Free Jack Strong: A Story of Life After Life by Walter Mosley Page A

against mine and I felt his, felt his manhood, and it was like everything went red. All the things I refused Ralph came up and out of me. I was another woman … another woman.
And God help me … I felt free.
…
    Mama, am I gonna die? Mama? Mama? That boy who was in the next bed last night, they took him away this morning. His arms and legs were all stiff, and he only had one eye open. I heard them talking about me when my eyes were closed and they thought I was sleep. No, I wasn’t foolin’; I was just restin’ my eyes like Papa does. But they said that I was gettin’ worse. One nurse said that they’d have to cut off my leg if it didn’t look any better by today. Am I gonna die, Mama? Can they put a leg back on?
…
    Bobo? Bobo, you there? Don’t you worry, man. It’s wrong what they doin’. It’s wrong for the state to kill a man no matter what that man done done. It’s wrong, and if they kill you, you ain’t no more a murderer but a victim, and God will take that into account when they bring you up to Judgment. God will lay you down and wash away the poison they slaughtered you with. He will sang to you and raise you up. He will forgive your sins just like he did for Mackie, and Jojo, and even that crazy white boy kilt all them women. Just like he will forgive me for killin’ that young couple for no reason. He will see that the people who kilt us is also the people who drove us crazy and even though they strap you to that gurney and inject poison into your veins it’s not you, Bobo. It’s not you at all.
…
    Those voices and a myriad of others cried out in the darkness of my sleep. I wanted to wake up, but it seemed like every soul needed to say something, to apologize or explain, to regret or exult in their actions.
    Pieces of personalities combined with the unbearable intimacies of men, women, and children. Some of them spoke in other languages, but I understood every word and nuance. All different races and religions, sexes and sexual persuasions … and perversions. And the things they knew: the terrible secrets and hopeless tragedies, the facts and figures, skills and abilities. Knowledge swirled through the dream like a jewel-skinned snake moving through high grass in moonlight, catching glimpses of visions and recollections—a jewel-skinned viper hungry to devour every memory.
    It wasn’t me dreaming, not exactly—it was more like the dream dreaming me, making something out of all those disparate exultations, fears, and complaints.
    A lower caste genius from Goa plotting a reign of terror against the Brahmin caste.
    An eighty-six-year-old white woman shut-in dreaming of children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren—but never of the adults they’d become.
    Every one of them as real as I, lost in sleep and struggling for consciousness, as real as I but not like me. I was … becoming something, something necessary and different. I was eroding and resurrecting the characters and memories, the knowledge, the hopes and hopelessness of those speakers in the darkness of the dream becoming me.
    After what seemed like a month of fitful slumber, I opened my eyes.
    The room I found myself in was large and antiseptic, a hotel room rendered in washed-out blues and bland tans, furnished with a bed and bureau, a blue door (leading to the hallway, I supposed) and a glass door that opened onto a small terrace looking down four floors onto a concrete plaza with a fountain spraying recycled water on marble statues of frolicking, naked nymphs.
    In the distance was the twilit Strip of Las Vegas.
    My memories of the Strip were varied. I saw a man’s reflection in a glass. He was me and had a razor-thin mustache, the pit boss of a major casino floor. I was what they called a leggy blonde dancing naked in front of leering men, sweat running down my spine and thighs. I was an old man sitting at a bus stop at dawn waiting for someone, I forget who, to pick me up after night guard duty. I was a fat woman with