Blue Light Read Free Page B

running really; he was walking hard with all the force of a run in his heart. He kept up his fast pumping walk until the police stopped him, a fat man in boxer shorts screaming down the streets of Oakland. There was an article about it in that week’s Oakland Standard , a throwaway paper. An unidentified man was detained after being stopped on the street in his BVDs raving about a zombie. He died in police custody from a heart attack, the coroner’s report said.
    When Elza got home that night neither man was in the house. She called the hospital, but no ambulance had been dispatched for Horace. She called the police, but they didn’t identify Gregory until late the next day.
    William T. Portman, burned out on hallucinogens and homeless, was living in the park at that time. Philosophy school dropout and compulsive liar, he had changed his name to Ordé and took to begging and living off young women who were temporarily fooled by his lies and handsome blond features.
    Ordé had a lean-to made from a tarp in the bushes behind a large water tower. There was a woman with him then. He usually had a woman with him, until she got tired of his talk. This one’s name was Adelaide.
    It was late in the afternoon and Adelaide was sunbathing with Ordé atop the wooden tower. She had fallen asleep, but Ordé didn’t know it.
    “I can see,” he was saying, “a great wrong across the city. It’s like a fog, only deadly. But not smog. Not something … something scientific —” And then the blue light came into his eyes. He knew at once that it wasn’t one of the wild hallucinogenic flashbacks. His body didn’t melt, the history of his life wasn’t written on the ground beneath his feet. It was his true nature repeated a trillion times. It was the whole history of something that he didn’t understand — not yet.
    “Did you see that, Addy?” Ordé asked sixteen seconds later.
    The girl opened her eyes and sat up. She was naked and beautiful. Nineteen, with red hair and green eyes. Her eyes were small and too wide apart — which banned beauty queen contests from her life. But Ordé loved her. He’d loved her for almost a week now, and she hadn’t tired of his lies yet.
    “Did you hear it?” Ordé asked.
    “What’s wrong, honey?” She had never heard his voice without the strained notes of prophecy in it. Even when he made love, he talked in that Moses-giving-the-commandments kind of tone.
    “We have to make love,” he said.
    She reached out to hold him.
    “No,” he said. “It has to, it has to — cook.”
    “Huh?”
    Ordé touched his eyes. “The word. It has to filter down. It has to bond so I can, so we can … come together.”
    “We can do that now, honey,” Adelaide said.
    She reached for him again, but he held her away.
    “No. No.”
    After a long while Ordé and Adelaide dressed and then climbed down from the water tower. Addy was a little scared of the beautiful man that she had tamed in the park. His sudden and solemn sanity, his unwillingness to lose himself in her perfect body made her think that it was time to leave.
    She would have gone back to the dorms alone except that he took her to the small stream up above the tower and washed her. It was summer and the moon was three-quarters full. “The water was cold,” she told me years later in the woods of Treaty. “But he was so sure of every stroke against my skin.”
    For once he didn’t say a word, just led her, undressed her, used her T-shirt as his rag. Somewhere between the moon shimmering in the water on her skin and the fading echoes of Moses, she forgot to leave Ordé.
    On the walk through the trees and then onto Derby, toward Telegraph and her dormitory, Adelaide began to think of a life with a man who lied about everything and then, in turn, believed his own lies. Maybe that wasn’t so bad.
    On the same walk Ordé saw great stone bodies, larger than the sun, floating in absolute darkness. These titans were dreaming, before the world,