“What’s going on?” Temple shouted.

  “On the floor!” a white man screamed, exhibiting a face contorted with rage.

  The Aryans and my wife and children obeyed. I wanted to go along but Temple was in charge at that moment.

  “What are you doing in my house?”

  “On the floor!”

  “Fuck you!”

  The lead cop slammed me in the head with the butt of his rifle. It was a heavy blow but Temple was both strong and resilient. I was hoping that I didn’t have to pay for his bravery with a concussion or worse.

  “Hit me with that shit again and I’ll take it away from you and shove it up your ass!”

  The lead cop was shocked for a moment. He had hit men like this before. They had always fallen into oblivion. He regained his confidence, though, and took a step toward us. Temple pivoted. He had no proper training but in my imagination his body was a weapon and he knew how to hurt and maim and kill.

  “Hold it, Faust,” came a commanding voice from the front door.

  The brutal, enraged cop stopped but I could see that he wanted nothing more than to beat me into a bloody pulp.

  Temple smiled at him while I quailed at the back of my own mind.

  A hale and tall man in a very nice dark-blue silk suit walked into the living room.

  “This is Mr. Just’s home,” the man explained. “If he wonders why we’re here, we should at least answer him.”

  “Who are you?” Temple asked.

  “Captain Short of the Second SWAT team, Holly­wood division.”

  “And why are you here?” I asked, taking the place of my warrior half.

  The green moth had plastered itself into a corner of the ceiling. My family and newfound friends were facedown on the floor.

  “As you know, Mr. Just, there was a monstrous crime of vehicular homicide committed down on Hollywood Boulevard last night.” Short spoke of the tragedy as if he had seen it on television or read about it in some dime novel.

  “Yes,” I said, “of course. The police came here about it this noon.”

  “Since a material witness to the crime might have been a Black man,” the white captain said, “the officers who questioned you requested that your block be put on the regular officers’ route.”

  “I’m being watched?”

  “It’s all legal,” Captain Short assured me. “These officers noticed three white men loitering around your front door. A closer look told us that these men got into your home. We were worried about your safety. Are you safe?”

  “Definitely. These men are new friends.”

  “Do they have anything to do with the crime you’re charged with?”

  “You’re here about that?”

  “All I did was a search on our system. You popped out like a greased pig.”

  My persona faded into the background and Temple took over.

  “You’re the pig,” Temple informed Captain Short. “I’m the nigger.”

  This bare statement stopped the good captain for a moment. I think maybe he could see the change in me—maybe not as clearly as one of the Initiated, but he saw some shift in my personality.

  “These men are friends of yours?” he asked, waving at the white T-shirts on the floor.

  “More than you are.”

  “What does that mean? You have something against the police?”

  “Are you apologizing to me right now?”

  “What?”

  “Only enemies break down the front and back doors to a man’s home. Blackguards shove a man’s family facedown on the floor.”

  “Blackguards? Are you a pirate, Mr. Just?”

  “What the fuck do you want with me, man?”

  “We came in here to protect you.”

  “What does that have to do with what happened on Hollywood?” I asked, taking over from Temple. “What does it have to do with my upcoming court date?”

  Short could tell that there was some kind of switch going on before him. His eyes narrowed and his head tilted to the left.

  “You want we should search them, Captain?” the man who hit me asked.

  “Do you want to go outside and talk, Mr. Just?” Captain Short offered.

  “No. I want to stay here with my family and my guests.”

  “It’s not necessary, Faust,” Captain Short said to my attacker. “We’ve obviously made a mistake. Mr. Just and his family are not in danger.”

  “Let’s get outta here,” Officer Faust said to his men.

  Nearly a dozen heavily armed policemen vacated the house in less than a minute.

  I followed the captain out onto my front lawn with its lemon trees on one side and its rose bushes on the other.

  “What about my door?” I asked the top cop.

  “Call my office and give them your name. They’ll put you in touch with the people that can reimburse you.”

  He handed me a card and walked over to a police cruiser while the men from the assault jumped into a very military, canvas-covered flatbed truck.

  As the police rolled away I noticed my neighbors, at least two dozen of them, out on the street looking at me and my broken house. Even though I recognized some of them and the others were mostly familiar faces—there was no intimacy between us. My children knew a few of the youngsters on the block. We had hosted some birthday parties but we had no close friends on Charbadon.

  Watching my neighbors watching me, I began to understand the moment of development of the Worldmind. This was a philosophical term from German, particularly from Georg Hegel. We, the atoms of life, are separate, alienated from one another, but one day, in a far-flung speculative future, we might unite against the hegemony of matter and antimatter; we might meet in the middle of the street and cleave existence with our meeting.

  I was created to stop that assemblage.

  “Dad?”

  Brown was standing there behind me. Last week, and a thousand years before, he was four inches shorter than I. Now he was half a head taller.

  “What?”

  “You been standing out here for five minutes.”

  I looked out again and saw that most of the gawkers had gone back into their houses. Maybe I had stared them down.

  “Come on, Dad.”

  Tessa and Brown went shopping for groceries and clothes for my son. Seal entertained our white guests while I went upstairs to rest my aching crown.

  While I slept, Reaper and Rat Man fixed the front and back doors. When Tessa returned, she sat down with Rooster to consider our options. The kids had drifted off like the adolescents they still were. When I finally awoke, Brown was watching television and Celestine was up in her room reading something on the Internet.

  “How do we even find this guy?” Rooster was asking.

  “Yes,” Tessa agreed. “Do you have some way of, of, I don’t know . . . feeling him?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t know . . . maybe. But we don’t have to worry. Waxman needs me to make his plans viable. He can kill but he can’t raise his victims from the dead without me. If he could capture me then he could build this army of death.”

  “Then rather than trying to stop him we should be getting you to safety,” Tessa said.

  “Temple would never let me do that,” I proclaimed. “And anyway, Waxman is too dangerous to be allowed to run around free. Everyone he touches will die.”

  “What do you care?” Rooster asked. “You kill people.”

  “Only in self-defense.”

  “If him just touchin’ you will kill you, then self-defense should be to run like hell.”

  “No. He can’t hurt any of us. If my virus is transmitted to you first, then it is proof against his.”

  “I don’t even know why I’m here,” Rooster complained. He stood up. Maybe he was planning to walk away.

  “You’re here,” Temple said, “because I have made you my vassal.”

  “Say what?”

  This was only the second time that Temple made a statement or did something that was contrary to my own view. When he made love to my wife, I was jealous but I also loved her. When he fought against Lon Farthey (even though I didn’t remember it) or when he chased Waxman, I had no disagreement with his actions. Only when he was willing to put innocent lives in jeopardy and now, when he was calling Harold Rimer a slave, did I pull away.

  That was exactly what happened—I pulled away. I realized that no matter how strong Temple was, he got that strength from me. If I lost confidence in him, his control over my body abruptly ended.

  “Nothing, man,” I said, trying to sound like my alter ego. “You’re free to do whatever you want. If you want to go and take your friends, I can’t hold it against you. Waxman is extremely dangerous but he’s my responsibility. I’m going to try to bring him down. I could use your help.”

  “Why not let the cops do it?” Rooster replied. “They’re after him already.”

  “They don’t know what they’re dealing with. He could kill thousands before they isolate him. We don’t know the extent of his powers. They might not be able to hold him.”

  “I don’t really understand what’s happening,” the big white thug said. “When me and the guys came here yesterday, all we planned to do was bust you up and then kill you and your family. I was mad as hell that you killed Raver. Mad as hell. But then you killed me and brought me back and I remember bein’ mad but I don’t feel it anymore. I tried a couple’a times to get it back. I still get angry but it’s like it’s in a box, all locked up except for the shouting. Why is that?”

  “I don’t really understand,” I said honestly. “Waxman and I have . . . missions we are supposed to accomplish. That’s why we’re here.”

  “So then shouldn’t you two be workin’ together?”

  “I don’t want to work with him. I don’t believe in the eradication of life. I don’t know what I believe.”

  We talked for more than an hour while Reaper and Rat Man banged on the doors. The resolution was as it had been in the beginning: we’d dig a ten-foot-deep hole in the garage and get a big freezer for the living corpse of Tor Waxman.

  “I think you guys should come see this,” Brown said when we’d rehashed our lack of strategy for the sixth or seventh time.

  Brown was sitting in front of the plasma TV we had installed on the family room wall. A caramel-colored woman with deep-red lips was talking from a seat behind a low desk. I forget her name but she was a news anchor for one of the local stations. Superimposed on the fake wall behind her was the picture of an Asian man wearing a green golfer’s hat.

  “. . . Lee Fung was taken to the hospital for injuries he incurred when he was thrown from his car by the madman who killed twenty-three people on Holly­wood Boulevard last night.” There was a brief cut to a handheld video of a car ramming through a crowd of pedestrians. Then the scene returned to the brunette anchor. “The doctors said that Mr. Fung’s injuries were minor, but just two hours ago his body temperature spiked to one hundred and six and he died before any action could be taken to reduce the fever.”

  We were all there in the room looking at the news report. There was a video of Lee Fung being carried on a stretcher. He was shaking his head in disgust and talking to a reporter from another news station.

  “Doctors are unable to explain what killed Mr. Fung but the police want to add this death to the mounting murder charges against the mad carjacker.”

  An artist’s interpretation of Waxman appeared on the screen. It was an extremely general likeness. There were maybe a thousand men in the city that it resembled.

  “It was Waxman,” Seal said.

  “It’s all Waxman,” Reaper added. “That man’s crazier than any lunatic I ever seen. And I’ve seen some crazy motherfuckers.”

  “It’s my fault,” I said. “If I hadn’t, if Temple hadn’t chased him, those people would still be alive.”

  “No,” Tessa said with absolute certainty. “The fact that you made his face known will turn the world against him. He would be killing people anyway. That is his nature.”

  “That’s kind of you, baby,” I said. “But Temple chased that man. He ran after him with murder in his heart and that’s what got all those people killed.”

  Just then a strain of upbeat staccato music sounded from the TV. A black band appeared across the bottom of the screen carrying red letters that said: NEWS BULLETIN—THEIR DEATHS RELATING TO THE MAD CARJACKER AND LEE FUNG REPORTED—REDONDO BEACH CALIFORNIA. EIGHTY-ONE KNOWN DEAD.

  The candy-colored news anchor swiveled in her chair to face another camera.

  “This just in,” she said. “Eighty-four deaths connected with unexplained spiked body temperatures have been reported in the Redondo Beach area.

  “For the past week residents of the Redondo Beach Men’s Shelter have been reporting to emergency rooms or found dead in their beds or on the street. Most of these men seem to have died of the fever.

  “A few days ago, before any illnesses were reported, a man named Troika Meldman took up residence in the area. This man bears a strong resemblance to the artist’s picture of the mad carjacker.”

  The artist’s rendition of Tor Waxman once again appeared behind the anchor.

  “No one experiencing the illness has survived. The CDC has sent investigators to Redondo Beach and Hollywood to try to come up with some kind of answer to this possible outbreak of some new kind of virus.”

  “Turn it down, Brown,” I said.

  All of my family and newfound allies were talking.

  “That’s crazy,” Brown was saying.

  “He must be some kind of Typhoid Mary,” Rat Man speculated. “He’s a carrier, like, and everybody he comes in contact with dies.”

  “Except us,” I said.

  “How the hell you expect us to believe that?” Reaper challenged. “I mean, if what you say is true, all he got to do is touch some skin and that’s a death sentence.”

  “You can believe it because I’m saying it,” I told Reaper. My voice was absolute in its certainty.

  “But you and your family shared blood,” Rat Man said.

  “They’re different but they both hold life,” I said. “Waxman will not be able to cross that divide.”

  There was silence and concern in all our faces. We were stragglers from different military companies and divisions brought together by some great fiasco. I was in charge but no one had absolute confidence in my ability to lead.

  “What should we do?” Tessa asked.

  “Start digging that hole. Brown?”

  “Yeah, Pop?”

  “Help these men dig in the garage. Tessa?”

  “Babe?”

  “Order that freezer unit online and make sure it’s here in a few days.”

  “What you gonna do?” Rooster asked.

  I smiled and Temple did too. We were there at the forefront of consciousness. “We’re going to prepare for war,” we both said in harmony and yet as one. “Death will come looking for us. He will come at his strongest. He needs me to fuel his foul war. But that will not be.”

  Everyone’s eyes were on me. And I was at peace with my selves and their striations.

  War was coming and I was glad.

  I was hauled into a meeting with a judge six days later. We met—Lena Clayborn, Fyodor Trapas, Melanie Blythe, me, and a new judge—the Honorable Maxwell Lousange.

  The new judge was tall and powerful-looking. He had a strong personality and did not allow my lawyer or the state’s attorneys to take over the meeting.

  “I don’t want a circus in my court, Mr. Trapas,” the judge told the prosecutor.

  “It’s a simple case of manslaughter, your honor. I’m willing to offer eight to fifteen for a plea.”

  “Ms. Clayborn?” Judge Lousange inquired.

  “It’s ridiculous, your honor. My client was thrown into a cell with a very large, very violent criminal who had vowed to kill people of color, especially Latinos and African Americans. The guards knew this man’s history, at least they should have. My client was found unconscious. There were bruises consistent with strangulation on his throat.”

  “Your client’s knuckles also hit Mr. Farthey’s temples so hard that his skull fractured in eight places. That’s the coroner’s conclusion.”

  “That may well be,” Lena said to the judge, “but if these blows were the reason Mr. Farthey died, then the strangulation had to have happened first. A man with a broken skull cannot strangle another man.”

  “Mr. Just could have faked the strangulation wounds,” Fyodor rebutted.

  “Choked himself into unconsciousness to get out of being charged for killing a man in his cell? That’s not only farfetched, it’s insulting,” said Lena.

  “He exposed himself to a minor,” Trapas added.

  “He was walking in his sleep in his own backyard. He had an erection. He was probably looking for a toilet.”

  Max Lousange had a square face with gray skin lightened here and there by a pink underglow. The judge smiled at my counselor’s words.

  “Do you have any other evidence, Mr. Trapas?”

  “He killed a man with his bare hands, your honor. He subjected a child to a sight that she’ll have to carry with her the rest of her life.”

  “Did he summon the child?”

  “Not that we can tell.”

  “Did he speak to her?”

  “No.”

  “And he was on a deck at the back of his bedroom when he was battered and arrested?”

  “Yes, your honor.”

  “I see that the officers who took Mr. Just into custody suggested that he be put in isolation and seen by a mental health professional.”

 

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