Harbinger (7 page)

The clinic was a couple of blocks away, but I turned onto the beach path instead, just as I would have done with Jeepers. Today I was the only beachcomber, unless you counted a couple of seagulls beaking away at tide-stranded delicacies. I kicked at an emerald rope of kelp glistening in the sun. The wind blew in my face, salty and brisk. A few fishing boats trolled far beyond the breakers. I looked back towards the village. The church steeple shone above the trees. Ulin’s fortune derived from cutting edge aerospace research and development. Most of the residents of Blue Heron were engineers and top of the line idea people. They lived here because it was in their contracts to live here, Langely being some kind of proto control freak. Every morning more than half the population of Blue Heron jumped in their cars and drove to the research facility ten miles inland. So on weekdays it was me, the spouses (a la some kind of 1950s template) and various service people.

I resumed walking, the empty leash dangling from my fist, imagining Jeepers plodding along beside me, sniffing at the wet sand, as he had done yesterday. Up ahead someone came out of the dune grass and angled toward me. I kept walking. The individual got closer and I recognized Jillian Bravos, a young woman from the clinic. She was a nurse’s aid or something, what they call you when you take blood samples or hand patients cups to pee or masturbate into. We’d slept together a couple of times, and it pushed back the loneliness, but somehow our liaisons had felt otherwise inauthentic. To me, anyway. Part of it was I had honed the fine art of wall construction, and Jillian didn’t know the secret password. Neither did I, for that matter. And I didn’t want to know it, either.

“Ellis!” She waved and caught up to me.

“Hi, Jill.”

She looked at the leash then scanned around the empty beach. “Taking Jeepers for a walk?”

“Yeah, it’s kind of our last walk.”

“Oh, don’t say that.”

Jillian was a sweet girl. Her yellow hair was cut short and her cheeks got red in the cold. She had a sturdy frame, ample breasts, a frequent smile. She wasn’t my type, which is probably why I picked her. There had been other girls, all of them Blue Heron locals and none of them my type. It was pretty messed up, but there you go.

“Did you ever see that TV show
The Prisoner
? I asked Jill.

She shook her head. “I don’t watch much TV. Mostly just
Miami Vice
.”

“
The Prisoner
was about this guy who was a secret agent or something, and he winds up captured by the bad guys, and he has to live in this village where everybody works for the bad guys, only it’s unclear. You know? It’s all kind of mixed up and goofy, so you don’t know what’s real and what isn’t. Plus nobody has a name.”

“No names?” She smiled uncertainly

“Yeah. Everybody has a number instead. The secret agent guy was Number Six.”

“It sounds weird. Are you sure you’re not making it up?”

“It was a BBC show,” I said.

“Well no wonder!”

I nodded, looking past her down the shingle where the land curved away. “What would happen,” I asked, “if I kept walking along this beach for a long time?”

“I guess you’d get tired.”

“What I mean is, would I be allowed to?”

“What’s to stop you?”

“I don’t know. Giant white balloons and guys in golf carts, maybe.”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“Want to walk with me to the clinic? I’m on my way there now. Don’t you have an appointment? I think I saw you had an appointment.”

I jingled the leash, remembering how Jeepers used to like it when I scratched him behind his ears. “Yeah,” I said. “I guess I forgot about that appointment. My dog isn’t up for a really long walk, anyway. Lucky I bumped into you.”

Jillian picked up my hand and looked into my eyes, which made me uncomfortable. “What’s wrong, Ellis?”

“Nothing. Shall we go?”

Holding hands, we walked to the clinic.

And so they took my eyes. My corneas, to be exact. In later years they discovered the corneas regenerated more perfectly when they took the entire eye. But these were the early days.

When I came to I was in my own familiar bed in my own cottage, and someone was puttering. I reached up and touched the thick gauze. Already the tingling of my re-gens had begun. My mouth was dry and sticky with the post-op crud.

“I’m thirsty,” I said.

The puttering stopped (I think she’d been dusting). Brisk steps to the bedside. A hand gently lifting my head, a straw inserted between my lips. Cold apple juice, sweet.

“Please open the window,” I said. “It’s stuffy in here.”

“It’s cold outside,” she said in a nursey voice.

“Please open the fucking window.”

She opened the window.

“Sorry,” I said. “Guess I’m cranky when I wake up blind.”

“Mr. Ulin wanted to see you as soon as you were awake.”

“Swell. As long as he doesn’t expect
me
to see
him
. That was sort of a joke.”

“I’ll call,” the nurse said.

“Do that.”

She began to walk away.

“Nurse? I really am sorry. I shouldn’t have said that about the window.”

“It’s all right, Mr. Herrick. I think it must be awful for you.”

Something caught in my throat, but I kept it there and wouldn’t let it out. The nurse left. She was right: it
was
awful. The eyes were only the latest in a seemingly endless season of harvest. Besides various organs, Ulin’s medical team was particularly fond of my pituitary excretions. I mean, who wouldn’t be? The process for harvesting those excretions was complicated, invasive, painful and recurrent. Ever recurrent. I was tired.

Langley Ulin showed up in my bedroom and sat heavily in the wicker chair. The chair made a dry straw cracking sound. Ulin’s breathing was labored, as always. I couldn’t see him but I pictured him in my mind: a walking cadaver “rejuvenated” by multiple transplant surgeries and the experimental hormonal, blood and pituitary treatments. Ulin’s skin was deeply jaundiced and textured like bee’s wax. There wasn’t much they could do about that yet. My brain was the one organ they couldn’t harvest. So they irrigated
Ulin’s
brain with a chemical wash derived mostly from my pituitary gland. He should have left it alone. The treatments occasionally caused synaptic misfires.

“How’s the world look to you now?” I asked.

He grunted. “They couldn’t do the transplant. Your corneas degraded too rapidly.”

“Sorry about that.”

“It was an anomaly.”

“Hmmm.”

“We’ll try again, as soon as your regenerations are complete.”

I swallowed sticky spit.

“There’s a concern that some regenerated organs are not adaptable to transplant.”

“So maybe one set of eyes is all you get out of me.”

He grunted again. “We’ll beat the problem.”

“Will we?”

“Inevitably, yes.”

I pictured him slouched in the wicker chair, staring possessively at me with my own eyes—my original pair, which they’d taken almost ten years ago. None of my harvested organs lasted as long as they would have had they been left in my own body.

So it was horrible all right, but I’d stayed with the program. My dad’s heart had failed. In many ways Langley Ulin had assumed the role of surrogate father, and I had no intention of letting him down and letting him die. That didn’t mean I loved him like a father; far from it. Freud no doubt would have relished my cockeyed contradictions.

It was dark under the thick gauze wrap, and a part of my mind clawed at the darkness, like something primitive and trapped. In a day or so the itch-tingle of regeneration would be driving me mad. Then, gradually, light would reenter my world, seeping in around the edges at first. In a few week’s time I would be able to see in a blurry approximation of normal vision. A week after that I’d have regained full ocular function. At which point—Ulin had just proposed—my corneas would again be harvested.

“I wish I had my dog,” I said.

“Your dog?”

“Jeepers, my dog.”

“Don’t you worry about that dog. My people take fine care of him, fine care.”

I turned my head on the pillow, detecting a misfire.

“Jeepers wasn’t ever lost, was he?”

“Jeepers creepers where’d you get them peepers!” Ulin said. “Remember that one?”

“Not really.”

“Before your time.”

“What about my dad?”

“What about him?” Ulin sounded distracted.

“What was your deal with him?”

“That’s old news, ancient history.”

“So I’m a history buff.”

“You know something, Ellis?”

“What?”

“I’ve never felt better in my life, and I’m eighty-two years old. I’ve got you to thank for that.”

“You’re welcome as hell.”

He stood up, the wicker chair crackling. His feet shuffled to my bedside. He smelled like something kept in a closet and brought out once a year for Christmas or Hanukkah. His fingers trembled over my eye bandages, touched them lightly. I flinched away.

“They’re always blue,” he said.

“I guess they would be.”

“The clearest blue  . . .”

“I hate it when you hover,” I said.

He laughed dryly. The fucking Crypt Keeper. Suddenly I felt terrible loneliness.

“I miss my dog.”

“That poor animal is dead,” Ulin said.

After a day of depressive torpor I felt capable enough to do my own puttering. As soon as I woke up I suggested the nurse find something else to do with her day. She respectfully declined my suggestion and told me breakfast was ready.

“Thanks. I can find my way to the kitchen by myself. I can also find my way to the bathroom by myself, and since that about covers the necessities, you might as well go home or someplace.”

“Oh, I couldn’t just leave you alone,” she said.

“Yes you could. In fact, I insist that you do. Good-bye.”

“But—”

“I hope I won’t have to get rude again. It’s really not in my nature and it gives me a stomach ache. But I’m cranky as hell, and you wouldn’t want me to get a stomach ache.”

When she was gone I listened to the empty house for a while, no friendly scrabble of dog claws on the floor. That wasn’t fun, so I groped my way to the kitchen, following my nose, which was following the smell of fried eggs and coffee. Wobbly with suppressed grief, I sat down and pulled the plate to me and wound up dumping breakfast in my lap. It was a hot breakfast. I bolted up, knocking my chair back and shouting something nasty.

“Oops,” somebody said behind me, and I froze.

“Who’s that?”

“Jill.”

“Sorry, I didn’t hear you come in. How do you like my mess?” I was irritated that she hadn’t bothered to knock, but I kept it to myself.

“It’s spectacular. Want some help?”

“Yeah.”

I sat on the other side of the table drinking coffee while Jill cleaned up the eggs and toast and whatever else had been on the plate.

“I fired my nurse,” I said.

“I know. I bumped into her.”

“A lot of bumping goes on around here, doesn’t it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing. Sorry about the mess. I could probably clean it up myself.”

“It’s all right.”

Insert uncomfortable silence.

“Um, want some coffee?” I said.

“You know I pass your house every day on my way to the clinic. I’m not spying on you. As far as I know, no one is spying on you.”

“I’m the paranoid type.”

“I don’t know about that, but you’re certainly the suspicious type. And—and not very nice. Sometimes.”

I heard her scraping breakfast into the trash then the sharp clatter of plate and utensils in the sink.

Sheepishly, I said, “I guess I can be kind of abrasive.”

“I’ll go,” she said. “I know you love to be alone. Even those times I slept with you I could tell you wanted me to leave after it was over. After we made love. Maybe I should have left, to make you happy.”

“I wouldn’t say I love being alone, exactly.”

A hesitation vibe in the air. “Do you want me to stay? I could call in.”

“I don’t want to get you in trouble.”

“Ellis, just tell me what you want.”

“I want you to stay. I want you to sit and have a cup of coffee with me. And I want to apologize.”

“I’d love a cup of coffee, and you absolutely don’t have to apologize.”

“I apologize anyway, for being a shit.”

“I need sugar for my coffee. Lots of sugar.”

“Aren’t you sweet enough already?”

“Don’t,” she said. “I already know you’re good at charming insincerities.”

Ouch.

So I got me a new nurse slash housekeeper until my eyes grew back. No, strike that. I got me a friend. The whole thing still felt weirdly scripted, but I was tired of my own suspicious mind and wanted to rest and make some decisions. To that end, I allowed the situation go all domestic. Jill came by every morning before I was out of bed, made breakfast, checked my eyes, got me comfortably arranged, then trotted off to the clinic. She returned at lunch and again in the evening. The resting part was fairly easy, but decisions didn’t come readily. Maybe I needed to define my choices. Jill helped me out in that department, too. One day she said:

“Would you like to go for a drive up the coast?”

“You mean leave the village?”

“Yep.”

“Can we do that?”

“Why not? It’s Saturday and it’s beautiful out. We can go to Seaside. It’s about forty miles. Feel up to it?”

This was the second week of my regeneration process. I’d discarded my Man With The X-Ray Eyes bandages and the world presented itself to me in soft cotton candy blurs of color and gray scale, painful if the light got too bright.

“Let’s do it,” I said.

October and unseasonably warm. The windows rolled down and the wind in my face, crisp and clean flowing behind the lenses of my very dark glasses. Eagles on the radio, cranked.
Hotel California.

“How’s it feel to get out?” Jill said.

“Scary.”

We ate clam chowder on the pier. I dumped two packets of oyster crackers in my bowl and stirred them around with my plastic spoon. She hadn’t commented on my “scary” remark but it hung between us just begging for elaboration.