She took more blood and then said, “Hold Brown down while I inject him.”

  The request alone called up Temple. He moved through my skin to hold Brown by the shoulders. When the high school quarterback bucked from the pain, my inner anchor held him down with ease. A moment after the inoculation Brown fell back into restful unconsciousness.

  I stared at my son, wondering how I could be involved in such perversions without even a discussion. He was my boy and I loved him without expectation. He could have been anything, done anything, and I would still adore him. But I was proud of him too. He’d fought with the big Aryan avenger. He had suffered for not being strong enough to protect his mother and sister.

  I felt something wet and soft against the webbing of skin between my left thumb and forefinger. Looking, I saw that Tessa had knelt down to kiss that hand.

  Temple, who had not strayed far from my consciousness, lifted her in my arms and took her to the bedroom.

  I had never brought such cries of pleasure from my wife. She writhed and whispered, scratched bloody welts across my back, and whenever I came, she froze as if in some kind of religious trance.

  It was a grueling experience. Temple and Tessa were ecstatic, but I felt like the third wheel on a unicycle. At one point in the middle of their rapture Temple asked, “Have you been having sex with that man Truth?”

  A look of terror appeared on her face. She grabbed me by the head and said, “Never again, baby. I promise you that.”

  That was when I realized that Temple was indeed a part of me. His rage at Tessa’s infidelity drove him to such an extreme level of violence that he exited my body in mid-stroke, leaving me shaken and confused.

  “Marty?” my blood-wisened wife said.

  “You’ve been sleeping with him?” I asked.

  “We’d been together since I was in my early teens. It was him that I looked up to before you . . . and now you.”

  I sat down in half lotus at the end of the bed. Temple’s erection was now my limp cock. His rage was my philosophical attempt to make sense of betrayal. Maybe that’s why the forces of existence homed in on me. I was a wise man and therefore their fool. We philosophers ask questions because we sit on the outside of being, imagining that thought somehow has influence over reality.

  “I never satisfied you?” I said.

  “You gave me everything, Marty.”

  “You call him Martin.”

  “I’m sorry. I was raised in a place where men had to be violent and tough-minded. But I needed you. I need you more than Martin or Truth.”

  “Except with sex,” I said. “Except when you need to be with a man.”

  Tessa looked at me. I could see her pain reflecting my humiliation. I could see how much she loved me and needed me and, at the same time, how she’d never gotten past the perceived needs of her so-called disadvantaged past.

  We were both Black people, she and I, but race doesn’t come with a manual and a code of behavior—only our genes do that.

  I shook my head and got up off the bed.

  “Where are you going?” Tessa asked.

  “Do you love him?”

  “Which one?”

  “The blood,” I said then. “Is it like a conduit between what I dreamed and what you know?”

  “How I see things and just a few ideas,” she said, “like the hundred and seven.”

  “Were you ever just with me?”

  “I started seeing Truth when he got out of prison, seven years ago. He was so broken and scared. He saved me from a bad situation when I was a child.”

  “So Brown and Seal are mine?”

  “Of course. Of course they are.”

  “Which one?”

  “I just told you. Both children are yours.”

  “Which man do you love?”

  “I’m your wife, Marty. In my heart I am only yours.”

  “Okay then. To answer your question, I’m going downstairs.”

  Free will is the fount of all unhappiness. That’s what my professor back at university, Dondi Muller, used to say. He was from Copenhagen and bisexual. He lived in a three-bedroom flat with his daughter Igga and an old man named Furman.

  Planets don’t mind the fiery pain of birth or the inevitable crush of existence, he’d say. Beams of light do not question the arc of their passage. Only life defies fate. Only life tries to alter the course of rivers and the pull of gravity . . .

  Sitting on the long couch in my living room, I remembered the lecture for the first time since it was given. That was at a brown bag lunch-talk that a young undergrad named Tiffany Lumpkin wanted to attend. I thought that if I brought her she’d agree to go out with me, but Tiffany and Muller hooked up three days after that brown bag lunch-talk.

  He had been my advisor but I dropped him over the Tiffany thing.

  And now his words came back to counsel me about my role as an antibody in the loosely connected body of life on Earth.

  . . . but neither can the stuff of existence know happiness, Professor Muller had said. Rocks don’t cuddle or giggle, nor do they feel awe at the dawning of the day. Life imbues matter with meaning and this, this small and intangible projection, creates the space that we call the soul.

  I wondered if my bite worked differently than a direct blood injection. I almost went upstairs to ask Tessa but the door to our communications was closed—at least for the moment.

  Could my blood affect animals? Could Tessa or Rooster infect others as I had?

  Should I kill myself? Would that stop the seemingly inert matter of the universe from committing genocide on all life?

  This line of thought led to the real question that plagued me back when the world had not yet begun to change—back before the rise of the Eternal City and the March of Death. That question was: Am I crazy?

  I looked around the room where I had murdered a man and brought him back to life before the last breath fled his body.

  Maybe I belonged in an institution.

  It occurred to me that if I allowed professionals to examine my body and mind, they could say whether I seemed competent or not. They could identify schizophrenia or psychosis in my behavior or abnormalities in my blood. Maybe this was why my delusions tended toward concepts of the blood. Or maybe, maybe Tessa and I had experienced one of those rare mental disorders in which we labored under the same or similar delusions.

  There came a loud chime from the front door.

  This was odd because our doorbell was a distinctly unmusical buzzer.

  I waited a moment to see if Tessa would come running down—but she didn’t.

  So I went to the door and opened it.

  Standing there in the glare of the porch lamp was the slender man in the white trench coat. He was bald and his eyes were the color of liquid mercury. His pallid skin seemed almost synthetic. There was such stillness in his mien that it felt to me as if time had ceased or, at least, had paused in the space he inhabited.

  “Our souls once mingled,” he said.

  “Who are you?”

  “You are the one that was known as the Antibody and the Cure.” The little dome-headed white man sneered, evoking disdain and dismissal with the expression.

  Temple tried to take over my body but I, somehow, stopped him. While I was concentrating on suppression, the waxy white man reached out and grabbed my left wrist. Where he held me I felt a ring of cold. This was not an inert sensation but like a living organism attempting to worm its icy way through my flesh.

  I gasped at the feeling. It was like I had stuck my hand in the freezer and had been lassoed by the coils of a snake made of ice.

  The small man smiled.

  A shiver went down the back of my neck and made its way down my left arm to the place where the living cold had entered. The little white man looked up in mild surprise and then his hand leapt from my wrist like a cold frog from a heated stone.

  My temperature rose, fever-like. My breath became shallow and fast.

  Somewhere Temple was straining against an impassable barrier.

  I smiled at my ability to resist both the white man and the man inside me.

  “My name is Tor Waxman,” the bald man said in a conciliatory tone. “May I come in for a few moments?”

  “Why?”

  “We are brothers,” he said simply.

  If he had said anything else, threat or compliment, I would have turned him away. But his assertion of our kinship was like the evocation of an unbreakable bond. Whether we liked each other or not, whether we were enemies or not, we were still bound.

  His claim of affinity proved to me that I was not insane. He was really there, standing before me—not a hallucination but some kind of omnipotent angel loosed upon mortality like a magnificent and hungry tiger set on a field of grazing sheep.

  I stood aside and gestured for him to enter. He went into the living room and sat upon a wooden chair painted yellow by my wife during the first year of our marriage.

  Perching on the edge of our couch I asked, “So you went to sleep and woke up transformed?”

  “I died three days ago,” he said. “But before the last figments of life passed from my brain I was drawn into the Beyond by the forces that also took you.”

  “Like an alien abduction?”

  “That idea is so human,” Tor Waxman said, curling the left side of his upper lip. “We were the focus of the gods, the very stuff of the universe. You and I are harbingers of the Divine.”

  “And what message is it that you believe we are here to deliver?” I asked.

  “Death to life.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “The sham of life represents a cancer on the natural order of being, Martin Just.”

  “How do you know my name?”

  “I might be dead,” Waxman said. “I might be a demon but I can still read the newspaper. I died up in Riverside and awoke next to a woman the man I had been was married to for twenty years. As I took her life, I felt you. That afternoon I arrived in LA. The next morning I knew that it was you in the papers.”

  “You murdered your wife?”

  “I returned her to the Infinite.”

  “And what do you want to do with me?”

  “Between the effects of your bodily fluids and the effects of my touch we can raise an army of the obedient dead. Through these dead and deathless soldiers we can begin the eradication of all life.”

  I stared into his silver eyes. Waxman did not blink.

  “Why?”

  “You know why.”

  “But life is precious.”

  “The idea of self-importance is an illusion. Life is stupid. Only eternity is precious.”

  Temple was at the back of my mind, ranting to be released. He wanted to go to war with Waxman.

  I remained calm and by doing so kept him at bay.

  “No,” I said. “I cannot be a part of absolute genocide.”

  “There is no other way.”

  “If that’s so, why not just make Mars go out of orbit and crash into us?” I said. “Or maybe urge the sun to go supernova and burn life away? If this is God we’re talking about, why fool around with insignificant beings like you and me?”

  “You really don’t know the answer to those questions?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Eternity is quiescent. Aware in a way that only absolute being can be. It is not a physical thing, not at the root. Matter is simply the outline of a greater being.”

  “But I met many different beings in my sleep.”

  “All aspects of one master force, as you and I are parts of a single plan.”

  “If the universe is dormant, then how did it take you and me and all those others?” I asked. “How were we transformed?”

  “In the moment of what the science of this species calls the big bang, there is a nanosecond of motive for Being. During this transition, in the last bout of existence, the potential threat of life made itself manifest. When the current big bang occurred, in that brief tick of intention, a message was sent to the appropriate agents and we were created.”

  “You’re saying that the experience I had, we had, was crafted billions of years ago?”

  “Sixty-two oh five six three nine one eight eight nine zero zero zero one five two six seven so-called years past.” Tor Waxman smiled at the utterance of this number as if it were sacred.

  “If we both come from the same place, why can’t I remember all this?”

  “That is the right question,” he said through a deathly grin. “My . . . situation, my being dead made me more like the masters. I remember almost every­thing . . . almost.”

  “You remember that we are supposed to raise this army of the dead?”

  “It’s only logical.”

  “What is this, this touch—your power?” I asked then.

  “Death,” he said. “Any life-form I touch will die within twenty-four to one hundred and sixty-eight hours.”

  “But not me.” Somehow I knew this was true. “You knew that, but you had to try to kill me anyway.”

  “I didn’t know for sure.”

  “So you don’t know everything.”

  “Marty,” Tessa said. She had entered the room from the doorway that led to the stairs.

  Waxman leapt to his feet and ran at her. He grabbed her by both wrists.

  “Oh!”

  There was a moment when time stood still. Tor Waxman raised Tessa’s arms high as in triumph. I knew exactly what was transpiring. Soon, at the end of the day or, at most, the week, my wife would die from the dead man’s touch. The only way to save her was by my blood or spittle. And then she would transform into some kind of New Age zombie answerable to Waxman, intent on devastation.

  I hated him then.

  Tessa’s eyes closed and then opened. They were completely white, with neither pupil nor iris. Her mouth went slack and it seemed as if she’d fall. But then she closed her eyes and opened them again. Everything was normal and she brought down her arms with a triumphant whoop. Tor Waxman fell away from her and cowered.

  Tessa caressed her wrists with either hand and I found the strength to stand.

  “You have shielded them,” Waxman said to me.

  Tessa stumbled to the yellow chair and sat.

  “You’re smarter than you pretend to be, Antibody,” the embodiment of death rasped.

  Temple was clawing at my resistance while Tessa sobbed on her chair.

  Suddenly Waxman stood upright, a hunting knife in his left hand.

  “But she can still die the pedestrian death,” he said.

  Temple came forth in me like a madman ripping out of a straitjacket.

  Waxman’s silver eyes widened and without preamble he turned and ran.

  I was satisfied to let him go but Temple was not of the same opinion—and he was in charge.

  Death is fleet.

  He ran down the center line of Charbadon Lane, the street we lived on. I barreled after him with the grim determination of a predator, of another man who controlled my body.

  Tor cut down an alley, jumped on top of a parked car, and leapt from there to the roof of the garage.

  To my surprise I was able to match him step for leap.

  He hopped into the backyard behind the home we skipped over, ran across another driveway and then off into the Hollywood Hills.

  I followed close behind.

  The ground was uneven and the vegetation made the run an obstacle course, but Death was not stymied and neither was I.

  All around me I perceived the souls of living things. They quailed at the passage of Death. And I kept running, driven by the intensity of my alter ego, my adolescent ideal of a perfect self.

  Through more private properties, down a series of blacktop streets, and onto Hollywood Boulevard we ran. The boulevard was crowded with cars and pedestrians. Waxman was half a block ahead of us. We were slowly closing that gap when he stopped at a pink Cadillac. He opened the driver’s-side door and pulled the man sitting there out and onto the sidewalk. He jumped behind the wheel and without closing the door he hit the gas, running up on the curb, plowing through a crowd of pedestrians.

  Temple moved to copy Death’s actions. He took a step toward a copper-colored Buick but I clinched down on him. We froze in mid-step. I was the cage and Temple the trapped beast. I could feel him straining against my will but I would not relent. Tor Waxman didn’t care about innocent life, neither did Temple.

  There were shouts and screams, moans from the injured, and many, many bodies that littered the street and sidewalks. I was breathing harder than I ever had before. My lungs sucked down air desperately. I put my hands on my knees.

  Nobody noticed me because they were all running toward, or away from, the carnage that Waxman had wrought.

  I couldn’t get enough air.

  People were screaming.

  Within a minute or two, sirens sounded.

  With great concentration I stood upright. And, while the street wailed and cried, I staggered back the way I had come.

  The walk back home was the coda of one life and the beginning of another. I lurched, stiff-legged, up the hillside on a path Brown and I had often used on our walks together. I felt like a soldier from some long-ago war, walking home after a mighty conflagration in which all the foot soldiers on both sides of the battle had lost more than they’d gained. In the distance I could hear the mechanical wails of a dozen or more ambulances. I was still breathing hard.

  Temple had taken my body to the extreme of its endurance. He was the warrior, where I was just a draftee hoping to survive, traumatized by the ugliness of war.

  Halfway up the trail a huge bright-green moth with long, elegant gossamer wings landed on my left shoulder. I didn’t brush it away.

  Together, the moth and I climbed the Hollywood Hills. We reached the path that led to the web of small lanes that brought us finally to Charbadon.

  The door to my home was open again. It had been left that way from the frantic chase after Waxman.

 

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