“HOW DID YOU meet Ronnie?” Alton Brown asked Lorraine Fell in her bedroom later that night. They were fully dressed except for their shoes, reclining on pillows and bunched-up blankets on her bigger-than-king-size bed.
The sliding glass doors that led to the balcony outside were open, allowing little breezes in that wafted through flimsy curtains and over them now and again.
“He attacked me,” she said. “I guess you could hardly call that a meeting, but it was the first time we were physically aware of each other.”
“He tried to rob you?”
“And rape me and beat me too,” she said in a bland, distracted tone.
She was thinking about how different her perspective on life had become; how she’d learned to tell the truth through telling stories that were near enough to actual events; like UTB-Claude Festerling was close to being a man who’d once lived.
Everything she said about Ronnie was true, but there was so much more. And even though there was more, this was enough to tell the tale.
“And you’re still friends with him?” Alton asked.
“After a while he realized that he was wrong,” she said. “And I came to understand that even though there is no God, that there is.”
“What does that mean?”
“That the history of religion is more like a story between cousins or peoples than it is the study of the master and the slave.”
“Hegel,” Alton said.
“I used to study him, but now I know that not only am I a part of God, I am also equal to God.”
“I’m not even religious, but that still sounds like blasphemy to me.”
Lorraine smiled and kissed the awkward young man’s cheek. “What about you, baby?” she said. “What’s going on in your head?”
The question seemed to throw Alton off. He leaned away from Lorraine.
“What?” she said.
“I don’t know how to say it.”
“Why not?”
“Didn’t Ronnie tell you?”
“He hasn’t said one word about you. Why would he?”
“I don’t know. It just seems like you guys are so close that you’d talk about everything.”
“Everything is a matter of perception.”
“Do you always talk like that?” Alton asked.
“It used to be that this was the way I thought and wrote papers. Somehow I couldn’t talk about what I thought, and therefore I couldn’t really feel how I felt, if you know what I mean.”
“So you feel that I’m not a part of everything?” Alton looked crestfallen.
“Not the everything that Ronnie and I talk about. But here tonight you are definitely in my constellation.”
“You’re a strange woman.”
“I’ll make love to you at sunrise because you called me a woman and not a girl.”
Alton smiled at that, both amused and expectant.
“What didn’t Ronnie tell me?” Lorraine asked, and Alton’s smile flitted away like a carp, she thought, running from a shadow crossing over the surface of its pond.
“I have a longtime girlfriend,” he said.
“What’s her name?”
“Christine.”
“That’s a lovely name.”
“Aren’t you mad?”
“Why would I be?”
“Because we got together and I lied by omission.”
“Christine isn’t part of my everything.”
“You don’t love me?”
The question seemed essential, a product of hunger. She imagined a cat her brother had once owned called Whitey. Whitey would mewl around his bed when it was hungry or lonely.
The memory of Whitey made Lorraine aware of a crying sound that no one else could hear. It was Nontee careering through the stratosphere, crying like that old cat—enraged, starving, and alone.
“Lorraine?”
“Yes, Alton?”
“Do you want me to go?”
“Why would I want that?”
“Because I lied.”
“Is you sitting here talking to me when you want to be fucking a lie?”
“Not really.”
“I have nightmares, Mr. Brown. They’re terrible, and only if I lie down next to Ronnie do they go away. But if I do that tonight, they’ll get worse. I need you to stay here with me to keep my mind active. That’s more than love, and it doesn’t have anything to do with your girlfriend.”
“I don’t really understand any of this.”
“Does that matter?”
* * *
“IS SHE GONNA come runnin’ out here screamin’ any minute?” Freya asked Ronnie.
They were sitting on the sofa, facing the windows, her leaning against his chest with his arm around her shoulders.
“I don’t think so,” Ronnie said.
“But you say she do it almost every night.”
“There’s somethin’ going on.”
“You mean her and Alton?”
“No. She’s, she’s planning something, but she doesn’t want me to know what it is. She doesn’t want me messed up in it.”
“You mean like some kinda crime?”
“My arm hurts,” Ronnie said, holding out his left forearm for her to see.
“Looks like a bruise under the skin,” she said.
“It’s an infection.”
“You should see a doctor, then.”
“I wanna feel it for a while first.”
“Why?”
“You know there was only two people I evah learned anything from,” he said like that shadow over a carp in Lorraine’s mind, avoiding Freya’s question almost playfully. “The first was Miss Peters, and the second was Old Bristow up in Attica.”
“Who was he?”
“Old Bristow was doin’ three life sentences for killin’ his wife and his wife’s boyfriend.”
“That’s only two murders.”
“His wife was pregnant with her boyfriend’s child.”
“Oh.”
“He didn’t remember doin’ it, but the crime was so bloody and his girlfriend was white, her boyfriend too, and Bristow was black as tar. But old Bristow wasn’t bitter about it, because he felt bad about what he did.”
“He found religion?”
“Naw. He just knew that killin’ two people for bein’ in love was wrong. I don’t even think that Bristow knew who I was, but I used to sit around an’ listen to him ’cause that motherfucker knew some shit.”
“Like what?” Freya kissed Ronnie’s cheek.
“Like one time, this dude Trevor was sayin’ that America’s war on drugs was worse than the drugs themselves. And Bristow said that the original war on drugs was the ancient Roman army.”
“He told you that the Romans had a war on drugs too?” Freya asked.
“That’s what I thought he meant,” Ronnie said excitedly, like a child. “But, but, but he said that before every big battle that the centurions, that’s like a captain, gave every soldier some opium.”
“What for?”
“They’d eat it and then they didn’t feel pain or fear.”
“But how could they fight if they were high?”
“Fightin’ for them was like a reflex. They fought and fought and wasn’t afraid’a nuthin’. That’s what Bristow called a real war on drugs.”
“You so crazy, Ronnie Bottoms.”
“Crazy ’bout you, girl. You know I been thinkin’ ’bout you ever since that night you made me buy you that Italian sub and celery soda.”
“You gonna get all crazy with me tonight?”
“Not with my arm like this. I think if my blood beats too hard, it’ll get bad.”
“So what am I supposed to do?” she asked with a hint of a smile behind the words.
Ronnie hugged her close and wondered what his soul mate in the other room was planning.
Freya allowed herself to be folded into the embrace, feeling oddly wonderful and definitely strange. For the first time since she was a little girl, she thought about having babies.
“Do you want to have children, Ronnie?”
His first thought was about the double rebirth of him and Lorraine in the secret place between the boulders in Central Park. This memory contained equal parts pain and ecstasy, miracle and something akin to death.
But these thoughts were too big for Freya’s tender question. She was hugging his neck and wanting him the way he’d once wanted. There was something transformational (though that wasn’t the word in his mind) that her small query brought about in his heart; a new road like that interminable path traveled by him and Lorraine on the journey between the Silver Box and their return to Central Park.
“Ronnie?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you?”
“Want to have children?”
“Uh-huh.”
“One day.”
“When you find the right girl?”
“I got the right girl right here.”