Stepping Stone
Author: Walter Mosley
Date: 2013-04-02T07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fiction; Science Fiction; Science Fiction Fantasy
Description: The best-selling author of the Easy Rawlins mysteries presents a two-in-one omnibus of stories that explores life's cosmic questions, from the meaning of life to the nature of good and evil, from the perspectives of individuals who are given unique insights that are largely inaccessible to the rest of the world. 50,000 first printing.
Publisher: Tor Books
Rights: All rights reserved

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For Julia Masnik,
who makes the impossible
possible

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In memory of Jayne Cortez.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Part One

Illustration

Part Two

Illustration

Illustration

Illustration

Part Three

Also by Walter Mosley

About the Author

Copyright

PART ONE

“EXCUSE ME,” a young woman said from behind.

The elevator car was stopped at the nineteenth floor of the Westerly Building and my mail cart was blocking her exit. But the thing was I didn’t notice her standing there behind me and when I had gotten in, the elevator car had been empty, I was sure of that.

I had worked for Higgenbothem, Brightend, and Hoad for twenty-one years with nothing out of the ordinary happening. I mean, there was the World Trade Center disaster down around Wall Street and some freakish weather now and again; we, the nation, were fighting a war against somebody, and preparing to fight against somebody else, in the Middle East, though no one seemed to be quite sure who the enemy actually was. There were economic reversals and the rent, for most New Yorkers, had gone through the upstairs neighbor’s roof but nothing unusual had happened within the confines of HBH proper.

My employer occupied floors sixteen to twenty-two in the Westerly Building on East Fifty-sixth Street. I worked in the mailroom, had done so since my first day on the job in 1986. I started out as a mail delivery clerk and had ended up the manager of the department. There were just three employees in my section. The only difference between me and my two perpetually temporary subordinates was a title and $4.65 an hour. Kala Daws and Pete Mulray were responsible for floors sixteen to twenty-one, whereas I only had to deliver mail on the top floor and do the managerial paperwork for our small section, that was once a hallway, on floor seventeen.

I never was sure exactly what HBH did. It had something to do with finance and there were executives from around the globe that spent as much as twenty-four hours a day studying graphs and documents in foreign languages on their huge plasma screens. I didn’t even know the names of most of the languages nor did I understand the significance of the charts. But that wasn’t unusual. I had, what they called at my uptown high school, a learning disability. Information made it into my mind but unless it had some direct relation to the way I saw the world I wasn’t normally capable of using it. And the way I saw things had very little in common with my teachers, at least most of them.

“That don’t sound like no disability to me,” my aunt Tiny used to say when my counselors called. “Sounds more like common sense.”

Earlier on I had problems with what my teachers termed as “communication skills.” I couldn’t speak clearly and often used words in the wrong order when under pressure or confused. I could write okay and I had been reading voraciously since the age of six. I didn’t have trouble putting words down on, or picking them up from, paper but people didn’t want to read the notes of a boy who had a perfectly good voice and most of my teachers didn’t believe I was really reading the books that I carried everywhere.

My fourth-grade teacher, Miss Boucher, used to keep me after school and worked to help me think about how I put my words together. We would sit for hours in the study room of the library and talk. Whenever I made a mistake she would look at me and touch my hand. I’d realize what I had done wrong and repeat the phrase correctly. By the sixth grade I rarely misspoke anymore.

Miss Boucher cured my disability but I was already tagged as a slow learner and mildly retarded so I was shunted down a particular path of learning that was inapplicable to my needs but still valid, in a way—because all my teachers, except Miss Boucher, believed that I couldn’t be taught.

I wasn’t bothered much by what people thought, however. School didn’t interest me very much and I spent most of the time considering simple things like ants and cloud formations; the way brides smile on their wedding days and all the possible patterns that water can make if you turn on the faucet quickly and then slam it shut. Sometimes I’d sit all day in my small eastside apartment watching the various arrangements of people as they walked down the street.

*   *   *

THE YEAR BEFORE that girl appeared behind me on the elevator I went back to my old elementary school and asked if Miss Boucher still taught there. It was a long shot but I remembered she was young when I was in her class and I had just that March reached the age of forty.

“And who’s asking?” the head of the office inquired.

“My name is Truman Pope,” I said. “I used to go to school here and Miss Boucher taught me to get my words right.”

The registrar, Nancy Bendheim, had a stern visage and a reluctant air about her. But when I explained how Miss Boucher had impacted my life she smiled a real smile and nodded.

“Alana still teaches here,” the registrar told me. “She’s in class right now but she’ll be finished at eleven thirty. If you’d like to wait…”

Mrs. Bendheim let me sit in a parent-teacher conference room down the hall from her office. The room was quite small with a beat-up old class table for a desk and two chairs. It was a grim place with light green, stained walls and a pitted wooden floor. But there was a window that looked out into the branches of an oak tree. The lunch courtyard was on a lower level than the entrance of the school and so the room was one floor up. There were all kinds of activities going on among the branches. Spring leaves, that youthful kind of green, and insects, caterpillars, sparrows, starlings, and even one frisky gray squirrel. There were initials carved here and there by brave student climbers and a pair of tennis shoes that had the laces tied together hanging from a precarious branch that was, no doubt, too perilous a place for the custodial staff to reach.

Those shoes caught my attention. They were old and weathered, had probably been hanging there for a few years. I imagined the boy who, after having outgrown his old footwear, wanted to get one more bit of use out of them. I thought of how happy he must have been when the bolo he threw grabbed on to that skinny branch. Did he pass by below every day in the lunch court and look up to see his finest hour?

“Truman?” a gentle voice said.

Turning away from the window I saw her through a small boy’s eyes. She was still slender, still copper skinned with brown eyes. Her brown hair had become mostly gray but that was the only difference. Judging from her face she had not aged a day since the afternoon I had said, “I watch go him,” and she touched the back of my hand so lightly that it almost tickled.

“Is that really you?” she asked, a friendly smile brightening the dull room.

“Um,” I said, unable to keep from grinning myself. “I, uh, I came by because I had the day off and I was walking around the old neighborhood and remembered, I mean thought about you.”

Miss Boucher moved to the chair next to my station at the window and sat so gracefully that I experienced a sudden intake of breath as I used to when I had my schoolboy crush on her.

“How are you doing, Truman?”

“I was just walking around the old neighborhood…”

She touched my hand to get me beyond the skip in the scratched record of my mind.

“I wanted to see if you were still here to ask you something,” I said.

“What’s that?” she asked.

I remember looking into her eyes amazed that more than thirty years had elapsed.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean I guess it was just to say thank you. You know you were the only teacher I ever had who didn’t think I was an idiot. I mean … They always said that I had a learning disorder but, but…”

“But that’s just because they couldn’t understand you,” the older but still lovely teacher said, finishing my words now because there was no more I had to learn.

“Yeah, I guess.”

“So you just came by to say thank you?” she asked me.

“Didn’t you always used to say to me that if there was something then there was always something else?” I asked.

Miss Boucher smiled.

“Yeah, so,” I blundered on, “I guess I came here because I wanted to see you again and to thank you for helping me be okay with things.”

“What things?” she asked.

Answering that one question I must have rambled on for half an hour. I told her about how I had been labeled overactive by school officials and how I could never go to college. I couldn’t have gone anyway because my aunt Tiny got sick when I graduated high school and I had to work to help her until she was old enough for the state to foot the bill. I talked about my job and how much I liked moving from station to station delivering mail to people who rarely realized that I was even there.

“… and, anyway, I was, I just wanted to say thanks. You know most of my teachers never liked me. Or maybe not, I mean they didn’t not like me it’s just that they didn’t care and they didn’t understand. I mean I don’t think that it was because I’m black or anything. Tish Loman and Ronnie Dewar got along with some of the same teachers in different classes and they didn’t have any problems. But it was just that nobody would ever listen. I tried, I tried to do how you taught me but …

“Anyway. I’m not complaining, it’s just that I always think about how nice you were and how the reason I can do my job and make it to manager is because you showed me how to see things and say them too. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with me—”

“Certainly not,” Alana Boucher agreed.

There we were, in that ugly room sitting on the wrong side of the window, next to the branches of an ancient oak. Miss Boucher put her hand on mine as she had done so many years before.

“So you’re still here,” I said to fill in the silence.

“Where else would I be?” she said.

“If you taught all the classes in this school I wouldn’t have been called stupid by anybody and I could have gone to college,” I said.

“And what would you have done then?” she asked, smiling, holding my hand.

“I could have been one of those guys in suits making good money. My aunt Tiny wouldn’t be in a rest home but in a good place or in her own home with a nurse to make sure she takes her meds…” I wanted to say more but if I kept talking I would have started crying.

“I bet you visit your auntie every week,” Miss Boucher said.

I did see Aunt Tiny on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and most Saturdays. But nobody knew that. I remembered then that Miss Boucher seemed to know what I was thinking and what I was doing without me having to say. It was like she could see into my mind.

“And those people who work in those offices don’t know birdcalls and how clouds spin,” she continued. “They don’t know how to sit down and watch and listen so closely that the world seems to stop.”

She said more but I stopped listening to the words and went into a kind of trance. As I sat there and looked out I could see three hundred and sixty degrees around me, more, because I could see above and below too. The three dimensions of space flattened out in front of me and I could see it all as if it was on a movie screen. There was no up or down, front or back.

I remembered then why I had missed Miss Boucher so much. Often when I was with her as a child I had the experience of wide perception. I could see a spider crawling on the wall behind me and feel the wind against the window outside. The world became larger and more intricate.

In that ugly green room I could feel the grin on my lips and energy thrumming from the boiler room three floors below. I could feel the sky even and, when everything inside me went still, I perceived glimmers of life outside in the hallway and down in the lunch yard.

I knew that it was just an illusion but it felt good … like everything.

“But,” I said, coming out of the reverie, “but those guys at HBH are rich. Nobody wants to pay me to sit and watch bugs crawl.”

“Maybe you aren’t watching closely enough,” Alana Boucher suggested.

I don’t remember much after that. I sat forward in my chair to hear her better and she took my hand in both of hers. We talked, I’m sure of that, but I didn’t remember a word of what we said until the end when we were standing outside on the sidewalk in front of the school.

“You have to pay very close attention, Truman,” she was telling me. “The truth will reveal itself if you watch with intention.”

“Why were you always so nice to me?” I asked her. The answer to that question was the real reason I had come.

For a moment she just stood there looking at something above my head.

“I loved spending time with you,” she said at last. “The other teachers never understood how special you were. When we would sit in the remedial room and talk I began to feel elation and hope. You would show me things outside the window—birds and bulky little beetles trundling along. It was like you gave me a new pair of eyes.”

I came there to thank my teacher but our last words were her expression of gratitude. I left her feeling mildly confused but happy, still and all.

That evening I went to visit Aunt Tiny at Eastside Nursing Home for the Elderly. She was in the ward on the fourth floor near a window that looked down on Eighty-third Street. I had moved to the eastside in order to be close to her.

Tiny weighed well over three hundred pounds and she was shorter even than I am.

The hippopotamus and the spider monkey, she used to say when I was small and she held me in her arms looking into the full-length plastic dressing mirror she had in her bedroom.

The world and her moon, I would respond, remembering a phrase from a children’s book I’d once read.

“Hi, monkey,” she said when I pulled up a stool next to her chair by the window.

“Hi, Aunt Tiny.”

Tiny wasn’t small and she wasn’t old either. But at sixty-eight, with nearly twenty years of retirement already behind her, she had done forty years of hard labor and was, as she said, just tired—body and soul.

“What you do at work today, sugar?” she asked me.

The two things that Tiny and I had in common were our dark skin tones and the fact that we liked to sit and talk at the end of the day.

“I took the day off.”

“You played hooky from work?” she asked with a mischievous smile on her broad mouth.

“I took a personal day and went to my old school to see Miss Boucher.”

“She still walk there?”

“Uh-huh.”

“How is that nice lady?” Tiny asked. She lived in a rest home not for her mind but simply because she was too tired even to walk more than a few paces on her own.

I told Tiny about our talk and when I was finished she said, “Remember, Baby, anything Miss Boucher says is important. Even if you don’t understand, even if you don’t remember exactly what she said, you keep them words in your heart because that woman know sumpin’.”

And so a year had gone by and I watched everything that happened around me. I watched walls and floors, the ceilings and the people who never noticed me. I sat in my one-room apartment and looked out of the window at the brick buildings across the street.

*   *   *

AND THEN, “Excuse me,” a young woman said from behind my cart in the elevator car.

I pulled the mail cart out of the way. As she eased around I studied her. She had long, thick hair that was neither red nor brown but a color somewhere between the two. Her skin was ecru and her eyes were on the reddish side of violet. The pantsuit she wore was light yellow in color with intricate drab green designs etched here and there. The fabric was light, almost like pajamas and her shoes were burgundy and looked to be made from glass or at least a hard plastic.

“Sorry,” I said.

She smiled and nodded, gliding out into the hallway. She had moved beyond my line of sight when I got the sudden urge to call out to her. I blocked the elevator doors with the cart and jumped out in the hall. No more than a few seconds had gone by but she was gone—vanished.

I was about to run down to the turn when someone shouted, “Hey, what’s wrong with you? You think this is your own private elevator?”

This shocked me because I had thought I was in the elevator alone. But looking back into the car there were six people standing there; among them the senior VP Mr. Alan Travane and Lana Metcalf the vice president in charge of human resources.

After a moment’s hesitation I jumped back into the elevator moving my cart to allow the doors to close.

Everyone got out on the next floor except Miss Metcalf. She was younger than I, short, my height, and very pale skinned.

“Please come to my office at four forty-five this afternoon, Mister…?”

“Pope.”

“Excuse me?” she asked as if she thought I were making a joke.

“Truman Pope is my name,” I said still wondering about the strange-eyed girl.

“Do you know who I am?”

“Yes, Miss Metcalf.”

“Then I’ll see you at my office at four forty-five,” she said as she got off.

The doors closed on her and I stood there wondering where that girl had gone.

*   *   *

“SO WHAT HAPPENED with you and Miss Metcalf?” Kala Daws asked me at the sorting table that noon. She, Pete, and I were having sandwiches for lunch as we did most days.

“Um,” I said trying to conjure up the image of the events in the elevator. This was difficult because there were two superimposed memories: the sudden appearance of the girl in yellow and the angry riders whom I did not see until I turned back. There was something about the turning back that seemed most important.

“What’s wrong, True?” Pete asked. “You havin’ one’a your spells?”

The question brought me back to the table with my friends, still unable to recall the events in question with any clarity.

“I blocked the elevator door and … and there were people in a hurry behind me,” I said.

“So why you do that?” Kala asked. She was young and cream brown, a graduate from Wesleyan waiting to be promoted.

She and Pete were both what the company called floaters. These were entry-level positions where, under the watchful eye of Miss Metcalf’s assistant Stella Furman, potential executives were introduced to HBH by working in various operations areas.

Floaters almost always started in the mailroom. That way they moved around the entire company and began to see how things worked. Most floaters understood more about HBH in one month than I had gleaned in my twenty-one years on the job.

I was the only permanent employee in the mailroom.

“I thought I saw somebody,” I said in answer to Kala’s question.

“And so you blocked the door with your cart with two vice presidents and a manager in the car?” Pete asked.

Pete was a well-built young white guy. He’d graduated from Harvard and his father was on the board of HBH. He was affable and friendly and I thought that there might be something going on between him and Kala. I liked both of them. I never learned how to act my age (as my teachers so often told me) and so I usually got along well with young people.

“Yeah,” I said lamely. “Yeah. I just blocked the door and went out and looked.”

“Why, True?” Kala asked almost plaintively.

“I thought I was alone in the elevator. I guess I was in a kind of a daze.”

“Don’t say that to Lana when you go to her office,” Pete said. He called all the VPs, managers, and even the owners, by their first names. “Just tell her that you thought you thought you saw somebody and acted out of impulse.”

I smiled and nodded. It was nice that the kids wanted to help me. A few of the floaters who stayed at HBH smiled and said hi to me when I dropped off their mail. But, more often than not, the ones who passed through my mailroom resented the fact that I was their manager. Most times they tried to reorganize my system because they had college degrees and I was just a drudge.

But Kala was a young black woman who had been trained to respect her elders while Pete, on the other hand, was born of privilege and felt that it was beneath him to compete with the working classes.

We ate our sandwiches and the kids made suggestions as to what I should say in my disciplinary meeting with Lana Metcalf. Their words were like the pleasant chatter of frisky birds in a summer tree. I heard them and nodded now and again but the only thing on my mind was that girl in the yellow pj’s walking in and out of my life in just a few seconds.

*   *   *

“COME IN,” Lana Metcalf said in a stern yet evenly metered voice. I had been waiting in the antechamber of her office for twenty-six minutes.

I had never been inside the her office before because I’d always left mail for her, and her predecessors, at the assistant’s desk. It was a room both shallow and wide with full-length windows that peeked around other skyscrapers, offering a glimpse of the East River. Her desk had a green-tinted glass top and there were no books, photographs, knickknacks, or doodads anywhere in evidence. It was a room with no character and a view, as Kala would say, to die for.

“Have a seat, Mr. Pope.”

I did as she asked and tried to keep my eyes on her face so that the cityscape didn’t distract me. I gave a wan smile and waited for the hammer to drop.

“What was that in the elevator this morning?” she asked without pleasantry.

She was a handsome woman. Some might have called her pretty or at least attractive. But there was a hardness to her face. She seemed to be hiding more than she showed. It struck me at that moment that most people I met used up the greater part of their resources, their personalities, hiding from the eyes of others. This was a kind of revelation for me.

I spent most of my time thinking and watching. I had no TV or computer. I didn’t even own a radio. I read books at bedtime, any book I happened to have at hand, and before that I spent my time observing anything that moved or had an interesting form. One night I spent more than an hour examining the thick black cord plugged into the wall and connected to my toaster oven …

“Mr. Pope,” Lana Metcalf said peevishly.

“Yes?”

“About this morning.”

“I thought I saw someone in the hall,” I said. “A woman in a yellow pantsuit. I thought I saw her drop something and went out to pick it up for her. I guess I was mistaken.”

This was the story that Kala and Pete had suggested I use.

Lana was studying me.

“Are you … under a doctor’s care, Mr. Pope?”

“No.”

“A mental health care professional?”

“No.”

“Would you submit to a drug test?”

“Do I have to?” I asked.

This question stymied Miss Metcalf. HR had all kinds of rules and regulations that they had to follow. Her brows furrowed.

“No,” she said after a moment more of scrutiny. “No, you don’t. I can’t force you to do so without three complaints on file.”

“I’ve worked here for twenty-one years, ma’am,” I said. “Nobody has ever had a complaint about me or my work … that I know of. I’ve never missed a day due to sickness and I don’t take days off if there’s no one trained in the mailroom.”

“There are four reports that your mail delivery system is faulty,” she said. She spoke with both anger and vindication in her tone.

“Has anyone ever complained that they haven’t gotten their mail?”

Again she was stumped. This only served to stoke her anger.

“There wasn’t anyone in the hall,” she said.

These words stung me. As the day had progressed I had become obsessed with the girl in yellow. I was convinced that she was what Miss Boucher had told me to look for. But I was too late, too slow. Now I’d missed the most important moment in my life.

“I said that there wasn’t anyone there,” Metcalf was saying.

“Yes, ma’am. I know that now.”

“So what possessed you to block the door and walk out into the hall?” she asked.

“I’ve answered that question already.”

“And you refuse to take a drug test?”

“Do I have to take one?”

Scrutiny turned to resentment in her eyes. It was something like the sky when it slowly turns from a pale yellow to orange in some sunrises.

Metcalf reminded me of my teachers in school. She got angry when I said things that she couldn’t refute. She expected me to be the fool from the mailroom, the man with the low IQ who managed to get a pity diploma from a substandard city high school. Neither my teachers, nor she, had any idea of what went on in my mind. But I had no way of letting her know. She would never listen to me. She could only get angry when I didn’t submit the way she wanted me to.

“I’ll be getting back to you, Mr. Pope,” Metcalf said, after pausing to subdue her irritation.

Between two buildings at the end of the street I saw a hawk flash by. This sight elated me, made me forget the anger of the earthbound VP.

“I said that I’ll get back to you,” Metcalf told me.

“So I can go?”

“Yes. But this isn’t over.”

“What?”

“Excuse me?”

“What isn’t over, Miss Metcalf? I mean I stopped the elevator because I thought I saw something. That’s all. I didn’t steal anything or insult someone. I just made a mistake. Why can’t it be over?”

“I’ll be getting back to you,” she said again.

*   *   *

ON THE WALK home there were tears in my eyes. I was crying but not sobbing or bawling. It was a gentle sorrow passing through me, a feeling of loss, of a deficiency caused by the flash of yellow, like that hawk. I knew that I had missed something important that day and I wasn’t sure the chance would ever come again.

Maybe I was retarded, as so many of my teachers had told Aunt Tiny; not stupid, but underdeveloped like a hard avocado. The kids in my schools became accountants and criminals, soldiers and whores; they either got jobs or went to prison but regardless of what they did it made sense in the world we lived in. I didn’t make sense, not even to myself. I never knew my parents or had any family outside of Aunt Tiny. I couldn’t even talk right until Miss Boucher with her gentle ways taught me how.

I was lacking in most things but I did have a telephone. That was one thing that made me like other people. That was one thing that made me normal.

The phone rang at 8:16 that evening. I wondered, on the first ring, who it might be. I didn’t have any friends outside of Aunt Tiny and getting to the phone was a chore for her. On the second ring I worried that it was the nursing home calling to tell me that Tiny was sick or maybe dead.

“Hello?”

“True?”

“Oh … Hi, Olive.”

“You don’t sound happy to hear me,” she said.

“No, it’s not that,” I said. “I was worried that it might be the place where Aunt Tiny’s staying. I thought that maybe she was sick.”

“Oh,” Olive said.

*   *   *

OLIVE BREVE HAD been my girlfriend for a few months twelve years before. She was the only woman that I’d ever had sex with. We met in a small library in the West Village where I used to go to read on Saturdays. We started talking about ants. I was infatuated with the idea of pheromones as a kind of communication. Olive asked me what I was reading and we started talking about smell in ants and even in humans. Later on she told me she thought I was talking about sex, that’s why she asked me up to her apartment when we’d had coffee together after the fourth time we talked.

Olive was a big woman when I met her, forty-five pounds overweight by her own underestimation. She also told me that she hadn’t had a boyfriend in at least three years. When she found out that I’d never had a girlfriend (or sex) she had me take off my clothes and from that day for the next eighteen weeks and four days she gave me almost daily lessons in lovemaking. Olive worked at a small investment house down in Tribeca and I’d go there every day and walk with her to her place on the Upper West Side. I did this because she needed someone to help her with her diet and exercise regimen and I was besotted by the sex.

I thought there was something wrong with me and so I never really considered having a girlfriend or any kind of sexual relations. But once I got to know Olive I went crazy. We walked and ate salads together and had sex all the time.

I did whatever Olive asked me to do as long as it didn’t get in the way of my job. I had to work hard because Tiny was already retired and needed my help.

Olive lost the weight and soon after met Tristram Charles. After fifteen weeks of walking Olive started jogging. I tried to do that with her but she was stronger than I and had a much better wind. She met Tristram on a jog in Central Park and was soon lost to me.

*   *   *

“HOW ARE YOU, Olive?” I asked sitting there in my solitary studio.

“Fine.”

I was thinking that Aunt Tiny always told me that Olive would call one day.

Don’t you worry, Baby, Tiny would say, that white girl’s gonna call. You just wait and see.

“How’s your husband?” I said when Olive was quiet.

“I was wondering if you wanted to get together for coffee one day,” she replied.

“Um, sure. I guess.”

“You don’t know?” she asked, peevishly.

“We haven’t talked at all in twelve years, Olive. I’m just a little surprised to hear from you, that’s all.”

“I’ll tell you all about it at coffee, okay?… Day after tomorrow?”

We made a plan to meet at a chain coffee place across the street from her work on Thursday. I didn’t really want to go but I rarely said no to anything that I didn’t have a solid reason for. Olive and I had been friends as well as lovers—that’s why I was so sad when she refused to see me while being courted by Tristram Charles.

*   *   *

THE NEXT MORNING went fine. There was a lot of interoffice mail to sort and Kala and Pete did a really good job keeping up. I liked it when I had to concentrate on the job in front of me. It kept me from drifting and staring off into space.

But at lunch I learned that Lana Metcalf had approached each of my deliverers on their routes and asked them about me.

“What did she want to know?”

“She asked both of us if you ever seemed drunk or high at work,” Kala told me.

“And she wanted to know if you seemed odd,” Pete added, “if you seemed unbalanced.”

“What did you say?”

“She talked to me first,” Kala said. “I told her that you were always proper and on top of the work, that you were never inappropriate or strange. Then I called Pete on his cell so that he wouldn’t get blindsided.”

“I told her the same thing, True,” Pete said. “That woman wants to get you fired, man.”

After Kala and Pete went off on their afternoon rounds I sat down at the sorting table and thought about the possibility of losing my job. I supposed that I could find work somewhere else. It seemed crazy to me that one mistake in twenty-one years could get me fired.

I must have worried about my predicament for quarter of an hour or so when I heard the buzzing. A big green housefly had somehow made it into the long corridor that had been made into the mailroom.

I loved it on those summer days when some wild, untamable creature like a fly would make its way from the outside world to my seventeenth-floor domain. Having it hum around the room added a kind of natural music to my day. I forgot about Lana Metcalf and unemployment. I did my job and made deep droning noises in my throat to accompany my newest friend.

*   *   *

AT 7:15 THE next morning an athletic man in a dark gray suit was waiting in the mailroom, seated at the sorting table.

“Mr. Pope?” the man asked rising from his chair.

“Yes?”

“My name’s Harry Driscoll. I work for an outside company that audits the procedures of departments in corporations.”

He handed me a letter on operations letterhead informing me that this audit was authorized by the VP in charge, an H. Michael Samson.

Driscoll shook my hand. He was younger than I, but not by much—tall and white. His smile was insincere, I remember that most.

“Do you always get in this early?” Driscoll asked me.

“Between seven and seven thirty.”

“You’re not due in till eight forty-five,” he said, giving me that smile that was not a smile.

“I guess not.”

“Do you find that you need extra hours to do your job?”

“Sometimes there’s a lot of mail from the night before,” I said. “People work all kinds of long hours here. So if there’s a backlog I can jump on it. If not I have my coffee and ease into the day. I go to bed early and get up about five. I like the walk to work in the morning before the crowds are out.”

Driscoll frowned and then nodded.

“Well,” he said, “don’t mind me. I’m just going to be sitting around observing. I may ask you a question now and then. You have two assistants, right?”

“Executive floaters,” I said, “Kala and Pete. They get in around eight forty-five.”

*   *   *

IT WAS ODD having a fourth person in the mailroom. There was more than enough space for him but he threw off the balance. Pete didn’t like Harry; I could see that by the way the Harvard grad avoided him. Kala was actually rude.

“Who sent you?” she asked after he introduced himself.

“I work for Donner and Pride.”

“Who hired them?” she asked.

“It was a corporate decision,” he said.

“How do we even know that you should be here? Nobody called.”

“I was sent by Mr. Samson from operations. Do you want to see the letter?” When he wasn’t smiling Driscoll seemed a bit more honest.

I worried about Kala getting herself into trouble and was looking for a way to interrupt when the phone rang. Pete answered but both Harry and Kala were distracted by the call.

After he got off the line Pete said to me, “That was Stella Furman from HR. She wants the files on a man named Horace Trippman from 1993.”

“What bullshit,” Kala said.

“You guys better get on your rounds,” I said, needing to separate Driscoll and Kala.

I suppose there was some authority in my voice because both kids gave me an odd stare. When they were off with their carts I went to my desk and unlocked the bottom drawer with a little copper key that had been on my key chain for seventeen years. From the drawer I retrieved another key chain.

“Where are you going?” Driscoll asked as I went toward the door.

“Getting a file for HR,” I said.

“I’ll come with you.”

“No. You need a security clearance to go down into our onsite storage facility. The letter you have doesn’t give you that clearance.”

“But they told me I could go anywhere with you.”

“They don’t say that in the letter,” I said.

Driscoll was about to say something else but I turned away and left.

*   *   *

THERE WAS A dedicated car at the far northwest end of the elevator bank. You also needed a special key to operate the call button. After a while I remembered which key and turned on the mechanism. I felt rushed. I didn’t want Harry Driscoll following me down to the subbasement of the Westerly Building. It had been a long time since I was in storage and him looking over my shoulder would have made me nervous.

The car took a long time to get there but Driscoll didn’t follow me so it turned out okay.

*   *   *

THAT ELEVATOR CAR was larger than the rest, designed to move furniture and filing cabinets. The walls were draped with canvas to protect them from damage in moving. I used my key to indicate the fifth-level subbasement and stood there facing the crack in the doors.

“Pardon me,” a voice said.

My heart skipped. I didn’t say a word and I didn’t turn fearing that she would vanish if I did anything.

“Excuse me,” she said.

I felt the hand on my shoulder but still I could not turn or speak.

“Truman.”

I steeled myself and swiveled from the waist.

There she was—the ecru-colored flower child in her Oz-like ruby hued shoes.

“Hi,” I said and she smiled. “I thought I made you up.”

“No. I’m very real but not everyone can see me.”

“Why not?”

“Because not everyone can see, really see. They make up the world that they know and then believe in things that aren’t there at all.”

“What’s your name?” I asked.

She was an inch or so taller than I and so she had to lean over a bit in order to kiss me. It was a light meeting of our lips. There was small electrical shock but I didn’t mind.

“I’ve been wanting to do that,” she said. “People call me Minerva. And you are Truman Pope.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “How did you get here? Why didn’t anybody but me see you? What’s happening to me?”

“On High once told me that it’s a question of harmonics,” Minerva replied. “You aren’t seeing me but rather you hear me, but not with your ears. There’s a resonance that beings like you and I have in common. We also resonate with certain places.”

Saying this she touched the center of my chest. I felt a thrumming there that reminded me of the fly in the mailroom.

The elevator doors came open then.

The storage floor was almost always empty and so it was usually dark. But when anyone walked out of the elevator a motion sensor turned the lights on.

Minerva giggled at the sudden brilliance.

Before us was a vast room with high ceilings and concrete-floored aisles that led down long rows of storage cages. Every office in the Westerly Building had at least one storage chamber; HBH had a whole room at the far end of the rightmost aisle.

“Are you real?” I asked Minerva as we walked. “Or am I going crazy?”

“I’m real,” she said with conviction.

She walked with me down to the storage room door and waited patiently while I fumbled around trying to find the right key. We passed into the stale-smelling file space, banks of overhead lights snapping on as we did so.

“Do you want to make love to me, Truman Pope?” she asked when I closed the door.

“Um,” I said.

She laughed and did a delicate and dancerly turn. The freedom in that simple movement caused a vacuum in my chest.

“Who are you?” I asked again.

“We,” she said, “you and I are many different things. Offspring and parents, living and dying, climbers who descend, lovers that hate … Today I am a portent and you are the darkness finally yielding to the light.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You haven’t answered my question,” she said.

“Here on the floor in the dust?” I asked.

Minerva laughed loudly but somehow the sounds were hushed as soon as they were heard. I think I was a little afraid of her right then.

“Are you afraid, Truman Pope?” This was odd because I had never been afraid of anything—ever.

“Only a little on the inside,” I said.

“Of me?”

“No, not you,” I said. “Of something that I’ve always felt but could never, never say.”

“What’s that, Truman Pope?”

“It’s like my whole life I’ve had to live on a skinny ledge outside the window of a tall building way up above the street. Nobody knows I’m out there and they all have their windows locked and barred. I edge my way along afraid that I’ll doze off and fall and so I hug the wall and keep on moving hoping for a place that’s wide enough where I could sit and think.”

The words came out of me as if I had given it a lot of thought but really I was more surprised by what I said than I was by the odd elfin girl-child.

“That’s how everybody lives,” she said. “Everybody in the Westerly Building and Midtown and the western hemisphere. People in Mongolia and China and Peru all hug that same wall. But here and today I am a door in the stone that keeps you out. I am the passageway to another side of you.”

These words brought tears to my eyes. I had been waiting to hear someone say something like that my entire life but hadn’t known it. I didn’t know what to say so I went down the long aisle of dusty black metal filing cabinets searching for the Ts in 1993. I found Horace Trippman’s file and sneezed from the dust. Minerva was behind me, standing very close. When I turned around we were face to face.

“I have to bring this file to Human Resources,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because it’s my job.”

A grin spread across her wide, sensual mouth.

“Do you always do your job, True?”

“I guess.”

“That’s all we need from you.”

She kissed me again, lightly, her mouth partly open. Backing away, I swallowed hard and turned toward the door. Minerva walked with me, half a step behind. We went through the door together but when I slammed it shut she was gone.

Gone. Not there … as if she had never been there. This didn’t surprise me. There was something about Minerva that was just beyond what I could reach or touch.

I looked around quickly but there was no sign of her. I unlocked the door and went back into the storage area. When the lights came on I looked at the footprints left on the dusty concrete—only my small shoes had left any impression there.

*   *   *

“HERE’S THE FILE you wanted,” I said to Stella Furman. She had gray hair and glasses with rhinestones embedded along the frames.

I placed the manila folder in her inbox and turned to leave.

“Mr. Pope,” the middle-aged receptionist said.

“Yes?”

“Lana would like you to come in for a moment.”

She indicated the door behind her and I took a deep breath before walking through. Just the movement from one room to the other had profound meaning for me. It felt transcendent, as if I had died and my soul was traveling from one level of being to another. I felt ecstatic and nuts.

I had to be going crazy. There was no Minerva. She was a product of my mind. There was electricity in my shoulders, drumbeat music in my mind.

In Metcalf’s wide and shallow office I came upon her and Harry Driscoll. She was behind the desk and he was on the other side in one of the two red vinyl and chrome visitor’s chairs. I went to the empty seat and sat down without uttering a word. There was something rude about my behavior but I didn’t care.

I leaned back against the hard foam of the cushion and looked Lana Metcalf in the eye. She waited for me to say something but I kept my silence.

“Mr. Driscoll informs me that you wouldn’t allow him to accompany you to the storage facility.”

I glanced at the efficiency expert and he seemed to become a little unsure.

“Mr. Pope,” Lana said.

“Yes, Miss Metcalf?”

“What do you have to say?”

“About what?”

“This, this situation.”

“What situation?”

“Answer my question.”

“I don’t know what you mean, ma’am. I didn’t let Mr. Driscoll into the storage facility because the rules say that only certain employees of HBH are allowed in there. H. Michael Samson doesn’t have access and so he couldn’t have given it to your dog here.” I had never in my life addressed anyone in that manner. It felt like someone else speaking.

“My what?”

The HR supervisor actually got to her feet. I was sure that I was going to be fired right then and there. But I didn’t care. I had experienced a miracle over the last few days. It didn’t matter that my experience was caused by a mental or chemical imbalance; it didn’t matter that I was mad. Minerva was more important than the reality that Metcalf, Driscoll, and all of HBH could manufacture.

I had to hold myself back from jumping up and capering around the room.

The intercom buzzed and Stella Furman said, “Mr. Hoad to see you, Miss Metcalf.”

Before the HR supervisor had time to react the door came open and Mr. T. S. Hoad, Esquire, walked in as if he owned the place. And indeed he was one of the three partners who still held controlling interest in the company.

Harry Driscoll literally leaped to his feet. Lana was already standing. I would have been in awe myself if I had not already gone insane.

Hoad was in his seventies and a bit stooped over, but he was still well over six feet tall. He was gaunt with an aquiline nose and green bird eyes peering out of parchmentlike skin that was color of bone. His suit cost more than my whole wardrobe. His tie alone was worth a weekend stay at a fancy hotel. He had thin longish white hair that was combed straight back.

“Get up, Pope,” Lana Metcalf said. “Give Mr. Hoad your seat.”

“Is this how you treat my employees, Miss Metcalf?” Hoad asked. “You order them around like servants?”

“No, no, no sir.”

“And who is this gentleman here?” Hoad asked, holding his head to the side and squinting with already beady eyes. “He doesn’t look like one of ours.”

“Harry Driscoll, sir,” Harry Driscoll said, “from Donner and Pride.”

“Donner and Pride.” Hoad repeated the words as if considering some strange dish set before him at the dinner table. “I’ve heard of you. You charge twelve thousand dollars just to walk in the door.”

“We get results, sir. We’ve saved the companies we worked for millions in operations fees.”

“This isn’t an operations office,” Hoad said.

“Well … no, it isn’t.”

“I called in, Mr. Driscoll, sir,” Lana Metcalf said.

Hoad moved toward Driscoll, went around him, and lowered into his chair.

“Oh?” the old man said lacing the fingers of his hands under his chin. “Why?”

“I was, I was worried about the efficiency of the mailroom.”

“You spent twelve thousand of my dollars on an issue that is not under your job description or your purview?”

Finally Lana Metcalf was silent.

While staring at the HR VP Hoad said, “Mr. Pope.”

“Yes, Mr. Hoad?”

“Please return to your mailroom and try to forgive this unpleasantness. You’ve done a good job for us for many years and we appreciate that. You’ve helped train some of our best young executives and even if they aren’t grateful, we are. And, be assured, we know that you have always done your job with the utmost efficiency.”

“Thank you, Mr. Hoad,” I said. For a moment there I might have forgotten Minerva, so impressed was I at being the object of Hoad’s attention.

I left the room with the wizened old man still gazing at his VP: a bone-white, utterly patient vulture waiting for a wounded beast to die.

*   *   *

“HEY, TRUE,” Pete said when I got back to the office.

“You called your father?” I asked him.

“They fucked with you, man,” the boy said. “That was just wrong.”

Kala came up and kissed me on the cheek. It was the first time I’d ever been kissed by a floater but the second person to have kissed me that day; if indeed Minerva was a person and not a figment.

I told my friends the story and we laughed together but half the time, in the back of my mind, I was still in the basement with Minerva.

“My dad told me that Human Resources was overstepping its bounds by harassing you,” Pete said. “He called Uncle Tad about it.”

“Mr. Hoad is your uncle?” Kala said, shocked.

“No really,” Pete said. “I just always called him that.”

“It’s like my aunt Tiny,” I said.

“Who?” Kala asked.

“Haven’t I ever told you about my aunt Tiny?”

The kids both shook their heads.

“How could we work together for all these weeks and you not know about the woman who raised me?” I said. “I mean that sounds impossible. I think about Tiny every day. I visit her three times a week.”

“But she’s like my uncle Tad?” Pete the savior said.

“She raised me but we’re not blood.”

“How come you didn’t live with your parents?” Kala asked.

“The first thing I remember,” I said, “was being a small child on the street. I was walking, walking. It felt like I had been walking for a very long time. I think I knew where I was going but a bigger kid came up to me on a street corner and pushed me down. I closed my eyes and when I came to I had forgotten where I was supposed to be going.”

“Where were your parents?” Kala asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t remember that far back. Maybe I did know before I fell but then…” I was lost for a moment there. Whenever I went back to that, my earliest memory, I felt bereft …

“How old were you, True?” Kala asked.

“I don’t, I don’t remember. All I know is that I must have had blood on my head or something because this woman, Aunt Tiny, said, ‘Oh Lord, child, what’s happened to you?’ and she took me home and washed off my head and tried to find my parents but she never could and so she just kept me.”

“Why didn’t she call the police or something?” Pete asked.

“Because they would have put me in an orphanage or a foster home and Tiny knew that she was a good person but she couldn’t vouch for the city.”

“Wow,” Kala said. “Wow. That’s some story. Did you ever find out what happened to your mom?”

“No. Tiny took me in and I stayed with her until I graduated from high school. Then I got this job.”

I could see that my story moved the kids, that I had been lifted out of the ordinary somehow and now had a unique place in their eyes.

I had come to accept the fact that I was an orphan and that no one knew where I’d come from. Tiny was good to me. Miss Boucher was kind. But now, after Minerva, my parents took up a larger space inside. Maybe they were insane too. Maybe they’d been institutionalized and, somehow, I escaped the people who had committed them. I imagined my mother secreting me under the floorboards in some closet while the authorities came to take her and my father away. Maybe they were languishing in some Bedlam while I walked down skyscraper halls delivering mail. My parents were lost to me and I didn’t even know where to begin looking for them.

“You should find your parents,” Kala said as if she occupied that place in my mind too.

“Yeah,” I said. “I sure should. But we got to get this mail out right now. Too many interruptions today. Thanks for your help, Pete, but we got to get to work.”

*   *   *

PETE AND KALA, individually, were the best floaters I ever had. Together they were perfect. They did double-time bringing mail to the recipients on the various floors. I did my route and then started going through the paperwork that I had at the end of every day. I wanted to get everything perfect because working at HBH, crazy or not, had been the most important thing in my life for many years. I didn’t want to lose that job over some lapse of sanity. Mr. T. S. Hoad, Esquire, had given me a reprieve—I intended to take advantage of that.

*   *   *

A BLISSFULLY UNEVENTFUL afternoon descended upon me. I decided to clean out my desk just after four thirty. There were things in the top drawer that I hadn’t seen or thought about for years. There was a huge magnifying glass with a wicker handle that I bought in a thrift shop on lower Fifth Avenue and an old Ethiopian Bible written on goat parchment that was illustrated with red and blue and yellow depictions of the saints. There was a stack of blank Bible paper that I’d bought from a small shop on Bowery and a paper cylinder of wax matches that I got from someone who had gotten them in Italy, from a restaurant near the Vatican they’d said. There were many meaningless keys and candy wrappers, pencils, dried-up ink pens, erasers, and various staples, straight pins, and other office supplies.

There was also a pink envelope addressed to me and sent through interoffice mail. It was from Cindy Brickerman. It must have been nearly twenty years ago I’d gotten that letter. It was delivered two days after Cindy had left HBH.

Dear, dear Truman,

I’m writing you this note to thank you for helping me figure out some things last month. I don’t think you can understand how much you did for me that day. You were so kind and it was like you made a little space for me at that cluttered sorting table of yours. Kind of like you sorted me out the same way you did the interoffice mail.

I started thinking when I spoke to you and after a few weeks it came to me that I was going about everything the wrong way. What was it you said? If people would just ask themselves what it was they wanted then they could get up tomorrow and go that way.

I’m doing that now. I’m leaving America and going to Korea to be a teacher of English. That’s the first thing.

Thank you so much for your help

Love,

C

I had run across Cindy sitting on a bus stop bench a few blocks away from work. At that time I used to take a walk during my lunch break. That was before I was made manager and they had a floaters program. My boss back then was a man from Martinique named Gerard “Popo” Chosez. Gerard was a nice guy but he was noisy and spent the entire lunchtime laughing or shouting at his wife and then his girlfriend on the phone. I’d take my sandwich and eat it while watching life as it unfolded up and down the crowded Midtown streets.

Cindy was a skinny young white woman who had gone to some fancy college and already had her own office. I had met her on her first day at the job. She was lost and I walked her to the place where the orientation was being held. Even though I’d forgotten her name when she was crying on that bench, I remembered her and couldn’t just walk away.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, taking the seat next to her.

“I, I, I don’t even know.” She tried to laugh at how ridiculous that must have sounded but instead more tears flowed out.

I put my arms around her as Tiny had always done for me when I was distraught. I cried a lot as a child because the other children so often made fun of me.

Cindy Brickerman grabbed on to me and sobbed. I had nothing to say. I didn’t even remember her name and so I sat there and held her thinking about how generous and loving my adoptive aunt had been.

After a few minutes the crying subsided a bit and Cindy’s grip loosened.

“You don’t know why you’re crying?” I asked.

“John Hightower called me into his office today,” she told me. “He said that I was going to be put in charge of my department. Shauna Finn is leaving and, and he wants me to take her place.”

She grabbed on tight again and cried some more. I held on as the lunch hour faded away.

“What’s wrong with a promotion?” I asked after a bit. “Don’t you feel like you can do the job?”

“It’s not that. I don’t know. I’m just so stupid. I know this is a good job and that I should be happy. My parents are so proud of me. But I don’t care about investment possibilities in Zimbabwe or how much oil there is in the ground under Venezuela. I only want, want…”

“What is it that you want?” I asked.

I leaned back and looked her in the eye.

“I don’t know,” she said, “not exactly. I want my life to mean something. You know?”

The words were like an old favorite song in my mind. It wasn’t that I shared her desire but that I also felt that life didn’t mean much to anyone outside of physical needs and the emotional reactions to those needs. One could walk one way just as well as another, marry one spouse or stay single, raise a family or go off to war. It was all the same in the end—and on the way to the end too.

“Yeah,” I said, “yes I do understand. It’s very often that I say to myself that people should just ask themselves what they want and get up and go that way.”

Cindy was staring into my eyes and I felt something deep down inside me; something like an eruption, maybe even a solar flare. Cindy gasped, I remember. She was looking at me as if I had become something else while sitting there.

“That’s true, isn’t it?” she said. “It’s like turning your head or looking up.”

We remained in that loose embrace for a few minutes more and then, without saying a word, we got up and walked back toward work. For a block or so we held hands. It wasn’t anything amorous. We just felt close.

Once, a week later, she came down to the mailroom to visit. The magic of our connection, though not gone, was muted. That didn’t seem to matter though. She brought me a small box of four chocolates and said thank you.

Gerard made insinuations for the rest of the afternoon.

“Truman gettin’ a little something from that white girl,” he said as if there was a third person in the room.

A few weeks later the little pink envelope came and I kept it in the drawer to remember how sweet life could be even while being meaningless.

The phone rang startling me.

“True?” Olive Breve said.

It took me a moment to reorient myself and to remember who the voice belonged to and why she would be calling me.

“Hi, Olive.”

“I just called to remind you that we’re supposed to be meeting at six fifteen. I remember how you get distracted at work sometimes.”

A sound like an explosion on a floor far below went off in my chest. That was the sex I remembered with Olive. She made me happy because she paid attention to me. The sex we had was all her. She was bigger than me and stronger too. The first time at her apartment she climbed up over me and said, “I need this right now.”

“I’ll be there, Olive,” I said. “I’m leaving in a few minutes.”

*   *   *

“OVER HERE, TRUE.”

The coffee shop was crowded but Olive had taken a seat by the window. There were two large paper cups sitting on her table. I remember thinking that this was the best Olive. She looked the way she had midway in our brief relationship. She was larger than the last time I saw her but not nearly as heavy as when we first met. It was the moment that she began to see that she could achieve her goal and become the image she had in her mind. That was when she was the happiest and I was still an important part of her life.

I remembered the nights when I was sound asleep and the phone would ring. I’d wake up and see that it was midnight or later and Olive would be there on the line.

“I’m downstairs, True,” she’d say, “and I’m comin’ to get ya.”

*   *   *

I SAT DOWN across from her and she smiled. Her hair was blond now instead of brunette and her eyes were brighter.

“What are you looking at?” she asked.

“Your eyes … they’re … bluer.”

“That’s my contacts.”

“Oh.”

“I got you chamomile,” she said. “You never drink coffee, right?”

“Thank you.”

I sipped my tea while she regarded me.

“It’s nice to see you, Truman.”

“You too,” I said.

She smiled at my answer. “You never did talk much did you?”

“I’m a little shy about talking. My aunt Tiny used to say that there’s a lot more to hear than there is to say.”

“How is Tiny?” Olive asked.

“She’s in a nursing home.”

“Oh,” Olive said with some sorrow in her face.

“It’s okay. She likes the people in her ward and there’s a window she can sit by. They have a TV and she can watch her shows. I see her at least three times a week. I’m going there tonight after we have our coffee.”

“Hm,” Olive said, speculating on words I hadn’t spoken.

“What?”

“You made a plan to see me with an escape hatch built in.” This was the later Olive, the one that was easy to anger, the Olive who needed a man she could show off her new beauty with; a man that wasn’t me.

“You’re the one who made the plan, Olive. I always see Tiny on Thursday nights.”

She smiled and I looked to my right. Sitting there, four tables away, was Minerva. She had on the same pajamalike clothes and was sitting alone, holding a coffee cup to her chin and smiling—at me.

I turned back and saw that Olive was smiling too.

“I’ve been made a portfolio manager at my firm,” she said.

“Congratulations.”

“Tristram made partner at Grumbacher and Lewis.”

“That’s nice. You guys must have a great condo or something.”

Olive leaned forward and took my hand. She looked at me with that old time yearning in her eyes.

“I’m so sorry, True,” she said. “I never meant to hurt you like that.”

“It was a long time ago, Olive,” I said, glancing over at Minerva.

She winked at me.

“But I was wrong.”

“You fell in love, only it wasn’t with me,” I said.

“So you don’t care?”

It struck me at that moment that something was wrong. Between the madness that was Minerva, Miss Metcalf’s outrageous attempt to have me fired, then T. S. Hoad’s incursion, and now Olive calling me out of nowhere, apologizing for an affair turned sour over a decade before … something was definitely wrong.

That something showed in my face.

“What, True?” Olive asked.

“I don’t know. I mean my life’s been upside down lately. Everything is happening at once … Let me ask you something.”

“What?” Olive said.

“I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, I mean, I’m not saying anything about you I just need to know something.”

“What?”

“Why did you call me the day before yesterday?” I said. “I don’t mean why did you call me but why on that day? Right then?”

“I … I had a dream about you the night before.” She stuck out her lower lip and nodded.

“What was the dream about, I mean, what happened in the dream?”

“Why are you asking?”

“Just tell me. Okay?”

Olive leaned back and looked up at the ceiling. She was still quite pretty and very fetching in her tight-fitting red pantsuit. She knew that red was my favorite color.

“You were standing at the entrance of a graveyard,” she said, her face revealing surprise as if she had not considered the content of the dream before. “And, and you had your hands raised up and there was music playing. There was a girl, a young woman standing off to the side. She was laughing.”

“What was she wearing?” I asked.

“It was a dream, Truman, not something real.”

“Just tell me, Olive.”

“A, a pantsuit. Yellow. With these green drawings on it.”

I wondered then if I was really there in that coffee shop. Was I in an institution somewhere in a straightjacket between padded walls? Was I sitting at a table babbling to myself while everyone ignored me?

“True, what’s wrong?” Olive asked.

“I have to go, Olive. I have to go see my aunt.”

“But I need to talk to you.”

“About what?”

“I realized something after that dream.”

“What?”

“That’s why I apologized,” she said. “When I woke up Tristram was lying there next to me sound asleep. We’ve had a good eleven years together. He’s cute and rich and my parents love him. My mom’s always saying that ever since I’ve been with T that my life has been getting better. And I agreed with her but the other morning, after that dream, I realized that it wasn’t T who helped me. He only saw me after the change, after I lost weight and decided to climb the ranks in investments.

“It was when I met you that everything changed. You planted the seed in me. When I said I wanted to exercise you said that we should walk from downtown to my place every day. When I said that I didn’t like my job and that I wanted to work somewhere else you said that I should change myself not my job.”

“I did?”

“Don’t you remember?”

“I was probably thinking about your kisses,” I said, rather lamely.

“That’s why I wanted to see you,” she said, looking into my eyes again. “I want you to take me back.”

I was a scrawny, middle-aged black man who had no blood family, who had worked in a mailroom his entire life. But still Olive was willing to throw her lot in with mine rather than ride the high life with Tristram Charles. It made no sense at all.

“Don’t you want me, True?”

“I don’t know why you want me, O,” I said falling back into our old intimacy.

“What do you mean?”

“Am I like a diet plan or an exercise regimen for you?” I said. “Am I a flashlight to have around in case the lights go out?”

These notions hadn’t occurred to Olive. She thought that her offer would thrill me, that her coming back, even if it was after a twelve-year hiatus, was something that I’d jump for.

“But we were so good together,” she said.

“You’re a good woman, O,” I said. “You took me in and showed me something I was too afraid to go after. You made me a man in the way women make men.”

“You’ve changed, True.”

“Only in the past two, three days,” I said. “If you saw me Monday I would have been just like when you met me in that library.”

“Take me back, Baby,” she said. “Ever since that dream I’ve known that my life is just empty. There’s nothing wrong with Tristram or my job—but I know now that there was once magic in my life. In the dream I was the dead and you were calling to me.”

Minerva was gone.

That was a powerful moment. Minerva had slipped away again but the madness seemed to increase. I felt heavy and liquid like the element mercury. My breathing seemed to have deep meaning while the world around me looked flimsy and impermanent.

“I have to go, O,” I said with the equanimity of the ages. “So tell me what you want.”

“You.”

“That’s not gonna happen,” I said. “I’m not for sale or barter, not anymore.”

Olive’s face began to quiver. Deep creases formed in her trembling lips.

“What, what if you just came to see me one night. One night. We don’t have to make love or anything like that, I just need to talk it all out.”

“You want me to help you crawl out of that grave?”

Her eyes cleared and she sat up looking at me with odd certainty.

Instead of getting angry like I expected she said, “Exactly.”

*   *   *

ON MY JOURNEY uptown I caught glimpses of Minerva here and there. She’d be crossing the street or going past me in the opposite direction. Finally she was smiling at me from the far end of a subway car. I knew that she was just a figment of my imagination and resolved, right there on the Number Six train, to ignore her.

“What?” a woman sitting next to me asked.

She was young and dark skinned, even smaller than I.

“Oh,” I said. “Sorry, I must have been talking to myself.”

I expected that at the least she would grimace, she might even get up and move farther down the car. But instead the young woman smiled.

“My daddy’s like that,” she said. “Sometimes he’s thinkin’ so hard that he have a whole conversation before we stop him. My mama used to say that he better never get rich ’cause if he did all she’d have to do is invite the judge ovah to dinner an’ my daddy’d be committed before dessert.”

I laughed wondering if the young woman was really there next to me on the train or just another delusion.

“I’m Truman Pope,” I said, holding out a hand.

“Maud Lolling,” she replied, pumping my hand like we’d just made a wager. “I didn’t mean to say that you were old like my daddy, Mr. Pope. It’s just that you reminded me of him.”

“I’m past forty,” I said.

“But you got a young face and you don’t laugh like older people do. It’s only your eyes look like they seen a lot.”

“A lot of nothing.”

She smiled again.

The train was slowing down.

“This is my stop,” I said.

There was a flash of disappointment on her face.

“I work at Higgenbothem, Brightend, and Hoad,” I said as the brakes whined. “They call it HBH.”

“Why you tellin’ me that?”

“Just in case you want to know.”

*   *   *

“HI, BABY,” my aunt Tiny said.

She was watching a TV show. I’ve never been able to watch TV for very long. The stories jumped around too much and I found myself getting lost in the commercials. But I sat next to the only family I had while she watched the last few minutes of the apparently heart-wrenching drama.

*   *   *

“WHEN I WAS a boy did I act funny?” I asked her when the show was over and we were sitting next to the big window at the far end of the ward.

“Funny how?”

“Crazy like?”

“Uh-uh. You was always sweet an’ nice an’ helpful too,” she said. “Why you ask that?”

“I saw this girl dressed in yellow but nobody else saw her. Later on I saw her again and she talked to me but didn’t leave any footprints on a dusty floor.”

Ernestina “Tiny” Pope was a huge woman and unable to walk a city block without stopping for a nap. She was older than her years, worn down by hard labor and deep poverty but her mind remained sharp.

“You always saw things,” she murmured.

“What things?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t see ’em. But you did. You really did.”

“Like when?”

“One time, when you wasn’t no more than four you pointed up at a clear blue sky an’ said, ‘They movin’.”

“Who was movin’? I aksed you and you said it was some peoples that had lived inside the earth but now they were bothered and had to pass on to someplace new. You said that by the time they got where they was goin’ that there wouldn’t be no more people like there’s people today.”

“I said that everybody would be dead?”

“That’s what I aksed,” Tiny said, “but you said that everything is always turnin’, turnin’ an’ that we had to leave these bodies and dreams behind.

“You were beautiful as a child, True, but then the kids and the teachers at school ruined all that. They made funa’ you an’ called you retarded. They gave you Fs ’cause you knew too much or you didn’t care about what they had to say.

“So now if you startin’ to see people and knowin’ things again you shouldn’t think it’s ’cause you crazy, Baby. You ain’t crazy. You were a gift to me and to the whole world.”

Tiny had begun to breathe heavily and I worried about her overworked heart so I changed to subject to the nurse, Sigrid Marcone, who Tiny loved. We talked for an hour or so about Sigrid’s wayward son and all the children he had sired by three different women. After a good laugh I kissed Tiny’s broad cheek and left for my apartment.

Minerva walked with me down the dark streets. She was luminescent at night but I didn’t talk to her and she had nothing to say to me. We just walked side by side—a man and his mania.

PART TWO

WHEN I GOT home I was exhausted. It had been three very long days and I felt that it was only a matter of time before the authorities came and took me away to the madhouse. I was heartened by what Tiny had told me but the fact that I saw things that other people didn’t, even if those things really were there, meant those other people would have to think I was crazy.

I fell into bed with all my clothes and even my shoes still on. I didn’t take two breaths before falling, corpselike and headlong, into unconsciousness.

*   *   *

I WAS DRIFTING through the urban night sky at a leisurely speed. Far below the city of New York glowed, not from electric light but with the souls of the many. Bright or fading, representing every species and all the colors of the spectrum, I could see them through rooftops and walls, under the streets in careening subway cars and crawling along the tracks. Now and then a bright soul would wink out—an unexpected death. Beings were being born and hatched, devoured and eradicated, coming together and transforming into something new.

I floated high above it all listening to the music of the light like a solitary mountain climber hearing the wind. I closed my ectoplasmic eyes to appreciate the intricate composition as I floated along silently, unseen and unsuspected. I was a shadow in the dark sky, a snake in the tall grass.

And then I heard a mournful note. It was human and so was I. It rasped and bellowed and I began to descend. Soon I was hurtling out of the sky like a flaming meteor drawn to earth from the heavens.

I found myself in a stuffy bedroom. There was one small, weak lamp sitting on a night table, shining on the bed where a huge black man, my age but Tiny’s size, slept restlessly. And there next to him a black woman, my size but Tiny’s age, sat listening to his moans.

The man, I knew somehow that his name was Arthur Army, was turning and kicking. His body was failing him because of the weight and the alcohol, the cigarettes and various drugs. I saw in his light a man, Arthur’s father, turning away, walking away, beyond reach; a man who would not respond to a child’s calls. His fever occluded the faces and the words but the knowledge was still there.

In the woman’s emerald light there was only the deep and spreading forest of a sweltering swamp that went on and on. She was alone there, an old woman breathing in the rotting and yet fragrant air—waiting. Agnes Landstone-Army was the last surviving person in her mind. Her parents were dead and her husband was gone, Arthur had become like a wild animal and her friend, Dot, was somewhere down south sitting in a room trying hard to remember her own name.

I was there but with less of a presence than the silverfish that scuttled, little swirling lines of platinum light, under the worn carpeting on the floor. I experienced Arthur’s and Agnes’s pains and losses. I felt like crying but knew that this would be an insult to these people’s agony. So instead I reached out to them. And though I was unfelt and unseen my body linked the fevered Arthur and the soul-dead Agnes. They came together in the forest.

“Mama?”

“Yes, son?”

“Where are we?”

“All the way back in Eden, child. All the way back before there was even a Adam or a Eve, before the serpent, before God…”

“Ain’t that blasphemy, Mama, to say that there was sumpin’ before God?”

“I cain’t he’p what I know in my mind, Arty,” Agnes Landstone-Army said.

She was sitting on a chair set among the high roots of a giant cypress while Arthur stood waist deep in lukewarm swamp water.

“Mama?”

“Yes, child.”

“I’m sorry for all the things I done and all the things I put you through. I’m sorry for puttin’ you here where there ain’t even no God to comfort you.”

Before this Agnes’s face was wizened and hard but now there was a hint of softness. I wondered what she would say. Would she forgive him? Would he wake up and hold her? Would he give her the same kind of support that she had given him through his drug addictions and prison sentences, his five illegitimate children and all her boyfriends that he drove away?

But another note, this one strident and insistent, called to me. It was all the way downtown. The power of the call drew me away so quickly that I wasn’t able to hear Agnes’s reply.

*   *   *

A MIDDLE-AGED WOMAN, white with brown eyes and gray-brown hair, was sitting at a dressing table with a pistol in her hand. Through the wall, in another apartment, a man and woman were making love. Down the hall two teenage girls slept in small, closet-sized bedrooms.

Entering the woman’s mind I saw that she was looking down into a hole, a deep chasm with gravity much greater than anywhere else on Earth. The pull was inexorable and the woman, Fiona Pinkley, gripped the gun to keep from falling. The only way she knew to anchor herself was to plant a bullet in her head.

This was true—I could see that it was. Fiona’s balance was gone, her fall was imminent. I settled down next to her feeling the gravity but unaffected by it. I watched as her mind cast off the ballast of her life: Richard who was at work, Bella and Wendy who slept down the hall, her parents who were in Florida fighting with hurricanes and landlords. It was all too much. Life was a taut and frayed rope that had to break one day. It wasn’t death that she feared but the long fall …

She raised the pistol to her head and, without considering the consequences, I entered her mind.

Fiona gasped and put the gun down.

“What?” she asked into space.

I did not, I could not speak.

“Please answer me,” Fiona whined. “Please.”

I imagined a bright red songbird and she did too.

“What does it mean?” she asked.

In my mind the bird became a flock alive with chatter and hungry for seed.

“It’s so beautiful,” she whispered. “But I can’t.”

The birds, now acting on their own, flew into the sky above our heads (we were now on an island far from any shore). They swooped around and came back to ground in even greater number.

Fiona walked toward a finger of large stones that jutted out into the sea. She sat there in jeans and a T-shirt with the pistol, Richard’s pistol, in both hands. I could tell that she was weighing now with intelligence the right move to make. The red birds, once of my mind but now of hers, settled around her squabbling and playing and looking for food.

I wondered and worried over her decision but before it came I was dragged away again.

*   *   *

THIS TIME I was in Europe, in France, in a small home in Nice where two Algerian families lived …

*   *   *

MANY HOURS LATER I rose out of sleep like a drowning man from turbulent waters. I gasped and my heart beat fast. I had been in a nearly a hundred places watching, and sometimes participating, in the tragedies, large and small, of humankind. I had saved some, failed with many, and even participated in the killing of a rapist in Hartford, Connecticut. Always I was a conduit sent, or maybe brought, to short-circuit the lost hearts of man.

*   *   *

“TOUGH NIGHT, HUH?”

She was sitting there next to my bed as Agnes had done for Arthur.

“Minerva,” I said. “Why are you here?”

“That’s like asking why does the sun rise?” she said. “I’m sure there’s an answer but why don’t we just enjoy the light?”

“Am I going crazy?” I asked the hallucination.

“How could you be you and not be crazy?” she replied.

“I want to understand what’s going on,” I said. “I want to know why I’m like this.”

“That’s why we’re here, Truman,” Minerva said gently, “to understand.”

“Can’t you just tell me?”

“Can’t.”

“Why?”

“Under orders.”

“Whose orders?”

“Can’t tell you that either,” she said with empathy. “I’m here to succor you but you must find the answers by yourself.”

“Do you know who my parents were?” I asked, ignoring her fey compassion.

She frowned, squinted, and concentrated as if trying to remember some long-ago event.

“No,” she said finally, shaking her head, “I never knew them.”

I cried then, realizing that I had been waiting to ask someone that question since before I could remember. Who were my parents? Where did I come from? How could a child one day find himself walking down the street coming from nowhere and headed for Aunt Tiny?

Minerva was holding my hands. Her skin was rough like Tiny’s, like any woman who worked hard.

“What do you do, Minerva?” I asked.

“I wake up early and go to war or to my smithy or my library,” she said. “I pass the time with made-up duties—waiting.”

“Waiting for what?”

“Have I made you sad, Truman Pope?”

“Yes, Minerva. Yes, you have.”

“Do you want me to leave?”

There was something in her tone that gave me pause. I did want her to leave but that was only because of the trouble I had experienced since she appeared behind me in the elevator. I worried that if I got rid of her now the madness would remain and I would have no outlet, no escape from the insanity. I wanted to tell her, No, I don’t want you to go, but those words would not come out. I looked up at her—the smiling, yellow-clad girl-child—and shook my head ever so slightly.

She ran a rough fingertip down the right side of my face. The touch tickled and I moved my head just a bit. In that motion I lost sight of Minerva for an instant and by the time I turned back she was gone.

Her departure left me in profound silence. I realized then that most of my life had been filled with chatter and ambient noise. It was rare to have the jangling of the world abate leaving me with the sounds made by my blood moving and the breath moving in and out of my lungs.

There were no words in my memories. I remembered faces and good deeds, Aunt Tiny sitting with me when I had fever and the textural taste of broccoli with melted margarine on it. These sensual memories went on for over an hour as I faced the chair that Minerva had occupied.

It struck me at the end of this long chain of seemingly unrelated thoughts that the chair had always been next to my bed. I used it as a night table but maybe I kept it there for her. Maybe I had those crazy floating dreams every night and Minerva was there to make sure I didn’t get lost.

I quickly dismissed this thought as just another symptom of my madness.

*   *   *

DAYDREAMING CAUSED ME to leave home later than I normally did. The sidewalks were crowded with pedestrians rushing to get to work on time. But crowded avenues weren’t the only thing different about my long walk to work. For the past twenty and more years I’d walked unconsciously, feeling and observing the world around me with no real awareness, no intention. There wasn’t much of me present in those walks just as there wasn’t much of me in the night sky of dreams the night before. Few people knew me or even talked to me but that was okay.

Now however I was filled with my own anxieties and frets. Olive and Minerva and Miss Metcalf were there worrying me—each for different reasons. My parents were not there but towered in their absence. There was Arthur and Agnes Army and dozens of others that I touched without them knowing it. I had been to prison cells and boardrooms, AIDS wards and deep in senility the night before.

I had not remembered my dreams before that night. I had never felt such pain.

But in the end nothing mattered. I was still Truman Pope, still walking to work. I was still the mailroom manager for HBH. This was all rock-solid reality and from these facts I gathered what strength I could.

*   *   *

KALA AND PETE were there before me. I was twenty-seven minutes late for the first time … ever. But the kids didn’t say anything. They had hustled the mail accrued from the night before and loaded up their carts without my help. It dawned on me that I could be replaced in less than a day, that Miss Metcalf could have found a substitute for me and very few of the employees of HBH would have ever even known.

But that reality couldn’t drag me down. If the president of the United States died the vice president would take his place. I had the job at that moment and that was enough for me.

*   *   *

THE BIG-BODIED HOUSEFLY was still buzzing around the room. It alighted on my knuckle twice as I made notes on the ledger that accounted for every piece of interoffice mail that passed through our corridor-turned-office. I was a resting point, a stepping stone in the long three- or four-day journey of that small bug’s life.

I called him Bruno because he was so burly and hairy. I know that he could have been a she but the name fit.

I was thinking about that fly when the phone rang.

“Hello?”

“May I speak to Mr. Poe, please,” a voice asked.

“Do you mean Pope?”

“Uh-huh, yeah, that might be it.”

“I’m Truman Pope.”

“Oh … hi, Mr. Poe, Pope. This is Maud Lolling from the subway yesterday.”

“Oh,” I said. “Yes. How nice of you to call me.”

“I’m not botherin’ you am I?”

“Not at all. Um, it was nice to meet you on the train.” I was trying to remember what she looked like but I only had a body image in my mind. She was slight and young and very dark skinned …

“I don’t really know why I called,” she was saying.

“Could we have lunch tomorrow?” I asked, cutting off any attempt she might make to hang up.

“Really?”

“Absolutely. We could eat at the café at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”

“Is that the one where they got the big Egyptian pyramid that you can walk through?”

“Yes.”

“I know where it is. You wanna meet at one o’clock?”

“I’ll be there.”

*   *   *

AT THREE THAT afternoon Kala, Pete, and I were having our coffee and tea break. Kala’s old college roommate was coming to visit her for the weekend and she was telling us stories about how daring Sheila was. She had hitchhiked across the country with another girl in her sophomore year and was arrested for civil disobedience in three different antiwar rallies in and around D.C.

“She has a black belt in karate,” Kala was saying.

“What kind?” Pete asked.

“What kind of black belt?”

“No. What school of karate?”

“I don’t know. It was a place off campus.”

Pete was about to elaborate on his question when the door opened and Miss Metcalf walked in. A definite chill came with her.

Pete glared at her while Kala turned away.

I appreciated the loyalty of my floaters but I didn’t want them to get in trouble so I said, “Could you guys leave us alone for a while?”

Without a word the floaters got up and went around Metcalf to the door.

When they were gone and the door was closed I said, “Have a seat, Miss Metcalf.”

She resented the authority in my voice, I could see that. But she took a chair across from me and put her hands on the table. She was wearing a one-piece black dress and had a large, roseate pearl hanging from slender golden chain around her neck. She had very little makeup on her pale face and her straight brown hair was not coiffed. This unbusinesslike attire was lovely and so was she, even through the brooding resentment of her eyes.

“Would you like some coffee?” I asked. “Kala brought in one of those expresso machines that use the little packets.”

“No thank you.”

“I don’t drink coffee myself,” I said.

“Mr. Hoad’s assistant called and told me to come down here,” she said, the word “assistant” a burning embarrassment in her memory. “She said that I was to apologize to you.”

“It’s not necessary,” I said.

“I wasn’t given a choice.”

“Why do you hate me, Miss Metcalf? I haven’t done anything to you, have I?”

“I don’t hate you.”

“You spent twelve thousand dollars for a man to find fault with my work, with my department.”

“You left company officers in the elevator while you wandered off,” she countered.

“How old was Hester?” I asked. The words came out of my mouth as if I were someone else, someone who was close to Lana.

Her eyes opened wide and she rose from her chair.

“How do you…”

“She was,” I said, and then halted looking for the relationship in a place that couldn’t properly be called memory. “Your great aunt. From Rhode Island.”

She began to shiver, shaking hands raised to cover her mouth.

Just then the phone rang. I was in another place beyond that room, outside from even the notion of a room separate from other spaces. I was coming back from a shared awareness where life is an ocean and all individuality merges into and reemerges from the one.

“Hello?” I said into the receiver.

“True?” Olive asked.

Lana Metcalf had turned and was headed for the door.

“Sit down, Miss Metcalf,” I said to her back. “This’ll just be a moment.” Then, “Hi, Olive. I’m having a meeting. Can I call you back?”

“Can you come over to my place Sunday at six?” she asked.

“In the evening?”

“Of course.”

“Okay. Where is it?”

She gave me a number on Park Avenue and I scribbled it down, said good-bye, and turned back expecting Lana to be gone. But she was sitting there in front of me again, her eyes filled with tears.

“How did you know about my aunt?”

“Kala and Pete were talking about it,” I lied. “I guess they must have overheard something on their route.”

Her relief was so great that she didn’t question why she sat when I commanded her to.

“Oh. Of course I told the people in my department that I’m going to the funeral.”

“You look lovely,” I said and she frowned, feeling something in those words. “And don’t worry.”

“Worry about what?” she said, the old nemesis rising out of sorrow. “What would I have to worry about?”

“When Mr. Hoad calls I’ll tell him that you were sincere in your apology.”

It was apparent that she had not considered Hoad calling me to check up on her. And now she was wondering if I was sincere in my promise.

But I wasn’t worried about Lana and her concerns; what bothered me was my ability to share consciousness with her. If I was crazy, if I was insane, she would not have responded when I mentioned her aunt. But then again, maybe Pete or Kala had said something about the funeral and I blended that into my madness.

“I really am sorry,” Miss Metcalf said lamely. “I’m just, I don’t know, I guess I was embarrassed by him coming into my office like that.”

“I have to get back to work,” I said. “But don’t worry. I won’t cause you any more trouble.”

*   *   *

AT HOME THAT night I drifted again. I entered into a brawl between two homeless men—one of whom died. I wandered into the consciousness of a daughter who’d had a withering sexual life with her mother. Her mother had died the night before and she was planning the funeral while contemplating suicide.

I stood by listening to a brother and sister in Algeria plan the assassination of a young man that they’d attended high school with. They, the siblings and their friend, were on different sides of a conflict and, try as I might, I couldn’t reach past their hatred.

I encountered many angry, troubled, and lost souls that evening. Pain paved the night with its explosive rages and sad resolves.

My final stop was with two lovers …

They were in the throes of passion when I was drawn to their side. They were in a hallway pressed into a corner humping so hard that it sounded as if they were pounding on the wall. They spoke no words and their minds were filled with carnal desire. Their orgasms were simultaneous, loud, and gripping. The culmination of their passion went on for well over a minute.

I thought of Olive and a pulse went through me as if my body were a beating, dying heart.

As they lay there on the thin carpeting of the unlit inner hall I could feel the regret roll off them. She was sorry to have betrayed her husband once again with one more in a long succession of men. And he once more felt remorse that he was not going to be loved for long.

Their sorrow was mild compared to other experiences I’d had that night. I’d seen brutalization and murders, sorrow so deep that even the expectation of death could not ease it. But somehow the emptiness of these lovers’ lives was the saddest betrayal of human potential. They were hollow cartoon characters hunting mosquitoes with a shotgun. They were waiting vessels with holes at the base. They were aimless and heartless, feckless and a waste. Seeing them I lost heart in my nature and moaned in my sleep.

I turned and my eyes opened momentarily. Minerva was sitting there on the night table–chair watching me closely. My eyes stung and I blinked. In that instant, as was her nature, she disappeared.

I rolled out of bed and stumbled to the bathroom where I urinated and washed off, scrubbed, brushed, and flooded all the nooks and crevices of my human body. I staggered like the drug addicts I’d seen in the night. I made noises and promises but no one was listening to me.

The shaft of bright sunlight through my apartment window seemed weak, ineffective; a failure in its task.

Outside, people on the street impressed me as the blind in the land of the blind, descended from the blind, and giving birth to sightless children. Even the ground under my feet felt insubstantial, unable to support the weight of the sins that humanity perpetrated against itself over and over again like madmen never able to feel certain that they accomplished even one chore correctly.

I ended up on the marble stairs of the art museum, hours before it was due to open. I couldn’t get comfortable on the hard surface. I couldn’t take deep enough breaths to calm my nerves. I paced and settled, clenched my fists and followed the clouds with my eyes. I watched bugs crawl and fly. I saw a sparrow attack a giant, sickly cockroach as it tried to crawl to safety. My dreams were becoming reality. I wanted to die then and there.

“Hello, Truman.”

I had not expected Minerva to come but she had said that her task was to succor me.

“Hey, Minnie, how you doin’?”

She sat next to me. Her scent was like a deep pine forest when the sap was running and the snow was nearly gone.

“You know you take all this far too seriously,” she said. “Life is nothing but a series of events unfolding one after another. A man dies, a leaf sprouts from the mud, a lion licks her cub and grumbles—it’s all the same as a stone set in the earth waiting for the world to explode.”

“But what about the sorrow and the sadness, the rage and hatred?” I asked, certain that anyone noticing would think me a fanatic talking to the air.

“Without distress there can be no relief,” she said. “Without bleeding no one could heal.”

“But there’s so much unhappiness.”

“At this very moment a quarter billion children are laughing.”

“But so many of them are also dying.”

“They are all dying.”

“Is there no answer?” I cried.

“There is no question,” she replied.

I looked around and saw that dozens of people were sitting on the stairs. Hours had passed. There was an empty space around me—people avoiding me the same way that they covered over the psychoses in their own dark minds.

Minerva was gone again.

*   *   *

I WANDERED THE galleries of the museum barely looking at the paintings and sculptures and jewelry. At one point I entered the great hall where an ancient Egyptian structure stood, the building that Maud remembered. Seated there on a marble bench was a big black man who was staring into space with bloodshot eyes.

I sat down next to him and looked at the old stone building thinking that even it was an infant in the ever undulating and unfolding drama of infinity. We sat there for ten minutes or so before I decided to speak.

“You’re Arthur Army, aren’t you?” I asked.

“I know you?”

“I met your mother once at a social function. She showed me a picture of you. How is she?”

“She cried.”

“About what?”

“It don’t matter what,” he said, somewhat belligerently. “My mama never cried about nuthin’ as long as ago as I could remember. She never cried and there she was with her head on my shoulder blubberin’ like a baby.”

“Why aren’t you with her?”

“What business is it to you, mothahfuckah?”

“I liked Agnes,” I explained dispassionately. “She’s a, a strong woman. I guess if she’s crying there must be something very wrong.”

“Me.” Arthur Army nodded, agreeing with his answer.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s me that’s wrong,” Arthur said. “She cryin’ ovah me ’cause I nevah did do right.” Army paused for a moment blinking the tears out of his red eyes. “I remembah in the fifth grade Mrs. Gonzales brought us here. She told me that all I evah needed to know was right here in this buildin’. She said that if I could understand what the artists an’ the artisans had to say then I’d know everything I’d evah need to.”

Arthur turned away from me then to stare at the stone building. I could see that he intended to stay there until he came to some notion of why that structure stood there.

Quietly I stole away, a ghost giving up the haunt.

*   *   *

“MR. POPE?” Maud Lolling said.

I was sitting in the café reading a copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince that I’d bought in the museum bookstore. The certainty and cruelty of the author had a numbing effect on me. He supported my dark notions of the world but at the same time gave me hope that there might be answers.

I stood up and kissed the young girl on the cheek. This surprised her I think. She moved her head and shoulders back an inch but touched the place where my lips had brushed her skin.

“We gonna eat here?” she asked.

I gestured at the chair and she sat.

We were silent, each gauging the other but not in an adversarial way. We were like children on the school yard on the first day of the year, destined to be friends for life, or maybe just for that afternoon. It was a familiar sensation; one I had not experienced for more than thirty years.

“Maybe I shouldn’ta come here,” she speculated.

“It’s odd that we meet like this but there’s certainly nothing wrong with it. Is there?”

“My boyfriend would be mad,” she said. “Well, he really ain’t my boyfriend ’cause he got another girl. He don’t think I know about it but I do. But I haven’t told him and I haven’t given him back his medallion so in a way he’s still mine—a li’l bit.”

“Even if you two were married this is just a lunch.”

“But I don’t know you so it’s like a date.”

I was enjoying the triviality of our chatter. She wanted to be there and she was telling me so by saying she shouldn’t be.

“If your boyfriend walked in right now you could tell him that I’m your cousin from Salt Lake City. You could say that I live in Venezuela now and that I’m a Baptist missionary among the Catholics and the socialists.”

That brought out Maud’s teeth. She smiled and ducked her head a little. I really hadn’t noticed how lovely she was before the laugh. Tiny and dark skinned she wasn’t what the magazines and movie screens would have called pretty but there was something compelling about her. Suddenly I felt that Maud Lolling was a delicate soul and I cautioned myself to be gentle, not too crazy, around her.

“You silly,” she said.

“Yeah,” I agreed.

The waiter who had served me tea while I waited for Maud came up with flimsy paper menus. He was white and tall, somewhat arrogant with a mustache so thin that if you only gave him a brief glance you might not have noticed it.

“Are you having lunch?” he asked disdainfully.

“Of course,” I said. “We’ll decide in a minute.”

Maud was frowning at her menu.

When she looked up I said, “Lunch is on me.”

“But it’s expensive.”

“I like the atmosphere and the company,” I said. At least I mouthed those words. But I was not alone in my head. There were thousands, maybe millions, of voices in there—men and women, boys and girls. I felt that I could be anyone right then.

But instead I became the words that Maud wanted to hear. Why not? She was young and lovely in her way, innocent and on an adventure.

She smiled and the condescending waiter came back to write down our soup and salad, sandwich and chicken potpie.

*   *   *

“WHY’D YOU TELL me how to get in touch with you?” she asked after Trenton (the name on our server’s badge) poured our ice water.

“Because I wanted to talk some more but I had to get out.”

“Why didn’t you ask for my numbah?”

“I thought that if you wanted to talk more that it could be your decision. It’s just not right for an old man like me to be asking a young girl for her number.”

“I’m nineteen,” she argued.

“I’m forty.”

“I did wanna talk to you,” she said. “Not like some boyfriend, but, you know.”

“I know that conversation with you is easy and I usually have a hard time with words. I try to say things and people don’t seem to understand or they hear something else and it’s like they aren’t even talking to me.”

“I know what you mean,” she said with mild emphasis. “I try to talk to my moms and to Roger, my soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend, and Miss Klein at work but they nevah seem to get it.”

Maud told me that she worked at the office of a famous clothes designer, a white woman known all around the world. It was an office filled with women and Catherine, her boss, had taken her in to teach her about the world of fashion.

“She always tryin’ t’ teach me how to be what she is—like that’s what I want but I don’t,” Maud said. “I wanna be my own kinda person not what that woman want. Don’t get me wrong—I think her life is fine for her but that don’t mean I got to be like that.

“An’ Roger always be tellin’ me what to do an’ he get jealous even when I know he hittin’ it wit’ Talia Grimmens. An’ then my mama tellin’ me that Roger ain’t right and that it’s good he cheatin’. But it ain’t good—it’s sad an’ it’s wrong. Even my girlfriends don’t understand what I want…”

Lunch came and then dessert. Maud talked and talked. I couldn’t have been happier. It was like watching an artisan creating a masterpiece right there at the table. She was teasing out a barely perceptible path that would bring her to a place where Maud Lolling could be herself with the minimum of external contradictions.

“That’s why I think I need to go to school,” she was saying at one point and then she stopped.

A moment went by and I asked, “Why do you think you need school?”

“I been talkin’ ’bout myself for almost two hours,” she said. “It’s rude to do that. Why don’t you tell me about yourself, Mr. Pope?”

Her attention brought me back into myself. I was no longer one of many but just me.

“Truman,” I said.

“Why don’t you tell me about yourself, Truman Pope?”

“What do you want to know?”

“Where you from originally? Salt Lake City?”

“I don’t know…”

I told her about my first memories and about Tiny and the trouble I had at school. After a long while of talking she stopped me.

“But this Olive was your only girlfriend?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Evah?”

I nodded feeling shy and exposed but still safe in her sight.

“You know I’ve had more than one boyfriend.”

“You’re an intelligent and friendly young woman,” I said. “However many boyfriends you’ve had I’m sure there’s a lot more waiting on line.”

“You wanna take a walk in Central Park, Truman?”

I said yes not knowing that the fate of humanity might have been part and parcel of that simple nod.

*   *   *

AFTER SOME TIME we began to hold hands. It didn’t feel sexual at the time. We were just old, old friends together once again.

“I had this uncle once,” she said to me in the empty northern region of the park. “He was so mean that nobody liked him. My mama wouldn’t even invite him to Christmas dinner. But then he got real sick, real sick. The doctor said that he was gonna die. They gave him poison instead’a medicine he was so sick. And then one day his girlfriend called and told us that Uncle Murray was better, that he woke up one day an’ started eatin’ and the sickness went away.”

“And so did your mother ask him to Christmas dinner then?”

“No, but he came anyway. It was just like that Christmas story when the evil businessman turned good. He brought us presents and talked to us and told us that he realized that he had been wrong. Now he’s my favorite uncle. He don’t understand me too good but he listens and don’t try an’ tell me how to be.”

There was a sparkle and fearlessness about Maud. She was a perfect companion in my insanity. I was sure that she was there and that my life was real in her presence. The only thing wrong was that I was beginning to dread the moment when we had to part.

We made our way to Madison and went to a chocolate store where I bought her hot cocoa.

“Mr. Pope?”

“Truman.”

“Right now I’ma call you Mr. Pope before I ask you this question, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Do you have a extra bedroom in your apartment?”

“Just one room.”

“A extra bed?”

“I have a small couch but I don’t think anyone would be comfortable on it.”

She gauged my answer, turning it around her mind.

“If you an’ me was sleepin’ in the same bed,” she said, “would you keep your pants on while we was there?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because I wanna come stay wit’ you tonight.”

“But you want me to keep my pants on?”

“I don’t wanna be your girlfriend or nuthin’ like that but I wanna stay wit’ you an’ keep on talkin’. You know what I mean?”

“Yes.”

“Can I trust you?”

“I will wear pants and a T-shirt but I can’t say that I’d like that.”

“You bettah not.”

*   *   *

“SO DO YOU like me, Truman?” Maud asked.

She wearing my pajamas and lying back with her head against my chest. I’d had an erection for most of the night and my heart must have been healthy because it had been working overtime for hours without pain or coronary.

“Can you feel my heart beating?” I asked.

“Uh-huh. But I thought maybe that was like that all the time.”

“No.”

“That don’t mean you like me.”

“I have my clothes on, don’t I?”

“So?”

“That means I’d do just about anything to keep you close to me.”

Maud turned around and put her hands on either side of my head.

“You sweet,” she said.

We had talked the entire night about life and how it appeared to us. We talked about the war and starvation and all the lost souls that kept their sorrows buried under falseness and lies.

“When I kiss you,” she said, “I don’t want you jumpin’ all ovah me.”

Then she leaned down and kissed my lips and mouth in a way Olive never had. It was deep and soulful and I couldn’t help bringing my arms around her. The smacking sound our mouths made caused a tingling sensation in my abdomen.

“Uh,” she exclaimed. “That didn’t feel like the kiss of a man who only had one girlfriend before.”

“You believe me, don’t you?” I asked.

“I guess. But you kiss nice.”

“I just followed you and anyway you didn’t want me to jump you so I had to concentrate on what was there.”

Maud smiled and took my hand. She laid the back of her head on my chest again and we lay there in the glow of our odd meeting.

I sighed and she squeezed my fingers.

“I’m sorry about this, Mister, I mean, Truman.”

“Sorry you came?”

“Uh-uh. I’m happy to be here with you. I feel real good in this bed with you. But I know a man wants somethin’ else. I know you wanna get wit’ me.”

A tremulous ripple went through my chest, I grunted and held her hand even more tightly. She pressed her head and shoulders down against me in response.

“I’ve been waiting for something to happen for my entire life,” I said. “A window to open, a light to shine in. I walk down the streets looking at bugs and birds and all the different people. Sometimes I feel that I’m up there in the middle of the sky looking down on the world.”

“Is that because a’ you not havin’ any real parents?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I just keep on looking. And so waiting for you to say now or never is just another street to walk down.”

“Do you mind how long it take?”

“No. I’m happier right now than I have ever been.”

“Could you be happier?”

“No.”

“Not even if I said yes?”

“Not even then. You see I’m not here waiting for you, I’m waiting with you.”

Maud turned and kissed me again. Then she laid down next to me, turned her back, and fell to sleep.

*   *   *

TWO PEOPLE WERE screaming. Maud was shouting something that seemed important but the other person was drowning her out with his frightened yells. I opened my eyes to see Maud was holding me by the arms. I was the man hollering and she was shaking me, trying to drag me out of the dream.

“It’s okay, Truman!” she yelled. “It’s okay!”

My heart was thundering. My throat hurt from the strain. I was panting and desperate. Then I looked into Maud’s dark eyes.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Nightmares.”

“What did you see?”

“Let’s go down to the coffee shop. I’ll tell you down there.”

While Maud was changing in the bathroom I slumped down over folded legs and wept.

*   *   *

“WHAT WAS IT?” she asked at the counter of Metro Diner on Second Avenue.

I had tea with cornflakes and she pancakes with hot chocolate.

“I was in a, in a bedroom where a black man and a white woman were lying in bed,” I said. “They were naked, asleep. The covers had been thrown off and somehow I knew that they had been having sex all night.”

“Maybe that was what you wanted for us,” Maud said. “Only I’m not white and we didn’t do nuthin’.”

I heard her and registered the words but the dream flowed out of me right around her interpretations.

“They were asleep but not alone in the room. I was there but there were dozens of other men and women all of them black and murdered.”

“Dead people?”

“Murdered by the man,” I said. “Tortured, raped, strangled, shot, and bludgeoned. Some had been left to starve to death in subterranean rooms while others were blinded before being executed. As many victims as there were packed into that room there were so many more outside wanting get at him. But they were all dead, impotent, unable to touch or even to call out to the living.

“One woman was trying to get at the man. When she brushed my shoulder I saw her last moments. He had tied her to a pole and forced her to watch while his men beat her father down into death. She was yelling and screaming the whole time. She wouldn’t stop even though her father was gone. The man tried to talk to her but she wouldn’t stop shouting and so he cut her throat. It took her only a few seconds to die but it seemed like longer. For the span of those eternal seconds she was trying to wish herself free and whole so that she might destroy that man.”

“Shit,” Maud Lolling said.

“Everyone in the room was like that,” I said. “They all had terrible stories that came together around the sleeping, peaceful man. I reached out with one arm connecting myself with everyone in that room and everyone waiting to get in. And when I felt all of their pain I laid my other hand on the sleeping man’s brow. A second passed and then another. The victims all stared, waiting. And then suddenly the man jumped up filled with the fears and feelings he had made in his years with the Tonton Macoute. He suffered the pain of the crushed baby skulls and the rape victims, the broken men and severed limbs. He shouted, ‘Forgive!’ and ran to the balcony right out into the night air fifty-six stories above the street.”

Maud had taken my hand.

“And did you feel everything that he felt?” she asked.

I nodded, swallowing hard.

“That’s a real nightmare,” she said.

“Thanks for pulling me out of it,” I said. “I was with him on that fall. I wanted to die just like he did.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “If I hadn’t been playin’ wit’ you like that maybe you woulda dreamed about flowers or sumpin’.”

“No. I have dreams like that every night lately. They feel so real.”

“How come?”

“I don’t know. It’s like I’m goin’ crazy.”

“Maybe you should see a doctor.”

“If it goes on,” I said, reviving from the tea and the child sitting with me, so concerned. And then, to change the subject, I asked, “What do think about staying with me last night?”

In the morning Maud’s face was older and more beautiful. Her eyes had sheared through my fears and more quickly than I thought possible the dread of the nightmare ebbed away.

“It was one reason at first but then it was sumpin’ else completely.”

I smiled at the riddlelike structure of her reply. I liked riddles. I was no good at solving them but their language and their maddening questions usually made me happy.

“I been stayin’ with my mother for a few days and then with Roger a few. I was goin’ back and forth and they both hate each other and they both make me mad too. I wanted to show Roger that I didn’t have to be with my mother not to be with him and I wanted to get away from her too.”

“Couldn’t you just stay with some girlfriend?” I asked. “I mean going home with a stranger sounds a little risky just to make somebody jealous.”

“I ain’t afraid a’ you, Mr. Pope. You the sweetest man I evah met. You wouldn’t hurt no girl.”

I couldn’t help thinking that this was what people thought about the mild and smiling men and women of my terrible dreams.

“Anyway,” Maud said, “that’s what I thought when I got to your house but it turned different then.”

“Different how?”

“There wasn’t no TV or radio or magazines in there but I didn’t care. My mama, an’ Roger too, always got music playin’ an’ the TV on. They always talkin’ or on the phone and so are the people through the walls an’ ceilin’ and floors.

“It’s always noise all the time up in their places but it’s so quiet at your place and I didn’t get bored. You listened to me and told me how you felt. I don’t think I could live like you do but it was real nice. I nevah had a man hold me all night and not try and hit on that coochie. And I could kiss you if I wanted. All that meant something to me.”

“Want” was not a regular part of my vocabulary. I could go days without eating and years without sex. I found entertainment in the lay of architecture or dust motes sifting through sunlight. I could work twenty-four hours straight and still not feel exhausted and there was no sweetness or salt, drug or alcohol that called to me. I rarely wanted anything but at that moment I had a yen, a hankering for Maud Lolling.

Maybe, I thought, I could get her an apartment across the hall from me and we could have dinner at the diner one or two nights a week. We could visit when she wasn’t with her mother or some boyfriend. And every now and then she could come over and spend the night. I’d be fully dressed and she would lay her head down on my chest.

I wanted her but would not say it. Her saying no was worse than not asking. Her laughing at me would have been more terrible than the worst insults and tricks played on me in my years at school.

“It meant something to me too,” I said. “I really liked having you with me.”

“You ain’t scared a’ Roger?”

“I’m not afraid of anything,” I said.

This was true. I could be hurt, or even worried, but not frightened. Threats rolled off my back and death didn’t scare me one whit; death happened all around all the time.

Maud stared at me with eyes so deep and dark. I could see that she didn’t believe that I wasn’t afraid but there was concern there too.

“I’m afraid a’ what Roger might do,” she said. “You know I don’t think we should see each other no more.”

“Why not?” I managed to ask the question without showing any of the pain of heartbreak.

“Because I like you but you can’t be my boyfriend and if we stayed friends Roger would beat you.”

“I’m not afraid of Roger.”

“You ain’t seen Roger.”

I didn’t answer because it was her fear, not mine that we were discussing. I nodded and took her hand.

“I’ll always be here,” I said.

Maud gazed at me again looking for something and not finding it. She nodded, winced a little, and then stood up from the counter.

“You want me to help pay for breakfast?” she asked.

I shook my head slowly, sadly.

She kissed my cheek and then my lips and turned away.

I watched her leaving tears streaming from my eyes.

“You’re making a mistake here, Truman,” Minerva said.

She was sitting there next to me in her yellow pajama-suit. The green scrawls on the left pant leg and right arm seemed familiar now. I grimaced, put a twenty-dollar bill down on the counter, and walked toward the exit without saying a word.

Half a block away Minerva said, “You can’t make me disappear by ignoring me.”

“I eat there three times a week,” I explained, “and if I start acting crazy they’re not gonna be nice to me anymore.”

“Who cares what these mortals think? They’re like puddles in the sun, dust on the wind.”

“They’re people,” I countered, “living beings.”

“So are flies and mosquitoes, rhinoviruses and weeds.”

“And so what am I?” I asked the apparition as people gingerly moved around me on the crowded avenue.

“That’s a good question, Truman Pope. Are you ready to answer it?”

“I have to go home and change,” I said.

“Do not go to the whore’s house,” Minerva commanded.

“She wants to talk.”

“She will derail your will and pervert your mission.”

“What mission?”

“I can’t say.”

“Then how am I supposed to know?”

“I’m telling you not to go there,” Minerva said, all the smiles gone from her mien.

“What will happen if I do?”

“I don’t know but it will be counterindicative.”

“To what?” I asked though I wasn’t quite sure what “counterindicative” meant.

“You must listen to me.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t have to listen. I have friends here, a life. I don’t have to be a part of this insanity.”

“I’m real, Truman,” Minerva said. “I’m the closest thing to absolute reality.”

The cast of those words coupled with her tone struck me. It was as if she walked out of my mind and attained reality, where before she’d just been a phantom, a dream. It seemed to me that with those words she gave birth to herself. I was astounded by this perception but that didn’t alter my resolve.

“I’ll do what I want to do, Minnie. You can follow your own way.” And with those words I turned my back on her and walked down the street.

*   *   *

OLIVE’S APARTMENT was on Park a few blocks north of Fifty-seventh. The building was tall and yet old-fashioned, built from rose-tinged stone. I wore black pants and a white shirt with a thin brown tie. It took me a long time to decide on that tie. This was what I wore to work a few times a week but I had never worn a tie to see Olive before, not unless I went to see her right after work and forgot to take it off. But I wanted to send her a message—that I was there as a friend but not a lover. She was married and we were over; that’s what the tie was there to say.

There was a doorman with black velvet pants and a red jacket with long tails. He stood up to block my way.

“Olive Charles, please,” I said.

“Are you dropping something off?” the clean shaven semi-Beefeater asked.

“No, no.”

He stared at me with gray eyes that had tiny green flecks in them.

“Name?”

I was distracted by the beauty of the foppishly dressed white man’s eyes. They reminded me of something that happened so long before, something I’d forgotten but, somehow, I felt, the experience had not yet forgotten me.

“Your name, sir?”

“Truman Pope.”

To the doorman’s left, in a small office area, there was a switchboard mounted in the wall. To the right of the board was an old-fashioned telephone receiver hanging from a hook. The man in the red jacket picked up the receiver and punched a button. He waited a moment and said, “A Mr. Poe is calling for you.”

He listened and sneered, then hung up the phone.

“Second elevator down the hall,” he said. “Six-Gee.”

*   *   *

IN THE ELEVATOR I had the beginnings of an erection. This was always the response I’d had when on my way to see Olive. She was the only woman I’d ever had sex with. The things she had done to me were shocking, experiences I had never imagined. And every time we met she had something new to show me—until the last day when we made love so tenderly and then, when it was over, she’d said, “I’ve met somebody new, True. I can’t see you anymore.”

But even this memory did not deter my excitation.

I tugged on the brown tie to reinforce my convictions.

*   *   *

SIX-GEE HAD AN ornate lavender door. There were unrecognizable forms carved into the deep wood. The portal swung open while I was searching for the ringer. Olive stood there in the huge entranceway wearing a short red dress that was tight-fitting on top with flouncy skirts.

“Hi,” I said.

Her nostrils flared and she took my hands and kissed my lips. For some reason the erection subsided as I allowed her to pull me along.

The living room had twenty-foot ceilings and a window for the wall that faced Park Avenue. The floor was dark green and medium gray marble with golden, oddly shaped throw rugs here and there. The couches were identical coral-colored shell-shaped affairs that faced each other over an ancient red lacquered Chinese chest. Olive settled on one divan that faced the window. She patted the seat next to her but I chose to sit on the other sofa.

“Are you afraid of me, True?” she asked.

“No, just careful.”

“You think I might ravish you?”

“What do want from me, Olive?” I asked.

“Why did you come?” she replied.

“Because you asked me to.”

We went on like that for a while, her trying to pull me into some intimate confession and me fending her off.

But I wasn’t just talking. In my mind I was climbing a swirled ladder, step by step—ascending, attaining as I scaled the rungs new panaceas of consciousness. I was clambering toward a place that would bring me and my desires into a singular moment where the confluence would be both desire and satisfaction.

“You changed my life, True,” she was saying.

“We just walked together and talked.”

“I was using you,” she said. “You were just some poor guy with a low-paying job who needed his brains fucked out. I never meant there to be anything long lasting between us. I just wanted somebody to love me and I felt unattractive.”

“You were beautiful,” I said.

“I thought you were crazy mad for me because I was your first. I never paid attention to what you said but somehow I heard you anyway and acted on what I heard without even being aware that it was you who had given me the ideas. You helped me to become what I am and I want you back.”

I was staring at her and still on my ladder. I was calling out for an event that was nearly impossible by any estimation. Inside of that moment was the entire history of everything known and unknown, possible and beyond reason.

“It’s too late for that, Olive,” I said. “I have other things to do.”

“You have a girlfriend?”

“No.”

“Do you love somebody else?”

“Not like that.”

“Then why? Don’t you want me?”

“Olive,” I said, “you don’t need me to get up the courage to walk out of here. You don’t need a secret lover or someone to take revenge on Tristram with. His infidelities don’t mean anything. Your mother or the people at work or the doorman downstairs don’t mean anything. Pack a bag and go to the place where you want to be.”

“But I can’t do it alone,” she said, no longer sexy or seductive.

“All of humanity is alone,” I said. “It’s a gift and a curse but most of all it is inescapable.”

We were completely connected right then, she and I. Her gaze was potent and her desires like a blazing star. I was the focus of all that power. She was the human race and I was one in a trillion trillion possible destinies. If someone was to walk between us right then, I was sure, they’d explode into flame.

The front door opened. It was a good forty feet from the couches but Olive and I were hypersensitive and so we turned together.

I had never met Tristram Charles. Olive didn’t want us to meet. I thought then that she was ashamed to have had a boyfriend who was poor and black, small and uninteresting.

I had never met Tristram Charles but the hale and tanned poster boy for the American Way could not have been anyone else. He wore tan pants and a lime-colored short-sleeved T-shirt that fit his powerful torso like a thin coat of paint.

He was rushing across the marble floor toward our pink shells. There was a threat in his stride. If I had the ability to fear for my well-being I might have been troubled.

But even if I had known fear there was nothing to worry about. Mr. Charles wasn’t going to fling himself into instantaneous violence. He stopped a few feet from where I sat and said, “What the hell is going on here?”

“It’s nothing, honey,” Olive said with surprising calm. “I ran into Truman the other day downtown. He’s an old friend.”

“I know who he is. Your friend Ida told me all about your jungle fever.”

I was repairing the ladder in a place that wasn’t quite real. It was the final proof I needed to explain my insanity. For some reason I felt that I had climbed into the core of a problem that I had been trying to solve for many, many years—long before I had ever been born.

Olive brought the two central fingers of her left hand to the center of her forehead. She frowned and made a little grunt that was like the deep note of a solitary buoy of pain.

“And you,” Tristram Charles said to me, “you get your black nigger ass out of my house before I tear you a new one.”

Now Olive’s face was expressing both fright and pain.

“Sit down, Mr. Charles,” I said. “Sit down next to your wife and be quiet.”

It was a shock to all three of us when the enraged husband obeyed my commands. He wanted to speak but could not. He wanted to stand but instead he sat down next Olive as if bound by gravity and gagged by the flesh of his own lips.

Olive had brought both hands to her head by then. Tristram was glaring at me. I was breathing hard as if having just finished a Herculean task. It took me a moment to catch my breath. By the time I could talk again Olive was lying on her side wracked by the pain in her head.

I stood up.

“A little while after I leave you should forget me,” I said to them both. “It would be better that way.”

I left the building wondering if I had ever really been inside. Maybe I was sitting in a park somewhere imagining the seductress and the hateful king, the jester in the red tails and maybe even Maud Lolling.

*   *   *

I WAS IN my bed that night reading Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett. It was a book I had long owned but never read. It was about the depravity of the human soul; murder and kidnapping, torture and greed. The hero was almost as guilty as the villains. It was a world bent on self-destruction.

As I read I wondered about the night sky outside the window and that ladder in a place that was nowhere but soon to be everywhere.

Everything came down to blood. Without bleeding no one could heal, Minerva had said. And then there was Maud’s relative, the man who had come down with a deadly malady but then had been transformed.

I wondered if the knocking on the door at three in the morning was another phase of my madness. I laid the Continental Op down and pulled on my pants. I opened the door and all that was crazy lifted from my mind.

“Hi,” Maud Lolling said.

“Hi.”

She came in around me, water finding its way past a blockage of stone. She went directly to my little dinette table and pulled a newspaper out of her purse.

“Look,” she said pointing to an article on a middle page.

Haitian Strong Man’s Apparent Suicide

Last night Auguste Rauron of Haiti apparently jumped out of his fifty-sixth floor balcony on West Forty-ninth Street. A woman friend visiting him said that he ran from the bed and went straight for the window. Police sources said that they were investigating but that suicide, “was a definite possibility.”

Rauron has been blamed for the deaths of dozens of political prisoners in Haiti during his tenure as an officer in the notorious Tonton Macoute. Recently Haitians in Europe and the U.S. have demanded that Rauron stand trial for crimes against humanity.

He is survived by three ex-wives and eight children, all of whom presently reside in Port au Prince, Haiti.

“I was talkin’ to one a’ my girlfriends about the dream you had and her father was there listenin’. He showed me the paper and said that you was pullin’ my leg but I told them that you knew about it before any paper or news program.

“I tried to put it outta my mind. I even went over to Roger’s house. But he was high an’ passed out. All I did was lie there next to him thinkin’ about your dream. Finally I just had to come here an’ tell you. You ain’t crazy, Truman, not at all.”

And then she kissed me. We staggered over into the bed and pulled at each other’s clothes until we were naked. Maud was not a shy lover. She wasn’t afraid of germs or passion. I rose to her feeling and cried out. Our orgasms were profound and straining. Our eyes held each other speaking volumes while executing silent, almost violent exertion.

*   *   *

“I DIDN’T KNOW a man could come that many times,” Maud said a few hours later. The sun had risen outside and I was at peace.

Who cared if I was crazy?

“Am I your woman now?” Maud asked.

Mine, I thought. Ownership. Tristram thought that he owned Olive. America thought that they owned oil in the ground from Venezuela to Iraq. But ownership and the certainty of death were mutually exclusive. It was we who were owned, we who were born into slavery—we were possessed by our desires and our relentless mortality, by gravity and the odd nature of being. We, all the people in the world and me, are temporary manifestations, I thought, moments in time that pass quickly and leave traces that are ephemeral and misleading.

“Am I?” Maud asked again.

“I am yours,” I said. “And I will remain that way.”

“Can I move in?”

“Yes.”

“What if Roger comes after me?”

“I’ll send him away.”

“He’s real big,” she said, “an’ mean too.”

“I think I’ll quit my job,” I said.

“Why? We gonna need money. I mean … I’ll work too but this apartment must be expensive.”

“I got it from my aunt Tiny,” I said. “It’s rent controlled. And anyway, I saved almost all the money I ever made. We can live a long time on that and time is short.”

“What you mean?” Maud asked.

“The nature of humanity is about to change drastically,” I told her. “In ten years this planet will be like a new world.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know why. I don’t know what I’m talking about,” I said. “It’s just that I have a, a premonition.”

“What’s wrong, Truman?” Maud asked then. “You seem so sad all of a sudden. Am I movin’ too fast for you?”

“No,” I said. “You’re the one good thing in my life. It’s just like I told you—I feel like I’ve gone crazy. Such wild things are happening that I don’t know what’s real and what’s not. I mean how can I have a beautiful young lover like you coming to my door and pushing me into the bed? How can I wake up in the middle of the night and know that a man across town has just jumped to his death? It doesn’t make sense.”

Maud Lolling’s intense dark eyes bored into me. I could see that she was thinking but I refused to speculate on her thoughts. After a good long while she spoke.

“It don’t mattah,” she said.

“What doesn’t?”

“As long as everything happens one thing aftah the other then you don’t have to worry about if you crazy or not.”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you wake up sometimes and you in a madhouse?”

“No.”

“Have I been here all night long, every time you open your eyes?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Then it don’t mattah if you crazy if everything always makes sense.”

The simplicity of the child’s logic made me smile and then laugh. I was almost convinced by this reasoning but then I remembered Minerva. I explained that I was the only one to see Minerva and that she didn’t even leave footprints in the dust.

After deep concentration Maud asked, “Did you evah ask anybody else did they see her?”

“Miss Metcalf said that no one was there.”

“But she she wasn’t lookin’ for no girl in yellow. Maybe Minerva was there an’ Miss Metcalf didn’t see her.”

“Maybe.”

“So you cain’t say if this Minerva is or isn’t. But I’ma be wit’ you now an’ if you see this chick then tell me an’ I will tell you the truth I swear.”

As I heard these words I began to feel the weight of deep fatigue. I was tired, very, very tired. It felt as if I’d been on a long uphill road for years and years. My shoes had worn out. My clothes were rags and my skin was roughened by the wind and sunlight and hard labor of that endless journey.

I slipped into a deathlike slumber.

My dreams were easier now.

They started with Tristram and Olive having a fight. He was going to leave for Florida, the first stop on his journey to South America and then Africa. But first he visited his lover, a young woman named Gloriana. They went out clubbing with friends of hers.

Olive emptied the bank account she was authorized for and bought a first-class ticket to San Francisco where she was to stay with an old college roommate before flying off to Beijing. Her headaches did not abate but she learned to live with the pain.

I followed them from place to place, seeing into their futures and wondering about the nature of sin. Every time I began to get bothered or upset, Maud would put her arms around me and squeeze until the restlessness died away and I was objective again.

I slept for many hours following Olive and Tristram to Kennedy Airport. They weren’t on the same airlines but they were both on my mission. On the plane Tristram felt aches in his forearms and calves, he was assailed by wave after wave of restive energy. More than once the stewardess had to ask him to go back to his seat.

Olive had visions every time she closed her eyes; empathetic experiences of children suffering and dying across the globe.

“True,” she said and I opened my eyes.

“What?”

“You have made a great mistake. You have broken your vow yet again.”

“I’m free to do whatever I want,” I said to Minerva. She was standing at the foot of the bed where I lay naked with Maud.

“‘Freedom’ is a human word,” Minerva said with a sneer. “You are far beyond their isolate fantasies.”

Maud moaned and then sat up.

I looked at her and then at Minerva. Maud turned to me and asked, “Is this the one that no one else can see?”

I smiled and Minerva went pale.

“She can see me?”

“I guess so.”

“How did she get in here?” Maud asked.

“She can go anywhere it seems,” I said.

“They will obliterate us,” Minerva said, no longer smiling.

“Who?” Maud and I asked together.

“The On High.”

“You’re exaggerating,” I said.

“Do you remember now?” Minerva asked.

“No. But I don’t care. I don’t know how but I gave Olive what she wanted. I have someone that loves me right here.”

“Like that fly in your office,” Minerva said with a sneer. “This, this thing in your bed is even less than some bug.”

“You bettah shet yo’ mouf, bitch,” Maud said and I loved her for it. She was the girl who should have loved me when I was a child at school. She was the protector I’d always wanted—the sister, lover, confidante, and friend.

“Go away, Minerva,” I said.

The violet-eyed, light brown–skinned woman-child gaped at me.

“You’re sending me away?” she said.

“I need time to be with my lover,” I said.

“But you have destroyed all I have done to rectify…”

“Go now,” I said and she was gone. It wasn’t exactly like she’d vanished but more that she was never there.

“I could see why you think you crazy, baby,” Maud said. “That’s some wild shit right there.”

PART THREE

IT WAS A bad flu season that year; the worst the world had ever known. The CDC finally admitted the vaccine that had been developed was useless. They said there seemed to be at least eighteen discrete strains of the virus that clustered and traveled together. The virus attacked the body in vastly differing ways.

One bug affected one or more of the senses leaving people temporarily blind or deaf or paralyzed. But these weren’t the only symptoms; another one was muscular pain and swelling. There were three or four brain reactions most of which led to comalike symptoms. The flu could attack the vascular, nervous, and respiratory systems, the bones and glands, even the quality of blood.

Children and the aged were the most likely to succumb but they weren’t the only ones. Schools around the world were empty while hospitals had to expand into tents anywhere they could pitch them. Hundreds of thousands died while tens of millions fell into their beds and the medical experts around the world feared that this might be the superflu that had been predicted for years.

Even though the world was facing oblivion I hardly noticed. Maud and I spent our days and nights, twilights and dawns so much in love that it seemed impossible. For months we spent every day getting closer than the day before. None of her family, and few of her friends got sick. Roger came at me one day when I was walking down the street to the corner store. He threatened me and then, for some reason I could not fathom at the time, he abruptly turned and walked away.

Maud loved me, I was sure of that. She went with me to visit Aunt Tiny at least once a week and sometimes she’d go there by herself to have girl talk with my only kin.

“I would love you no mattah what you did,” Maud said to me one day when we were sitting on a bench in Central Park. It was late fall and the cases of flu had risen to over three hundred million worldwide while deaths had exceeded eleven million. The sensationalist dailies were calling the disease Holocaust Flu.

“There’s not much I can do,” I said.

“I saw Minerva,” she reminded me. “And you said, even before the flu, that the world was gonna change.”

I had put those crazy days out of my mind. Minerva had not returned and my dreams subsided. I was in love and that was all that mattered.

“I haven’t done anything, M,” I said.

“The newspapers sayin’ that one woman finally got better from it in Poland,” she said. “They say that she could lift six hundred pounds in the rehabilitation gym.”

“Truman Pope!”

I heard my name and knew that the angry voice was addressing me but I could not believe it. I was in Central Park with the only woman I would ever love and it was a lovely day—nothing could go wrong.

“Truman Pope!”

I looked up to see dozens of men and women in and out of uniform with weapons leveled at Maud and I. She grabbed my arm and gasped. I was, once again, trying to figure a way out of the madness.

“On the ground!”

I stood up instead. Maud cried out and I felt a sharp pain at the back of my head. The blackness of unconsciousness slithered with snakes and vipers.

*   *   *

I WOKE UP in a bright and antiseptically white room, bound to a chair with chains, and wrapped in a straightjacket. The room was large, bigger than most apartments. I looked around as well as I could hoping for a glimpse of Maud. She wasn’t there, nobody was.

I tried to conjure up Minerva but she would not come.

There wasn’t going to be any escape for me and no relief. But that didn’t matter as much as it might have at one time.

I had known isolation and then I was loved.

I accepted the swaddling effect of the jacket and chains and used the time to remember the moments with Maud. She was my anchor and I was her lighter-than-air balloon.

“Mr. Pope,” someone said.

My eyes were closed in reverie so I didn’t see him enter.

He was a tall man in a black suit; white and sandy haired, the eyes were a little small for his head.

“Yes?”

“Why haven’t you or your girlfriend nor any of your families and friends come down with HF?”

I had wondered that myself.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Phillips.”

“Well, Mr. Phillips, I’m not a doctor.”

“No,” he agreed, “but you are an anomaly.”

“How’s that?”

“Your blood holds the template for the Holocaust Flu.”

“Where’s Maud?”

“Tell me about Olive and Tristram Charles,” was his answer.

“I used to go out with Olive—years ago.”

“You were at her house five months ago.”

The doorman, I thought. He’d remember me. But why was I so sure that it couldn’t have been Olive? I didn’t really remember that afternoon very well.

“Why am I here, Mr. Phillips?”

“You, my friend, are ground zero. We have traced back the worst plague in the history of the human race to you. And we need some answers.”

“I don’t have any answers,” I said feeling that familiar out-of-body sensation I had when learning how to talk with Miss Boucher.

At that moment a dark stone tower appeared in my mind. It was cylindrical but tapered toward the top. Thick black smoke emanating from the tower infected the sky for miles around with its taint. At the base of the smokestack (which was larger than any skyscraper that I had ever seen) was a small doorway. People were hurrying out of that portal, running and falling and shouting out in pain. They were naked and filthy, flooding the countryside as they streamed back toward the world where they had died.

“Don’t fuck with me, Pope,” Mr. Phillips said. “I can hurt you and I will if you don’t give me what I want.”

“What can I tell you?”

“Did you have intimate relations with Olive or Tristram?”

“Tristram?”

“Answer the question, Mr. Pope.”

“No, no. No sex, no kissing, no drinking from the same bottle. Do you think I have this flu?”

“Why were you at their house?”

“Olive wanted to talk to me … Is she okay?”

“What did she want to talk about?”

“She wanted me to help her change her life.”

“How were you going to do that?”

At that moment Minerva winked into existence right there next to Phillips. I was happy to see her and smiled. Phillips had no idea that she was there. He kept asking questions and from somewhere my mouth answered but my attention was on Minerva and what she had to say.

“You’re a fool, Truman,” she told me.

“Why do they have me here, Minnie?” I spoke with my mind as my body gave somewhat satisfactory answers to the inquisitor.

“The Holocaust Flu, of course.”

“What do I have to do with that?”

“You created it.”

“Me? Are you insane?”

“You took your own divine genetic code, scrambled it up, and inserted it into an inert virus in Olive’s body. That’s where her headache…”

She stopped talking because Mr. Phillips had turned my chair over and now he was kicking me. I sustained blows to the stomach, arms, chest, and head. It hurt but what was bothering me was Minerva’s claim about a divine genetic code.

The seemingly sane white man had lost his mind. He got down on his knees and started hitting me with his fists. He was cursing. I tasted blood. The chair shattered and Phillips hit me again and again. A shadow appeared on a far wall between my attacker’s legs. Feet rushed up and Phillips was pulled off me by three men in uniform.

I looked up, half blinded from the blows, and saw that Phillips had gone completely, rabidly mad. He was foaming at the mouth and struggling with supreme effort. He broke away and came down on my face with his knee and all his weight behind it.

I blacked out.

*   *   *

I AWOKE IN another white chamber, this time a hospital room. I was alone again and in terrible pain. Both legs and my left arm were in casts. I couldn’t open my mouth and could only see out of my left eye. I moved my head slightly to the left and Minerva was sitting there. She smiled and twisted her body in such a way as to physically express sorrow.

“What do you mean, ‘divine’?” I asked.

“You don’t remember?”

“No.”

“I should have never let you become Truman Pope.”

“I am Truman Pope. I’ve always been me.”

“I would have killed you had I the strength,” she said.

“You could kill me now,” I offered.

“They can but not I,” she said. “And I won’t let them do it either. Eternity would be a bleak business without the fool.”

The door opened. A woman in a business suit and a man wearing a military uniform walked in. Minerva stood and backed into the wall behind her. I could still see her outline and her violet-red eyes.

The man was black, which at first gave me some relief. I hoped the white woman wasn’t his superior.

They both sat in chairs near my bed.

“My name is Olga Rhone,” the woman said. “This is General Ulysses Germaine. I’m from the UN and the general represents the White House.

“We’re sorry about Mr. Phillips. We were unaware that his sisters had died from the Holocaust Flu. The only excuse we can give you is that when you didn’t show remorse he lost control.”

She didn’t seem very apologetic.

“I haben’t dohn nuthin’,” I said through the wires holding the bones of my jaw together.

“You are the carrier of the virus,” she said.

“I neber been thick in my lie.”

“Have you ever been to the Middle East or met with any representative of any foreign power or anyone who might condone terror?” Germaine asked.

That was when I lost hope.

I shook my head as best I could.

For the next hour or so they asked questions and I cobbled together slurred answers under the watchful eyes of Minerva. My jaw hurt so badly that I wanted to scream. And I was worried about Maud and Aunt Tiny. Finally the pair stood up telling me that they would be back, that I was a prisoner of the United States and that I was definitely the cause of millions of deaths worldwide.

As soon as they were gone Minerva came out of the wall.

“You’re a fool, Truman Pope. You said that you were just going to watch.”

“Help me.”

“Will you listen to me if I do?”

“If we can save Tiny and Maud.”

“Your pets?” she said in an exasperated tone.

“Leave then.”

“No, Truman. Don’t make me to go again. I can’t leave you again.”

“Then help me.”

She smiled and sat on the bed next to me. Reaching out with both arms her hands first rested against my ribcage and then sank below the skin, muscle, and bone. I was blinded and ecstatic. Music of the sweetest horns and the wisest drums played all through me. I sang a song that had never been known on Earth. I moved past a distant star and watched the migration of ghosts going against the tide of the cosmos. I expanded out past the gravity of the Milky Way. And there was so much more to experience—so much more …

*   *   *

WHEN I OPENED my eyes Minerva said, “The body is cured.”

“How?”

“The same way that leaves replace themselves or time turns and wonders about his journeys,” she said wistfully. “But now we have to move quickly. The casts and wires and restraints are gone.”

It was true. I could open my mouth and move my limbs.

“I can manage the glamour around both of us,” she said. “Stay close to me.”

I went to the closet and looked for my clothes but they were not there.

“What are you doing?” Minerva asked.

“Looking for my pants.”

“Get behind me,” she barked.

I did as she said.

We passed through the closed door as if it wasn’t there. Military guards were standing on either side but they seemed unaware of us.

“How are we doing this?” I asked when we were alone in the stairwell.

“If I could merge with you we could fly to your plaything’s side.”

“Why don’t you?”

“There are traps in your soul, Oh-Ti. If I were to do any more than heal you I would be destroyed.”

“What did you call me?”

“Come on.”

*   *   *

WE WERE ABLE to go unseen into a clothing store and steal pants a shirt and some shoes. After that we took a subway into Brooklyn where Minerva brought me to the front of an apartment building on a quiet street of brownstones in Carroll Gardens.

“Wait here,” Minerva said imperiously. The tone reminded me of … something.

She went into the house leaving me on the street to wonder about who I was and what.

People were dying all over the world and somehow I was to blame. Minerva was real, I believed, I had to believe that. It was possible that I was insane but I couldn’t rely on that assumption. I had to do something to reverse and stop and repent my crimes.

I closed my eyes and tried to remember before the day I found myself walking down the street toward Tiny. I concentrated so hard that my shoulders trembled. Nothing was coming but I kept up my concentration.

“It’s okay,” a strange voice said.

I opened my eyes on a Hispanic man. He was my age and height with brilliant emerald eyes, impossibly crystalline.

“I had that flu,” he said to me.

“And you recovered?”

“I can see into people’s hearts now. I see other things too. I see that you are … special.”

“Can you tell me where I came from?” I asked the stranger.

The man stared harder until his eyes fairly glowed. Then he shook his head and said, “Your story goes deeper than I can see, my friend.”

“What, what else have you seen?”

“My daughter died from the flu,” he said. “I saw the red light of life wink and then perish. And then another kind of shining came up out of her clay and she was above my head and laughing but nobody else saw her.”

“What did she say?”

“I can only see, my friend,” the man told me. “She kissed me with ghost lips and then hurried off to be reborn.”

We stared at each other for a long interval. He was seeing something and smiling even though his young daughter had died.

I saw in him a thousand possibilities. The errant disease could have made him into a dozen different kinds of seers. He could have seen the past, the future, the other, the opposite, or simply beyond. This man, I knew, was a soul-seer, a rare breed of a hitherto nonexistent race.

“Truman,” Maud said and I took her into my arms.

“They didn’t even see me when I walked out the door, Baby,” she said. “They didn’t even notice the door come open.”

While we embraced Minerva came up close to the Latin man with cut emeralds for eyes.

“Oh no,” the sprite uttered. “It has already begun.”

The man smiled and touched Minerva’s cheek.

“You can see me too?” she asked him.

“Yes … very clearly, very well. You seem to be more real like your friend here.”

“We have to get out of here, Oh-Ti,” Minerva said to me.

*   *   *

“… I HAVE TO get to my aunt Tiny,” I was saying in a suite on the top floor of a Midtown hotel.

The window of our rooms looked out over Central Park. Maud and I were sitting on a couch made for two while Minerva sat on the floor in lotus position with her eyes closed and the corners of her mouth turned down.

“She is safe,” Minerva said. “But you may not be if we go out. People are recovering with all the powers of Oh-Ti.”

“Are you crazy?” Maud asked Minerva.

“Did I take you out of that room full of guards without them seeing us?” Minerva replied.

Maud went silent.

“What is happening?” I asked then. “Why have you been sitting like that for hours?”

“They know what you’re doing, Oh-Ti. They have felt the vibrations even through our disguise. One of the mightiest has sent his soul to smite you and to kill all life that you have made.”

“You got a child, True?” Maud asked.

Minerva laughed out loud.

“He has more than one, girl,” she said.

“No I don’t. I don’t have any children.”

“What about with that girlfriend?” Maud asked me.

“No.”

“I’m going into the bedroom,” Minerva said. “Come join me at three twenty-three in the morning. Come join me if you have any hope of surviving.”

*   *   *

MAUD WANTED TO watch the news on TV. She wondered if our faces would be there with a plea by the police for people to turn us in. We surfed the channels but there was no mention of us. The news was filled with miraculous stories about people recovering from the Holocaust Flu. Though millions had died, tens of millions were on the mend with strange changes to their bodies and minds. An old woman in Cleveland lay down with the disease at the age of eighty-seven. When she got up she looked to be no older than sixteen. A paralytic in Mumbai got out of bed with the strength of ten men. Some people did not wake up. Instead they stayed in their sickbeds talking in their sleep, speaking in different, often unknown, languages telling tales of the past and the future.

One such victim was Ella Lancaster in Montpelier, Vermont. Her brother was being interviewed about her symptoms. The brother and news crew were standing outside in front of a blue-and-white medical facility.

“At first we couldn’t even tell what language it was she was speakin’,” Elbert Lancaster originally of East Montpelier said to the interlocutor. Elbert was an old man wearing farmer’s overalls and a red-and-blue checkered shirt. “Then this one intern doctor recognized some words an’ told us that she thought Ella was speaking in ancient Greek. They got this professor from up at UVM to come down and tell us what she was tryin’ to say.”

“And what was she saying?” the off-screen reporter asked.

“Scary things,” the deeply tanned old white man said. “She said that a retribution was comin’ down on us from on high. That God himself was the target of evil, that we had to build a great tower to bring back to life those that had been sacrificed to save us. She said that there will be a host of seraphim rising out of the graves of the Holocaust Flu and they would lead and build and plan the protection of the ages. Young people, she said, would rise out of ancient bodies, strong bodies would be given to the weak. She said that it was up to me to open up my land to build a tower that will forge the dead back into living bodies. She said that End of All Days was only a probability but that we will suffer more than any before us had ever done.”

The words Elbert Lancaster spoke made sense to me though I couldn’t have explained why. I was lost in the world, even more than when I was an orphan cared for by Tiny. The tower Elbert spoke of had been in my vision. The people staggering from under the thick black smoke were the ones who had died from my flu. They had died and passed through Limbo back into life. They would have the knowledge to fight the On High.

“Honey,” Maud said.

“What?”

“It’s time to see Minerva.”

I stood up but was uncertain on my feet. Maud put my arm around her shoulders and guided me toward the door. She turned the knob and pushed me through falling in after because she was pulled by my weight. I believe that was why she didn’t shrink away from the chaos of Minerva’s lair. After that the door slammed shut and there was no possibility for escape.

It was the most alien place that human eyes had ever seen.

To begin with there was no floor or ceiling anymore, just a yawning abyss above and below. The walls were fleshy and bleeding like a very, very infected throat. These walls pulsed and stank and glowed. We were standing there though there was no floor. It was as if gravity pulled us up and down at the same rate and so we hovered there, weightless and gagging on the stench.

A viscous fluid flowed down the far side of the chamber. Within this stream I could make out Minerva’s features. It was as if she was dissipating and being replenished by the same downward motion.

“Welcome, Oh-Ti,” she said.

Maud screamed loud and long.

When her pitiful cry was over I asked, “What is this, Minerva?”

“It is the essence of the disease you call life.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will.”

At that moment a whining cry burst all around me. A flash overhead hit the fleshy casing that was my muse. The blast was like a monumental clap of thunder following a solar flare. The power was so great that Maud and I were thrown down.

The flesh of the room constricted around us and a fire, hotter than anything before on Earth, burned, burned.

Minerva cried out in agony and my skin began to peel away. She was dead and I was dying and the roll of flaming thunder beat harder and harder against us. It was coming in a quick succession of waves—thousands of brutal, death-dealing swells of pure power and also hatred.

Maud was yelling out my name and I was crying in the crevice of burned flesh that was once Minerva.

*   *   *

A LONG TIME later I awoke in the small room. The flesh walls were gone. The devastation I expected was nowhere to be seen. My memory, however, was complete. Maud was unconscious on my right and Minerva was dead on the left.

I was numb and no longer wholly human. I lifted my lover and staggered from the room.

*   *   *

“WHAT HAPPENED?” Maud asked in the deli.

It was four thirty in the morning and all the hope for the world man had once known was both destroyed and reborn.

In a defunct granite quarry on the outskirts of Barre, Vermont, Elbert Lancaster and fifteen hundred impossibly strong flu survivors from around the world were building the vast Tower of Reincarnation. Ella Lancaster, her eyes like pale opals, gave instructions from a trance that would never be broken. Men and women who revived with gills and thicker skins migrated into the oceans and began new underwater cities sworn to protect the life there. New eyes and minds, enhanced sinew and blood, sixth, seventh, and eighth senses blossomed unseen but potent. Some old people were made young again—blood donors came into being with the ability to cure almost any disease with a simple transfusion or by sexual intercourse—sometimes with just a kiss.

I could see all of this as I pondered my lover’s question.

The world was lamenting and not yet aware that they were now a single entity being organized to battle the On High and its absolute detestation of the life I had created.

In war-torn Eritrea a girl in the womb of a flu victim was even now being trained in the ways of defense. A boy in Ho Chi Minh City had just been born. He might well become the master of war; hated and loved, needed and ultimately, if humankind, and indeed all life, was lucky—he would be sacrificed for a peace that would reverberate through the dark corridors of existence; places that the human mind could, as yet, not even imagine.

“What happened to your friend Minerva?” Maud asked.

“She died.”

“How?”

“Someone was trying to kill us, her and I, but she fooled them and the assassin’s thrust only found her.”

“What was that room, True?”

“It’s what I really am,” I said, knowing myself for the first time in a long time.

“Are you an angel? Was she an angel too?”

“We were the same,” I said.

“What you tellin’ me, True? Spit it out because I’m real scared here.”

“Where I’m from, M, the thing that you would call a mind can be whole or of many parts. I was of two natures. One was a being who was interested in cosmic mechanics, how things worked and what, if anything, was their destiny. The other self was a soldier, a being who went out and did what was supposed to be done—that was Minerva. She hid me from view for more years than the dinosaurs lived. She kept me hidden because our race would have had me destroyed.

“Our people can be described as intergalactic social spiders that spread their webbing throughout the universe. Any planet or system or fecund area of space is taken by them. They prefer a place like Old Earth before any kind of life began but they are willing to destroy any life that does not come from them.”

“And you one a’ them spiders?” Maud asked. I could sense no fear in her.

“Yes,” I said. “I came here, hidden by Minerva—her secret brother. I begged her to let me experiment. After millions of years I came up with the basic genetic code that would allow another kind of life. Something different.”

“You created life?” she said, her voice tremulous and unbelieving.

I nodded and looked up hoping for forgiveness.

“But that was billions of year ago,” she said.

“After the dinosaurs went down I lost myself in the rainforests of the world. I was told by Minerva that the On High would come and that they’d destroy what I had done. But that was okay because I had been stealthy. No one could have detected the onset of life from my hand. All I wanted to do was live among the insects and viruses, birds and snakes. I did so for many millions of years while Minerva, Ah-Ti, waited for a sign from our people.

“But then one day I found me a monkey. I liked the playful creature and took his body for my own. For tens of thousands of years I reincarnated myself into simian form until my spiritual link to the On High was severed.

“When man rose from simian loins I followed him through the variety of paths. I was astonished by human ability, potential. The On High has only one goal, that’s why Ah-Ti hid me from them. But humans can be almost anything. This body and this race is primordial and primitive but I believed that there was more promise among this people than the ones who engendered me.”

“You created life on Earth?” Maud asked. “You tellin’ me that you’re God?”

“Only in human terms of the word,” I said. “I was also created. The hierarchy of heaven goes on forever.”

Maud stood up as if she was going to leave me but then she sat down again.

“Why didn’t you tell me all this before?”

“For a hundred thousand years I traveled among the civilizations and barbarities of humanity,” I said. “I was trying to come up with a way to save my children. But I was helpless and Minerva refused to engage. Finally, thirty-eight years ago, I decided to become a human child with no memory of the On High and their ways. I reasoned that if I was only human an answer might come to me.”

“Why didn’t Minerva stop you?”

“We are one in the same but I was the more powerful half because my might came from darkness where strength always hibernates. It was this darkness, this unconsciousness, that patterned and spread the Holocaust Flu. And I was right—Truman Pope, the little man who everyone thought was nothing, came up with the plan to save the world.”

Maud was staring at me, trying to decide what to think. Was I what I said? Was everything she ever thought or imagined wrong? Was she insane?

“What now?” she asked.

“I can make everyone forget us,” I said. “Not in one fell swoop but one at a time. I have the power of glamour as Minerva did. We can live together and weather the next storm.”

“What’s next?” Maud asked. I was happy because she reached across the table and took me by the hand.

“The flu is dormant now. It will sleep for six years. When it rises again half of the world and half of those who were infected the first time will succumb. The next change will prepare us for battle. Our leaders will be children but anyone with sight will mark them.”

“How many will die?”

“Eight hundred million and then some.”

“But, True, how can you kill all them people?”

I touched my lover’s brow and she saw the great tower billowing black smoke and belching out gouts of newly revived seraphim, as Ella Lancaster called them.

“Angels?” she said.

“Each one will contain a piece of my knowledge and over the next century they will slowly come together. Under a Vietnamese general and an Eritrean sister of salvation the world will rise up and defy the dictum of eternity.”

*   *   *

I GOT MY job back at HBH. Mr. Hoad himself shook my hand and told me that the place wasn’t the same without me; that made me very proud. They even hired Maud to come in as a receptionist. She went to school again and now has a job on the top floor doing something I don’t really get. I find it hard to understand business and most jokes.

At night we sleep wrapped in each other’s arms and she roams the world with me watching miracles unfold, religions falling into disrepair, and humanity, my eternal gift, glittering like the brightest star in the sky.

ALSO BY WALTER MOSLEY

LEONID MCGILL MYSTERIES

All I Did Was Shoot My Man

When the Thrill Is Gone

Known to Evil

The Long Fall

EASY RAWLINS MYSTERIES

Blonde Faith

Cinnamon Kiss

Little Scarlet

Six Easy Pieces

Bad Boy Brawly Brown

A Little Yellow Dog

Black Betty

Gone Fishin’

White Butterfly

A Red Death

Devil in a Blue Dress

OTHER FICTION

The Tempest Tales

Diablerie

Killing Johnny Fry

The Gift of Fire/On the Head of a Pin

Merge/Disciple

The Man in My Basement

Fear of the Dark

Fortunate Son

The Wave

Fear Itself

Futureland

Fearless Jones

Walkin’ the Dog

Blue Light

Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned

RL’s Dream

47

The Right Mistake

The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

NONFICTION

Twelve Steps Toward Political Revelation

This Year You Write Your Novel

What Next: A Memoir Toward World Peace

Life Out of Context

Workin’ on the Chain Gang

PLAYS

The Fall of Heaven

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

WALTER MOSLEY is one of the most versatile and admired writers in America today. He is the author of more than thirty-four critically acclaimed books, including the major bestselling mystery series featuring Easy Rawlins. His work has been translated into twenty-one languages and includes literary fiction, science fiction, political monographs, and a young-adult novel. His short fiction has been widely published, and his nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times Magazine and The Nation. He is the winner of numerous awards, including an O. Henry Award, a Grammy, and PEN America’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He lives in New York City. Visit his website at www.waltermosley.com.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novella are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

STEPPING STONE

Copyright © 2013 by Walter Mosley

All rights reserved.

Illustrations by Greg Ruth

Cover photographs by Getty Images

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

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e-ISBN 9781466816114

First Edition: April 2013