He knocked.

  “Come in.”

  The slender clerk pushed the door open, bidding me enter with the same gesture.

  I walked into the sun-flooded room, surprised by the airiness and light.

  I guess I looked impressed by Lena’s digs because she said, “I get the morning sun. It makes me want to come to work early. How are you managing?”

  “I feel like the best-known name in LA. Yesterday, it seemed like even my wife didn’t know my name.”

  “Sit down, Mr. Just.”

  Clayborn’s broad wooden desk was painted clamshell pink, while the two wooden chairs before it, looking very much like kitchen chairs, were a carefree turquoise.

  “What are we going to do?” I asked my lawyer upon sitting.

  “So you want me to represent you?”

  “I thought we already settled that question.”

  “Your wife retained me, Mr. Just. I need you to accept her choice.”

  “Have you represented criminal cases before?”

  “That’s all I do. Tessa knew me because I represented an old boyfriend of hers—Truth Billings.”

  The mention of Truth sparked a question in my head.

  “And what can you say about my problem?” I asked, pushing the speculation down.

  “There’s not much there to convict you on either charge. You were naked in public view . . .”

  I suddenly had the almost irresistible urge to bite Ms. Clayborn. I was salivating and my jaws were clenched. Had I, in my sleep, been transformed into the living dead?

  I closed my eyes and shivered.

  “Is there something wrong, Mr. Just?”

  “Call me Martin, will you, Lena? We, we shouldn’t stand on ceremony.”

  I opened my eyes and forced a smile. Slowly, the impulse to devour my attorney ebbed away.

  “As far as the manslaughter charge is concerned . . . Martin, the bruises on your throat trump the ones on your fists.”

  I sighed.

  “It’s all so crazy,” I said.

  “Do you remember what happened?”

  “Only what I told the judge. I had that crazy dream and woke up disoriented. I’m still not right.”

  “I’d like you to go see my doctor. She can check you over for any underlying illness or trauma.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Okay. Maybe she’ll be able to tell me something helpful.”

  An appointment was made by phone. Dr. Ella Portman would see me as soon as I could make it to her office on Wilshire Boulevard.

  I stopped in the medical building’s parking garage and called my wife.

  “Hello?” Seal answered.

  “You’re still there, honey? I thought you were going to school.”

  “Mom needs me to hang around. And I really like this book.”

  “Is she up?”

  “Mom,” young Celestine called, and a moment passed.

  In that small span of time I wondered what I could do to escape my feelings of doom. My parents were both dead. My mother had been an only child and my father an orphan. I had no brothers or sisters, first cousins, uncles, or aunts. There was no family for me to call. I didn’t want Tessa or the children to have to bear my dread.

  “Marty?” Tessa murmured. I had changed from her lover to husband once more. “How are you feeling, baby?”

  “You haven’t called me that in years.”

  “Time has fallen out of kilter,” she said. I remember thinking that this was an odd choice of phrase.

  “Where are you?”

  “In a parking garage getting ready to go see a doctor.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “The lawyer sent me. How are you feeling?”

  “The nausea is gone. But I’m seeing things.”

  “That doesn’t sound good. Maybe you’re the one who should go see a doctor.”

  “No,” my wife said in a distant tone. “No. I’m not having hallucinations or anything like that. I’m seeing things that are very ordinary as if for the first time. I picked up the old thimble that came down from my great-great-grandmother, Narwyn. My mom told me that she used to be a seamstress on the Pinewood Plantation in Hickton, Mississippi, over a hundred years ago.

  “I studied the little finger cap for quarter of an hour. I saw the details and the way the finger pad was roughened to work against a needle’s point. There’s an enamel drawing of a white man in a top hat where the thumbnail fits. He’s holding up a piece of cloth . . . I never noticed that before.”

  “What’s wrong, baby?”

  “Was that you with me last night?” Tessa asked.

  “Of course it was me. You saw me, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. But you acted like another man. I called you Martin. I never call you Martin.”

  “I have to go to see this doctor, Tessa. Are you going to be all right?”

  “I’m fine. I’m just keeping Seal around in case I get stuck looking at something.”

  “Stuck?”

  “Go on, Marty. I’ll see you when you get home.”

  “You can put your clothes back on, Mr. Just,” Dr. Ella Portman said.

  “Any bones broken in my hands?”

  “No. Deep bruises, though. Were you in a fight?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “There are no head injuries,” she said, doubting my faulty memory.

  Dr. Portman was over seventy, tall, and distinguished looking. She had silver hair and was quite thin. Her yellow eyes, behind gold-rimmed glasses, were deep set and inquisitive.

  “I was in jail,” I said. “That was the trauma.”

  “What were you arrested for?”

  “Haven’t you read the paper today?”

  “I usually save all the papers up for Sunday and flip through them while on the exercise bike. Most of what you are told is lies. My father said that to me when I was just a child and I’ve always found it to be true.”

  “How am I, Doctor?”

  “Are you a health enthusiast, Mr. Just?”

  “No. I got three exercise machines sitting in the garage but never use them.”

  “Vegetarian?”

  “If pork is eggplant and lobster tail is really a fruit of the sea.”

  “You have the skin and eyes of an infant and your muscle tone is impressive. You never exercise?”

  “How’s my blood?”

  “We won’t know that for a few days. But from everything I can tell, you are in excellent health for a man half your age.”

  I didn’t go straight home. Instead I wandered over to Hancock Park and sat down on a bench next to the fenced-in tar pits. It was the most ancient place I knew of, and my mood was tending toward the prehistoric.

  I couldn’t, at the time, remember anything about the Plan other than that it was something as old as the ancestors of the atoms that my body was composed of. Beneath me, deep in the soil, lay the bones of wooly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers. This same history resided in my flesh, my bones. My existence was both impossible and eternally recurring, related to every event in the wide universe and particular, though in no way unique.

  While I sat there watching the fence that kept the casual human or animal from meandering to its doom, I tried to understand my predicament.

  Was I crazy? Maybe I’d had a stroke in the night. Dr. Portman hadn’t used any advanced examination tools to scan my brain. My perception could have been off like a derailed high-speed train barreling through primordial woods.

  It struck me that I had neither gone to work nor called to explain that I’d be out for a few days. The job I had worked at for seventeen years meant nothing to me.

  Forty-seven. That’s how old I was. Three and a half months and I’d be forty-eight. Tessa was ten years younger. She’d been going out with a drug dealer, the man named Truth Billings, when we, she and I, met at an upscale coffee shop in Westwood. I was working on my graduate thesis on ancient philosophy and she asked me why I was reading those boring books. I asked her out. She said that her boyfriend would kill me. Actually, she called him her old man. I took her to Santa Barbara for a three-day weekend. We talked and talked about school and the inherent opportunities connected to education. We didn’t have sex. I felt impotent next to her vitality and beauty, but for some reason this caused her to have affection for me.

  I took her home on Tuesday, and Truth was waiting inside. He was taller and blacker than I, with a vicious scar under his right eye. He pointed a pistol at my head and told me to get out.

  I refused. This was the one act of true bravery in all of my forty-seven years.

  Tessa told me to go.

  Once again, I refused.

  Truth told me that he would not hesitate to kill me.

  I told him that I loved Tessa.

  He said that she was his woman.

  I asked him if he would die for her.

  “Tessa?” he said.

  “Yeah?” she replied.

  “You love this niggah here?”

  “I don’t know for sure,” she said, “but I think so.”

  He pressed the muzzle against my forehead.

  “You know what I learned livin’ in the street?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Whatever you can take from me—you can have.”

  He put the gun at the back of his pants, under a white gabardine jacket, and walked out of Tessa’s studio apartment. They have remained friends over the years. He’s been to prison and, Tessa tells me, is now out of the drug trade. I never see him. She’s told me that he says he wants her back, but she tells him that she’s got a family now and there’s no going back from that.

  Something about her claim seemed to have importance beyond our relationship, at least at that moment in time. There was no going back for me either. Whether I was crazy or something beyond Superman and his vaunted Fortress of Solitude, I could not go back to the man I was, living the meaningless if wonderful life of a mortal human being at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

  The front door was open when I got home at 7:17 that evening. Normally, that simple fact would have scared me. I’ve always been a nervous kind of guy. But now an open door was just par for the course, as my father, a man who never golfed in his life, used to say.

  “I’m home,” I called upon entering the foyer of our modest two-story home.

  “Here we are,” a man said in a forced, coarse falsetto voice.

  Three men in jeans, T-shirts, and tattooed white flesh met me in the living room. My family was seated on the long tan sofa. Brown’s left eye was puffy and blackened, while Seal’s jaw had a stoic set to it with contradictorily frightened eyes.

  When Tessa’s eyes met mine, they lit up and she gave a muted smile.

  “It’s the head nigger,” the white man who had greeted me said. His voice was now a moderate tenor if still a bit coarse. “We been waitin’ for you to start the party.”

  The other two men were standing guard behind my family.

  It was all pathetically apparent. These men were associates of Lon Farthey. They had read, or had someone read to them, the address of my home in the irresponsible daily paper. I was to be tortured and killed but not before my wife and daughter were raped and my son slaughtered.

  It was Temple who made these assumptions. I never would have jumped to conclusions so quickly. I was a thinker, a de facto diplomat. I would have asked what they wanted. Maybe I would have offered them money and my silence.

  All Temple did was condemn and salivate. He hunched down like a dog in my breast. All I had to do was relinquish control and he would show me, and my grinning wife, what real manhood was.

  I relaxed my hold on this physical realm and Temple leapt at the mouthpiece for the gang. With his/my left elbow he cracked the big, fat white man’s jaw.

  “Hey!” yelled both of his friends.

  Then Temple socked the shocked leader right in the Adam’s apple. His next action was a bit of a surprise. He bit viciously into the side of the man’s neck.

  I was, Temple was, leaping over the sofa while the defeated leader slumped to the floor. My inordinately powerful hands grabbed the closest and shortest man by the shoulders and slammed him against the wall with such force that he was immediately rendered unconscious. I bit into his jaw and let him drop.

  When I turned to the last attacker, he was both afraid and armed with a vicious-looking hunting knife.

  I quailed at the prospect, but Temple grinned.

  “Get him, honey,” Tessa said.

  Time slowed to a quarter its natural speed. The last invader moved back, felt the wall behind him, and then came forward at a speed he believed was good enough to accomplish his murderous ends. I waited, waited, waited until the point of his blade was maybe four inches from my chest.

  Celestine yelled.

  I, or more correctly Temple, grabbed the big man’s wrist, moved to the side while twisting the arm behind him, and then bit deeply into the back of his neck. He yelled and crumpled to the floor, disoriented and weak.

  I used an ochre pillow from the sofa to wipe the blood from my lips and chin. I was still salivating, like a feral predator.

  “Daddy!” Seal shouted, but it was Tessa who ran into my arms. She kissed my bloody mouth and grunted with secondhand satisfaction.

  The real me, Marty, was appalled by my actions and her response. But Temple was in my hands and arms. It was Temple who returned her victorious kiss.

  “Brown,” Temple said.

  “Yeah, Dad?”

  “We’re going to lay these guys out side by side on the floor here. Move the coffee table over against the wall.”

  The smaller guy was already unconscious so I moved him first. The other two were woozy, losing consciousness in slow motion. I pushed them down and laid them out on the floor next to their compatriot.

  “Should I call the police?” asked Seal.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’ll see. Why don’t you go in the kitchen and boil some water, honey?”

  In a trance-like state, Celestine walked out of the living room. Tessa was holding my arm while Brown gazed vacantly, slowly giving in to shock.

  “Get Brown a shot of whiskey,” I said to my wife.

  She grinned and left my side.

  “Have a seat, son.”

  He backed toward the couch and fell rather than properly sitting down.

  “I tried to stop them,” he mumbled, “but that guy knocked me down.”

  He was pointing at the man I hit in the throat. I scanned the inert bodies. They were all unconscious. The first man I hit, the one who struck my son, might have been dead.

  One by one I ripped open the fronts of their T-shirts. When I was finished Tessa returned with a water glass half filled with amber fluid. This she handed to our son.

  “Drink as much as you can, Brown,” I said. And then to my wife, “Go see about Seal.”

  Tessa smiled at me. She was a new woman, as changed as I was. I realized then, under the dominant worldview of Temple, that my power was to infect, with the edicts of infinity, my own blood. The men I fought were touched by the influence of my saliva, but in a more profound way Tessa was altered by the transmission of blood.

  I went to the men one by one and laid my hand upon their bare chests. My palm felt hot.

  The third man that I had bitten writhed in agony at the touch. Almost instantly I understood that he was responding to some kind of celestial contagion that manifested itself through the alpha personality that was now anchored to my mild and mortal being.

  Brown sipped at his whiskey, not looking at the men laid out on the floor like dead and dying bodies set out in preparation for mass burial.

  I waited.

  Last bitten, first risen. The man who had only been infected by my saliva sat up and looked at me.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “You and your friends came in here for retribution,” Temple replied.

  Sitting on his butt, hugging his knees, the man nodded.

  “But all that’s over now,” I said, taking control from my newly minted alter ego.

  Again the man nodded.

  “What’s your name?” I asked him.

  “They call me Rat Man,” the little guy said, nodding toward his unconscious cronies, “but my name is Mason, Mason Drinkman.”

  Looking into each other’s eyes, Mason and I seemed to be transferring unconscious information. While we stared, my wife and daughter came in from the kitchen.

  Brown was still sipping his whiskey.

  The smaller man sat up.

  His name was Sean Gardener, and he was also known as Reaper. He turned to a shivering Celestine and said, “I’m sorry for what we did and what we was gonna do. I don’t even understand it now.”

  My daughter nodded and looked away. She would have fled if Tessa hadn’t been holding her by the shoulders.

  “What about Rooster?” Mason “Rat Man” Drinkman asked.

  “He’s dead,” Temple said with my voice box.

  Brown stood up suddenly, looking down on the corpse.

  “You want us to take care of it?” Reaper asked.

  “That won’t be necessary,” Temple replied.

  And, as if responding to an implied command, the dead home invader sprang to life, coming to his feet and holding his deeply bruised Adam’s apple. He began coughing, fell back onto his knees, and vomited thick, black fluid.

  Wild-eyed, he said to the floor, “I was, was, was dead. I was dead.”

  Everyone in the room was staring at him, a little stunned. Even Temple was silent.

  The would-be killer nicknamed Rooster looked up at the wall and said, “He’s out there. He’s out there.” He was more afraid of the entity outside than he was of his own death and resurrection.

  For a moment Temple and I shared the same point of view. There was someone outside—we could feel it too.

 

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