Futureland - Nine Stories of an Imminent World by Walter Mosley Page A

north, south, and east to go," the unrepentant grandmother replied. "I'll get Malik to drive you home."
    "Maybe you'd better. It must be the letdown from all that work getting ready."
    "Is Aja there?"
    "No. She was called away on that new job for Ocean Farms."
    "Then maybe I should go--"
    "No, Rhonda. No. I'd rather sleep alone."
    "I wasn't saying . . ." the woman sputtered.
    "Don't you get my jokes yet?" Fayez said. He found it difficult to sit up straight in his chair. __________

    By the time he was standing naked next to his bed, Fayez Akwande feared that he was dying.
    "Vid on," he said.
    The small monitor next to the bed winked on and a man's voice said, "Vid ready." But by that time Fayez was unconscious on the bed. A short while later the vid said, "Three minutes has elapsed. Vid off."
    __________

    When Fayez Akwande awoke it was nighttime. He was lying on his back, dressed in a full-length silk Ghanaian burial gown, his hands folded over his chest. The air smelled like the savannah. He stood up feeling both refreshed and afraid. There was a lit candle on his writing desk. Next to that was a handwritten letter.
    There was an electric tingle when Fayez first picked up the note, but that faded.

    Dear Fayez,
    You have defeated me. This is a rare thing. "As rare as dinosaurs," I usually say, because I frequently terminate those who thwart me in personal or business matters. I suppose that you think me a monster. I suppose I am. But be that as it may, you have given me one of the rarest gifts for my collection--the memory of a terrific con game. You beat me on my own ground, turning my greatest strength against me. For this lesson I will let you live. In the right-hand pocket of your burial gown you will find a relic of another one who challenged me. He did not fare as well.
    K.

    Immediately that he finished the note, as if it could somehow detect that he was done reading, the paper crumbled into ash.
    In his right-hand pocket Akwande found an ochre-colored envelope. Its contents were three small bones that once made up a human finger.
    4
    "But why, man?" XX Y, the burly madman from Alabama, said in an atypically high whine. "Why?"
    "I thought you'd be happy to hear that I'm leaving. Now you can make the Seventh Congress the war council," M Akwande replied.
    "I'm the one they want out," XX Y opined. "Everybody wants you, the man who saved Africa." The RadCon6 co-chair ran his powerful fingers through a full mane of coarse blue-gray hair, hair that was combed straight back and down to shoulder length. XX Y, chairman of the board, radical separatist, would rather have seen the world burn than give one inch to compromise. His eyes were holocausts of four hundred years of black suffering; their only promise was vengeance.
    "Why?" he asked again.
    "This world was set when they dragged the first African into a slave ship," Akwande intoned. "Like the child who sees his mother and father slain by devils wearing white faces. Like the girl raped by her imbecile brother in the playhouse next to her dolls. The heart," he said and paused, "the heart is rotten."
    "Is it the bones?" XX Y asked. He had never liked Akwande and his diplomacy. He never followed the Go master, he never would.
    "No, I'm not afraid. That was a crash I walked away from. No, I'm not afraid. But after I woke up and found those bones I went to the Infochurch that they put up in Newark. You ever been there?"
    "No," the Lion sneered. "Never."
    "There's five hundred workstations and service twenty-four hours a day. The hologram minister, Dominar of the Blue Zone, blesses and instructs the people on the usage of the terminals in deciphering God's secrets."
    "That's a bunch'a shit and you know it."
    Fayez ignored the quip. "Almost all of the parishioners are black," he said. "Those who aren't are Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, and poor whites. A couple'a people recognized me but they didn't speak. They just stared at their monitors. They spoke and the computer remembered