RONNIE FELT AN oily, slithering shock travel up his arm like a living thing burrowing under the skin. It was a frightening sensation but at the same time so powerful that he bowed his head as his mother used to make him do in church when the minister was saying the prayer.
He could see Lorraine clearly but not the space she was in. He was sorry that he killed her. He wanted to say that he’d only done it because she was screaming, but this seemed to him like a poor excuse.
“How are you doin’ this?” he asked.
“The Silver Box,” Lorraine said.
“Huh?”
“I need you to resurrect me, Ronnie.”
“Like Jesus?”
“No,” she said, “like a man making up for his mistake, like Ma Lin will never be able to do for all those poor people he killed.”
“The chink?”
“He is from Vietnam,” Lorraine said. “He was a soldier who murdered his own people because he thought it was his duty.”
Ronnie felt the truth of her words without images or specific details. He knew that the little old man had crossed the same lines he had. This made him think that he wasn’t alone.
“You had no right to do to me what you did,” Lorraine said. “I didn’t do anything to you. You had no right.”
“No,” Ronnie said.
“No?” the spirit screamed.
“I did not have the right to take your life.”
“Give it back to me.” Lorraine’s words echoed in his mind.
Ronnie closed his eyes and then opened them again. He found himself alone on his knees with his left hand on the stinking corpse head. On the ground next to the body lay a white stone about the size of a softball. He gripped the stone with his right hand and …
* * *
THE STINGING, OILY, writhing feeling that had been traveling up his left arm changed directions. Instead of flowing into him, it was tugging at his insides, wanting him to give in and release.
“You killed me,” Lorraine said. She was standing somewhere out of sight.
“So what you want?”
“Life.”
The word set off a series of connections in Ronnie’s mind. He saw himself raging and lashing out with a dispassionate eye. He didn’t understand why the man he was had been so angry and violent and just plain mad.
The metaphysical snake pulled at his arm like a playful dog wanting the ball to be thrown.
Ronnie saw his mother sitting in her chair in front of the TV. Her low-cut blouse revealed the tattoo of the name Missy on the upper part of her left breast. Grandmama Missy, his mother’s mother.
Ronnie’s mind’s eye settled on that word tattooed over a red heart on dark brown skin. He would place his cheek next to there and listen to the deep pounding of Big Mama’s real heart. She would put her hand on his side and hum some song she’d forgotten the words to. And he was so happy.…
The snake that was devouring and pulling on his arm was blind and writhing. The motion of its body was both language spoken and language heard.
Listening to Big Mama’s heart; that was life. And it was so beautiful and wonderful and safe that Ronnie would dream of that beat all through the night. If he woke up without her there, he would scream until she came and gathered him into the deep drumbeat of her embrace.
Then, from a place in the pit of his gut, Ronnie Bottoms felt the surge of passion, love, and freedom. It was like the magma flow of volcanoes that Miss Peters talked about in third grade science. The hot surging energy rose up through his chest past the left shoulder and down his arm into the incorporeal snake’s maw. Ronnie’s right hand gripped the white stone and it hummed in response. His bones vibrated as the whole history of his rage and anger turned miraculously into the humming love of his mother and the desire of the woman he’d killed.
It was like an orgasm that wouldn’t stop, an outpouring of love and rage and power and, and, and with God holding his shoulders so that he didn’t spiral off that perfect pussy pushing up against his unrelenting thrust.
At some point Ronnie realized that he was dying, that a man cannot come so long and hard without giving up his life. But he didn’t care about dying, because Lorraine had come into view like a green island after many years on the open sea. She was vast and beautiful and full of strange music that blared and insinuated, sang and laughed.
He felt his bones cracking and theoretical venom flowing into his veins. He squeezed that rock so hard that he thought his fingers might break. He opened his eyes and saw an endless plane of scarlet. Lorraine was singing crazily somewhere to his left while the stone purred like a sleepy tiger to the right.
The last thing Ronnie thought before losing consciousness was that he might get ripped apart between the python and tiger. Instead of fear, this notion called up the anticipation of ecstasy. If he were torn open, his essence could work its way back toward all the drifting souls in the universe, into outer space that really, he realized, was not empty at all.
* * *
THE SILVER BOX was enthralled with the passage of energy between Ronnie and the murdered woman. Lorraine Fell’s extracted and reconstituted consciousness hollered while the young man poured out his matter and his soul for her. The sympathy, the music between them was a perfect counterweight to the ignorance and hatred that formed these two frail entities. So much power was released that the Box had to erect a barrier between them and the rest of the park.
The understanding occurring, there under the pebble moon, in an almost forgotten corner of the universe, was a synchronicity so complex that Silver Box would have had to snuff out an entire galaxy to generate enough power to equal it. The divine machine’s perception units turned one after the other toward this deific phenomenon. So intent was Silver Box on Ronnie and Lorraine that for an infinitesimal fraction of a nanosecond, it forgot all else.