He would always eat or drink afterwards and in those early days I was glad for his companionship and the return of his trust, and sometimes we drank and talked until dawn. During these times he would tell me more subtleties about the Man and would re-predict the fall of the country. Once, he warned me, in a fatherly way, about reading life from books before experiencing it; and another night he advised me on how to schedule girls so that one could run them without being run in return. These were usually good times of good-natured arguments and predictions; but as we drank more often he tended to grow more excited and quick-tempered, especially after he had just entertained. Sometimes he would seethe hate, and every drink he took gave life to increasingly bitter condemnations of the present system and our place in it. There were actually flying saucers, he told me once, piloted by things from other places in the universe which would eventually destroy the country for what it had done to the black man. He had run into his room, on that occasion, and had brought out a book by a man who maintained that the government was deliberately withholding from the public overwhelming evidence of flying saucers and strange creatures from other galaxies that walked among us every day. Claude emphasized the fact that the writer was a Ph.D. who must know what he was talking about, and insisted that the politicians withheld the information because they knew that their time was almost up and if they made it public the black man would know that he had outside friends who would help him take over the world again. Nothing I said could make him reconsider the slightest bit of his information.

“What are we going to use for weapons when we take over?” I asked him once.

“We’ve got atomic bombs stockpiled and waiting for the day.”

“How can you believe that crap?”

He did not answer, but said instead: “You are the living example of what the Man has done to my people.”

“I just try to think things out for myself,” I said.

“You can’t think. The handkerchief over your head is too big.”

I smiled.

“I know,” he continued. “I know all there is to know about whites because I’ve been studying them all my life.”

I smiled some more.

“I ought to know,” he said slowly. “I have supernatural powers.”

“I’m tired,” I told him. “I want to go to sleep now.”

Claude started to leave the room, then he turned. “Listen,” he said at the door. He pointed his finger at me to emphasize the gravity of his pronouncement. “I predict that within the next week something is going to happen to this country that will hurt it even more than Kennedy’s assassination.”

“Goodnight,” I said as he closed the door.