Tessa was still sitting on the yellow chair that she had painted so long ago. She was caressing her wrists and staring off into space when I knelt before her and put my head on her lap.

  We didn’t speak for a long time.

  And then there came a soft, beautiful humming sound. It was a complex interweaving of melodies that were both otherworldly and distinctly alive. Inside the composition were supernovas and peasant dances, tin horns and pure vibrations that moved between the folds of space.

  “Where did you find it?” Tessa asked.

  Taking in a deep breath, the final gulp I needed for recuperation, I saw that the great moth had moved from my shoulder to her hands and wrists. The music emanated from the emerald insect.

  “It found me,” I said.

  “Is he dead?”

  “He escaped. He jumped in a car and ran down a crowded block of people. The man you call Martin wanted to follow but I wouldn’t let him.”

  “Let’s go to bed,” she said.

  We slept in Celestine’s room, me with Brown and Tessa with our daughter. The moth draped its nine-inch-long wings down the lamp on the desk. It purred a strain that led inward and downward, across a plain of stars and darkness.

  “Dad.”

  Someone was shaking me.

  “Dad.”

  I opened my eyes to Brown’s burly shoulders and brooding mien.

  The moth had arranged itself on the window. The transparent wings seemed to glitter in the sunlight.

  The other bed across the room was empty.

  “Where’s your mother and sister?”

  “Downstairs.” Brown’s eyes peered into mine. We were seeing things in each other that we’d not known a few days before. We were kin and kindred but there was more. Our family had increased to include all life. And life itself had become a solitary entity writhing in its own skin—becoming.

  I sat up with some effort.

  “The phone’s for you,” Brown said. “It’s after twelve.”

  Phones and clocks didn’t seem the appropriate topic. We should have been discussing the pulse of existence and what the past had rendered unto the present.

  “It’s your lawyer,” Brown said as if in counterpoint to my thoughts. “Mom says that you have to talk to her.”

  My son held out his hand. I snagged it and he pulled me up and out of bed with ease. I was wearing black slacks and a white T-shirt, no shoes or socks.

  I closed my eyes and opened them.

  “How do you feel, son?”

  “Like I could walk up into the sky and disappear.”

  We embraced and I went downstairs, wondering if I was the disease and not the cure.

  “Hello?” I said into the phone in my den.

  “I expected to hear from you before now, Mr. Just.”

  Just—yes, that was my name.

  “I don’t remember you asking me to call.”

  “Mr. Just, you can’t take this thing lightly. The prosecutor wants your head.”

  “I assure you, Ms. Clayborn, that I am not treating these accusations superficially. It’s just that I’ve been trying to come to grips with the ramifications in my life. I was so upset and exhausted that I only just woke up when you called.”

  “Then you need an alarm, Mr. Just.”

  “Did you hear from the doctor?”

  “She said that you were fine except for the bruises on your throat and hands. The trauma to your neck, she said, definitely came from an attempt to strangle you.”

  “That’s good, right?” I said.

  “Nothing’s one hundred percent with Fyodor Trapas against you.”

  “I’m sorry if I seem flip or uninvolved or anything, Ms. Clayborn. Is there something I can do now?”

  The buzzer for the front door sounded at that moment. This reminded me of the chime that went off in my mind when Tor Waxman called. As I thought of Waxman, a thrill of fear for the safety of my family went through me.

  I was still worried about something so insignificant as a single family unit; an infinitesimal piece of one of a billion trillion beings that comprised existence.

  “I guess not,” Lena Clayborn was saying in my ear. “Excuse me for chastising you, Mr. Just. I’m only trying to make sure that you get the best representation.”

  “It’s the police, Dad,” my daughter said at the door of the den.

  “Thank you, Ms. Clayborn. I might be calling you soon.”

  Two uniformed members of the LAPD stood at my front door. They were talking to my wife.

  “. . . no, no,” Tessa was saying. “I mean, I did hear the sirens last night but I haven’t listened to the radio or watched TV this morning.”

  The policemen were both white, both male. They were young. One was pudgy and the other thin. They were living beings: revolutionary insurgents, by definition, against the quiescent universe.

  “Hello,” I said.

  The great green moth floated down the stairs, landing on the wall above the front door. One of the cops, the heavyset one, looked up to see where it had gone.

  “Mr. Just?” the thin cop said.

  “Yes.”

  “There was a crime committed down on Hollywood Boulevard last night. A crazy man, maybe under the influence of drugs, hijacked a car and drove it down a crowded sidewalk.”

  “Oh no,” Temple said. “Was anyone seriously hurt?”

  “There have been nineteen fatalities so far. A few of the thirty-nine people in the hospital are critical.”

  “My God,” Temple blasphemed. “Do you think that the man is from up around here?”

  The chubby policeman looked down from the moth and into my eyes.

  “Why would you ask that?” he asked.

  “Because you’re here telling me about the crime,” my template proclaimed. “I doubt that you’d be wasting your time for any other reason.”

  “A few witnesses said that they saw a Black man chasing the carjacker,” the heavy cop stated. “They were both running pretty hard.”

  Brown moved to my side, catching the skinny policeman’s attention.

  “I didn’t see anything like a chase. Was the carjacker a Black man too?”

  “No.”

  I was of two minds—literally. Temple wanted to grab the police and bite them. He wanted to make sure that we didn’t have any further complications with the law.

  I, on the other hand, did not believe that there was any concrete evidence against me and wanted to let the scene play out until the officers left.

  I won.

  The policemen were suspicious. We were the only Black family on the block and one of the few in the hills. But there was no justification to arrest any of us.

  The chubby cop gave me his card. It read, “Officer Clement Riley,” with an email address and phone number at the Hollywood precinct.

  After the policemen left I closed the front door. Tessa, Brown, and I stood in the small foyer as if waiting for something. The green moth began to hum. It was almost mechanical, the dirge. It gave me the feeling of being inside a great motor that was idling.

  “What are you guys doing?” Seal asked from the top of the stairs.

  She skipped down to us, smiling and carefree.

  “Just . . . um,” Brown said. “Just hanging around.”

  “What’s your problem?” she asked. “You’re acting like something terrible happened when really it’s both—terrible and wonderful too. Can’t you feel it?”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Everything,” she said. “The sun and the trees and even the ground. It’s like we were living in a dark hole all this time and now we’ve been unearthed. We can see.”

  The moth’s tune brightened, seemingly in reaction to my daughter’s words.

  “But all those people . . .” I said.

  “Who died,” Seal finished the sentence. “I know. Mom told me. We have to stop him. We have to keep him from killing everyone.”

  “Yeah,” Brown said. “We have to, have to stop him.”

  Tessa held up her head and smiled.

  I realized that there was a grin on my lips.

  At that moment we were closer than we had ever been. Our blood was tuned by the moth over the door. But, as close as we were, we each had our own particular bent, our callings. From my nearly impotent schizophrenia to Celestine’s irrepressible optimism and certainty, we were a unit devised for . . . something.

  “I’m hungry,” Brown said.

  “Let’s go for pizza,” Tessa, my adulterous wife, offered.

  Rufio’s Pizza Paradise on Melrose was a favorite of the children. We took a back booth that was fairly secluded from the rest of the seating.

  The only way I can describe the meal with my family after the annunciation of my destiny is to say that it was like an experience I had when I was a teenager living down the hill. My parents had moved from Massachusetts to LA because my mother had gotten a job teaching literature at USC.

  Back then my girlfriend, Debbie Swanson, made brownies laced with a good deal of golden hashish. She and I and two friends from school ate the whole pan and then went walking down the beach. After an hour or so I realized that we were all talking and looking around, hearing snatches of what each other said and luxuriating in the wind and sand and sea.

  “Hey, guys,” I remember saying, “do you see what we’re doing?”

  We stopped and looked around in wonder, paused there appreciating that moment of grace. After a minute or two we started walking and talking again.

  “We’re still doing it,” Debbie said.

  Again we stopped and marveled.

  Again we moved on, babbling and reveling in the pleasure.

  “It was as if I had died,” Tessa was saying. “He took hold of my wrists and ice shot up my arms. I was, was engulfed by cold and emptiness. It wasn’t only that I was dead but it was as if I had never been alive. Somehow he had undone everything I stood for—my parents and children and those times when I was so happy I could hardly hold it in.

  “And then, just when my eyes could no longer see, there was this red shimmering in the distance. It was like a sunrise over the entire universe. Everything was bright and all distances were relative. I could see it all and it all made sense—even that man Waxman. He brought me to that higher awareness and made it possible for me to throw him off . . .”

  “I was on a football field,” Brown recalled. I noticed as he spoke that he’d been growing larger, more well-defined. “And instead of two teams it was just me running up against all these animals. There was a boar and a rhinoceros, a pack of hyenas, and this big albino tiger pacing back and forth at the goal line. And I was running with the ball and the goal was a thousand miles away. Every kind of beast was running after me and at me but I kept on going.

  “And the strangest thing was, when I would jump over some dog or alligator, when I was in the air, it felt like, like forever. When I jumped, time would stop and I could see everything in front and behind. I had all the time in the world to plan my strategy. I could see my opponents and I knew that if I didn’t let fear take over, I could make it all the way to that white tiger, and maybe even score.”

  “There was that moth on the lamp and she sang to me,” Celestine said. “They were real words but not in English or any human language. It was a story about moths and spiders and moonlight that shone so brightly that you had to go crazy and it was okay because things don’t make sense anyway.

  “Then I climbed up out of my body and when I looked down I saw Brown running and Mama naked with a sword and shield. Daddy had two faces and he was looking from side to side. Then he stood up and was just one man and he came to me. He kissed my forehead and asked if this was the right thing and I told him that there were two things, that there were always two things. Daddy asked what were they, and I said that it was what was behind and what was ahead. And when I said that, I knew that it was from the moth’s song, I knew it and kissed Daddy on the lips.”

  I don’t remember talking at the pizza restaurant. I think I must have said something profound but the ideas were to be shared, not hoarded.

  We ate seven large pizzas with every topping except pineapple and anchovies. I was in a daze and reveling in the beauty of my family.

  “How did you know to inject us with Dad’s blood?” Brown asked his mother. It might have been an indictment, but it wasn’t.

  “He changed me by having sex,” she said.

  I worried that this bald statement would embarrass my son, but he just nodded and Seal put her hand on my forearm.

  “You don’t have to worry, Daddy,” she said.

  We drove home late that afternoon and then decided to take a walk, just a family out for a stroll on a balmy afternoon. Again we communed rather than discussed, imagined ourselves there together in a war and in collaboration. The sides had not yet been drawn for us. That was probably the best day of my life.

  When we got home Rat Man, Rooster, and Reaper were waiting for us at the front door. We greeted them like old friends and invited them into the house.

  Brown went upstairs to put on his sweatpants and shirt because his clothes had become too tight. He was both taller and broader—powerful like a warrior instead of an athlete.

  While we were busy with the chairs and clothes, Seal talked to the rough men who had meant to do her serious harm only one day before. Dragging two chrome-and-purple vinyl chairs in from the kitchen, Tessa sat down with our daughter and guests. Brown joined them a few moments later while I sought out beer and brandy from the stores of our house.

  “I used to go out on Saturday nights lookin’ for nigger and beaner asses to kick,” Rooster was saying to Brown when I returned. “But now I don’t even have anything to say about it. I mean, I don’t feel sorry or guilty or anything like that. It just seems silly—stupid, really.”

  “We killed people, too,” Reaper was saying. “Sometimes it was mud people, but we killed just as many of our own when it came to business. It was Lon Farthey that got us jobs and gave the orders.”

  “He didn’t run me, runt,” Rooster said.

  “Fuck that shit, man. You know you jumped when Raver called. Maybe you grumbled but you still did what he said.”

  “You want me to come over there and kick your ass, son?”

  “You could kiss it, you fat-faced fuck.”

  “Come on, boys,” Rat Man said in an angry yet conciliatory tone. “We didn’t come here to fight over Lon.”

  “Raver,” Rooster corrected.

  “We need to incapacitate that man who was standing out in the street the other night,” I said. “He’s very dangerous and the police won’t know how to deal with him. He’s the one who killed all those people on Hollywood last night.”

  “We been talkin’ about you,” Rat Man replied. “You did something to us and we don’t even know what it is. The bites have all healed and my mind is like the messy room me and my brother had and then Mama would come in and neaten it all up. Bed made, toys in the closet. We felt real good about a straightened-up room, but it was a mess again in just a few hours.”

  “And?” I asked.

  “We were sure last night about what happened and what to do but we ain’t no more. But we still feel different too. It don’t feel right. It’s like we just don’t fit.”

  “I’m really good at keeping things in order,” Temple said with my vocal chords. “Work with me and your bed will be made every night.”

  “What’s wrong with you, man?” spikey-haired Rat Man asked. “I mean, it’s like you change into a whole ’nother person.”

  “I am who I have to be, Mason Drinkman. I can speak your mind or raise the dead, I can clean up the messes you’ve made and make chocolate milk for us all.”

  Sitting in the back seat of consciousness, I enjoyed watching Temple orate. He was magnetic and charismatic, as sure of himself as an alpha dog leading a pack of slavering curs in the wilds of India.

  “So what is it you want us to do?” Reaper asked.

  “I need a hole ten feet deep in the floor of the garage,” Temple announced. “That and a heavy-duty freezer that has a storage unit at least six feet long, three feet wide, and two feet deep.”

  The tattooed white men nodded but made no comment.

  Brown glowered and nodded. Celestine completely ignored the request.

  “We’ve been thinkin’,” Rooster said.

  “Yes?” my template asked.

  “We’re not on the same page with our boys up in Riverside. Last night we got into fights over what we should and shouldn’t be doin’.”

  “And?”

  “We need a place to stay until we get our bearings.”

  “You’ll stay here of course,” Seal said. “We’ll set up the guest room for two of you and one can stay down here.”

  Both Temple and I stared at my daughter. She was so certain and upbeat that there was no way to gainsay her offer.

  The white men all looked at me.

  I, not Temple, said, “Of course you can stay. The work in the garage will take some time and it will be easier to have you here.”

  “Diggin’ a grave for the living dead,” Reaper said.

  No one commented on this assertion.

  “If we’re going to have company I’ll need to do some shopping,” Tessa said sensibly.

  “I need to get some clothes, Mom,” Brown declared. “If we go to the mall in Century City we can do both.”

  “I could bake a cake,” Seal offered.

  My daughter was also changing. She was taller and more womanly—beautiful, as a matter of fact. Her eyes slanted just a bit more and the way she moved was something a father didn’t like thinking about.

  The white men noticed her.

  A father didn’t like that either.

  It was just then, between levelheaded preparations and parental protectiveness, that the front door flew off its hinges, slamming against the far wall of the foyer. Six armed and partially armored men flooded through the front door while four others appeared from the back rooms. They all carried rifles or shotguns. These weapons were pointed at us.

 

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