Inside a Silver Box Read Online Free PDF Page A

was simply a conduit, but the creation lay with you.”
    “I felt you on my right side,” Ronnie said.
    Again, the personification of the ultimate-weapon-turned-rebel brightened and again his expression said that there was something wrong.
    “I have to go,” he said. “I have to, have to look into things, see what passed over to where it shouldn’t be.”
    The form of Used-to-be-Claude stood up straight and then his body fell in on itself like the fast-forwarded film of a piece of fruit drying up in moments instead of days. Finally the simulacrum turned into dust, leaving the empty white suit and red shirt to fall to the ground.
    “He’s gone,” Lorraine said.
    “He’s everywhere,” Ronnie added, thinking of his mother’s pastor and his powerful belief in Jehovah.
    Lorraine cupped Ronnie’s jaw with her hands and stared into his eyes. “That was amazing,” she said.
    “The way he disappeared?”
    “How you brought me back to life. You took my soul inside you and used your own body to give mine form and reality.”
    “That Vietnamese man killed a lotta people, huh?” Ronnie asked.
    “But he thought he was doing the right thing,” Lorraine answered with a nod. “He didn’t realize until he was in the position of his victims what he had done.”
    “You mean like people are bad but they don’t even know it?” Ronnie asked.
    “I guess so,” Lorraine said. “But like with you, all you have to do is give somebody a chance to reach out and they might.”
    “They might not,” Ronnie said. “I could have pulled away from you when that thing grabbed my arm. I knew that if I did that, you’d be stuck here in that dead body like Claude’s soul was.”
    “But you didn’t pull away.”
    “But I coulda.”
    Lorraine’s smile was familiar, like the tattoo on his mother’s breast. This close feeling seemed impossible to the suddenly reformed thug, but there it was.
    “What should we do?” Lorraine asked.
    “You think Claude’s coming back?”
    “It’s not Claude, but the Silver Box. He could be gone for minutes or years. Maybe we should get out of here and put ourselves together.”
    “We are kind of a mess, right?” Ronnie said. He was still amazed by the lightness in his voice and at the spiritual serenity that had replaced his perpetual physical hunger.

 
    SEVEN
    “W HAT SHOULD WE do?” Lorraine asked Ronnie. It was still early morning but there was bright sunlight all around.
    “I know a thrift store over on Ninth Avenue,” he said. “You got any money?”
    “In my belt pack,” she said. “I always carry my wallet in there.”
    Looking at Ronnie, Lorraine suddenly became aware of herself. Since waking up, she’d had the feeling of when she was a spirit restlessly searching for her killer. But then, suddenly, she felt alive. Looking at Ronnie, she saw him as her killer not her savior.
    She sneered at this notion and then, in contradistinction to this feeling, she smiled brilliantly.
    Though he couldn’t have put it into words, Ronnie understood what Lorraine was feeling and thinking. “I’m so sorry, girl. I mean, I was wrong but it was like I couldn’t even help it. I mean, I just didn’t care.”
    The young woman’s smile darkened but did not disappear. She nodded and stood up. “The world is magic,” she said. “If you tip your head and look at it from a different point of view, it all changes, everything.”
    “It don’t change what I did,” Ronnie said. “It don’t bring back my mother or make up for all the people I hurted.”
    “Can you feel all the people out there in the park?” Lorraine asked. His apologies angered her and so she changed the subject.
    “No. Can you?”
    Nodding, the young, now darker-skinned white girl said, “I can almost hear what they’re thinking. Almost. And do you know how many of them have brought a person back to life?”
    “Uh-uh.”
    “None. Not a single man, woman, or child anywhere in the park has ever done that. Nobody in