I connect with the truth in words while talking to a small group, or just one person, the truth is known. I am the doorway to truth, Chance.”
“Are you going to kill me?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “The others died, but you’re different. You’re... you’re weaker than they were. You’re one of the susceptible ones. More than anyone, you hear us. You hear the music.”
He handed the knife to me. “Cut a vein and cover the bottom of the bowl to about an inch or so.”
I didn’t want to die and I was sure that what he was going to do would kill me. But I couldn’t refuse him. Death was better by far than his disappointment. I cut my wrist and the blood flowed freely. The feeling of the blood trickling down between my fingers was familiar, almost comforting. It was a sensation I associated with power — my power.
The warm dollops plopped quickly into the white bowl. I tried to stop the bleeding with my thumb, but the blood kept coming. I tried three fingers, but still it came between and around. I was beginning to panic when Ordé took my wrist and placed a large gauze pad over the cut. He pressed hard for about a minute and then produced bandage tape and wound it tightly about the gauze. A large circle of blood grew on the bandage but stopped before reaching the edges.
Then Ordé took the knife. He raised his sleeve, showing his wrist. There were many scars there along the vein. I wondered if each incision meant a death.
Ordé chose a spot between scars. He dug in the point and made a quick twist with his wrist. The blood came out in quick droplets, mixing with mine. Ordé’s blood was darker, but mine was heavier. At first the droplets formed little pools across the top like dark islets in a crimson sea. But as he bled more, the islets came together to form continents.
When he was finished Ordé simply pressed his thumb against the small incision for ten seconds or so. The bleeding stopped completely, and I wondered if that had to do with his truth also.
“We have to wait for the mixture to prepare itself,” Ordé said.
He sat across from me and smiled.
I remembered the first time I sat in his presence on the afternoon I’d decided to die the second time.
“How’s it goin’, brother?” he asked me.
“Fine.”
“You at the school?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What you do there?”
“I study Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War and its impact on the idea of history. That’s the general idea anyway...” I stopped myself from going on to explain that the general and medical observer and historian not only told history but was himself a part of that history; he was history. That was my thesis, simple and elegant, I believed. But no one in Ancient Studies had thought my idea was scholarly enough, and they were happy to see me gone.
“You like that?”
“It doesn’t seem to matter. Maybe it did a long time ago, but not now.”
“All you learn around here is how to mix up the slop,” Ordé said.
“You got that right.” That was the first time I felt Ordé’s truth telling, but I didn’t know it then.
“You know the water tower above the statue back up in Garber Park?”
“Yeah?”
“I get together with some people there at noon on Wednesdays. You’d learn a lot more up there than you ever will in a classroom.”
“About what?” I asked.
Ordé turned to me then and looked in my eyes. “About everything you miss every day. About a whole world that these fools down here don’t even know exists.”
Back then I thought it was his eyes that convinced me to live at least until the following Wednesday.
Sitting there in his kitchen, as we stared at each other over a bowl of our blood, I wondered at how far I had drifted from my pristine studies.
“See,” Ordé said. “The blood mixes itself.”
He was right. The darker blood and the lighter had formed into longish clumps like fat worms. They twisted and turned against each other, sometimes slowly, sometimes fast. Every now and then two worms would collapse and fall together and then fall apart — another color completely now, almost white.
“When they’re all the same color it will be ready,” Ordé said.
I watched the spinning worms, thinking that this was the first time I could see Ordé’s truth outside of my mind. It wasn’t just Ordé’s words or Claudia’s lovemaking that dazzled me. This was proof.
My stomach began to tighten. The back of my neck trembled, and I wanted to jump up from that table. I wanted to run.
“You see,” Ordé said. “They’re all that milky pink color.”
“Yeah,” I barked.
Ordé went to a drawer in the built-in cabinets around the sink. He pulled out a small whisk and came back. The pink worms were writhing violently by then.
Ordé plunged the whisk in and mixed briskly. The worms turned back to liquid. It was as if the writhing were an illusion, a vision brought on by Ordé’s suggestion.
“This is the lightest color I’ve ever seen,” Ordé said.
“You mean like with Mary?” I asked.
“She was the first,” he said. “That’s what killed her and Janet Wong and Bruce too. They drank a darker fluid and died.”
Ordé looked me in the eye.
I raised the bowl to my lips. The thick fluid was warm on my tongue. In my throat it seemed to change back into worms. Sinuous and twisting they went down. I tried to take the blood from my lips, but Ordé put out his hand to increase the tilt of the bowl. I drank it all down. And then threw the bowl to the floor.