After many hours, almost in daylight, the boulder fell, sealing the dead man in.
Coyote spent the day circling, coming closer. She was skittish, frightened even by small breezes that rustled in the dead grass. It wasn’t until twilight that she made it to the rockbound cave. She sniffed and studied, whimpered and barked.
When she reached the upper part of the blocking stone, she pawed the dry dirt a little and stared hard, as if maybe she could peer beneath.
The dead hand shot out of the ground faster than she could see. The long-nailed finger destroyed the right eye and curled upward to rip out the bones of her head. But she was too quick to be killed. Half blinded but still alive, crying loudly at the pain and darkness, she ran at full speed back into the hills.
And then Gray Man rested. He leaned back against the cave wall in a corpse’s recline. One arm thrown carelessly beneath him, one leg at an almost impossible angle. He would lie like this for years, pondering the corpse he inhabited.
He traveled up and down the corridors of remembrance, witnessing the earliest sights forgotten by Horace: his mother bathing with him and his sister in the old iron tub in the row house in the Third Ward, a spider crawling down the banister on his first real bed, the smell of urine in the alley down at the end of the block. He remembered every word in every language that Horace had ever heard. English, Spanish, French, German, and Japanese. He remembered the numbers and their relations, as much as was taught up to the seventh grade, when Horace dropped out of school. He extended the roads of Horace’s knowledge until the path of mathematics converged with the fear-laden knowledge of the big bomb. He plumbed the meaning of philosophy by comparing words that lay dormant and ununderstood. He studied crime and then ethics. He learned of prayer and of God. He learned of Satan and knew somehow that this was his deity on this planet.
Gray Man hated life.
Horace had not been a good man. As a soldier he’d killed in Europe and later in prison. He knew about God (the blue light in life’s eyes) but didn’t seem to care. He stole and once, in a drunken stupor, had raped a woman who he knew and lusted after.
Horace was dead but he could be recalled. He could be an ally. He would understand all those millions of word sounds and word strings repeated over and over, never meaning the same thing or sometimes meaning nothing or sometimes meaning feeling. The pinch that is good. The smile that is bad.
The joke.
What Gray Man hated most were questions asked that needed no answer and phrases repeated again and again with no purpose or resolution. There was only one answer, only one resolution — and they were both death.
Horace had understood what Gray Man needed to know.
Horace was dead, of course. He was gone when Gray Man came, but the pieces of him were still there. Like in the movie of the man named Frankenstein and the monster with the same name.
A nose, a brain.
He could be rebuilt like the old Chevrolet he once owned. The engine could take you all the way to Las Vegas and back, baby.
A dying man yells at the end of his life.
He sees the clawed hand of the Reaper reaching for his belly. Razorlike talons cut him open; blood and guts spill out like mud.
A dying man yells from a hillside grave after the end of his life.
A one-eyed coyote looks up from her four pups and sniffs the air. The coyote pups all look too. They stop their suckling and whimper from a pain they felt before birth.
Horace comes awake in the desert. The gravelly ground under him feels wonderful. The stab of small sharp stones against his cheek and ribs are things to laugh about, feelings to celebrate. He looks up and sees a moon that is ten times larger than it has ever been. Next to this moon floats a shimmering cloud of incandescent blue gas. A bright red stone, the size of the old moon, orbits the cloud crazily, like an erratic electron.
He stands up and sees that his hands are very large. But as he watches them, they shrink back to normal size.
“It’s hard to keep things in place,” another Horace says.
Horace looks up and sees himself approach out of nowhere.
“This thing you call desire is a powerful tool. It’s easy to let it get carried away.”
“Who the fuck’re you s’posed t’be?” the real Horace asks.
Gray Man, in the form of his host, in the chambers of imagination, raises an eyebrow, and the true Horace — the dead Horace — feels the skin being ripped from his body.
His scream fills Gray Man’s lips in the hillside crypt.
“I am your master,” Gray Man says. “Grey Redstar. Recently from elsewhere.”
Horace falls to the ground and rolls around until his slick-blooded body is plastered with small stones. He screams again as the second skin covers his body — a skin of pain. Then he lies still, arms and legs jutting straight out, teeth chattering.
Gray Man shrugs and Horace is standing in front of him, skin covering his flesh again. The evening breeze feels cool, but Horace no longer trusts sensation.
“I request your help, Horace LaFontaine.”
“Who’re you? Where am I?”
“Everything you see is mine,” says the dead man. “It once was yours but you never knew it.”
Horace understands these words more clearly than he has ever understood anything. He starts to wail. The cry echoes throughout the mindscape desert.
Three years later Gray Man stirred in his grave. Coyote heard the cadaver’s sigh. The half-blind mother skimmed the outer edges of his tomb with four perpetually half-grown pups sniffing at her heels. Gray Man exerted his untiring strength against the great rock, and after a few days it began to give.
He was free to follow his light, which is the darkest of dark blues.
He retraced his steps, stopping now and then to break into isolated desert homes. There he sucked electricity from the walls and found money and clothes to fit him. In one house he murdered a small child who had been allowed to stay home because he was sick that day. Gray Man didn’t care about humans much, but he needed to see how they died, how they clung to life, because he knew that the Blues would be similar but much stronger. The killing of little Billy Cordette was simply a science experiment, a test in the ways of half-life. He held the boy by both arms, slowly increasing the essence of death that his enhanced cells exuded. Billy struggled and screamed for his mother. He kicked and bit but finally submitted to the killing force running up and down the muscles of his body. Gray Man saw the repose of extinction as beautiful. It was as if life existed only for this beautiful moment. A cut flower, a roast suckling pig. I felt as Gray Man did and at the same time I trembled in a dark corner of our mind.
Gray Man was dressed in a green suit with a yellow shirt, brown hat, and brown shoes when he got back to Oakland. He returned to the house where Horace had died and looked up at the immense oak that Horace LaFontaine had watched during his last days. Gray Man stood there a long time looking at the house. On the lawn there was a tiny sign that read ROOM FOR RENT.
Inside Gray Man’s skull Horace LaFontaine hollered.
Gray Man stood there because of his fine sense of what life is composed of — pain.
“Why do you scream, Horace?” Gray Man asked.
Inside his mind Gray Man had come to a small cell like the one Horace had lived in for seven years at Attica. Horace was in his cell, but he could see what Gray Man could see. He saw his sister’s home. The large wooden house painted white and trimmed in gray.
“Let her alone!” Horace cried.