IT WAS LONG after midnight in Central Park. Bruised, bloodied, and in charred tatters from fire and flying shards of stone, Lorraine and Ronnie lay side by side, unconscious, dying.
They were there in the bushes, no more than a foot between them, bleeding and expiring from a disaster unimaginable by most human beings.
A muscle convulsion caused Lorraine to turn in her last moment, and her right hand brushed against Ronnie’s left elbow. Slowly the wounds, contusions, and internal injuries began to heal themselves. The broken bones and malfunctioning organs began repairing themselves. Breath returned and deepened.
Two hours passed.
Ronnie opened his eyes first. He sat up and pulled Lorraine to him.
She smiled and put her fingers to his cheek. “God is dead,” she said.
“Him and his father too,” Ronnie added.
“How did we survive?”
“Because we were supposed to,” Ronnie said, “or at least it was a chance he took.”
“So you think we have to do it?”
“At least we got to try.”
“But how? There’s not enough to either one of us.”
“Then let’s dig our hands in the dirt and do it that way, the old way that maybe never was.”
* * *
ON THEIR KNEES facing each other, Lorraine and Ronnie clasped hands and then speared them into the ground much as Clavell had done to the duplicitous Ti-ti. At first they felt nothing. But then the earthworms and roots, bacteria and underground voles, moles and other rodents allowed their life force to be sucked up into the vortex created by the enemies-turned-friends.
The ground beneath them turned hot and a mound of earth grew beneath their knees. Slowly a head and then a slender pair of shoulders rose up out of the ground. A tall black man who was arisen from both the minds and the blood of Lorraine and Ronnie.
Naked and somewhat ageless, UTB-Claude stood between them. He was weak and they exhausted. There was a smile among them; Ronnie saw that Claude’s eyes were a metallic white like platinum and then they were all unconscious, lying on the turned-up earth that was the womb for the last vestige of the Silver Box.
* * *
WHEN THE POLICE came the next morning and rousted the trio, there was no resistance from them. As a matter of fact, they were all smiling and officers wrapped blankets over their shoulders.
There were six officers for the three naked and near-naked trespassers.
“These dudes jumped us,” Ronnie said as handcuffs were put on him. “Clavell, Nontee, and this guy callin’ himself Inglo. They beat our ass an’ stripped us. Don’t ask me why.”
“That’s right,” Lorraine said. “I think they were mad that we were together.”
“What about you?” a caramel-colored cop asked the tall black man who didn’t have a stitch of clothing. There was dirt in the tall black man’s hair and he had eyes of shining white.
“What about me?”
“Were you attacked?”
“Hell yeah, I was. And I got a lawyer too. His name is Roland Gideon.”
Ronnie Bottoms laughed out loud, and Lorraine breathed a sigh of relief.