A shod toe nudged my butt.
I rose up, knocking the metal cot onto its side. The heavyset guard looked down on me. He had a clipboard in one hand and a yellow pencil in the other.
“Get up, Foote.”
The guard walked me down a long concrete corridor. The walls and low ceilings were corroded and painted a pale lime green. The guard was short and fat. I wondered why he didn’t have help moving me, why he wasn’t afraid of me. Then I glanced back over my shoulder and noticed that he was holding his pistol down at his side.
“Keep your eyes front and your arms down, Foote,” the guard said.
At some other time I might have been afraid, but with Death tracing the pathways of my veins, there was little I feared.
“Hold it right there,” the guard said after a minute or so.
To the right was a heavy metal door.
“Face the door,” the guard commanded.
I did as he told me.
“Okay, now lace your fingers behind your neck.”
He reached around me, slipping a round key into its keyhole. He pushed the door inward.
The room before me was smaller than the cell I’d come from. It was further diminished by a wall of bars that dissected it. On the other side sat a smallish white man in a dark blue suit.
“Go on in, Foote,” the guard who was ready to kill me said.
I did as I was told, and the heavy door slammed at my back.
The moment the door closed, the little man stood up. He was taller than I expected him to be, but he was also exceptionally thin.
“Mr. Foote?”
“Uh-huh.”
“My name is Howard Weissman. I’m your lawyer from Legal Aid.”
I didn’t have anything to say, so I sat down in the metal chair provided.
“Do you know why they arrested you, Lester?” Weissman asked. “You don’t mind if I call you Lester, do you?”
There was a large cockroach on the wall behind the bony-faced lawyer. If I remained perfectly still, I could hear slight orange vibrations coming from the bug. The way the lawyer looked at me, he was probably worried that I might have received a concussion during “questioning.”
“Can you hear me, Lester?”
“What’s going to happen now?” I asked.
“They have no case. There’s no evidence. Detective Barber just brought you in for questioning. Did they hit you?”
“So can I leave?”
Weissman nodded. “The papers should be processed in about half an hour. We can sit here and wait until then. Maybe you can tell me why they’re after you for these poisonings. That is, if you want me to help you in the future.”
“There is no future,” I said.
That was the end of our conversation. I spent the next thirty minutes or so watching the cockroach pulsing red and yellow while Weissman watched me.
I went out the front door of the Berkeley police station on the lookout for Gray Man, but he wasn’t there. The sun was shining, bursting with secrets that it wanted to tell me, but I didn’t care to hear them. I walked around the streets, gaping at all the men and women, white and black, old and young. I was thinking about starfish and how I wanted to go down to the ocean and watch them — for days.
“Hey, brother,” a black man in black leather jacket and pants said.
“Hey, brother,” I replied.
My words seemed to have more meaning than they ever had.
“What’s happenin’?” my new friend asked.
“Nuthin’ to it,” I said.
“All right,” he agreed and then walked on.
I walked for hours. The police had released me in the early morning. They had released Addy the night before.
I didn’t care what happened to me. For years suicide had been my final solution. No matter what I felt, no matter what anybody did to me — I could always end it, I could always throw down the final card.
And then I had died. Died from a dead man’s touch. I was neither the vision nor the mind that understood. I was merely a window through which events could be seen. Just a window even unto my own death.
And now, resurrected, I was free for a few hours. I didn’t need anything or anyone. I was no more concerned about truth than the starfish that still navigated somewhere in my mind’s sea.
I was Buddha and Mr. Natural. I was naked to the world, and nobody cared — not even me.
At about noon I found myself in Garber Park. I was hungry and enjoying the gnawing feel in my stomach. I climbed the dirt path up toward Ordé’s rock. It wasn’t until I heard the murmuring of the Close Congregation that I remembered it was Wednesday.
That’s when my reverie broke. I wondered what had happened to Julia. I wondered about Gray Man and if he had killed again.
I was walking, even though I didn’t want to, toward the place I feared most. Nobody made me do it. Nobody asked me to. Ordé had left me alone in his house while he pursued his own ends. I didn’t have to warn him or protect him. There was nothing I could do, and I felt that helplessness. But still I walked toward the Close Congregation because my life had its own path to travel; I was the witness, the invisible chorus of a tragedy far older than the Greeks.
Ordé stood atop his park rock. He surveyed the Close Congregation with something like love in his eyes. He glanced from one face to another and then finally caught sight of me as I came up toward the back of the audience. Among them I could see many of the Blues. Reggie was there holding his little sister’s hand. Eileen Martel, Myrtle Forché, Gijon Diaz, Zero Friend, and Claudia Heart were among the Congregation. I looked at Claudia, trying to recall the passion but could not.
When Ordé caught sight of me, he nodded and started his speech.
“Death comes among us, my friends,” he said softly. “Death and life.”
He looked over to his left, and I saw Addy standing there, looking haggard, with Julia in her arms. Julia smiled when our eyes met.
“This is my daughter,” Ordé said. “Alacrity.”
There were ahhs and nods among the crowd. I thought that the name fit her well, and I understood why she said that Julia was not her name.
“She has come to bring us joy while Death nips at our souls,” Ordé said. “An abomination of blue light has come among us. A man who should be dead but who is not. A Gray Man. A man who died but who came back among us. He wants to kill all the Blues. He has already killed Phyllis Yamauchi. He wants to and plans to kill us all. He has great powers and has no debt to the body of life. He only wants death, silence, nothingness.”
Everyone listened. Most of them, I believe, thought that Ordé was speaking in metaphors, images, symbols. They didn’t believe in a Gray Man. Who would?
“This is the last day of our meeting,” Ordé said. “It’s time to get on with life. We must spread out to the larger world and disperse the music as best we can. We must sing and we must survive because the future of everything depends on this struggle. Death cannot take us if we move beyond his knowledge. The world is wide and he is but one man, not even a man, just half a man. His will is indominate, but we are like air.”
“You don’t really mean that we can’t meet again, do you?” Alice Rodgers asked. She was one of the Close Congregation, a citizen, a human.
“Not you, Elan,” Ordé responded, using his name for her. “You can keep on meeting. You should. Only the Blues have to go. But we’ll send a messenger to you later on. Someone who will lead you on the journey.”
“No!” a man shouted.
And then another.
Soon almost all of the Close Congregation were chanting no. Meanwhile, the Blues, hearing the word death and fearing it, had gathered up around Ordé’s rock. The crowd seemed almost hostile, almost as if they were going to attack Ordé and his brethren.