Blue Light (4 page)

I was desperate back then.

“It feels good, doesn’t it?” Ordé asked.

Many nodded.

“It’s like the cold kiss of a spirit beyond your ability to see. You can feel her only for a brief moment and then she’s off.”

We nodded some more.

“You are lost,” Ordé said.

He stepped off his rock, walked into the crowd, cleaving the congregation, and went up into the trees. Feldman and Alexander, two of Ordé’s larger acolytes, blocked the way to anybody who wanted to follow him. He would be gone for the rest of the day. He’d probably go down to San Francisco, in the secondhand brown suit I’d bought him, to look for a woman.

It was time to look for a mate again.

Many of the Close Congregation followed him up to the point of the large carob trees into which he disappeared. They pressed up against the large bodyguards and called out, “Ordé! Teacher!”

I didn’t go running after him.

I had been with Ordé for nearly four years by then. I’d left everything behind me and joined the Close Congregation. Ordé and his words were my only connection left to life. The day we met I’d intended to kill myself. I’d been with him ever since. I knew he’d be back. I was one of the few who knew where he lived in town. I collected donations from the Close Congregation, kept his bank accounts, and paid his bills.

Ordé had a lot of money in the bank, the large donations he collected himself in private interviews, but he spent very little of it. I controlled the checkbook, but all I craved was his truth.

Ordé’s words were the truth. You could see every image, feel every sensation he described. His metaphors (what we thought were metaphors) took on a palpable reality that hung in our nostrils, stuck in the back of our throats. Halfway through any sermon I would notice that I was no longer listening to his words but instead experiencing the phenomena he described.

“Hello, Chance,” Miles Barber said.

He had come up behind me while everyone else drifted after Ordé.

“Detective Barber.”

“Where’s your boss gone?” the policeman asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “He doesn’t check in with me every time he splits.”

“He go off like that often?”

“You know as well as I do,” I said. “You come up here enough.”

“He always go alone?” Detective Barber asked.

“We’re never alone, Officer.”

Barber’s hair was thick and black, but his eyes were light gray. He wasn’t tall and he always wore an odd-colored suit. That day it was an iridescent gray-green two-piece suit with a single-button jacket.

He looked and sounded as if his entire life were just off the secondhand rack.

“I don’t care about your blue light bullshit, kid. I wanna know if your boss disappears with people from this group into the woods.”

“You asked me that before,” I said.

“I can arrest you anytime I want, kid.”

“Yes, you can, Officer.”

Barber took me in with his eyes. I had known many policemen. Ever since I was a child they’d been rousting me. I knew when a cop hated me — my big frame, my black skin. But Barber didn’t have time for that kind of hatred. He had a job to do, that was all.

I would have liked to help him. But I could not.

I couldn’t, because helping him would have condemned the dream. Barber was a cop, that’s all. He found out who did wrong, uncovered the evidence to prove it, and sent the wrongdoers to jail. He wasn’t concerned with the subtleties of truth and necessity. He couldn’t see above the small laws that he worked for.

I wondered, as he interrogated me for the fifth time, if he knew how close he stood to his precious truth. Did he know that three and a half years earlier I had been summoned from my Shattuck Avenue dive by Ordé?

A man, I forget his name, who lived two floors below knocked on my door a little after 11:00
P
.
M
.

“Phone,” he said. Before I could get the door open he was already going back down the stairs.

There was a pay phone on the second floor that we all used to receive calls. I was surprised because no one ever called me. My mother never even knew the number.

“Chance?”

“Teacher?” I asked. I had never seen Ordé away from the park except for that first time we met. It had been only a short while since I’d been a member of the Close Congregation.

“Come to me,” he said and then he gave me the address.

I was flattered by the call. I didn’t ask why or if it could wait till morning. I just told him that it might take a while because I had no car or bike or money for the bus.

“Hurry” was his reply.

I found myself running down the nighttime streets of Berkeley.

Ordé lived in a small house about six blocks down from Telegraph. There was no path through the uncut lawn to his door. I could feel the wet blades of grass against the bare sides of my sandaled feet.

He opened the door before I reached it.

“Come in.”

The small entrance area had a doorway on either side. The room to the left was empty and dark except for a single flickering flame that I thought must have been a candle. The room to the right had an electric light burning behind a half-closed door. I turned toward the brighter light.

“No,” Ordé commanded. He gestured toward the flickering dark.

I obeyed him not because I felt I had to. I wanted to please him because when he spoke he seemed to understand all the pain of my life. He never blamed or made empty promises; he simply explained and left me to make my own choices.

We sat on the floor in the dark room on either side of a fat candle. He wore black slacks and a loose collarless shirt that was unbuttoned. The light played shadows on his shallow chest and gaunt face. His blond hair was in shadow, making his bronzed skin seem pale.

“You are half of a thing,” he said, speaking softly and with no particular emphasis. But I felt the words wrap tightly around my mind. “The lower half,” he continued. “The tripod, the foundation, the land below the stars.”

I wanted to get up and run. Not to escape, but to work off the elation I felt upon receiving his words.

“You are sleep before waking, like I was before blue light. I look upon you as you would see a man who used his head to hammer nails. Poor fool.”

The image was so clear in my mind, I worried that it might be a flashback to an old acid trip.

“Do you understand?” Ordé asked.

“I think so.”

“What?”

“The blue light is God,” I said.

“No. I don’t think so,” Ordé said with a little wonder in his voice. “No. Not God, but life. Not lies or hopes or dreams. Nothing that is to come later, but right now. Right now. Here.”

I had never experienced anything like sitting there receiving his words. The only thing even approaching it was an early memory I had of my mother’s trying to show me the San Bernardino mountain range. I was three or four, and she held me in one arm while pointing off into the distance. All I could make out was “far away” and colors. But as she kept explaining and pointing, I slowly made out the mountains she described. The elation I felt at realizing mountains for the first time was a weak emotion compared with what Ordé made me feel there in the darkness.

I’d heard him speak many times before, but it never had that kind of impact. It was as if I were transformed temporarily and for a brief moment I saw through his eyes, shared his expanded awareness.

“Do you understand?” Ordé asked again.

I nodded.

“Can you see what I’m saying?”

“It’s like the whole world,” I said meaninglessly. “Everything.”

“Everything must change,” he said, making sense out of my nonsense. “But in order for that to happen we must multiply. We must grow until every animal and fish, every rock and drop of water is one. Everything must merge.”

“Like an explosion?”

“Yes. But slowly. Over thousands of years. But it will never be unless we can mate.”

“Why can’t you?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I try,” he said. “But my blood is too strong. It devours the egg.”

My eyes had adjusted to the darkness by then. There was a wooden bench behind Ordé and a pile of clothes or rags on the floor.

He stood up and walked toward the door with the electric light shining behind it. I followed him into the light.

It was a small dinette separated from the kitchen by a waist-high wall of shelves. A large table, topped with red linoleum, dominated the room, but it was the small corpse slumped back in one of the chrome chairs that captured my attention. It was Mary Klee, one of the Close Congregation. Head thrown back, dark foam down her chin. One eye was wide-open while the other was mostly closed. She wore jeans and a T-shirt.

There was a bowl half filled with what looked like congealed blood on the table before her. I’m sure I would have been sick if I wasn’t still stunned by the power of Ordé’s words.

“I hoped that if we shared blood, her cells might have been strengthened.” There was no apology in Ordé’s voice. “But even just to drink some of it, she died.”

He stood for a long time then, pondering, I suppose, the future of his race — the generation of blue divinity. I sat down across from Mary, looking into her cockeyed stare. I’d never seen a corpse before, but then again, I’d never believed in God before Ordé told me that there was something higher than God.

The silence continued for half an hour or more.

“Can you drive a car?” he asked finally.

I must have nodded.

“Put her in the car in the backyard and take her somewhere,” he said.

There was a junkyard in Alameda I knew. No one patrolled it at night and there were no fences. All the way out I wondered why I obeyed him.

“It’s only words,” I said out loud. “Only words, but Mary’s really dead.”

But I knew the answer. Those words had transformed me, made me believe in something that I could be a part of. Ordé didn’t mourn Mary. How could he? People were, at best, coma victims in his eyes. He hadn’t murdered her; he had tried to elevate her life.

Detective Barber interrupted my thoughts.

“I know you think that he’s your friend, kid,” he said. “But you knew those people too. If you think he cares more about you than them, you’re wrong. MacIlvey was his girlfriend and she’s dead.”

“We’re all dead, Officer,” I said. “Some of us just don’t know it yet.”

Barber shook his head at me. He was a good guy. At that moment I wanted to be like him. I wanted to forget the sad truth of Ordé’s prophecies.

P
HYLLIS YAMAUCHI WAS AN
astronomer working at Berkeley when the shaft of blue light came in through her laboratory window. A year later she heard about a fanatic who claimed that knives of blue cut through heaven to enlighten us. She came the following Wednesday. I had no special senses then, but I could tell that the meeting between Ordé and Phyllis Yamauchi was monumental.

The tall blond fanatic came down from his rock and took Phyllis in his arms. She was crying and he made sounds and faces that expressed no emotion that I knew.

Ordé picked up Phyllis, hoisting her with one arm as if she were a child and said, “God is not alone on this earth.”

At first there was silence among us. Then I started to clap. After that the applause came, applause and cheers.

It was Ordé’s power to see the past as it moved toward the future and to rouse the hearts of men with this knowledge.

But others had seen the blue light also. Gijon Diaz, a man who loved puzzles. Reggie and Wanita Brown. Eileen Martel, who brought home dozens of wounded animals, all of whom recovered even from the worst injuries. And there was Myrtle Forché, who was a playwright before blue light and a monologist after. They, and others, showed up at Ordé’s Wednesday sermons. They didn’t all come to every sermon, but there was a loose association that kept most of them coming back from time to time.

They were the Blues. Men and women who had transcended the human race. Part of their mind had lived among stars so far away that our science hadn’t even imagined them.

That I moved among them, shared smiles and drank from the same cups, elated me. I believed that I was privy to a pantheon of gods. Though only children in the first months after their creation, they heralded an evolution that would become the divinity their mortal lower halves had always dreamed of.

Doctor Edward Marie at the Alameda County Jail infirmary didn’t expect Winch Fargo to survive his wounds. But while Ordé made his prophecies, Winch’s wounds slowly healed. After seventeen months on a hospital cot Winch opened his eyes to confusion and his mind to pain. He asked for painkillers, but Doctor Marie saw no reason to comply. The wounds were mostly healed. Edward Marie couldn’t see into the half-life that infested Fargo’s mind and body, the fragment of that divine equation that flitted through him like a curse from some long-forgotten victim.

Fargo had to be chained in the courtroom because he would exhibit violent spasms now and again. His defense attorneys said that he had a degenerative nerve disorder. Doctor Marie disagreed. The prosecutor dismissed the jumping agony as a ploy by the defendant to save himself from the maximum sentence.

Winch didn’t care. The chains he wore were in his blood. Pain chains. Somewhere far, or near, or not at all, in his head. When the feelings converged he’d jump up, or at least try to, and scream.

Maybe the jury would have set him free. Maybe they would have sent him to a psychiatric ward, where drugs could have soothed his anticipation of eternity.

They might have except for Eileen Martel; she and the boy, Reggie, and the little girl, Wanita. They had already been to Ordé’s rock.

That’s how I know the tale.

Eileen had only recently found the Close Congregation when one day Reggie and Wanita were in the park with their mother. Wanita went right to Eileen and crawled into her lap.

Eileen made friends with the children’s mother. She said that she’d lost her husband on the same day that Mrs. Brown’s daughter Luwanda had died. She gave the family money and offered to baby-sit when Mrs. Brown needed time to work.

They were often seen at the Close Congregation — chalk white Eileen and her young brown charges. The older woman also traveled in the company of dogs wearing homemade casts, flightless birds, and all sorts of wounded wild animals that became tame in her presence. A broken leg or wing, yellowy oozing eye, or bloody gash all healed under Eileen’s care. Reggie’s mother told me that Reggie had gone wild after his sister died; he’d go out the window at night and sleep all day under his bed. He wouldn’t listen to her or even talk until Eileen met him in the park.