Gray Man stirred as Horace closed the toilet door. He stretched his mind to semi-wakefulness as Horace got down on his knees before the bowl. For so long Gray Man had considered the crystalline equations of light that he found it difficult to attach meaning to a simple chemical reaction. Before Gray Man could arouse himself, Horace had poured the ammonia into the bowl. Before Death could reach into his glove, Horace’s hand, the corpse laced the ammonia with bleach. Before Death could restrict his lungs, Horace inhaled deeply the mustard gas.
As Horace lost consciousness, I was thrown fully into the mind of Death. Everything in that consciousness was disintegrating, falling into dust. Horace dying, already dead. His last act was that of a hero killing his inner demon.
But then Gray Man screamed. He would not leave without fulfilling his self-proclaimed mission. And for a second time he resurrected the husk of Horace LaFontaine. Reassembling shattered cells and broken capillaries, he writhed there before the toilet bowl until finally he began to vomit. Black bile and poisons gushed from the dead man’s lips into the tainted water. Gray Man pushed himself out into the kitchen and staggered up the stairs. In his room he took out a special plug that ran a bare wire from the wall socket. He sat on the brown sofa chair, sucking on electricity.
The light within him remembered the internal workings of Horace’s body. The hatred within him recalled Horace the man.
Again they were on an open plain under a crazy sky. Horace found himself on his knees before a towering Grey Redstar.
“Fool!” Death shouted.
Horace, his courage gone, trembled.
“I warned you!” Death declared. “Didn’t I warn you?”
There were no thoughts or words within Horace. All he had left was the anticipation of pain.
The following weeks passed like centuries. Writhing in his Attica hole, skinless and demented, Horace LaFontaine could not scream, because his lips were sewn; he could not breathe, but suffocation did not bring death.
While Horace suffered in the recesses of his own mind, Gray Man finally caught the scent of one of the Blues. On one of his long walks he heard the ripple of a complex strain, music that spoke a language far beyond the range of life. He followed that melody until it led him to Phyllis Yamauchi’s empty home. He broke in through a side window and then walked down a long corridor to the memory of a prison cell and the recollection of a man.
“Horace.” Gray Man smiled at his prisoner. “You’ve been bad and you have to suffer for it.”
Horace looked up at his captor without recognizing him as the source of his pain. He had come to believe that his sins in life had made this hell. Gray Man was just the executor of the sentence. That’s why he could not be killed.
“Would you like to go back for a while again, Horace?”
His skin grew back and his mouth sucked air. Horace appeared on the desert plain with Gray Man.
“You would have to promise not to try and kill me, though,” Gray Man said. “You can’t kill me, you know, but you could cause me a great deal of grief and delay.”
Horace could speak but did not.
“Would you like to go back?” Gray Man asked again.
“Yes.”
Sitting on the edge of Phyllis Yamauchi’s sofa chair in her living room, Horace simply enjoyed the rhythm of his breath. It reminded him of waves at the shore. He wondered then if the ocean was actually breathing, soaking up the sun and stars in its heart and thinking about those long-ago times that sang in Gray Man’s soul.
Gray Man had a soul, but Horace did not. Horace was, he knew, just like a thinking rock, a mechanical doll that made a mistake and thought he had a heart.
Hours later Phyllis Yamauchi opened the door and walked in. Gray Man was deep in his solitary cave, and Phyllis did not know him to be there.
She looked at the stranger with no fear.
Horace stared back at her, wondering why his executor cared about her.
“Who are you?” Phyllis asked.
“My name is Horace.”
“What do you want here? Are you going to rob me?”
“I just wanna die,” Horace said. He sobbed and then choked as if he were experiencing a bout of nausea.
Gray Man leaped into his consciousness like a pouncing lion. And in that brief fraction of a second before he was exiled again, Horace saw the true nature of Phyllis Yamauchi. She was blue, all blue, and sparkling. Tendrils and spikes and curving wings of light spread from her body. Somewhere over her shoulder was an orb of maddeningly dark blue.
The presence of Gray Man, as he rose in the corpse’s body, struck at her like a gale. The blue in her was tinged with yellow for a moment, and then Horace was in his grave. Dead and buried far below the consciousness of Gray Man.
It took less than five seconds to squash the life from Phyllis Yamauchi. Gray Man used his inhuman strength and his claws and his teeth and the electricity that flowed in him. But in those few seconds all the force of life in the small woman exploded outward. Horace felt the vibrations in his grave.
Gray Man fell back from the small body weak and in pain. He dragged her down to the basement. He stripped himself naked and stripped her too. Then he performed a ritual of death that he had created long before in the northern California desert, all the while singing a long, whining dirge.
Seven
When I woke up, the dirge was still in my ears. I had passed out on the floor. Gray Man and Horace were still alive in my senses, but I didn’t feel afraid. Somehow Ordé had passed his newfound courage on to me.
Ordé and Reggie were gone. I went to the front door and opened it on a beautiful Bay day. The sun was bright but the air was cool. My heightened senses were more in order. I could look deeply into things if I wanted, but I had to push it. And somehow the plain grass and simple concrete took on a special beauty for me.
I didn’t know where to go, so I made it up to Ordé’s rock. None of the Close Congregation was there, as it was a Tuesday. There were people in the park, of course. Baseball players, old men on their constitutionals. There was a young woman holding a red-haired child about three or four years of age. She was slight, in her mother’s arms, gazing into my face with all the amazement of a newborn. It was a little disconcerting to have a small child stare so intensely, almost as if she were interrogating me. Her eyes were so dark and unwavering that I could almost feel the weight of their intent. That’s when I looked closer. I could sense in her face something blue.
The mother, who had been looking around, noticed the child’s fixed stare and looked at me. She tried to turn the girl, to talk to her, but the child kept moving her head to look at me. She was saying something to her mother that I couldn’t hear.
So I walked the seventeen steps it took me to reach them, realizing as I walked that every fact and action I took from then on would be of interest to generations that follow. Up until then I had been a follower and an acolyte. I was writing a history about something I was seeing unfold. But now it came to me that I was a piece of that history. Like my hero Thucydides, I was a part of some of the most important events in the history of the world. Those seventeen steps might be remembered as were Job’s trials and Socrates’ hemlock.
There was nothing special about the mother. Just another hippie. Young but with strands of premature gray shot through her long red hair. Her skin was very tanned and red underneath the tan. The tiny wrinkles around her eyes and jaw were from long hours spent out of doors.