Black Jack (7 page)

She used to mind him not being able to speak, but her experiences with the world had taught her that speaking was, in fact, the art of concealing one’s real thoughts. The boy had never lied to her. Still, she was sometimes certain he spoke to her telepathically. Small things. Like, Hello. I love you, Mother. I’m cold, or I like this story you are reading to me.

She bent forward and kissed his cheek. The whiff of apple puree. Her hands - they were ugly, the knuckles grown large and shiny with hard work - stroked the cornrows on his head. They ended in colorful beads at his shoulders - her handiwork. Many years ago she had taken the Tube to a hairdresser in Brixton to learn how to braid his hair, so different from her own.

On the TV screen Richard Attenborough was explaining the evening habits of sea lions. Once when he was eight she had come home to find the TV on the National Geographic channel. Assuming it had been a technical glitch she had put it back on Disney, but the next day she had found it back on the Discovery channel. Her astonished eyes found his and found them a-sparkle with excitement. By will alone he had changed the channel setting. Enthusiastically, she had looked forward to other feats of mind manipulation, but many months later she had had to accept that that was the extent of his capability.

‘How are you this morning, my love?’ she greeted cheerfully. The large catlike eyes fixed on her, unblinking, intense, sad. In the silence inside her head she listened intently for a reply, but nothing. He had stopped responding to her for some time now. She understood: he was dying.

He had been dying since the day she had found him, but now she felt him hurrying away faster. Already he was hardly more than a twig in autumn. The thought of life without him filled her with such horror that even the sight of a single crow while going about her day caused her sleepless nights and nightmares for weeks afterwards. Her fingers caressed his arm. Stiff as a bone, crooked at the elbow, and curled inward at the wrist. Some drool ran down the side of his face. She dabbed at it with a face towel and smiled gently. ‘I dreamed of your grandfather last night. He was sitting on the steps of our old home in Calcutta, looking well and happy…’

With great devotion, as if she was performing a sacred ritual, she began the twice-daily, hour-long process of carefully contorting and manipulating his dead limbs one by one out of his clothes, meticulously cleaning every inch of him, swaddling his bottom and redressing him. It was a source of great pride to her that so many years bed ridden had not left him with a single bedsore. As she administered to him, she recounted all that had happened to her the day before, the people she had met, the things they had said, the gossip she had found inside the glossy magazines on Lady Carrington’s coffee table, and what she had witnessed in the streets from the bus on the way home. And all the while those beautiful, cat eyes never left her face.

After removing the feeding tubes, she positioned his wobbly head on a thrice-folded towel at an angle to allow the collecting saliva to flow out on the towel and not his clothes. Then she lavished his face with butterfly kisses and bade him goodbye.

The air outside smelled of winter.

Bumi shut the door behind her and walked down the street, unaware she was watched by the man living in one of the rooms across the road.

When she passed out of his range he moved away from the net curtains and put his binoculars away. He rubbed his unshaven face thoughtfully. His relentless obsession had begun late one night when he had spied her leaving her bathroom without even a hastily tied towel. Casual enquiries down the shops and from his landlady had brought the information that she was husbandless and lived alone. True, he had never seen anyone else come out of her door, but he was not convinced that she actually did. For one thing he saw the blue light of the TV every day while she was out.

He had twenty minutes before he had to leave for work. He lay on his filthy bed, unzipped his jeans, and closed his eyes. First he savored that towelless body in all its glory. Then he saw himself erect and huge looming over her, grabbing her by the hips, throwing her on the bed, and doing to her what he had seen done to the shameless sluts on those special Internet sites he frequented. If she screamed he would gag her; if she resisted he would tie her. He was merciless with her. The bestial urge to have her even when he was limp and finished was so strong that he knew he must engineer a way to realize his needs very soon. Or it would eat him from the inside like a colony of white ants inside a dead wood.

Houston, this is
Discovery
. We still have the alien spacecraft under observation
.

 -
Recording from the space shuttle
Discovery

Until they were irrevocably lost to him, Black followed his mother’s footsteps in the street below. Though he had never actually felt her hands on his numb skin or the kisses she rained on his face and hands, for the next ten hours he would desperately miss her presence. She was his whole world. Every day, he waited for the twilight hours when she would rise, and listened to the muted sounds of her movements around the small flat, until she appeared at his door beaming with goodness. Of late, though, he noticed her smile had become worn and forced, and that she herself appeared encased in a cocoon of barely suppressed dread. It saddened him greatly, but there was nothing he could do.

He was dying and she knew it.

Since he never slept while she was in the flat, he let his eyes blur on the ceiling, and with his eyes wide open he slipped off into sleep. The sound of a key in the street door awakened him. Feeding time, Black. Heather’s heavy tread came up the stairs and headed toward the kitchen. She arrived at his side without any eye contact. He recognized the scent on her breath. Once his mother had put one, just one, fizzy drop on his tongue, and said, ‘Coca-Cola, but it’s bad for you.’

For the next twenty minutes Heather’s corpulent face hovered over him, silent, efficient, and detached. She left the flat without having spoken a word, her thick shoes clunking dully down the stairs. The click of the street door closing behind her was a good sound. The carefree laughter of small children passing by floated up. A woman scolded. Their sounds faded away. He looked at the clock on the wall. It was 12.30 p.m.

He watched a documentary, but it was a repeat, and it didn’t hold his interest. Visions of death, his own, kept intruding upon his concentration. His mother had taught him that humans reincarnated incessantly, but he had learned from watching the telly that other religions believed differently. He hoped she was right, for he longed for the chance to be returned as a normal human being.

The news came on. Automatically he transferred his focus to it. He had an insatiable curiosity about the world outside his room. Often, he watched the broadcasts put out by all the different channels - BBC, ITV, Channel 4, CNN, Aljazeera, Fox, MSNB, and sometimes even the foreign language channels that he could not understand. After the news he flipped through the channels without finding anything worth watching. The occupants of the tree outside his window, a pair of courting pigeons, were returning. He moved his attention to them. He loved watching them.

He was wondering if he would still be around in spring when their nest was once again filled with noisy chicks, when he experienced a strong fluttering inside his chest. It was something he had never registered in his paralyzed body before and it shocked and frightened him. Was this Death come to snatch him away? His eyes darted to the clock - at least three hours before his mother’s return. He told himself that he was not afraid of dying or what lay beyond, but he must see her one last time. Innocently, he decided to wait for her return before he died. The panic ebbed away and after a while he realized he was not dying, at least, not just yet.

A cookery show came on. Food intrigued him. He watched the presenter bite into a peppermint profiterole, roll her eyes dramatically, and expel a long ‘mmmmmm’. When she could bring herself to speak, she described the experience enthusiastically: delightfully refreshing, elegant, light... In his dreams he was often sitting up and eating, all manner of things - cakes, spaghetti, sandwiches, pizzas, fruit - but he always awakened no wiser about their taste or the sensations of eating. He didn’t know the difference between juicy and chewy.

The winter night descended leaving the room illuminated only by the flickering blue light of the TV. Black eyed the clock: 3.29 p.m. A strange stillness hung in the air, but he was overcome with a sensation of disquiet. He wished again for his mother’s return with the evening paper, for normality. An instinct warned him. Ever since the fluttering. Something was not right.

And he was right.

The TV flickered suddenly and became a silent, blue screen. A deadly quiet filled the room. He listened intently and heard only the blood drumming in his ears - where were the outside sounds? Fearfully his eyes skirted around the room. Inside his head a vibrant, beautiful voice said in perfect English, ‘Don’t be afraid. Friend.’ Then the clear deduction:
It cares about me...

He stared in disbelief as dry, black rain poured from the ceiling, and flashing, swirling vortexes and white orbs appeared in it. Within that whirlpool of pulsating energy a being began to materialize. At first he was only a transparent, shimmering wave of green, undulating like an interrupted two-dimensional broadcast on TV, but he very quickly gained density until it was no longer possible to see through him.

When he was completely solid the rain and the swirling stopped. A glowing, pale green, humanoid boy stood in his room. Black gazed at him in stunned wonder. His mother was shorter than Heather, and the being was shorter than his mother. Hard to tell, but perhaps the entity was his height. He had a large forehead, no eyebrows, enormous eyes (at least three times the size of a normal human being’s), high cheekbones, a delicate nose, and a pointed chin. His neck was long and graceful and his straight, shoulder-length hair was the same color as his skin. He was dressed in a long, emerald green robe that was belted at the waist and smoldered like live embers. The edges were trimmed with some strange material that flowed and lapped around him like water.

But the most spectacular thing about him was his skin. It looked like polished jade or some similar stone, but not only did it glow with a peculiar luminosity, it also reflected its surroundings. Extraordinary thing in itself, but made stupendous by the never-ending,
fantastically complex and colorful fractals
that appeared and disappeared
on the surface of his skin. The self-repeating forms appeared to Black’s entranced eyes, marine-like - indescribably beautiful, jeweled seahorses. But on deeper reflection he had the impression of dancing dragons.

Impossible to see his feet, but his hands were shaped exactly like that of a human being, perhaps more slender. He secreted a scent that Black could not identify, but found pleasant nonetheless. In his head, Black heard again the bright voice reiterate, ‘Friend.’

The reassurance was unnecessary. The boy being emanated such nobility, kindness, purity, compassion, and warmth that Black felt no fear. His presence was all around the room, uplifting.
In fact, compared to the shining perfection and radiance of his visitor, Black felt himself to be no more than a shadow.
He seemed more real than everything else in the room.

He came forward, the watery edge of his robe silent on the floor. When he was but a foot away he raised his left hand, probably some form of greeting, but in the reflective surfaces of his arm, Black saw, for the first time, his own reflection.

Why, Black! You’re black.

He had
never
imagined - but his mother was Indian, who… Must not then be his mother. That horrible moment also brought understanding of why she had never once thought to bring a mirror to him. Pitiful. Twisted skeletal limbs protruded uselessly out of his blue Thomas the Tank Engine pajama sleeves. That large head that could not be set straight, and the horrendously drooling, half-open mouth...

‘Hello, Black,’ he heard in his head.

His baffled eyes drifted upwards. The being’s irises, a deep green, were not round, but bled out into the whites of his eyes, which were not really white but a much paler shade of green. Caught in the being’s gaze Black understood that he was safe, but utterly naked. That the being had total access to all his memories: everything he had seen, heard, experienced, felt, and every thought he had ever entertained even if it was only for a few seconds. There was nothing that the being did not know about him.

A thought formed in Black’s head. He’s not blue so he can’t be Lord Krishna. Could he be one of the forever youthful ‘boy gods’ his mother spoke about?

The marvelous creature laughed, the dancing fractals in his beautiful face glowing brighter. ‘I’m not a god! I was created as you were.’

Black formulated the question. Who are you?

‘I’m a hyper-dimensional being. Your scientists might categorize me as a virtual visitor from the zero sum point, or what they assume to be the vacuum of the universe.’

An alien who speaks English.

‘In the strictest sense I am not an alien. An alien is a stranger or foreigner from one’s own dimension. I am not of your realm. I can only hold my physical embodiment for short periods in your world. And to be perfectly honest the only English words I know are the ones I found in your mind.’

What’s your name?

‘There is no word that adequately translates my name into English. The language of hyperspace is nonverbal. It is made of tone, archetype, and color. Even if I put it into your mind, it would sound garbled to your ears, and you would not be able to replicate it. It might be more fun if you simply found a name for me.’

For some seconds Black could only look at the being with what he now knew was a dull, open-mouthed stare. Then a truly lame idea - Green. He was instantly embarrassed, but all the fractals in the being lit up more brightly than when he had laughed.