“Are you afraid for her?” Gray Man asked softly.
“Let her alone!”
“Pain is the center of life, Horace. Without pain, without anguish, there is nothing but me.” Gray Man peered into the imaginary cell at the memory of a life.
Horace saw in those eyes an infinite black field at night, under no moon or star.
“I am here to give you life, Horace. You struggled so hard against me in the tomb. You tried to take your body back, to have life again. But you cannot take life from death. You cannot defeat me.” Gray Man smiled. “But I can give you pain. It is similar to the gift of life. It is life’s border.”
“Please let her alone, man. You don’t want her,” Horace said. “You want them people like that coyote.”
“Come on, Horace,” Gray Man said. “Let’s go see your sister bleed.”
“No!” Horace yelled. “No, no, no, no, no, no!”
Gray Man’s mind filled with the protestations of life. He enjoyed Horace’s screaming. He had learned a lot from his host. He could be rid of him anytime now. There was no more need for Horace LaFontaine. But Gray Man kept the dead ex-con in his prison cell, in perpetual night, looking out at the full moon, always hungry. The only food he served him was raw, maggot-infested carrion.
Keeping Horace around made for an interesting and important game.
Horace was dead, merely an elaborate figment of Gray Man’s imagination. But Horace felt alive. When Gray Man let him out of his cell, fed him decent food, let him think he was healthy and strong — then they could fight.
Death versus life.
Horace used all of his will to try and overturn Gray Man, to retake his body and freedom. In these battles Gray Man learned much of the ingenuity of life. He felt the maddening beat of life. He learned what it took to squash out flesh’s pitiful molecular spasm.
“Yes?” She was young and brown, not Elza.
Somewhere inside his mind Gray Man could feel Horace sigh and then laugh. Laughter was their greatest weapon, Old Man Death knew. If life could laugh, then death had to be absolute. And if life proved anything, it was that death was not complete, not yet.
“You have a room to let, young lady?”
She hesitated a moment and then smiled again. “Sure,” she said. “But I don’t know if you’d like it. I mean, we usually just have a student up there.”
“I’ve been away and I need a place to stay. I was walking down your street and noticed the sign. I’m looking for my family.”
“Are you English?” the young woman asked.
Horace could see her through the window Gray Man had opened for him to witness the torture and murder of his sister. The young woman was very dark with small features that made for a plain face. Her figure was slight, not the kind of woman that he went after in life.
“Why no,” Gray Man said accenting his dead words. “I’m from the Islands. Will you show me the room?”
Horace watched the slim-figured young woman as she climbed the stairs. Gray Man saw nothing. He wasn’t interested in life. He wasn’t interested in this girl.
“What’s your name?” Gray Man asked at the door to Horace’s old room. He didn’t care, but he knew from Horace that this was what was called manners.
“Joclyn. Joclyn Kyle. What’s yours?”
“Redstar,” Gray Man said. “Grey Redstar. I’m from Trinidad originally, but I’ve traveled almost everywhere.”
“Oh,” she said as she fumbled around with the skeleton key in the door lock.
Horace’s room was just as he had left it. The big brass bed was the same. The maple chest of drawers and the broken-down sofa chair. The round maroon carpet in the center of the floor was new. The oak outside the window had grown a few new branches.
“I’ll take it,” Gray Man said. “How much?”
“One hundred twenty-five a month,” Joclyn said, obviously embarrassed by the high price. “But that includes utilities and kitchen privileges. Uncle Morris says that you can use the stove and the refrigerator as long as you clean up and don’t abuse the privilege.”
“Your uncle lives with you?”
“This is his house. He lets me stay here while I study at school. I’m from down in LA.”
“Do I pay you now?” Gray Man asked.
“Uncle Morris wants to meet somebody before they take the place,” Joclyn said. “He won’t be back till six.”
Gray Man stood there in the small room, staring at Joclyn. He considered killing her because he didn’t know what to do next. But he couldn’t find anywhere in Horace’s memories an excuse for such an act. And Gray Man wanted to be normal. He would have liked to kill Elza, to savor Horace’s pain, but more than that he needed a place to stay. He needed to be where the light struck. He needed to find his brethren.
“May I wait for him?” Gray Man asked.
“Well, not really, I have to go soon. To school, you know.”
Gray Man became angry then. He wasn’t used to waiting or to someone telling him no. He had no patience with the girl Joclyn or her absent uncle and so he receded, back into the dark cave of his mind.
Horace’s cell melted away, and suddenly he stood there before the plain girl.
“Uh,” stalled Horace. “Uh, well, maybe, I mean, I’ll go back out and come back around six. Six, right?”
Horace turned to leave but then turned back again.
“What part’a LA you from?” he asked. His voice was the same but the accent had become Southern.
Joclyn frowned and said, “On Compton Boulevard. I was born in Mississippi, in Greenwood, but I don’t remember it.”
“I lived on Slauson once,” Horace said. “A long time ago. Long time. But I used to go to a barbecue place on Compton. It was called... lemme see now... It was called, um, Bolger’s. Yeah, that’s it — Bolger’s.”
“I know Bolger’s. We used to go there all the time.” The happy smile on Joclyn’s face, the smile of a lonely girl who has found a displaced kindred spirit, might have sparked some interest in Horace, when he was alive.
“I gotta go,” he said.
Horace hurried down the stairs with the young landlady in his wake.
He was out the front door and walking away when Joclyn called out from the door, “Nice to meet you, Mr. Redstar.” Horace waved but didn’t say anything more.
Gray Man allowed Horace to walk until he found a place for them to wait.
Horace savored each moment. It wasn’t an hallucination. It wasn’t a lie. Somehow he knew that he’d been given a day pass from death. He found a bus stop on Peralta. While Gray Man lay dormant, Horace sat there watching pigeons peck, fly, and fornicate. The traffic moved. Every now and then an airplane or jet passed overhead. A breeze felt chilly on Horace’s face. He realized that there was no temperature in hell, not unless Gray Man wanted it.
Horace sat for more than an hour running the fingers of his left hand over the back of his right. His light touch, passing from wrist to fingertip, was more life than all of his drunken binges and back-alley brawls.
On his mumbling lips was a prayer, a hope that he had paid his penance and that God would let him live out a few weeks on this bench before he passed on to eternal rest.
But Gray Man was through with his plans. He could feel how peaceful and happy Horace LaFontaine was, and he didn’t like it, but the dark recesses of his mind were so pure that he decided to stay for a while.
In his mind there were no crazy, jangly, fleshy feelings. No monotonous pumping, hungering, snuffling around. In his inner cave Gray Man could ponder the infinite. He could send his mind outward past all things physical, past the limits of logic. He could bask in the glow of the giant blue eye of energy — the first thought. Basking in this pure notion of reality, Gray Man wondered how any true sentient being could think that mixing with flesh could be an improvement. It would be like a butterfly turning back into a worm, like a tree trying to press itself back down to a seed, like a sun worshiping dust.