Walter Mosley

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Contents

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WHISPERS IN THE DARK. Copyright © 2000 by Walter Mosley. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

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ISBN: 978-0-7595-2225-1

First eBook Edition: December 2000

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1

“Yeth he did too. Popo called me on the vid hithelf an’ he wath on’y two year ole,” Misty Bent said to her wide-eyed niece, Hazel Bernard. They were sitting out on the screened porch above the Tickle River. Misty’s drooping left eyelid and gnarled, half-paralyzed hands did not lessen her excitement.

“You kiddin’,” Hazel replied.

“Tole me hith mama wath thick on the flo’ and that he’d called the hothpital but he wanted me to know too.” Hazel shook her head remembering Melba’s death. “I beat the ambulanth but Death got there quicker thtill. Doctor Maynard called it a acthidental overdoth tho we could put her in the ground with a prietht and thome prayer beadth but you know Melba had had all the could take. You know it hurt me tho bad that the blood vethel broke in my head.”

“Her life wasn’t no harder than what we all have to go through,” Hazel Bernard said. She shifted her girth looking for a comfortable perch in the cheap plastic chair, but there was none.

“But you cain’t compare her an’uth, or you’n me for that matter. Ith all diff’rent.”

“What’s that crazy talk s’posed to mean?” the big woman challenged. Hazel said she dropped by to see how Misty was coming along after the stroke but really she was there to see if Chill Bent, Misty’s ex-convict son, had come back to live with her as some of the family had rumored.

“Ith juth what you thinkin’,” Misty replied.

“What you know ’bout what I’m thinkin’?” Hazel asked. She was thirty years younger than Misty, but she was also the eldest of thirteen children. Hazel had been the ruler of the roost since the age of nine, and no old woman’s pretending was going to trick her.

“You thinkin’ that the tht’oke done methed wit’ my mind, that I’m feeble in the head ’cuth my left thide ith parali’ed. You think I cain’t take care’a Popo but you wrong.”

“I do not think any such thing.”

“Oh yeth you do too,” Misty said. “That’th why you heah. I know. And you wrong but you done anthered your own quethton in bein’ wrong.”

Hazel shifted again and grunted. This was a day taken away from her housework and her children.

She swallowed her anger and asked, “Are you tired, auntie?”

Little Popo wandered onto the deck then. He was small for thirty months but his movements seemed more like those of an old man lost in memories than those of a child discovering the world.

“Hi, Popo,” Hazel said. “Come here.”

“Huth,” Misty hissed. “He thinkin’. He’ll talk when he want to.”

“What? You don’t call him to come sit on your lap?”

Popo went up to the edge of the deck and pressed his face against the loose screen.

“Don’t fall, baby,” Misty whispered.

The boy rocked back on his heels, his tiny black hands replacing his face upon the screen. He wore a white T-shirt and denim blue jeans with no shoes. His thick hair stood out long and wild but it wasn’t matted.

“Rain’s comin’,” Popo said.

“That’s right,” Hazel said. “Weatherman said that a storm’s gonna come outta the Gulf tonight. You’re right, Aunt Misty. He is smart to hear that on ITV and remember it like that.”

“No Internet in thith home,” Misty proclaimed. “Not even no old TV or radio that work. Thill thay it would meth Popo up.”

“Chill? No ITV?” Hazel didn’t know which road to hell was worse. Both together tied her tongue.

“I smell it,” Popo said, looking at the big visitor in the purple dress. “It smell like the knife an’ fo’k when they wet.”

The boy climbed up onto Hazel’s big thigh and sat like a tiny Buddha staring into her eyes. Beyond him Misty wheezed and doddered, grinning madly.

“He been readin’ though,” Misty said. “Thometime he read in the paper an’ then he try an’ fool uth, actin’ like he got the thight.”

“No uh-uh gramma no. Not Popo. I smelt it. I did.”

Hazel was a little disconcerted by the steady stare of the toddler. She was used to children his age having wandering, slightly amazed eyes. She shifted him to the crook of her left arm and bent over to snag the edge of the newspaper from the dinner tray between her and Misty. Popo giggled at the sudden movement. When Hazel sat back he hugged her big breast.

“Read to me from this,” she commanded, handing him the Thaliaville Sparrow.

Popo took the paper from his aunt and looked at it as if it were some sort of foreign document that he had to study before he could even tell which way it was meant to be read.

“Hm,” Hazel grunted.

Misty grinned and drooled just a bit.

Popo shifted the paper around and finally he held it sideways.

“Jacksonville, Mississippi,” he said, pronouncing each syllable as if it were its own word, “was rewarded yesterday by one of its native sons, Lyle Crandal. Today that son of a carpenter performed a miracle by breaking the four zero second bar-I-er on the four zero zero met-er at the two zero one six Oil-Im-pics.”

“No,” Hazel said on an intake of air.

“Uh-huh,” Popo squeaked indignantly.

“This is amazin’,” Hazel said to Misty.

“You thee,” Misty replied. “You cain’t compare yo’thelf to Melba’th mind or mine or hith. I got a blood clot and Melba had the blueth tho bad that the couldn’t breathe right half the time. Popo got thomethin’ in hith head that thmell thunderth-tormth an’ read before he potty trained. Tho Melba could die if the want to and that don’t make her leth than you. Ith on’y God can make a judgment. On’y God can save us or no.”

“On’y God,” Popo said, staring deeply into Hazel’s eyes.

“You got to get him tested,” Hazel said over the child’s head. “You got to get him registered and trained by the Elite Education Group in Houston or San Francisco.”

“No.” At the sound of the masculine voice Popo’s head jerked around.

“Chilly!” the boy shouted excitedly.

Popo jumped out of Hazel’s lap, tumbled down her shins and hit the floor. His tiny lips trembled near tears from the fall but his eyes stayed focused on the powerful man in the denim overalls.

“Hey, baby boy,” Chill said. He bent over and scooped Popo off the floor with one hand. In his other arm he cradled a brown paper bag filled with books. “You got to stay up off’a the flo’. It’s dirty down there.”

“Sorry,” the boy said as he snatched the topmost book from the bag.

“Shimistree a first book of experryments,” the boy read out loud.

“I got you all kinds’a books for little kids in grade school,” Chill said.

Popo giggled and bounced on Chill’s arm to indicate that he wanted to be put down. Chill leaned over again, allowing Popo to flop onto his stomach. The clear-eyed child was already deep into the words of the book.

“What you mean no?” Hazel said.

“I mean we not sendin’ Popo away to some white man’s idea of what smart and good is. All they do is wanna turn him against hisself. He’s my nephew an’ he belongs with his family.”

“But you can’t help him, Chill,” Hazel argued. “He needs computers and tests and teachers smart enough so he cain’t fool ’em.”

“He ain’t gonna fool me,” Chill said dismissively. The pale and jagged scar along his black jawline spoke of the violence and rage in the young man’s life. “An’ the books all say that he just needs to keep his mind busy learnin’. First books and then later computers, that’s what the experts say.”

Chill put the bag down next to his nephew, who was already halfway through the children’s chemistry primer.

“Look,” Hazel said pointing. “He almost finished with that one already.”

“Naw. He just read the words. He have to go through it five or six times ’fore he be through with it. That bag’ll last him almost all week.”

“And you gonna buy him a bag’a books every week? Where you gonna get money like that? Do you even have a job?”

“I’m workin’ for the catfish farms and doin’ some work around here and there.”

“That’s gonna pay for a boy like Popo’s education?”

“I got other plans.”

“Like the plans put you on Angola farm?”

“Prison,” Popo said even as he turned a page.

Chill stared at Hazel. He clenched his fists hard enough to make his sinewy forearms tremble.

“Thtop!” Misty Bent commanded.

Popo sat up in his Buddha position and Hazel flinched.

Misty had pulled herself to her feet by holding on to her plastic walker.

“Aunt Misty, sit down,” Hazel said.

“You go,” the elder woman replied. “You go and don’t meth with uth. Thilly want to do right. Popo jutht lotht hith mama an’ hith daddy already dead. An’ we ain’t thendin’ him nowhere.”

2

“M Bill Bent?” the white man asked. He was standing at the front door, tam in hand.

Chill had been doing push-ups and wore only a pair of sweatpants. His muscular chest was heaving and sweat poured down his face.

“No,” Chill said.

“Oh.” The white man hesitated. “Then is M Misty Bent here?”

“She in the bed.”

“Oh, I see,” the small white man said. There was a hint of Mississippi in his voice but in spite of that he spoke like a Northerner. “Well, you see, I’m Andrew Russell from the state board of education. I’ve come to speak to someone about Ptolemy Bent.”

In the background Chill could hear the radio receiver that Popo was experimenting with in his grandmother’s room. The high-pitched, wavering sound was like the sound effects from the old science fiction movies that they showed on Saturdays at the juvenile delinquent detention center.

“What you want wit’ Popo?”

“Popo. Is that what you call Ptolemy? We have been informed by various interested parties that the child is exceptional, bright. There’s a state law that we must test exceptionally bright children to make sure that they’re getting the proper education. You know that IQ is our greatest resource.” Andrew Russell smiled and nodded a little. He wore the popular andro-suit, green jacket and pants with a loose tan blouse and a brown tam.

“State law is you cain’t touch ’im till he sixty-one mont’s,” Chill said.

“But with his guardian’s approval we can test as early as twenty-foah,” Russell said in what was probably his friendliest tone.

Chill closed the door slowly, controlling his rage. He knew that he couldn’t lose his temper, not while Popo was his responsibility.

“Popo,” Chill called.

“Wit’ gramma,” the child shouted.

• • •

She was surrounded by colored lights that Ptolemy had wired around the room. Yellow and blue and green and pink paper shades that had been colored with food dyes, lit by forty-watt bulbs. The four-year-old Ptolemy sat at his grandmother’s vanity working on six disemboweled old radios that he had dismantled and rewired. He turned the various knobs, roaming the electronic sighs, momentarily chancing upon talking or music now and then. Six bright green wires connected the radios to an archaic laptop computer on the floor. Waves of color crossed the old-fashioned backlit screen. Now and then an image would rise out of the haze of pixels.

His hair had never been cut but Popo brushed it out as well as he could every morning. In the afternoon Kai Lin would come over and comb out the tangles that Popo missed at the back of his neck.

Misty had cranked her Craftmatic bed to the full seated position. She smiled at her little mad scientist while he searched for something, a secret that he wanted to surprise her with.

“Popo,” Chill said.

The boy glanced over at the screen and giggled.

“. . . former Soviet Union today gave up its last vestige of sovereignty, much less socialism, when it entered into a partnership with Macrosoft Management International in a joint venture to return order to Russian society . . .”

A long pure note wailed between stations.

“. . . born to be wi-i-i-ld . . .”

Static came after the song, and the volume rose.

“Popo!” Chill called again, but the static drowned out his words.

An almost imperceptible clicking blended in with the white noise. The volume dropped. The clicking became clearer. Popo brought his hands to the side of his head and pulled both ears.

“Popo,” Misty Bent said as loud as she could.

“Yea, Gramma?”

“Thill ith talkin’ to you.”

The boy turned around and stood on the white satin vanity chair. He was naked and smiling.

“Chilly.”

“They wanna take you to get tested an’ sen’ you to Houston, Po,” Chill said.

Ptolemy automatically put his hands in the air when the man came near. The child loved the feel of his skin against the muscular man’s bare chest.

“No,” Popo said. “I don’ wanna go.”

“I don’t want you to go neither. But we got to figger sumpin’ out.”

“We could run,” the boy suggested. “We could go in the swamps like them slave men you said about.”

Almost every night Chill told Popo stories of runaway slaves on the Underground Railroad. He said that it was because he wanted Popo to know African-American history, “like white kids know their history. From stories at home.” But escape was the real story he wanted to tell. He had been obsessed with escape ever since the day he was convicted of armed robbery. The only way he could fall asleep in his cell at night was by imagining himself a slave who had slipped his chains, pried open the bars, and outrun the dogs. Even after his release Chill needed this fantasy to drop off.

For a moment he considered his nephew’s innocent suggestion.

The desire for flight burned perpetually in his chest. He owned an illegal ember gun. With that he never needed a reload, and one LX battery could last a year.

But then his eyes fell upon his mother, Misty. She only walked for exercise now—fifteen minutes in the morning and five at night. Ptolemy loved his grandmother more than anything.

“No, baby boy,” Chill said. “No.”

“Then what?”

“If we had money we could prove to the state that we could afford to get you hooked up to the EEG’s Prime Com Link. If they could give you tests and we could get you into that Jesse Jackson Gymnasium that they got for city kids then maybe you could stay.”

“I could get money,” Ptolemy said.

“It’s gonna take more than your nickel allowance, honey.”

“How much then?”

“Just to pay for the computer link is a hundred fi’ty thousand a year. And then there’s forty thousand for the JJ Gym ’cause you not in the city limits. Three million prob’ly do it with costs goin’ up like they do.”

“I could get that,” Ptolemy said.

“Where at?”

“On the computer.”

“Naw, man,” Chill said. “Computer’s all linked up. They got identity cards along with your PBC on every computer.”

“Nuh-uh,” Ptolemy said shaking his head and grinning. “My Personal Bar Code ain’t on my computer.”

“That thing? That’s just a toy. It ain’t connected up.”

“I can wit’ my radios. I can too.”

“Show me.”

The child jumped around in the chair and started turning dials. The computer’s gaseous-looking screen went black. Letters and numbers appeared and reappeared in rapid succession on a line in the center of the screen.

Ptolemy hummed and sang while the computer spoke French and Chinese through the various radio speakers. Chill sat down on his mother’s bed and watched.

“Don’t let my boy get in trouble, Thill,” Misty said.

“He was born in trouble, Mama. Born in trouble.”

“But that don’t make him no thief.”

“If we cain’t get the money then the government gonna take him. I’ma just get ’im to show me, Mama. Ain’t nobody gonna steal nuthin’ but even if they do it’s gonna be me. I’ll push the button. But don’t worry, I’m just lookin’.”

As they spoke, words appeared and remained on the screen:

WORLD BANK INTERNATIONAL B of A, Citicorp, AMEX, HITO-SAN

welcome to our entry screen

** UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS IS PUNISHABLE BY NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL LAW **

Below the words were a series of codes and blank lines.

“See,” Popo exclaimed. “They gots lotsa money.”

“An’ they don’t know your bar code?” Chill asked.

“They get the bar code from your eyes,” Ptolemy said. “When you buy your computer they make you give ’em a eyescan. But they didn’t do that way back when they made these laptops. I just borrow somebody else’s bar-c from one’a the Jacker DBs and then I put it back when I’m through.”

While Ptolemy spoke the blanks were being filled in one at a time by an automatic code-breaking program that Ptolemy had adapted from the illegal Jacker Data Base. After all of the blanks had been filled in, a flurry of screens passed in quick succession ending finally on a screen whose header read PROJECT MAINTENANCE FUNDS.

“This ain’t nobody’s money,” the child said. “It’s what they got for extra.”

There were sixteen place numbers on each coded entry of the file.

Chill’s upper lip began to sweat.

“Turn it off, Popo.”

“But—”

“Turn it off!”

3

“Ow!” Ptolemy Bent yelled.

“You’ll need a haircut soon,” Kai Lin told him as she dragged the large brush up from the back of the child’s neck. “There’s more hair than there is little boy.”

Misty hissed her paralytic laugh and held a gnarled hand up to shoulder level. She was sitting straight, thanks to her mechanical bed, watching the squat Vietnamese woman torture the poor boy’s head.

“He don’t wan’it cut,” Misty said.

“He’ll look like a girl then,” Kai said, giving a hard tug.

“Ow! I don’t care,” Popo said. “I want my hair like the Jewish man who made relatively. Bushy and big.”

“By the time you’re his age all we’ll be able to see will be your feet.” Kai tickled Ptolemy’s skinny ribs and the boy doubled over in her lap.

Misty rocked back and forth in sympathy with the boy’s glee. Even Kai’s impassive face broke into a smile.

Popo grabbed Kai’s brush hand trying to wrest away the implement of torture. But Kai laid him flat on her lap and bent over to blow a loud kiss against his belly.

“I give! I give! You can brush, you can brush.” All of the air rushed out of the boy’s lungs, making him too weak even to sit up.

“No,” Kai said. “All done.”

The boy cheered and jumped down, hurrying over to the radio corner as Misty called it. By then he had deconstructed fifteen old radios, putting their parts together again on every available space. The wires and transistor chips resembled some new form of technologic life growing like fungus down the sides of the vanity onto the floor. There were three old-time laptop computers connected here and there. One of these cast indecipherable images of color and light. The forms sometimes seemed to have an alien sense about them, but mostly they were abstract events appearing for a nanosecond or an hour, changing imperceptibly or faster than the eye could follow. Another screen flashed strange characters at various intervals and in differing colors. These characters were being printed horizontally across paper, slowly unfurling from a two-hundred-foot roll on an antique dot matrix printer that Chill had brought home from a yard sale in Jackson, he said.

The final screen was connected to a HondaDrive AE storage system. The three-foot-high canister, encased in crystalline green plastic, was one of the two new pieces of equipment that Popo owned. The HondaDrive was a micro-level storage system that held trillions of bytes of information. It also had an I-crunch that could encode data, making it possible to exponentially expand its capacity. Three years ago a HondaDrive AE would have cost a million dollars. But within the past year, General Electric had stunned the scientific world—and the stock market—with the GE-AI-Drive, with its virtually unlimited storage capacity.

Now a HondaDrive AE was only ten thousand dollars. No one wanted them, so security had dropped to the point where Chill had been able to steal one from a Radio Shack in Memphis. Along with the drive Chill stole a LIBCHIP library box: a series of two hundred library chips containing over a million volumes.

“Let’s see you read your way outta that,” Chill dared his nephew.

“I will,” the star-eyed boy replied.

The computer connected to the HondaDrive was taking information from the radio receivers, translating it into mathematical codes, and storing the equations. Ptolemy sat naked, in lotus position, between the screens, watching them and making adjustments to the radio dials now and then.

Kai sat behind the boy and pulled him into her lap. He didn’t resist. She usually came to the Bents’ house last on her rounds as visiting nurse for the state. She told her supervisor, Horth Stone, that it was because Misty needed to take her walk late in the day, but really it was to be able to spend more time with the child.

“What is all this?”

“Computers,” the boy said. “Computers and radios and electricity and—and—that’s all.”

“But what are they doing?” Kai asked the same question every day. And every day Ptolemy said that it was a secret.

“It’s readin’ what the radio says and then it’s puttin’ it into numbers and then it’s puttin’ the numbers on the HondaDrive.”

“But how do you know how to do all that?”

“I don’t,” Ptolemy said as he leaned over to turn a dial. The clicking from the speakers changed tempo, and the boy nodded his head as if he were listening to a piece of music.

“But how can you do something and not know how to do it?” Kai asked.

“You use words that you don’t know what they mean sometimes. You drive a car but you cain’t make one.” Ptolemy was talking but his attention was on the screens. The image screen showed an eerie landscape of pastel greens and metallic blacks interwoven and slipping away into a distant red maw. “I just count the numbers in the radio waves and then use a equation that I got from the math lib’ary on the net. It makes up the numbers and then I look at ’em later.”

“What are you looking for?” Kai asked almost timidly.

Ptolemy turned to the visiting nurse. His deep brown eyes were like polished stones.

“It’s God, I think,” he said. “It’s God sangin’ through radio waves.”

“What do you mean? How could that be? I mean why hasn’t anybody else heard it before?” An instant hysteria bloomed in Kai’s chest. Something about the boy, his eyes, drew her but frightened her too.

“Maybe they did,” Ptolemy said in a matter-of-fact tone. He had turned back to his screens. He wasn’t really thinking about his nurse. “Maybe they did and then when they talked to him they lefted.”

“Left where?”

“To God, I guess. Maybe not though. Maybe they went to heaben.”

“Isn’t that where God is?”

“No,” Ptolemy said, turning again to the squat, mask-faced woman. “Heaben is between here and Him.”

“But, Popo,” she said. “Why hasn’t anybody else heard these messages?”

“’Cause they don’t play with the radio like I do. They all wanna make things but they don’t listen too much, you know?”

“No. I don’t know.”

“When I listen to the radio waves I can hear little pieces of him talkin’. And then, when I turn the knob I hear a little more. His words comin’ through in pieces all over. They think it’s static. They made the digit-thingy to block it out. Nobody wanna hear it in they music, so they miss it.”

“What does God say?” As Kai heard the words coming from her mouth she realized that she meant them.

“Hi,” answered Ptolemy. “How are you and can you hear me.”

“Could it be some alien race and not God at all?”

“I guess. But I don’t think so.”

“We should tell somebody about this,” Kai said. Behind her Misty Bent had fallen asleep.

“I did.”

“Who? Who did you tell?”

“Chilly.”

4

“I have to talk wit’ you, Kai,” Chill Bent said three weeks after the social worker/nurse had been forced to reconsider the existence of God.

It was a cool autumn day. The Tickle River was swollen with waters from recent rains, and fish could be seen darting around in schools numbering in the hundreds.

“Yes, Mr. Bent?”

“I’m gonna have to go away for a few weeks.”

“Where?”

“Outta the country.”

“Oh.” The nurse frowned.

“I gotta get some money or they gonna take Popo away. My cousin Hazel been talkin’ to child welfare and the EEG. They wanna take Popo to Houston but I won’t let ’em.”

“But maybe it would be better,” Kai suggested hesitantly. “M-maybe if he was in Houston you could visit and he’d have all the best guidance and education.”

“Boy needs a family and a home,” Chill said. “I been in the state institution before. It ain’t no good.”

“But that was a detention center,” the short nurse argued.

“No different. He gonna be detained in the school too. He cain’t come home when he want to. You know his grandmama’ll die a week after he’s gone.”

Kai Lin didn’t argue that point. She watched the large man’s ebony face. He had aged in the two years since Kai met him. Deep furrows had appeared in his cheeks, and something was wrong with his knees. He was still very handsome, though Kai would have never said so out loud.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“I cain’t say. But I want you to take care’a Popo. I want you to make sure that Hazel or Mr. Russell don’t get him.”

“They won’t.”

“’Cause I know you love that chile,” Chill said. “I seen how you are wit ’im. How you come over on your days off. And you know I’m right too. He learnin’ all he can right here, right here in this house.”

Tears sprouted from the ex-con’s eyes. They rolled down his face.

“I love that boy more than I love anything,” he said. “I will not let them take him. I will not let them white people and them people wanna be white turn him into some cash cow or bomb builder or prison maker. He will find his own way an’ make up his own mind god dammit.”

Kai reached out to touch the big man’s arm. He pulled her close, holding her forearms in a powerful grip. Kai winced but didn’t fight him.

“Maybe that’s what they’re afraid of,” she said. “Maybe they don’t want these children to use their minds and their spirits. Maybe if they did that the world would change.”

“I know you know,” Chill said. “They afraid Ptolemy would be their king if they didn’t brainwash ’im.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Kai said. “Sometimes I’m afraid when he talks. Sometimes I’m afraid of what he can see.”

“When I come back you an’ me gotta talk,” Chill said.

Kai did not ask about what.

• • •

Chill was gone for six weeks. The first couple of weeks he called every other day. Ptolemy traced the call on his illegal Internet connection and told Kai and Misty that he was in Panama City. After the third week, however, they received only one faxgram.

Dear Mama, Ptolemy, and Kai

I’m out in the back country down here and so I can’t call. I’m fine and I will be home as soon as I can. Just a little more work and I’ll have enough money to pay for Ptolemy’s home education and we don’t have to worry about what anybody else wants to say. Take care of your grandmother and Kai, Ptolemy. I’ll be home soon.

Chill

“Thill din’t write nuthin’ like that,” Misty Bent said after Kai had read it out loud to both her and Ptolemy.

“Sure didn’t,” Popo agreed. “Chilly never say no Ptolemy when he talkin’ t’me.”

“He must have had somebody write it for him. Maybe he dictated it over some kind of radio system,” Kai said to allay the family’s fears. She wasn’t worried that the faxgram came from Chill. What bothered her was how the high school dropout/ex-convict was making so much money in Panama.

The Vietnamese nurse had found a home in southern Mississippi. She loved the land and the people more than her native Hanoi and more than Princeton, where she’d spent so many years going to school. The people reminded her of the stories that her grandmother told. The great jungles and the wild forests. By 2010 Vietnam was divided into twelve highly developed corporate micro-states that produced technical and biological hardware for various Euro-corps. Gone were the farms and rice paddies. The back roads were paved with Duraplas, and the giant cobra was extinct. So Kai reveled in the heavy Mississippi air and the meandering back roads, the thick drawl on the English words and life that sprung from every tree and rock and stream.

And then there was the child who listened to God. Kai had only lived in Hazel’s house since Chill had been gone, sleeping on the Bents’ couch, but she had felt that house was her home since the day she’d crossed the threshold.

• • •

Six weeks after Chill had gone a private ambulance drove up the Bents’ dirt driveway. The attendants were from New Orleans, as was the van. The two white men rolled Chill into the house on the wheeled stretcher.

Chill was there under a thin sheet. His head was shaven and his eyes were covered with bandaged gauze. The form his legs made under the sheet was straight and motionless.

“Where should we bring ’im, ma’am?” one of the attendants asked Kai Lin.

“What’s happened to him?”

“Uncle Chilly!” Ptolemy screamed in dismay.

“Don’t know nuthin’ ’bout that, ma’am,” the second paramedic said. “We just picked him up from the airport with instructions to brang ’im here.”

“Am I in the livin’ room?” Chill asked.

“Yeah,” the paramedic replied.

“Chilly!” Ptolemy yelled again. He hid behind Kai Lin’s red silk dress, afraid of the white men, the chrome stretcher, and Chill’s decimated form.

“Then leave me here. Kai?”

“Yes?”

“Give these men fifty dollars each. I’ll pay you back later on.”

The white men were surprised at the generosity of the poor black paraplegic. They both thanked him, gave their apologies to Kai Lin, and left.

• • •

“There’s a clinic in the hills,” Chill was saying. They had wheeled him into his mother’s room and cranked his cot until he could sit up too.

“What have they done to my baby?” Misty cried. But when Chill smiled in a way that Misty hadn’t seen since he was a child, her tears subsided.

“. . . up there they cain’t be bothered and so they can operate with no problem. They wanted my eyes—”

“And you gave ’em up?” Misty said louder than she had spoken in years.

“That was one million seven hundred an’ fi’ty thousand,” Chill said. “My eyes were a perfect fit for a Swiss banker’s son who lost his in a ski accident. But when I was there they had a emergency. It was a Russian general needed the nerve in the spine where he could use his legs. They offered two million for that. I figgered that if I cain’t see then I really don’t need to walk. One thing led to another and I got outta there wit’ six million. They transferred the whole thing into my name ’fore I went under the knife.”

“Why you do that, Uncle Chilly?” Ptolemy asked.

Chill put his hands up in front of him and found his nephew’s face.

“I was worried that I couldn’t keep on payin’ for the house, baby boy. You know Mama’s social security an’ disability been payin’ for me so now my disability be payin’ for her.”

“Chill, no,” Misty cried.

“It’s okay, Mama. You know I been lost outside’a the house anyway. Any time I ain’t here I just wanna come back an’ hear you laughin’ or Popo readin’ an’ playin’ his radio. Don’t worry, Mama. Everything’s fine now.”

5

That night, when Misty and Ptolemy were asleep in their beds, Kai and Chill had their talk.

“I want you to marry me,” Chill said with his empty eye sockets staring at the ceiling.

“What?”

“I cain’t see. I cain’t walk. I got the money to p’otect Popo but I cain’t move to block a thing if they wanna come in here and take him away from us. But if you marry me, and move wit’ us to Jackson, we could get a big house and a Prime Com Link for Popo’s education. You could have boyfriends and free time, just look after Mama and Popo like you been doin’. Just do that an’ we can share the money in style.”

Chill could have told no more about what she was thinking even if he still had eyes. Kai’s face was impassive, even hard.

She blinked once and fifteen seconds passed.

She blinked again.

“Okay,” she whispered. “I accept.”

“You do?”

“Of course. It’s a trust. It’s holy.”

“There’s one thing I gotta tell ya,” Chill said.

“What’s that?”

“I sold my manhood too. With no legs I knew I wouldn’t be able to function no way. So you wouldn’t be marryin’ a man at all.”

“Oh yes I will be,” she said. She took his hand in hers and hummed a song she’d once heard on the radio and thought that she’d forgotten.

6

No one believed the lie about a fall at work that left Chill Bent paralyzed, blind, and rich from the insurance he got. They all knew that poor men and women often sold pieces of themselves to the rich in order to give their children a chance. Hazel Bernard tried to get the marriage between Chill and Kai annulled but failed. At the age of nine, in 2023, Ptolemy Bent joined the Jesse Jackson Gymnasium for Advanced Learners so he would have a social life among other children. But his education came from tutors and texts provided by the Prime Com Link. He worked hard on his radio receiver, which he never discussed outside his home, and one day he convinced Kai to buy him a three-hundred-thousand-dollar transmitter, the state of the art in amateur radio communications.

• • •

“Chilly, you awake?”

“Is that you, Popo?” The ex-convict put out a hand to gently caress his nephew’s face.

“Uh-huh.”

“You got peach fuzz on your chin.”

“You always say that. When you gonna call it a beard?”

“Peach fuzz,” Chill said behind a chuckle.

“I made contact, Chilly.”

“You did?”

“Uh-huh. An’ I told ’im ’bout you.”

“You think the big man’d have somethin’ better t’ do than worry ’bout a blind an’ crippled thief.”

“You the best man in the world, Uncle Chilly. He said he wanna meet you, you’n Gramma Misty.”

“Really? He said that? Damn. Well I guess it won’t be too much longer anyways. Kai said that the doctor said that my kidneys wouldn’t get a nickel down in Panama.”

“You don’t have to die, Chilly,” Ptolemy said, his voice wavering between high and low adolescent tones. “I’m’a just put some wires on your head. You and grandma.”

“You there, Mama?” Chill called out.

“Yeth, baby. Popo gonna make uth out a ethperiment. He thure look fine.” Misty’s ancient voice was weaker. Chill knew that time was short for both of them.

“I bet he do, Mama.”

After what seemed like hours of preparation, Ptolemy said, “Ready?” Then came a white hot flash at Chill’s temples and then the feeling of electric fingers going up under his skull and into the brain.

Suddenly he could see again. Ptolemy was sitting there looking at another Chill laying on the bed. The boy, almost a man, wearing a lavender andro-suit with no shirt, had hair that made him look like the king of lions. Still skinny though and darker than he had been. From brown to black, Chill thought and then he was gone forever from the Earth. First his thoughts were elsewhere and then slowly, electron by electron, the matter of his soul was transported. Somewhere there were bursts of stars and lines of reality that connected uncounted voices.

God, Chill thought. But there was no answer to his assertion. A halo of winking lights radiated next to him, mingled with him, and he knew in some new language that this was his mother. The word freedom occurred to Chill but the meaning faded with the clarity of his light. So much he knew that he was unaware of. So much beyond him even then.

It’s like I’m a breath, he wanted to say.

Yes, Misty’s new form replied.

• • •

Ptolemy Bent was arrested and tried for the euthanasia killing of his uncle and grandmother. He was sentenced to twelve years in a private prison run by the Randac Corporation of Madagascar.

At the trial God was ruled an improbability.

“He is aware that he disintegrated their brain tissues,” claimed Morton Tremble, the prosecution’s expert psychiatrist, “by using feedback from a powerful radio transmitter. Maybe he thought, consciously, that he was sending their souls to God or whatever. But in truth he only did this because both were so close to death already, as he himself has testified. He admitted that their bodies, including their nervous systems, would die. This is a classic case of mercy killing. And Ptolemy Bent was completely aware that euthanasia is against the law.”

Kai Lin, who was by Ptolemy’s side every day of the trial, stored his radio equipment in her basement and never visited her husband’s grave.