Touched, page 1
TOUCHED
Also by Walter Mosley
Easy Rawlins Mysteries
Blood Grove
Charcoal Joe
Rose Gold
Little Green
Blonde Faith
Cinnamon Kiss
Little Scarlet
Six Easy Pieces
Bad Boy Brawly Brown
Gone Fishin’
A Little Yellow Dog
Black Betty
White Butterfly
A Red Death
Devil in a Blue Dress
Leonid McGill Mysteries
Trouble Is What I Do
And Sometimes I Wonder About You
All I Did Was Shoot My Man
When the Thrill Is Gone
Karma
Known to Evil
The Long Fall
Other Fiction
Every Man a King
The Awkward Black Man
Down the River unto the Sea
John Woman
Debbie Doesn’t Do It Anymore
Stepping Stone / Love Machine
Merge / Disciple
The Gift of Fire / On the Head of a Pin
The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey
The Tempest Tales
The Right Mistake
Diablerie
Killing Johnny Fry
Fear of the Dark
Fortunate Son
The Wave
47
The Man in My Basement
Fear Itself
Futureland: Nine Stories of an Imminent World
Fearless Jones
Walkin’ the Dog
Blue Light
Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned
RL’s Dream
Original Ebooks
The Further Adventures of Tempest Landry
Parishioner
Odyssey
Nonfiction
Elements of Fiction
Folding the Red into the Black
The Graphomaniac’s Primer
Twelve Steps Toward Political Revelation
This Year You Write Your Novel
Life Out of Context
What Next: A Memoir Toward World Peace
Workin’ on the Chain Gang
Plays
The Fall of Heaven
TOUCHED
A NOVEL
WALTER
MOSLEY
Atlantic Monthly Press
New York
Copyright © 2023 by Walter Mosley
Jacket design by Gretchen Mergenthaler
Jacket artwork © Tigran Tsitoghdzyan
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or permissions@groveatlantic.com.
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: October 2023
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.
ISBN 978-0-8021-6184-0
eISBN 978-0-8021-6185-7
Atlantic Monthly Press
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
groveatlantic.com
I awoke on a Saturday morning with the Plan fully formed, but fading, in my mind. Nothing else had changed. It was as if I had gone to sleep years before, contemplating a tricky conundrum, and remained in that doze until the knotty question had been completely disentangled—at least mentally so, at least for a while.
But when I awoke it was merely the next morning, as if time had folded back on itself, depositing me where I was before.
Tessa was in bed next to me, sound asleep. Her hair was wrapped in violet nylon netting. She’d sleep for two more hours. Brown would certainly be asleep in his room and Celestine, whom everyone called Seal, was probably sitting in her bed reading a library book.
I sat up and took a deep breath that felt like my first inhalation in a very long time.
Cells began to fire in my body. That’s the only way I can describe it. It was as if my physiology had also undergone some kind of transformation. I could feel my organs and glands pumping out chemicals, altering tissue and even bone.
There had been an azure plane where beings, not human, had poked and butted me, fondled and fucked me in ways that made no sense in the earthly realm. I was there and others were too, other people, human beings, being prepared for something, for some things. It occurred to me that we were not all in accordance. Our Plans were different and sometimes even at odds. There were 107 assigned to the Great Change, but our tasks often seemed to contradict one another.
One hundred and seven human beings conditioned and trained to prepare for the Transition. But there were other creatures too; other earthly life-forms that were there to complete us—or maybe we were there to complete them or, even more accurately, to complete a circuit, a turning, a revolution.
It was only on that Saturday morning, with Tessa sleeping next to me and the sun slanting in through the seam of our heavy curtains, that I understood the Plan in its totality. And even then, while I was rousing from my centuries-long sleep, the lessons I had learned were receding into the shelves and cubbyholes of my unconscious mind.
I can remember only some of it now, after the first skirmish in an intergalactic invasion. There was a place that gave the impression of many shades of blue, but I can’t say if my eyes were working there. I was aware of different beings from a vast range of planes and realities. They spoke to me but in ways that transformed rather than informed me. They were like a congress that met only once, decided on the fates of worlds, and then disbanded when their words, their annunciations, had been received and digested.
My world, they said, was wrong. It, the planet itself, had spawned a disease of which I was a part. This contagion had begun to multiply and it had to be rendered impotent—by any means necessary.
I was to be an antibody in the eradication of this rampant syndrome. I was the cure or, more precisely, a cure.
And there were others who were being modified, as I was, to rid Earth of the danger of the genetic disorder of humankind—107 men and women refashioned to save the universe from the biology and resultant technology of evil.
There were 107 different plans, some radically diverse.
As I climbed out of bed the memories began to retreat. I knew that everything was different but I could no longer name the various other treatments (106 human beings), our agreements, and our therapeutic conflicts.
Throwing open the drapes, I forgot these serious issues and grinned broadly at the flood of sunlight.
I slid open the glass door to our second-floor deck and walked outside feeling that I was entering the world, committing to a battle like any foot soldier given his orders, obeying because that was my conditioning and my duty.
Mr. Snyder’s oak tree swayed in the morning breeze. There was the smell of fuel in the air and of food cooking.
“Mama, look!” a child shouted, but for me, at that moment, it was just one of the myriad sensations of this old/new world.
I had been a petty human when I had fallen asleep a thousand years ago but now I was something else.
One hundred and seven ways to change the world and no two of them in exact accordance. How could this end well? Beyond the chill on my skin and the chemicals in the air, I could feel the vibration of souls all around. Errant and leaky, confused and starving—the souls of insects and trees, humans and other mammals all drawn to the impossible hope of unity.
This notion of harmony arrested my worries. I had been in a place where there had been agreement among differences, something beyond love and understanding. I closed my eyes and imagined this pristine moment as if maybe it was a gaudy, rainbow-colored barge sailing off, leaving only the hope of something that had always been an impossible dream.
Standing out in that early morning, I knew it was my job to recall that amazing notion and to make everyone in the world aware.
I don’t know how long I stood like that, with the notion of the absolute fading from my mind but at the same time exhilarating my heart.
“Marty,” she said.
I turned to see my wife of a millennium ago. She was dark brown in a blue-and-green kimono. Beautiful, almost forgotten, it seemed impossible that she stood there.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Today?” I inquired.
Did she know what my mission was? Was she one of the crusaders? I realized then that I had never had
“Standing out here naked,” she said, “and look at your, your thing.”
I was naked and had become aroused sexually when I saw Tessa. The wind and sun felt good on my skin. The air in my lungs was rich and lush.
“There’s a change coming,” I said. There was an odd lilt to my words; an accent developed during the centuries away.
“What?”
I took a step toward her and reached out to take her by the wrist.
Tessa was afraid but she was also worried. While pulling her wrist away, she moved her shoulder toward me. It was a language older than humanity coming from the poetry of the genetic soul.
“Hold it right there!” a man shouted.
If I had been back for just a few more days, maybe just a few more hours, I would have been able to decipher the threat in those words. But my body had not finished with its internal makeover and the old world was new to me again—alien.
“God is not a being,” I said to my wife. “It is an ever-recurring, never-the-same meeting of entities that come together, not unlike the myth of the primal atom.”
“What?” she asked while looking over the deck at something on the lawn below.
“I said, don’t move!” came the voice again.
Tessa was looking at the origin of the command. Without letting her go, I turned my head in that direction.
There were two people in similar garments, a man and a woman, with weapons held high and pointed at me.
I stared at them, trying to make the proper associations, straining to understand what these two humans had to do with eternity.
While the woman kept a bead on me, the man, with great dexterity, climbed on top of our picnic table and hopped over the short railing surrounding our deck. He pulled out his gun again.
Tessa shouted and pulled away from me.
She moved toward the policeman, who was the color of bronze, but short. I don’t know why I thought a man of that coloring should be . . . larger.
“Get on your knees!” the bronze man said as he pushed Tessa to the side, out of the line of fire.
I noticed a woman and a girl-child standing in the yard next door. The woman was trying to keep the child from looking. It was then that I realized I still had the erection.
“On your knees!”
Was I being arrested for my erection? No. It was more complex than that.
I looked up a bit and saw Los Angeles down the hill from our second-floor balcony. The view was majestic to my human sense of proportions and, at the same time, quaint, almost miniscule, to the vision that had grown, was growing, inside me while simultaneously hiding the Plan from my consciousness.
I felt an impact against the side of my head and gravity took over from my natural biological resistance. That, I thought, was one of the keys to the threat of humankind. We, the elements of life, resist the natural flow of things. Aggression was part of the essence of biological life. This genetic irrationality was inherited from the first viruses that spawned in the warm pools of Early Earth.
Tessa screamed.
“Daddy!” Brown yelled.
“Stay back!” the cop hollered.
“Are you all right?” the female cop, an Asian woman, shouted. She was talking to my wife.
“Daddy!” Seal—Celestine—cried.
I went limp trying to counteract the gyre of escalating violence that I seemed to be causing. Or maybe it was the blow to my head that was slowing my mind. At any rate, darkness engulfed the multitude of thoughts associated with my consciousness, paring them down to a dark cavity below the surface of perception.
I awoke for the second time since my reincarnation.
I was in a short bed with a soft mattress beneath me, swaddled in a straitjacket that was bound to that bed.
“. . . but he was just sleepwalking, and the cops attacked him,” a woman was saying.
“He resisted arrest,” a man responded. “He’s going to have to stand trial, at least go before a judge.”
“Fine,” the woman relented, “but let him go home.”
“We can’t.”
“Mr. Just has never even been arrested for speeding,” the woman said. “What is the reasoning behind incarcerating him?”
“It is procedure to arrest the suspected perpetrator concerning any complaint of a sexual nature having to do with children.”
“What complaint?”
“He was naked and sexually aroused in front of a nine-year-old girl.”
“He was on the balcony of his own home, sleepwalking.”
“In plain sight of a nine-year-old girl.”
There were chemicals in my veins; I could taste them. Allowed enough time, I could have given them names on the Great List of the Moments of Existence as detailed by the Celestial Congress that anointed me “The Cure.” There were others on the list: The Answer, The Final Solution, The Gift of Laughter, and many more, most of which I had forgotten.
I sighed and sat upright.
“What’s going on?”
“Martin Just?” a man in a too-green suit asked me. He was what they call a Caucasian—a white man thirty pounds overweight and suffering from more than just the disease of mortality.
“Yes?”
“I am placing you under arrest for resisting an officer of the law and for lewd public display.”
“What’s your name and rank?” I asked.
This question irked the middle-aged cop.
“Detective Thomas O’Halloran,” he said. “Benson?”
Two uniformed policemen, one obviously named Benson, came into the room.
“Get him dressed, down to the precinct, and booked,” Detective O’Halloran declared.
“This isn’t right,” the woman speaker said.
She was maybe thirty, in a bright-red dress designed for a party and not a legal debate. Her heavy features kept her from being classically beautiful, but she was magnetic and there was a powerful, animalistic life force pulsing inside her.
“Take it up with the judge in the morning, Ms. Clayborn,” O’Halloran said.
“This man does not deserve to be thrown in jail,” the woman called Ms. Clayborn protested.
“Where are Tessa and the kids?” I asked.
The cop and lawyer turned their heads toward me.
“It’s late,” the woman told me. “Visiting hours are over and you’ve been sequestered at any rate.”
“What’s your name?” I asked the woman while the policemen worked on untying my restraints.
“Lena, Lena Clayborn,” she said. “I’m your lawyer.”
“I broke the law?” This idea struck a chord of fear in my core. It had nothing to do with petty human laws or morals. It was the possibility that I might fail in my duty that brought on mortal dread.
“You didn’t do anything wrong, Mr. Just,” the lawyer said. “This is simply a misunderstanding that has gotten out of hand.”
“Put these on,” one of the uniformed policemen ordered.
He was holding out a pale-green hospital outfit; loose pants and a jacket-like shirt with mid-forearm sleeves.
I reached for the clothing and noticed how dark my skin was compared to that of the other people in the room. I was reminded then that I was a Black man. This was once a very important detail of my life, inordinately so. My coloring defined a place among others that was varied and inconsistent but rarely a benefit. Race had made me at once different and part of an imagined whole.
“You might want to leave while the man gets dressed,” O’Halloran said to the female lawyer.
“I’m staying with my client as long as possible.”
I hustled on my pants and pulled on the cotton shirt.
“Where’s your shoes?” the second uniform asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Standing in the garish whiteness of the fluorescent-lit hospital room, I was trying to maintain balance. My body was still changing while the images in my mind were dissipating. I woke up hours before, in my own bed, certain in my knowledge of God, but this certainty was slowly devolving into a kind of disorganized belief system. I was under arrest for having an erection and I was a Black man, whatever that was supposed to mean.
“Under the bed,” O’Halloran said to me.
There was a pair of green paper slippers on the floor. I stepped into them.
