Gray Man wanted to be freed from the flesh. He imagined ripping off the old coat called Horace LaFontaine and flooding up from the earth toward home. That infinite journey from which he could return and tell them that it was all a mistake, that perfection had already been obtained, that he was the ultimate.
But before that could happen there would have to be much death. Many lights would have to be extinguished. Many lights.
Horace LaFontaine gagged and tried to rise up from his bus stop bench. He wanted to throw himself in front of the truck rushing down the street. He almost made it, but Gray Man reached up and stopped him dead in his tracks.
It was time to go see Uncle Morris and Joclyn.
“So you wanna room?” Morris Beakman asked Grey Redstar, recently from elsewhere.
“Yes, Mr. Beakman,” Gray Man answered. “I’m looking for work at the university and I have some cousins who live somewhere around here. I’d like to find them also.”
“What’s their names?” Beakman asked. He was a tall brown man with a broad stomach. His hair was gray and his nose had been broken more than once. He towered over Death.
“Azure,” Gray Man said and smiled. “The Azures.”
“Never heard that name before,” Beakman offered. His eyes seemed to be searching the prospective tenant for something.
“I’m willing to pay you three months in advance, Mr. Beakman. I’ll be very quiet and I won’t have any visitors, I give you my word.” Gray Man stifled his desire to kill the landlord. He knew there would be no profit and little pleasure in the act.
“I don’t take no mess, Mr. Redstar,” the large man said. “I don’t want no problems.”
“All I need is a place to sleep and study, sir,” Death said. “I’ll take my meals out and I don’t listen to your music.”
“What do you mean my music?”
“Just a way of speaking, sir. I don’t own a radio, that’s what I meant.”
“Well, you know, I usually only rent to students. But you got problems with your students too. Girls just seem to want to take advantage, and the boys all wanna get into Joclyn’s panties...”
“I just need a place to sleep and study, sir,” Gray Man said again.
In the weeks to follow Gray Man took long walks around San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley. He didn’t go into the parks much because fewer people were there. He wandered down streets both rich and poor, tasting the air and listening with ears that could hear the music of light.
When Gray Man wasn’t searching he burrowed down under consciousness. While he slept, Horace was free to wander in the body that was no longer his. At these times there was nothing of Gray Man in Horace’s mind, but he still felt as if he were being held prisoner in his bones. He was rarely hungry, and even though Gray Man had money in his pockets, Horace dared not spend it. Mainly because the money came from the corpses of men and women that Gray Man had killed and robbed.
Horace was sick of violence and blood. He never wanted another soul to feel pain because of him.
With no money he could spend, no real freedom, and Gray Man liable to reappear and torture him at any time, Horace stayed around his sister’s home. He wandered up and down the stairs and out into the backyard under the big oak. Morris Beakman was a construction foreman in the daytime and a cook at Logan’s Bar and Grill most evenings. Horace rarely saw Morris, and when they did meet, few words passed between them.
But Joclyn was always home when she wasn’t at nursing-school classes. Her parents paid room and board at Morris’s house, and the construction foreman/cook paid her twenty dollars a week to keep the place clean.
Joclyn liked Mr. Redstar when he wasn’t putting on airs. That’s what she told Horace one day when he was counting blades of grass in the backyard.
“I don’t ever say more than hi when you got airs, Mr. Redstar,” she said. “I know that you must be thinkin’ somethin’ or wonderin’ where your family might be.”
Horace explained that he had a mental condition, that when his face looked cold she should leave him alone because that’s when he was crazy.
“Real crazy?” the nursing student asked.
“Yeah,” Horace responded gravely. “Sometimes so crazy that I think everybody might be better off if I was dead.”
“Oh, don’t say that, Mr. Redstar,” Joclyn complained. “You’re a real nice man. So sensitive and quiet-like. Sometimes all that craziness is just in your mind. You know, I feel like that sometimes. I get real lonely, you know? Even if I’m wit’ people and I’m laughin’ or dancin’. I mean, I could even be kissin’ some boy an’ I still feel all by myself.”
Horace didn’t say a word. He just stared. For him the heartfelt chatter of her life was like a doorway out from his own misery. The smile on his face felt rare, almost alien.
Joclyn noticed his queer smile and ducked her head, mumbling, “I guess I shouldn’ta said that, about kissin’, I mean.”
Horace pressed his fingers lightly on the girl’s forearm. He didn’t even know that he was touching her until she looked up.
“That’s okay, girl. I know about kissin’.”
She smiled and a rumble went off in Horace’s chest.
For months after that he had a schoolboy crush on Joclyn. Whenever Gray Man sank into his dark realm of reflection, Horace ran down the stairs, looking for his new friend. What he loved was to listen to her talking about her courses and parents, her sometimes dates and her dreams. Horace even helped in the cleaning to spend time with her. They mopped and washed and talked and talked.
They never let her Uncle Morris find them together. It was like an illicit affair, some secret liaison that they maintained under strictest secrecy.
Whenever Morris came home, Horace sprinted up the stairs with a gait that defied his age. He never spoke more than two words to the landlord because he couldn’t make himself sound like the articulate Gray Man. He worried that the landlord might become suspicious and try to evict Death.
“You ever wonder about evil?” Horace asked Joclyn one day when they were drying dishes together.
“I don’t know,” she replied. The happiness in her voice was common when she spent time with her friend. “I mean, there’s a lotta bad in the world. But somebody bad can always come to be good too. That’s what they say in my church.”
“What I mean is way past church. Way past.”
Joclyn put down the glass she was drying.
“You talkin’ ’bout that mental illness again?”
Horace looked into his only friend’s eyes.
“It’s okay, Mr. Redstar,” Joclyn said. “You’re a good man. You just get a little stiff sometimes. I know you ain’t evil, ’cause evil destroys itself. My minister says that too. Evil has to lose ’cause he hate everything, even himself.”
Horace smiled as he began stacking dishes on the light blue doorless shelves above the sink. Just outside the window, in a dwarf lemon bush, he could see a huge black-and-yellow garden spider waiting in the center of her web.
When Joclyn left for school that afternoon, Horace saw her to the door.
“Thank you,” he said.
“For what?”
“For helping me. For showing me the truth. And you don’t have to worry about the downstairs toilet, I’m gonna clean it up real good.”
Horace took Joclyn’s cleaning bucket to the small water closet next to the kitchen. In the yellow bucket was a scrub towel, ammonia, some detergent and scouring powder, and a small plastic bottle of bleach.