Up four flights and we were finally at my door. Filtered sunlight streamed in through a half-closed dirty window at the end of the hall.
I put my key into the lock and turned it. The door blew outward because of a draft caused by an open window inside. I didn’t remember leaving a window open, but I could have; I didn’t have anything worth stealing.
He was looking out the window. His back turned to us. A smallish man, well dressed as far as I could see.
I fell back into the visions I got from Ordé’s blood for a moment. I was looking out of Grey Redstar’s eyes into the bloody entrails of Phyllis Yamauchi. When Death’s hardened hands kneaded and crushed the organs and flesh, small sparks of blue surfaced and extinguished, leaving behind traces that held images of Phyllis’s consciousness. One of these images was me and a trail of footsteps leading to my door.
I hollowed out my stomach and pushed backward, using my toes. Addy grunted and Julia released her grip. The man turned around as I yelled, “Run!”
He was a black man with two large fleshy bumps on his face, one above his left eye and one on his right cheek. For a moment there was sorrow in his eyes, almost an apology. By then I was back out across the threshold. As I slammed the door, my new sight picked up an explosion of deep blue hues.
“Oh, my God!” Addy cried as if she had shared my sight.
“Not that way!” I yelled at her.
She was running toward the window, not the stairs. Our fire escape had rotted away, but the landlord was waiting for the city to make him fix it.
The door behind me flew off its hinges, and Gray Man, in the body of Horace LaFontaine, fell into the hall. I ran down to the window to protect the child and mother, various hues of blue flickering around my second sight.
Julia screamed.
I heard the window open behind me but I couldn’t turn to warn them, because Gray Man was on me. I reached out to stop him; that’s probably what saved my life. He was excited and there was an electrical field around him. The shock threw me on the floor at Addy’s feet. I looked up to see her throw her child through the open window. Before I could rise to help them Gray Man ran up, stepped on my chest, and leaped after the girl.
I raised myself to the sill, fully expecting to see the corpses of both man and child. But what I saw was Gray Man running down the alley behind my building holding a tree branch and looking up at the sky. I followed his gaze until I saw the tiny figure of Julia climbing to the roof of the building across the street. She ran along the edge of the building at great speed and then disappeared.
“Come on!” Adelaide cried.
She was running for the stairs. I limped behind her as well as I could. The electrical shock had turned my muscles to spaghetti. I had to hold on tight to the handrails as I went down the stairs.
“Wait for me, Addy!” I shouted.
When I reached the door she was nowhere that I could see.
When I stepped outside someone grabbed me by the arm. I knew it wasn’t Gray Man, so I said, “It’s all right. I can make it.”
“Lester ‘Chance’ Foote?” someone asked.
I looked up to see Miles Barber standing there. He was wearing a two-piece maroon suit and a stained powder blue shirt. There were five uniformed policemen behind him. Three of them were restraining Addy.
“Let me go!” she screamed.
I tried to hit Barber. I balled my fist and threw it, but he sidestepped and I was so weak that the punch dragged me down until I was on the ground.
They cuffed me while Barber said something about murder and arresting me. Addy was yelling about her daughter, but the cops didn’t seem to care.
I couldn’t bring myself to care either. Touching Gray Man had sent shock waves of death up and down my nerves. I was shaking all over, wishing that I had never been born.
Eight
Miles Barber wasn’t a bad cop. That is to say, he didn’t hate Negroes. He didn’t enjoy other people’s suffering either, I’m sure. But that didn’t mean he’d shrink from violence if it would bring some justice to the situation. He didn’t mind inflicting a little unconstitutional pain.
“Why did you kill Phyllis Yamauchi?” he asked after his friend, Officer Harlan Castro, had hit me on the side of the head with a short length of sand-filled rubber hose.
I felt the pain and heard the question, but I couldn’t react to either. The cool slither of death was still moving along my nerves. It was as if I had died by just touching Gray Man. The feeling of death stayed with me, its images playing over and over in my mind.
I was in a coffin, aware, with no ability to breathe. Days passed like seconds as the coffin deteriorated and the worms ate my eyes.
“Phyllis Yamauchi,” someone said.
I imagined that Gray Man was waiting downstairs. Castro hit me down the center of my forehead with the hose. I fell off the chair, terrified that they would release me into the arms of Death. I wanted to confess, to be put in jail. Maybe in prison I could be free of his touch.
Maybe in prison I could finally kill myself and be forever beyond his designs.
But I also wanted Ordé. I wanted to hear his tempered logic. I wanted to think about a future world where I was welcome in the hearts of stars.
Life beckoned me while Death waited down in the street. The confession hung in my throat. Somewhere in the back of my mind I realized that I was bleeding.
Then I began to cry.
I hadn’t cried like that since I was a small child. It was a deep shuddering wail of helplessness. The two cops tried to lift me onto the chair, but I was a big man with the coordination of an infant. All they could do was prop me up against the wall.
All I could do was cry.
I tried to confess, but not one word was coherent. Miles Barber was holding a handkerchief against my scalp, trying to staunch the bleeding. But I was moving my head from side to side, seeing death in one corner and something beyond life in the other. I wanted Castro to hit me harder. Miles was talking to me in soft tones intended to pull me out of despair.
After a while it worked.
“Tell me about it, Lester,” he was saying.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
“Tell me what happened.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
“Sorry for what?”
“I’m sorry I didn’t, I mean, I’m sorry you can’t kill me too.”
They put me in a locked room by myself. It had an aluminum toilet bowl and an iron cot with interwoven leather straps for a mattress. I crawled under the cot and faced the wall. Almost instantly I fell into a deep sleep. My dreams began as faintly colored visions of corpses at various stages of decay. Long lines of death in shallow graves. As time passed, the landscape of death decomposed, fading to earth tones and then draining toward gray. The world became dimmer and dimmer until there was only a flat gray earth under only slightly lighter gray skies. A soft buzzing filled the air.
I had come to Gray Man’s peace. I saw his world, and then all of my own trepidation vanished.
In my dream I was sleeping.
I awoke on the shore of an infinite beach. There were great white gulls floating lazily in the sky above me. Pulverized quartz in the white sand glittered under a bright sun. I was alone and fully rested, a dreamer awakened from his nightmare into a vision of peace. I went down to the water and watched skinny starfish amble among the rocks, searching for food. They knew nothing of me and my dreams. They simply felt hunger, imagined themselves moving, and lived.
“Time to get up,” someone said.
I was lying on my side at the seashore.
I was lying on my side in the cell.