Inside me the worms were on the march. Through my stomach to my intestines. Under my skin and into my heart. I screamed louder than I had for Claudia. When I jumped up Ordé tried to grab me, but I hit him and he went down. I ran to the front door and out into the street; then I took off. Every now and then the parasites in my body brought on a spasm, and I’d fall tumbling across lawns and from sidewalks into the street. A car bumped into me on Telegraph, but I kept on running.
The visions started a few blocks after the accident. Wide bands of light in which images and histories unfolded. Molecules the size of galaxies, strange-looking creatures moving in and out of multicolored lights. A flat plain appeared on one curving screen of blue. The plain, as my mind entered it, spread out in all directions. No path to follow or mountain to set my sights on...
“What’s wrong with him, Martinez?”
“He’s trippin’, Sarge. Trippin’ hard.”
They must have been policemen. They must have arrested me. I know they did because I woke up in the drunk tank of the Berkeley jailhouse. But I was distracted by the visions and the sounds too. I imagined stars singing in a chorus; it was no mistake, no happenstance. There was meaning and the deft motions of a dance among the suns. It was then I realized that the worms had bored their way into my brain.
A pane of light opened before me. It shone like a parchment burning with alien inscriptions, equations, and hieroglyphs. I stared at the burning pages as they moved past. I took in each character but understood very little. Toward the end was the full biography of Ordé. His childhood as a liar and his adult life as a saint. I saw and felt everything he had known and done up until the moment of blue light.
There was a flash and then I was, myself, a page.
A blank sheet.
An unwritten footnote.
Four
“Lester?”
I opened my eyes to see a tall white man dressed in a white smock that hung open to reveal a red-and-yellow-plaid shirt and blue jeans.
“Yeah.”
“I’m Dr. Colby. How do you feel?”
“Where am I?”
“At Santa Teresa rest home.”
“I’m tired,” I said.
At some other time (it could have been later that day or another week) I awoke to find Colby standing over my bed again. He was thin. The whites of his eyes were laced with red veins, veins that seemed to be writhing.
“How do you feel?” he asked again.
“I don’t know. Everything looks funny.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Like your skin. If I look at it hard, I can see all kinds of blues and yellows that are like the negative of a photograph.”
“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.