Touched, p.5
Touched, page 5
I moved toward the front of the house.
“Daddy!” Celestine protested.
“It’s okay, Seal,” Tessa assured her. “These men are no longer a danger to us.”
I went out the front door and onto our well-manicured lawn. It was dark outside by then. Half a block away, equidistant between two lamp posts, successfully keeping himself to the shadows, stood a man of slender build. He wore a white trench coat and seemed to be bald, or maybe balding. I could feel him watching me, looking for some clue to my nature.
I could see why Resurrected Rooster was so disturbed. The man watching my house gave the impression of hollowness, a black hole that attracted and decimated all life. He was the Angel of Death.
I couldn’t see his eyes but I could feel him watching me. In this way we became intimately aware of each other. I could feel his contempt for my beating heart and living mind. There was a moment of uncertainty. The man in the shadows was considering what action to take. Then Rat Man, Reaper, and Rooster came out on the lawn to join me.
They exuded prodigious health brought on by Temple’s feral bites.
“That him?” Rat Man asked.
“He must have read about me in the papers too,” I said, nodding.
“I don’t think he can take all four of us,” Rooster said. “But I won’t be of much use against him.”
“Yes,” Temple agreed. “Because you were so recently dead, he will have some sovereignty over you.”
“I’d resist him,” Rooster told the man in my skin. “And you got these two and your wife. She’s got some power, that one.”
Maybe the man down the street could hear our words. He hunched his shoulders and then turned away. In a moment or two he was gone.
The five of us—three white-supremacist gangbangers, Temple, and I—stood for long minutes on the front lawn, stunned by the absence that the death-master’s departure left in his wake. None of us, not even Rooster who died and was resurrected, had ever been in the presence of anything so absolute, so crushing.
There was no longer any doubt in my mind that I had been altered in the Long Sleep of Transformation. All of us, five men in four bodies, stood in that terrible moment of grace. We were all out of our depth like shipwrecked sailors afloat on a calm sea rife with sleek, brown-tipped sharks.
And there was blood in the water.
Tessa was in the kitchen making hot chocolate when we came back into the house. Brown was slouched over on the couch and Seal had gone up to her room.
The home invaders with their torn T-shirts and new outlooks took seats around my son while I went to visit with my wife. I wasn’t worried about Brown’s safety, because we were all on one side—at least for the moment.
Tessa watched me while chopping the block of unsweetened chocolate she used for this special treat.
“Is he gone?” she asked.
“The man outside?”
“The other one,” she said. “The one in you.”
“Yes,” I said, a little surprised by the revelation that Temple was not omnipresent in my consciousness.
“I couldn’t see him until after the fever was gone,” she said. “But I could tell when you—when he—started fighting.”
“I don’t know what I think about that,” I said. “About him.”
“He’s just a part of you,” my wife comforted. “Something that was created out of necessity. That was you making love to me.”
“It didn’t feel like it.”
“No,” she agreed, “but I can see that he comes out of the long road of your mind.”
“Why can’t I see that? It’s like, it’s like I forgot everything.”
“You are the fount, Marty,” Tessa told me. “You cannot be aware. But I can read you because we have the same blood. And those men out there, they receive something too—something that gives them purpose beyond revenge. We all know our missions, but you, and the man inside you, act on reflex and instinct.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s the way it is.”
While talking, Tessa warmed the milk and blended in the fancy chocolate and brown sugar. She put some white powder in a red mug, two shots of brandy in a blue one, and then poured the hot confection into five white cups and the two mugs.
“Hot chocolate!” she cried.
I brought the men, including my son, in from the living room while Tessa collected our frightened daughter from her upstairs bedroom.
Once we were all gathered around the high table in the kitchen, Tessa gave the red mug to our daughter and the blue one to our son. The rest of us grabbed the white cups and drank.
“My mother used to make hot chocolate,” Reaper said. “She used powder out of a can that already had sugar in it, but me and Malcolm loved that stuff, man. She’d only do it when we had both been good for a few days, so it was only about once a month or so that we got it, but it was extra sweet because of that.”
After finishing his little speech, Reaper—Sean Gardener—went quiet, reflecting on a long life. I thought that he might be wondering about the chocolate he was drinking right then—how that particular brew was a portent for what might come.
“Only chocolate milk I ever had was cold,” Rooster said. He had a wide, florid face with gray eyes and two missing teeth. His voice was rough and hoarse, ingratiating in a roguish way. “Mama used to buy a box of sweet powder and a gallon of milk. They’d both be gone by morning.”
“Drink your chocolate,” Tessa said to Celestine.
Our frightened daughter obeyed.
“What happened to us?” Rat Man asked me.
I waited for a beat to see if Temple would come out and answer.
When he didn’t respond, I said, “I had a dream.”
“A dream?” Rooster rasped. “What kinda dream?”
“I don’t remember it completely,” I said. “As a matter of fact, I don’t remember very much. There was a declaration in the farthest reaches of infinity that life here on Earth threatened the well-being of existence.”
“The universe is afraid of a little man?” Rooster said quizzically.
“Not just humanity,” I said, speaking a truth that I was not quite aware of. “Life itself, the DNA molecule, is the threat, along with the machinations and machines that we produce.”
“But only men make machines,” Reaper said.
“The only real machine is the molecule we’re made from,” I replied. “One day we will splice ourselves with lions and porcupines, sharks and larks. We will build machines attached to our neurons, and each of us will grow to proportions greater than this solar system. The sad truth is that because we can imagine the universe, we can also destroy it.”
Celestine shivered and then yawned.
Brown’s head was drooping and I worried that he might fall off his high stool.
“You kiddin’, right?” Rat Man said in response to my obviously exaggerated claim.
“Not at all. We are an anomaly, an infection.”
“Like you get with strep throat or the clap?” Reaper asked.
Rooster nodded, agreeing with the underlying meaning of the question.
“Yes,” I said.
“But don’t an infection need a body to live on?” Rooster said.
“The universe is a living thing—actually an interdependent collection of living things that coexist and have done so through a billion trillion reiterations.”
“I don’t get ya,” Rat Man said. In one way or another all three men were reborn, but that didn’t increase their vocabularies.
“The universe is a phoenix,” I explained, wondering what Temple would think of my words. “It dies in flame and is reborn from the ashes again and again, every time the same but . . . deeper, more complex. DNA-based life is but one of these added complexities.”
“And what’s our job?” Reaper asked.
Seal fell from her stool but Resurrected Rooster was there to catch her.
“Her bedroom is the first one on the left at the top of the stairs,” Tessa said to a man who just an hour before was her mortal enemy.
“Our job is to save life, or as much of it as possible, from the insanity of the Eschaton,” I said as the portly racist carried my daughter from the room.
“Say what?” Reaper asked.
“There is a delicate dance done by all the matter, antimatter, gravities, temporal incongruities, and less explainable forces of the universe. Before the beginning there was mostly nothing and nowhere. Somehow the beings that now form our universe willed themselves into existence. If life has its way, that delicate balance will be dissolved and all that ever was, the same and not the same, will be as if it had never been.
“Like a man when he dies,” Rooster said.
The big thug had returned from my daughter’s bedroom. He had a very serious look in his gray eyes.
“But on a much grander scale,” I said.
“A man is bigger than a ant,” Rooster argued. “A ant is even bigger compared to a germ. But they all die. They all face this—what you call it—this dissolving.”
“What are you getting at?” I asked the tattooed behemoth.
“I died and came back to life,” he said. “There’s something wrong with that. It’s like goin’ to bed on a Thursday and wakin’ up the Tuesday before.”
Temple smiled with my mouth and said, “I don’t give a fuck about what the cosmic forces want or don’t want. I’m here to make sure that your babies have babies and that the forests can grow in ignorant bliss. I’m here so that guy we saw outside, and a dozen more like him, don’t get their way and just wipe out all life.”
“And who are you?” Rat Man asked.
“What?” Brown said to this question. He got off the counter stool and staggered on his feet toward Mason Drinkman. Rat Man wasn’t small, but his taupe hair was naturally spikey and he had eyebrows arched up in rodent-like fashion.
“That’s my father,” Brown slurred. He was drunk and confused. I think he was intending to throw a punch.
But Tessa put her arms around him and he wobbled to a standstill.
“Come upstairs with me, BB,” she said.
“But he said that about Pops,” Brown complained.
“Come on,” she said, pulling on his brawny, footballer arms.
They staggered toward the hall and stairway.
My template turned to Rat Man and said, “I am the Martin Just that Martin Just always wanted to be. I’m strong and fast and believe what I think to be the right way to do things. He calls me Temple. You can too if you want.”
“There’s a whole lotta people out there like that man we saw in the street?” asked Reaper.
“About a dozen.”
“It woulda been touch and go with all of us up against him alone. Don’t ask me how, but I could feel the power comin’ offa him.”
“Yeah, but, there’s more out there like me, too,” Temple replied. “And there’s others who have jobs that I can’t even explain.”
“How many?” Rooster asked.
“One hundred and six, seven if you include me.”
“And they’re all out there wanting to end all life?” Rat Man asked.
“Marty wants to save the world. Dead Man out there wants to end it. Some of us are interested in trees or fish—or the planet itself, which will almost certainly survive the writhing molecule. It’s our job to resolve our differences.”
“What does that mean?” Rooster asked.
“Either kiss, kill, or isolate.”
The three white men in torn white T-shirts stared at Temple, wondering what to ask next. But before they could bring another question to a level of articulation, Temple said, “You guys should clear out of here for the night. The kids are still scared of you and Marty needs some time with his wife.”
“Suppose we say no?” Rooster challenged. This was the first indication that the change had not made him a vassal as I had at first supposed.
“I’ll kill you,” Temple said.
“You think you could take all three of us?”
“I did once already tonight.”
“Come on, Harold,” Reaper said to Rooster. “We done messed with these people enough already.”
A few beats went by while the man who sometimes inhabited my body and the men who had been intent on slaughtering my family faced off.
“When you want us to come back?” Rat Man asked at last.
“At the end of the day tomorrow,” Temple said, “after five. And when you’re out there, look out for that pale guy. Don’t think you can take him. You can’t, and we can’t lose you guys. Not yet.”
Temple walked the three members of the Aryan gang to the door. As he watched them leave, his resolve dissipated and I became myself again.
It was an odd feeling—like having a blockage pulled out of your nasal cavity. It felt good and at the same time somehow uncomfortable.
I stood there for long minutes, at the open front door. The dark block had not changed but the universe had placed its full attention there. It was an invisible, intangible miracle—an event I would have preferred never to have been aware of.
“Marty?” Tessa was standing there behind me.
“You can tell the difference between us?”
“I can,” she admitted, “but it’s hard to say how. But both men are you, baby. One of them is just free of his, his inhibitions.”
“And he can fuck you while standing up and beat two men twice his size to death in the span of half a day. Then he can raise one of those men from the dead.”
“He had sex with me to pass on your blood,” she said, as if I weren’t expressing my rage. “I can see that there’s a full-fledged war being waged by a hundred and seven warriors. You’re one of those warriors. The man you’re so jealous of is just another aspect of you.”
“But it’s like I’m just a butler or a janitor and all you—Rooster, Temple, and all the rest—are more aware, more powerful . . . more important.”
Tessa smiled at me and shook her head lovingly. She said, “You’re like the king in a chess game. Your survival is our only hope.”
“Why the fuck is he so much stronger than me?”
“I keep telling you, baby, he is you.”
That conversation might have gone on for hours. We could have said the exact same words over and over again, mimicking the recurring universe that had tasked me and my brethren with changing everything.
We could have talked forever but Tessa said, “We have to go upstairs.”
“What for?”
She turned away and walked into the house. I resisted going after her for three long minutes. I wanted the trajectory of the world, seemingly set in motion by my dream, to stop. I thought that if I could just stay still, the danger would pass.
But standing there in the dark, moonless night, I knew that there was no escape from this unasked for destiny. Even my own mind was given over to the task of saving a doomed world.
I went into the electric glare of the silent house and walked up the stairs, more like a man sentenced to death than an interstellar agent set against the absolute holocaust posed by all things living.
There were two single beds set against opposite walls in Celestine’s room. She had asked for the pair of smaller beds in lieu of a larger one because she often had friends sleep over and this was a good way to accommodate her social tendencies. Seal was unconscious on her side and Brown was out cold on the visitor’s cot.
On a small table that Tessa had dragged between the two beds was her old medical bag from when she did a stint as a nurse for Doctors without Borders. I had convinced her to take this job after she got her nursing degree. When she returned, she told me that she loved me because my passion for her set her free rather than limiting her to what everyone else expected.
Next to the table was a pink padded chair that Seal used to sit in front of her blue vanity.
Tessa gestured at the chair and I sat obediently.
From the bag she took out two sealed packages containing single-use hypodermics. As she severed the packages with a scalpel, Tessa spoke.
“You saved my life, Marty,” she said. “I know I always let you think that I was happy to get with a man that I could throw around in the bed, that I could make him feel like there was no coming down. But none of that was true . . .” She took out the first injection device and looked at me. “You risked your life to take me away, and all you did was tell me how much you were learning. It was on that holiday I knew that I could be somebody and not somebody’s dog.”
She reached into the bag and took out a small bottle of liquid and a cotton ball.
“Roll up your left sleeve, baby,” she said, “and swab down the skin just above the crook of the arm.”
“Why did Seal faint?” I asked while doing what I was told.
“I crushed three sleeping pills and put them in her cocoa.”
“Why?”
She grasped my forearm and expertly drew the blood. Then she went over to Celestine’s bed and injected her in the hip. My daughter’s lips parted and her eyes opened. She looked right at me but I don’t think she saw anything.
“Once more,” my wife said.
She approached me with the second needle and I held out a hand to stop her.
“What?” she asked.
“We haven’t discussed this,” I said. “We always talk about things, Tess. That’s something we agreed on way back in the beginning.”
“Words are what humans use because they have lost or maybe they never had the talent for knowing,” she said. This phrase seemed familiar but I couldn’t remember where it had come from. “You gave me your blood, baby. Everything is in that. The dogs have been loosed on the world and you might be the only one who can save us—leaf and fin, scale and mind.”
“But I don’t remember.”
“Give me your right arm.”
