Blue Light Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF WALTER MOSLEY

  Blue Light

  New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year

  and Los Angeles Times Bestseller

  “A writer whose work transcends category and qualifies as serious literature.” —Time

  “More evidence that Mosley is the Gogol of the African-American working class—the chronicler par excellence of the tragic and the absurd.” —Vibe

  “Blue Light takes him on a mind-bending trip into the brave new world of science fiction, and Mosley proves that good writing is good writing, regardless of genre.” —USA Today

  “A quirky mix of action, up-to-date speculative tropes and New Age spiritualism poured into a quasi-mystery mold, Blue Light offers plenty of thrills, both visceral and ideational.” —San Francisco Chronicle

  “[Mosley] makes words sing on the page . . . a read that’s shiny-new but a surprisingly comfortable fit.” —The Austin Chronicle

  “Both classic sci-fi and classic Mosley . . . Mosley once again uses his flawless literary technique to examine the question of racial identity and what it means to humanity.” —The Source

  “Blue Light is a new venture into ‘science fiction’ . . . In Blue Light, Mosley details meticulously the grainy, disoriented insanity of being high on something-or-other in San Francisco during the Vietnam War years. He describes with mesmerizing clarity the hallucinatory twilight world of nightmares and euphoria inhabited by losers and drifters who move from one fix to another.” —The Times (London)

  “Mosley has created an enthralling sci-fi story while managing once again a close observation of Americans of another era interacting among racial and class lines.” —Mosaic

  “[Mosley] strives mightily for mythic resonance here, and he achieves it often enough to give the novel undeniable power.” —Locus

  “Mosley himself is not only a skilled writer, but an uncommonly intelligent and thoughtful one . . . [Blue Light] is compellingly written . . . a story that transcends novelty.” —Space.com

  “Blue Light provides the social history, character studies, humanity, and vivid violence for which Mosley is justly praised . . . Well-drawn characters as well . . . ordinary people made extraordinary, and Mosley knows how to make them believable and sympathetic . . . A success.” —Denver Rocky Mountain News

  “A beautifully written, deeply spiritual novel. Recommended.” —Library Journal

  Futureland

  “Beneath the high-tech gadgetry and noir atmosphere, the stories here are thoughtful explorations of race and identity . . . Futureland is populated by assassins and revolutionaries, and it is filled with suffering. Yet Mosley also peoples his stories with working stiffs and scrappy fighters. Against a bleak landscape, their resilient spirits feel like rays of hope.” —The New York Times Book Review

  “A truly formidable stylist and thinker . . . The more I think of it, the more I admire Futureland.” —The San Diego U-T

  “If you think the next century’s going to be all phaser guns and pointy-eared babes, then Futureland is the harsh dose of alternate reality you need . . . this is sci-fi without the sugarcoating, a suggestion that the years to come will be less ‘Live long and prosper,’ more ‘Live fast, die young.’” —Maxim

  “A vivid, exciting and, on the whole, well-executed take on cyberpunk that measures up to the work done 15 years ago by the Gibson and Bruce Sterling.” —Kirkus Reviews

  Blue Light

  A Novel

  Walter Mosley

  This history is dedicated to Thucydides, the father of memory

  Contents

  Prologue: The Radiance

  One

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Two

  Interlude

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Three

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  A Biography of Walter Mosley

  Prologue

  The Radiance

  I DIDN’T USE A tape recorder back then, but I remember every word. Our teacher stood on a simple flat rock and told us about the blue light. What it meant — at least, as much as we could understand. Here is what he said:

  I was once simple flesh like you, a man filled with meaningless words. But I was also a sleeping streak of blue light, scant seconds in length, jarred to consciousness after an age of silence. In the din of radiance rising from Neptune, I awoke and found myself leaning toward the cold gravity of that titan, rushing toward the small star it orbited. Ahead lay oblivion or the seed left on Earth eons before and, hopefully, grown to stature.

  Between the graceful dance of gravities, that needle of light, no wider than a meteorite, traveled forth. Other lights — exactly the same hue — at my side, each one a perfect array unwavering in its relationship to the rest. Each one made up of a flawless matrix of thought repeated again and again in a swirl of equations that held the secrets of your deepest dreams.

  As perfect and timeless as diamonds, a thousand thousand thousand brothers and sisters ignited in the silent and unfelt anticipation of breath, death, or oblivion.

  Our entrance into the solar band of energies caused friction, squeals of false consciousness. Many lights drew away toward barren celestial bodies. Most of us died in the ecstasy you call the sun. The survivors passed through clouds of helium and hydrogen. The poisonous atoms turned millions of blue lights to green. Those matrices faded, as did their tainted lights upon reaching Earth’s atmosphere.

  Still, nearly ten thousand blue needles were destined to break the skin of air, their divine messages still intact. Hundreds sliced the ocean, cerulean knives leaving wide-eyed mackerel and barracuda with the desire to swim up onto shore.

  But the rain of light moved quickly to land. Imagine a beetle contemplating infinity in his small brain, flipping forward and back trying to escape the inkling. Finally he leaps into the air, blue fire alive all around him. Then comes the merciful bat; a hiss of leathery wings, and the fire is out. Cathedrals in Rome would mourn this passing for a thousand years if they knew.

  Dozens of small creatures died in the path of light that night. Each one in a terrible ecstasy of blue notions. Each one more sacred than the history of prayer. But not all died. The sleeping mosquito struck by light might have stayed at rest because the blue light has no heat. The small weed would hear the call through the slow process of photosynthesis, her roots becoming sorcerous fingers exhorting Earth to live.

  The prophet always seemed smaller, weak after his sermons. But we felt elated and strong.

  There were other transformations on the night that Ordé, the prophet, saw blue light. These I have gleaned from conversations, newspaper articles, interviews, obituaries, and a peculiar facility that Ordé endowed upon me — the ability to read blood.

  Reggie Brown was pushing the baby carriage down Easter Street toward the Broward shelter that evening. Their uncle Barnes was drunk again and Reggie’s mother was still at work, so he bundled up the twins, intending to take them to Nurse Edwards’s station until their mother came home. Nurse Edwards had Fly Comics in h
er drawer and Baby Ruth candy bars too. She’d been their father’s friend; she was at their house when the letter came from the State Department telling how Mr. Brown was missing in the police action in Vietnam. Now she helped Mrs. Brown with the children when she could.

  Reggie stopped at a red light on the corner of Orchard and Easter. He peered inside the ragged double stroller to check on his two-and-a-half-year-old sisters. Brown girls, but not as dark as him, with fat faces that almost always smiled when he looked at them. Babies out of his momma like magic come to love them. Him and his mother, but not Uncle Barnes, not when he was drinking anyway.

  “Hey, hey,” Reggie sang. Wanita giggled but Luwanda just stared. She saw it coming.

  Reggie turned his head to see the flash of blue, and then he was walking again. Up a steep path in the woods. Beneath his feet was a stream filled with blue fish. The stream was shallow and the fish were big, but they had no problem swimming and diving. The sky was bright, but it was nighttime in his vision, night with no stars. Trees grew up the side of the valley, and the bright eyes of animals watched him move along. There were whispers. Terrible things. Gouts of blood, severed limbs in the mud. And beauty beyond Reggie’s poor words to say.

  He traveled upward for days, it seemed. Blue smoke rose from his bare feet on the wet rocks.

  A madman, who wore clothes fashioned from skins and bark decorated with bone and stone fasteners and buttons, was laughing at him. Beyond the man there was a valley. He could make out every detail — trees, leaves, and insects crawling in between. He could see single strands of spiderwebs waving lazily in the breeze. He could see the breeze too.

  The trees were singing, some in a sweet alto and others in a bellowing bass.

  Reggie started to run. It was a thousand miles away, but he knew that he could make it without ever stopping. He knew he could.

  “Honey?” the woman said. “Honey, you okay?” It was an older brown lady with a Spanish lilt.

  “Huh?” Reggie didn’t remember her. He didn’t remember standing there at Orchard and Easter.

  The lady wasn’t tall but was very round. Her glasses were framed in metal. Her teeth were edged in gold. There were big silver hoops hanging from her ears. She smiled at him the way women smile at small children.

  “Are these your little sisters?” she asked. She bent over to get a closer look under the tattered hood of the stroller.

  Even before she started screaming, Reggie understood that Luwanda was dead. He didn’t know how he knew, but that didn’t matter. His sister had passed into blue. She was in that faraway valley.

  Winch Fargo had watched them all afternoon. The old couple was selling lottery tickets at the outer edge of the church bazaar. The tickets were for a drawing to help out some kind of summer camp for needy children. Propped up on a little poster card in the center of the table was a picture of a smiling blond-haired boy who needed to get away for the summer.

  Mrs. and Mr. Martel were having a great time greeting their fellow churchgoers at Palm Park in South San Francisco. They didn’t know that the long-haired, self-tattooed, and dangerous Winch Fargo had been watching them from behind a succession of beer bottles, hidden by the pink stucco maintenance hut, secreted between two shiny aluminum trash cans.

  “If they stay till sunset,” Winch whispered, “then they’re mine.” The other tables began folding up at six-fifteen. The reading table. The events committee. Everybody waved, said good-bye. They offered to drive Philip and Eileen to the steering committee dinner. But the old couple was happy sitting in red nylon chairs, holding hands above the metal cashbox between them, watching the sun go down.

  “… one hundred and forty-four dollars,” Eileen Martel was telling Philip. The last of the bazaar vendors were more than a hundred yards away, loading empty brownie pans, dirty dishes, and bags of trash into the back of the church van.

  “And that’s just how much I wan’,” Fargo said.

  Philip looked up with a smile on his face. The long blond hair on the man didn’t bother him. It was dirty and down past his shoulders, but that was the new style, the hippie look. And so was the scruffy facial hair; you couldn’t really call it a beard. Bad teeth, but rotting and discolored teeth weren’t a sin — not everybody had medical and dental insurance from Hogarth’s Encyclopedia and International Publishing after forty-five years without a sick day.

  It was the pistol that took away Philip Martel’s second-to-last mortal smile. Pitted chrome that still managed a dull shine even in the last glow of twilight.

  Eileen uttered, “Oh my,” and squeezed her husband’s hand, her best friend’s hand.

  “I warned you,” Winch said.

  “You what?” asked Philip.

  “You was fool to stay out here until dark in the park.”

  It rhymed, Eileen thought uselessly, maybe everything will be all right.

  “The money,” Winch said. “That’s all I want. Give it.”

  Philip could feel his hemorrhoid throbbing, but the pain meant nothing, nothing at all. He nodded and made to reach down, but as his head moved he caught a glimpse of blue glinting off the silvery barrel of the gun. Helpless, he turned his eyes upward. Eileen, always with him, did the same.

  “What the fuck …” Winch saw the sagging, pasty-faced old couple smiling, actually smiling, when he had the gun. And then Winch peeked. He caught only the last second — not the full equation, only the echo.

  He guffawed, “Whoa ho!” And a blue snake the size of a python slid in through his eye socket. His head felt as if it were bulging with thoughts murmured in a foreign tongue, whispering ideas that had texture, smell, and the broken music of God.

  This last thought struck Winch as odd. He had never believed in God. Where did that come from? And where was the light?

  The blue light had faded and left the twilight darker than the closet in Winch’s childhood apartment. Darkness so lonely that he would have done anything for light, that blue light.

  He looked down and saw the old folks still sitting there — smiling.

  Eileen saw her husband for the first time, it seemed. Philip Martel. Soldier. Father. Son. Lover under the covers but never so beautiful as now. A blue sheen still hanging over him like the afterglow of sex. She relived hot summer evenings, like that evening, after long days of her cooking and cleaning and his cutting the grass. After all that sweat a glass of beer … But that was the first time she had ever really seen him. His smile so sad that she knew, somehow, why and what he had to do.

  “It was like we were in a bubble,” she told me at the prophet’s park many months later. “Like we felt everything the same.”

  Philip felt most of the blue radiance in his chest. The gun hovered somewhere beyond his sight. Sad for all those years before the light, he felt a sudden awareness in a place so far away that it was impossible to imagine. But he was there. Not him, Philip, but them — blue radiant spawn. Somehow their memories merged, and he was transported so far away and long ago that he saw the birth of Earth in a pinwheel of self-knowledge. He felt the long journey of his cells through eons of evolution. Crawling, rutting, flying, dying again and again. There was memory in his blood, quickened by the light. But also there was a call to death that formed around the weakness in his heart. His mind became part of the light as the light prepared to join the magnetic energy that flowed through the ground under his feet.

  He was dying. Dying in Eileen’s sad smile. Dying like the fading blue butterflies around his head.

  As his heart began its final wild sprint back to blackness, he spread his arms with the strength of death and rose, knocking down the flimsy card table, to embrace his dirty half brother — the man from an eon ago with the gun.

  “Whoa ho!” Winch cried out again. The light was gone, but the python still writhed in his head.

  From the parking lot the Martels’ fellow parishioners began yelling.

  Philip was already up, hugging Winch as though he was congratulating an old army buddy back
from the trenches.

  The muffled shot was not intentional. It was the volatile blue light that chose Philip’s fate, not the slug from Winch’s gun.

  “Stop! Stop!” from the parking lot.

  Eileen, quickly, was up and off behind the trees.

  Blue radiance rose from Philip’s corpse on the ground. Winch knew somewhere that he was witnessing a miracle. The light hovered, seemed almost to hesitate, and then rose, a hundred thousand glittering pins. They hovered for a moment more and then dove into the ground beneath his feet like a frightened school of fish disappearing at the first hint of danger.

  “No!” Winch yelled and then ran. The gun was in his hand, but his arms dangled awkwardly at his sides.

  “He’s dead,” Winch said to no one. “Blue snake.”

  Mrs. MacMartin, the social director, screamed and threw up her hands. Winch shot her, hoping for more blue light — but none came. Roger Pliner, Felicity Burns, Bright Williams, Chas Twill — all dead by Winch’s gun.

  “Old lady!” he yelled. “Come on out! I don’t wan’ the money! I wan’ the light is all!”

  The snake had swallowed his mind by the time the police came. Winch knelt amid the corpses in the parking lot. It wasn’t yet fully night when the flashlights hit him.

  “Put down the gun!”

  Winch held out the pistol in submission, thinking the voice was his mother’s. But the police mistook the gesture. He didn’t hear the shots. The first bullet took him in the right lung. Then one in the ankle as he rose up on one leg. In his right thigh, through his ear, in the left hand, the right shoulder, the lower intestine. Every wound a blue ember burning hot and bright. Winch Fargo smiled at the fires only he could see. They burned long after his mind closed down.

  At her rented house in the Oakland Hills, in the backyard, Claudia Zimmerman was on top of Marcus. His eyes closed, a big grin on his loose lips. She moved up and down, wondering what it would be like to feel as good as he did. Her dog, Max, poked his nose into the cleft of Claudia’s buttocks. It tickled. On the back porch her husband, Billy, was with Marcus’s wife in the hot tub. She heard Franny yelping, Yes, yes, yes.