Disciple Read online

  “I hear that you’re the president of that company you worked for,” he said.

  “Vice president.”

  “Yeah but the vice president in charge of the holding company, right? Justin Mack isn’t it?”

  “I have to go, Mr. Moore. Thanks for accepting my, uh, terms.”

  “How did you make VP?” he asked, rushing down to the step just above mine.

  I turned away and walked down the stairs. It wasn’t that I was angry at Ralph. But what was I supposed to say? That I was given the promotion in order the slaughter as many humans as it took to save a genus of jellyfish?

  Liam and R.G. (as I came to call Robert George) were waiting for me. People up and down the street and from the windows of my building glanced my way wondering idly what had happened to allow me to take a limo to work.

  * * *

  “MR. TRYMAN?”

  “Yes, Trina?”

  “Miguel Corvessa is downstairs. He says that he wants to speak to you.”

  * * *

  “HEY, BRO, THIS IS BAD,” Miguel said as he strolled into my office. He was wearing a long-sleeved black shirt that was a size too big and black trousers with a pale green belt. His cross-trainers were brilliant white.

  Miguel threw himself on my heavily padded rose sofa and put his legs up on the backrest.

  “This is the life.”

  Miguel was everything that I was not: young, svelte, strong, absolutely sure of himself, his family, his God. His skin was the color of rose gold. Two of his teeth were edged in yellow gold.

  “Check out the egg chair,” I told him.

  The young Mexican rolled to his feet, strode across the room, and sat back in the chair. At first he just luxuriated in the space-age padding but then I reached in and engaged the viewing screen.

  “Hey, man,” Miguel said. “This is bad. Oh shit. It’s got a TV. He got porno on this thing?”

  “Not anymore.”

  Miguel climbed out from under the screen and went to the window.

  “I dream about shit like this, Trent man,” he said, looking out over the Hudson. “How did you get it?”

  “I, uh … sold my soul to the devil,” I said.

  My only work friend turned around to gawp at me.

  “No,” he said, his eyes open wide and his splayed hands raised above his chest.

  “No,” I agreed. “It’s just I have this friend who I used to go to college with. He was always rich and his father owns a lot of stock in InfoMargins. He just found out that I was working here and made the right moves.”

  “It wasn’t the meteor?” Miguel asked.

  I went to one of Chinese thrones and sat. Miguel drifted over and settled across from me.

  “Bron, that’s my friend, called me the day before the meteorite and told me that it was going to happen. Later on, after it was reported, he told me that they had a better telescope than the Hubble and he was showing off but that was after the news report. I guess I got kinda scared when I heard you and Dora talking about it.”

  “Damn. You one lucky dude, man. One day you’re at a desk doin’ nuthin’ and the next you got all this. You get Dora too?”

  “What?”

  “She told me one night that she was doin’ Lessing, man. She said that he was a pig but he promised her this good job. But you know that pendejo just wanted her pussy, man. Then she comes to see you and the next day they tell her she got her job. I guess I figured Trent got him some.”

  I was never jealous of Miguel. His family had moved to Jersey City from Tijuana when he was only six. His father worked in the rubble of the World Trade Center and died of lung disease just three years later. After that Miguel started working to make money for his mother and younger siblings.

  Dora didn’t dislike me because I was black. It was more, or less, than that. Miguel had a life inside him. He wasn’t destined for riches. Dora would have never married him. But she gave him something better—her trust.

  “You just visiting, Miguel?”

  “No, man. I got a call from this Mallory chick. She said that they wanna send me to management school, that they’ll pay me to go to school for two years.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You do that, man?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How come you do that for me?” Corvessa sat forward in the chair with clasped hands and no smile.

  “Why not?”

  “You just do it? You call up your girl Mallory and tell her to do this and you don’t even know why? What did you tell her?”

  “I didn’t say anything except I thought you’d make a good manager.”

  “What I do to make you think somethin’ like that?”

  “You saw that I felt different after the meteorite appeared. You call me bro.”

  Miguel was studying my face. He was trying to understand my new position, my power.

  “This is crazy, man,” he said at last. “I’m a mail clerk. I don’t even got no GED.”

  “So? Don’t you think you could do what Hugo does?”

  “That fat fuck couldn’t find his butt hole with a whole roll of toilet paper.”

  I laughed. It was my first real laugh in quite a while.

  “If I fuck up,” Miguel asked, “will you be in trouble?”

  “No. Don’t worry about that. I got this job forever … until the end of the world.”

  “You sound crazy, bro. How come you lost so much weight?”

  “I got sick and after that I haven’t been too hungry.”

  Again my friend watched me, pondering.

  “Listen, Miguel, I need to ask you something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Do you believe in God?”

  “Yeah. Of course. Don’t you?”

  “What if, what if God came to you and told you to do something terrible? Not even God but one of his angels.”

  “He told Abraham to kill his son. He had Moses drown the Pharaoh’s armies. He killed Christ to save you and me.” Miguel face was vulnerable, even adoring.

  “So you would do anything?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what if God wasn’t like they said?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What if God was like a tree in somebody’s backyard?” I asked. “I mean he could live forever but only if somebody came out with a hose every day and put water in the ground and made sure that all the bugs and gophers were gone?”

  “I’d move in that house and have a hundred sons. And I would tell every one of them that they had to keep that tree safe.” Miguel was breathing harder, his eyes were fever bright. “You know, man, sometimes I think about that when I’m in the church, bro. I see that blond Jesus and the pictures of God reaching out with his hands. Why he got to have hands, man? He’s God not a man.”

  We sat in the wake of Miguel’s divine question. It struck me that in Miguel’s mind we were still equals. He wasn’t daunted by my newfound power and wealth.

  “You want me to go to that school?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ll tell them to pay you a manager’s salary and to make sure you get your GED.”

  “Did you talk to God, Trent?”

  “I don’t know, Miguel.”

  * * *

  THAT AFTERNOON DORA CAME for a meeting. She went around the desk and kissed me on the lips. It was only a peck but ten thousand miles from how she felt about me a month before.

  “Sit,” I said and she skipped to her throne.

  She was wearing a small white dress that accented her slim figure.

  “Thank you, Trent,” she said.

  I got out of the egg chair because it seemed too distant, too impersonal. When I rolled back into the opposite throne it was as if I were still a fat man. But I wasn’t that anymore. I smiled at myself but Dora thought I was doing it for her.

  “Thank you so much, Trent.”

  I yawned.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I haven’t been sleeping much since the promotion. A lot t
o catch up on.”

  “I bet.”

  My mind had become like the fractured vision through a prism or maybe the thousand images that a housefly resisters with each glance. I had already killed nearly three hundred people. I had looked up sixty-three of their names in my egg chair. I knew their families and their jobs. I listed them in the personal area on the egg chair computer. The Stelladren were floating in my mind and Mink and Shawna were there too. I was also thinking about messenger pigeons and their uncanny abilities.

  I hadn’t masturbated in two weeks.

  “Trent?”

  “Yes, Dora?”

  “Are you listening to me?” There was a little of the old edge in her voice.

  I remembered the times that she snorted and sniffed at me, it was almost a daily occurrence.

  One day she came up to my desk and asked, “What’s wrong with you?”

  “What?”

  “You went to college, at least that’s what you say. You’ve been working here for almost eleven years. I mean you don’t even need a high school degree to enter numbers on a screen. Why do I always have to wait for you? I could be making a double bonus if you could just concentrate for ten minutes out of an hour.”

  She had decided that I was no threat to her. I would never yell or scream or be able to outtalk her. I was a fat loser. It wasn’t because I was black or a man or even middle-aged. I was just a loser in her eyes.

  If I hadn’t shared her opinion I might have been angry.

  “I’m sorry,” I said in reply to her barbed question on the seventy-sixth floor. “But I just told you. I haven’t been sleeping. A month ago I was a data entry clerk like you with no future and no past to speak of. I don’t have a girlfriend or a dog or any brothers or sisters or hardly anyone else I can call to say that I’ve been made vice president of a cutting-edge corporation. You know I have a driver and a bodyguard and a personal assistant who I smiled at every day for four years and she never remembered me once.”

  My voice got louder as I spoke. Dora moved back a little in her chair.

  “So that’s why,” I said in a calmer tone, “I don’t … I find it hard to listen. I mean look out of this window. That’s my window. I have three uncashed checks in my drawer. I take home eighty-four thousand dollars a week, after taxes. Eighty-four thousand…”

  Dora’s eyes were frowning while her mouth was attempting to smile. She was very pretty. Not gorgeous like Trina or sexy like Mink and Shawna but she had the good looks of a perfect girlfriend, one that was bound to leave you at the most unpredictable, worst possible moment.

  I hated her. It wasn’t her fault, not really. She’d never been kind to me but she was a child in a world that wouldn’t play fair. I knew these things and hated her anyway.

  “You shouldn’t have come here, Dora,” I said. “We never really got along you know.”

  “I’m sorry about … how I treated you,” she said then.

  It came to me that we were talking to each other as people for maybe the first time.

  “No you aren’t,” I said.

  “Why won’t you let me thank you?” she asked miserably. “Why won’t you let me apologize?”

  “Because if nothing had changed, if I was still down on the fourth floor with you, you would have never have apologized or thanked me for bringing you coffee on the days it was my turn. All you care about is the AI lab in New Mexico and the power I have to send you there.”

  “Then why help me?” she asked with fear in her eyes. The fear I thought was the honesty she brought to bear. Maybe I’d take away what I’d given.

  I was like a minor god in her life right then; the loose cannon kind of god one feared rather than loved.

  “Lessing took videos of you and him on this desk,” I said. “There’s a camera right over there that he had pointed at your face while he did … what he did.”

  Dora’s gray eyes opened impossibly wide. She brought her hands to her mouth. I waited for some other response but none came.

  “I erased it,” I said. “There were others. I erased them all. I figured he owed you something. Not me. I don’t owe you a thing. I don’t like you. But what difference does that make? I don’t have to like somebody to do the right thing. And, and I don’t have to hate someone to hurt them. All I have to do is what I have to do. Do you understand me, Dora?”

  “You erased them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you watch the whole thing?”

  “No. No. When I realized what it was I turned it off and erased it. I didn’t even look at the others. He’s been fired. You have your transfer to AI.”

  It was a monumental task for Dora to take her hands away from her mouth. It took long minutes for her to navigate around the humiliation. She looked away from me, down at the floor.

  “You’ve lost more weight,” she said at last.

  “Don’t sleep, don’t eat.”

  “The new clothes look good on you.”

  “Thanks.”

  * * *

  IN THE WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED I got four dozen messenger pigeon chicks and put together the loft on the roof of my building, with the help of Liam and R.G. I started visiting my mother once a week in Long Island City and I had lunch every Tuesday with Miguel at fancy restaurants all over the financial district. The school he was in had its offices across the street from our main building.

  Every morning I’d go to a diner around the corner from my house to get coffee before Liam came at ten to pick me up for work. R.G. was always around somewhere watching me but I rarely saw him.

  It was at the diner that I met Marla. Actually I had been seeing Marla for more than a year at the counter. I sometimes said hello to which she would smile and give a brief nod. But we never really spoke until after I met Bron.

  I usually sat at the counter which was Marla’s post. Before Bron I went once a week or so to the diner, Freddy’s Fantastic Foods, but now that I was rich and mostly at leisure I could go every day for my coffee.

  It was when my chicks were six weeks old that Marla finally spoke to me.

  “You lost weight, huh?”

  She was deep brown with a healthy figure, not at all fat but full and firm. She wasn’t what I’d call pretty but she had a very nice smile.

  “Yeah,” I said still shy of strangers and the disapproval hiding behind their eyes.

  “And now you’re wearing nice clothes,” she said. “You look nice.”

  I saw in Marla a dozen women who over the years had tried to engage with me. I never could do conversation right. I always ended up saying something off, awkward. My gut would clench and I could hear the molars grinding in my ear.

  “Thank you,” I said with gasping breath. “It’s so nice that a beautiful young woman like you would notice someone like me.”

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing … I guess. You know I think coming here in the morning is the best part of my day.”

  “What do you do?” Marla asked. She wore a brown dress under a blue apron and had her hair tied back into a bun the size and shape of a baseball.

  “I used to do data entry but I got a promotion lately…”

  “That sounds good.”

  “Yeah. But there’s all this responsibility. You know. Where you from?”

  “Atlanta. I moved up here wit’ my boyfriend and then he took off wit’ this girl who I thought was my friend. I fount some’a her clothes in his pocket and I left.”

  “How long ago?” I asked.

  “Two years.”

  “Why didn’t you go back home?”

  “’Cause my boyfriend and Giselle moved back there. I just didn’t even wanna see them no more.”

  “Could I take you out to dinner sometime, Marla?”

  “Dog … you work fast, huh?”

  I didn’t want to but I looked down. I was more cowed by the rejection of a young woman than I was by the potential deaths of millions.

  “Don’t look all sad,” Marla said.
“I don’t even know your last name yet. Just talk to me some more. Gimme a couple days.”

  * * *

  “HOW’S YOUR NEW JOB, HONEY?” my mother asked. She was smiling, unconcerned.

  Her apartment was a one-room studio. At sixty-seven she had pared her life down to a sofa bed, a small maple table with two matching chairs, a red Moroccan carpet, and a Zenith TV with cable connection. She rarely ate at home going out with one or another of her friends from her answering service job almost every night of the week.

  Selma was her name and she was the only one of her thirteen brothers and sisters who ever read a book from cover to cover.

  She had given me her apartment but only because it was cheaper to live in L.I.C. and she thought that if she didn’t like it she could get her old place back from me.

  “It’s okay, Mom. You need any money?”

  “No, baby. I’m okay. You keepin’ that weight off, huh? Remembah not to eat too much now. The problem with a whole lotta people is not losin’ it in the first place but keepin’ it off.”

  “Do you still go to church, Mom?”

  “Every Sunday except last November. I had the flu so bad the first two weeks and then there was Thanksgiving dinner and Christmas shopping. I only went once in November but you know I believe that Jesus forgives us for bein’ weak sometimes.”

  My mother, round and black with tight shiny skin that seemed like it might pop at any second. I didn’t feel love for her even though she always said that she loved me. We only talked if I called her. We never saw each other unless I came out to Long Island City.

  “Do you think that God knows you, Mama?”

  “Say what?”

  “Do you think he knows your name?”

  “God knows everything.”

  “Yeah, but … do you see him sitting up on his throne wondering where Selma Tryman is at right this moment? Do you think that he’s listening to you right now?”

  My mother’s lips twisted as if she had a bad taste on her tongue. She moved her shoulders defensively.

  “What’s the problem, honey?” she asked, managing to smile again.

  I could have wiped that smile off her face. I could have said that I didn’t think that God would see her among the uncounted trillions upon trillions out in the universe. God wouldn’t know her from a shark tail or a leaf falling in the forest.