Harbinger (8 page)

“You know, this is my first time outside the village in ten years.”

“
What
? Are you serious?”

“Not usually, but in this particular instance, yeah.”

“That’s amazing.”

“Amazing plus other less appealing descriptors.”

“Wow,” Jill said. “I mean, I got the impression you didn’t even
like
it there so much.”

I slipped my glasses off and squinted at the blurry world then replaced them.

“I guess it has its virtues. It’s confining but feels safe. Also, I signed a contract. Strictly speaking this little jaunt is illegal.”

“Safe from what?” Jill asked.

“I dunno. The big bad world?”

“It’s big, all right. But I don’t think it’s so bad. It can be a pretty nice place, really. Don’t you like it here today?”

“I do. For one thing the chowder’s great. Not to mention the company.”

She placed her hand over mine and squeezed briefly.

“Would you categorize my last remark as a charming insincerity?” I asked.

“I don’t think you meant it that way, but yes. I’m sorry. Don’t be hurt. You want me to be honest, don’t you?”

“Not really.” I smiled to show her it was a joke, though it wasn’t.

“I think your charm switches on automatically in certain situations,” Jill said.

“You mean like during a clam chowder interlude?”

“Maybe.”

I raised my glasses, but her face was a pink balloon framed in yellow soft-focus curls.

Back home I invited her to stay the night but she declined, which stung.

“I really want you to,” I said.

She laughed. “I
know
. But I’m not ready for that again.”

“It isn’t auto pilot stuff,” I said. “I promise.”

“I’ll come back tomorrow,” she said.

“Okay.”

“Unless you’re mad at me.”

“I’m not mad at you.”

She kissed my cheek and gave me a soft, brief hug. I spent the night with myself and a recorded book.
For Whom The Bell Tolls
.

Pretty good but not Hem’s best. To make it short, the damn bell tolls for thee and thee and
thee
.

But not for me.

The next day my eyesight was marginally improved. When Jill showed up I’d already made breakfast for both of us.

“They want you to come down to the clinic this morning,” she said, accepting the cup of French roast I handed her.

“What if I don’t go?”

She shrugged.

“What would happen?” I said.

“Mr. Paranoid.
Nothing
would happen. You’re not a prisoner. You’re not Number Seven.”

“Six.”

“Whatever,” she said.

“I know, I know,” I said. “I’m an employee with full benefits.”

She sipped her coffee. “So don’t go,” Jill said. She grinned. “What do you want to do instead?”

“Can we go for another drive?”

“Sure. Where to?”

“I don’t care. Anyplace outside the village.”

Anyplace turned out to be Portland, a three hour drive. We had dinner in a Chinese restaurant. I got around okay. My eyesight had steadily improved but was still poor. The DMV would have declared me legally blind, but what do they know? In the restaurant I removed my dark glasses. The place was crowded, the whole city was crowded by Blue Heron standards.

“You look kind of nervous,” Jill said.

“Yeah.”

“So  . . .?”

“It’s just my Chinese restaurant look.”

“I see.”

“Okay—I
am
nervous. I feel truant. Two days in a row.”

She giggled. “Do you want me to write you a note to get back into the village?”

“I think my mother has to do that.”

“Right.”

“Jill, you’d be honest with me, wouldn’t you?”

“Honest about what?”

“About us. About why you want to spend so much time with me.”

“Oh, brother. Don’t go there, please don’t. I thought you were getting over that.”

“I’m trying to get over a lot of things. Let me ask you something. If I stood up right now and walked out of this place without telling you where I was going, what would you do?”

“Probably call an ambulance?”

“Why?”

“Because you can hardly see and you’d wind up getting yourself run over by a truck.”

I laughed. “Good answer.” I pushed my chair back and stood up, dropping my napkin on the table.

“Hey—”

“Relax, I’m just going to the men’s room.”

“Do you want me to—?

“No, I can find it all right.”

I negotiated my way between the tables. Things were pretty blurry. Each table had a little red lantern with a candle. To me they were like a fuzzy, pulsing star field. I put my dark glasses back on and asked a guy in a white coat which way to the restrooms. He steered me in the right direction. At the end of the corridor there was a green blur above a crash-bar door. EXIT. On impulse I walked to it, shoved the bar, and found myself outside in the cold night of Portland.

I picked my way around to the sidewalk. Traffic zoomed by. Towers of light all around, city cacophony. I took my glasses off and rubbed my eyes, blinked, rubbed them some more. Squinting, I could just make out the façade of the restaurant. The Jade Dragon. I moved down the sidewalk until I encountered a bus-stop shelter. I sat on the bench and waited, but not for a bus.

The minutes passed, maybe twenty of them. A vehicle pulled up in front of me, the door opened, and a man climbed out. I tensed, but it wasn’t a UI goon come to round me up. The man sat on the bench next to me, the car drove away, and moments later a bus arrived. The man stepped into it but I declined to board.

After a while I stood up and wandered down the street, feeling lost. And then I
was
lost. Finally I asked a passerby to steer me towards The Jade Dragon. By the time I got there more than two hours had elapsed since I ducked out the back. Jill was gone, and I was alone, except for my deflated paranoia. Fear by any other name. I was my own goon, a depressing realization.

“Ellis!” It was Jillian, waving from her car. I got in and we drove away from there.

“I was so scared,” she said. “I’ve been looking
everywhere
for you.”

I made all the appropriate noises of apology and contrition and tried to keep the self-contempt at a minimum. It was a long drive back to Blue Heron.

“I want to renegotiate my contract.”

“I see,” Langely Ulin said.

We were alone in the kitchen of my cottage. My dark glasses lay on the Formica tabletop. So did a fresh ten year contract, virtually identical to the last one, and a Lacrosse pen. My eyes wouldn’t stop watering, but that was okay; it was a good sign.

“You’re unhappy with the current arrangement?”

“Maybe.”

“I’ve mistreated you in some way?”

I wiped my Niagara eyes. “No.”

“What new terms do you propose?”

“Simple. The truth. From your lips.”

“The truth regarding what?”

“My father.”

“You already know all that.”

“I don’t think so. My dad and I didn’t have the greatest relationship, but it’s never made sense that he would essentially sell me to you. I know he felt guilty about it, but why did he do it in the first place?”

Ulin sighed. “Back then I had my feelers out, my people watching everywhere for medical anomalies. Of course I funded—and continue to fund—life prolongation and rejuvenation research around the world. But my feelers have always been out. I believed in the possibility of you or someone like you appearing one day. Call it intuition, or a dream, if you like. Those Seattle doctors didn’t know what they were dealing with, but my people recognized a green flag when they saw one. Preternaturally accelerated healing, and even the hint of organ regeneration. Fantastic.”

Ulin coughed into his hand and picked up his red can of Coke, sipped, and put the can back down.

“Well,” he continued, “you were a minor, so we needed your father’s help. We required your exclusive cooperation. We couldn’t afford to let the world find out about you.”

“Yeah, I understand
your
motives,” I said.

“Your father was a principled man,” Ulin said. “But everyone can be moved. His lever, ironically, was surgery. Heart valve replacement. Congenital defect discovered later in life. He had no medical insurance, and besides: most insurance companies wouldn’t have covered the procedure, not in 1974. Back then such a procedure was considered experimental.”

“You promised him a valve replacement for signing me over to you.”

“Roughly, yes.”

“That’s fairly slimy.”

“A matter of business negotiation.”

“He didn’t last long. What did you give him, a lemon?”

“He never underwent the surgery.”

“Why not?”

“He refused it after you ran away. He spent the final months of his life searching for you. I believe he intended to tell you everything and hope you would agree to cooperate of your own free will. If not he was prepared to accept the consequences and die. Some of this is conjecture. But the picture is clear enough, don’t you think?”

I remembered that night in Long Beach, when I ran. And later a phone ringing endlessly in a lifeless house. The rest I shut out. Or tried to shut out. Flies.

That night I experienced something like a dream but not a dream. I was lying in bed. Claws scratched at the bedroom door. I got up in my boxers and T-shirt and opened the door. Jeepers stood there, his eyes like white marbles.
My
eyes were fine, the water works shut off, in crystalline focus. Now that he had my attention, Jeepers turned and padded away, and I followed him.

He waited at the front door. I opened it for us and we went out. The air was perfectly still. My bare feet whispered on the lawn. Then the sidewalk was cold and hard, and Jeepers was trotting, claws clicking jauntily on the cement, and I started jogging after him. The dog’s nose was in the air. I looked up and saw a Glinda bubble drifting serenely above and ahead of us. Something moved inside that bubble but I don’t think it was a good witch; it wasn’t anything I could make out, just a shadow, like what you might see through the translucent skin of an insect egg.

The bubble led Jeepers, and Jeepers led me. We arrived at an open expanse of blue grass with an orderly copse of trees in the middle. Orderly? They formed a perfect ring. Each tree was between seven and nine feet tall and they stood close together.

As Jeepers and I approached, the two nearest trees opened up, or stepped aside.
Stepped
aside. In the middle of the circle a few people stood conversing quietly with one another. The night was so weirdly still that their whispery voices sounded like a sentient breeze.

Jeepers trotted right up to the group and they welcomed him. One man bent over and scratched the dog behind the ears, and Jeepers’ tail started wagging.

The man was my father.

I stood apart from the group, just within the ring of trees, all of which had begun to sway gently side to side. The two that had parted for us now moved together again, closing the ring. I couldn’t bring myself to look directly at these trees. I was frightened of them. A trunk pushed against me, urging me forward.

Only my father’s face was distinct. The other people were silent now, their features not quite discernable. Above them the Glinda bubble hovered and pulsed with a ghost light of its own. The light fell upon the people, and I suddenly realized that was why I couldn’t see them properly. The light did not illuminate but somehow obscured them. My father was recognizable because he had leaned out of the cone of light when he reached to scratch Jeepers.

“Dad—?” I said.

He smiled at me. It was a smile I’d never seen him wear in life. Easy and broad and loose, a happy and unselfconscious smile with parted teeth.

“That man lied to you,” he said.

“What man?”

“Ulin.”

Our voices were bell-clear within the circle of trees. My father’s voice seemed to be right inside my head.

“What did he lie about?” I asked.

“That whole business with the valve. I would have taken the operation. Heck, I was dying. Of course I would have. But they told me I had to hunt you up first.”

“You should have told me.”

He shook his head. “Here’s the deal, Ellis. Things happen the way they’re meant to happen, and that’s that. Everything has a reason and a purpose. That’s what I’m told. Anyway, it’s time for you to get out in the world. Past time. That’s what this whole deal is about. You aren’t supposed to hide out in Blue Heron anymore.”

The others who remained under the cone of light nodded their heads. Dad sat down on the grass and roughhoused Jeepers a little. Jeepers licked his face and my dad laughed. He would never have let the dog do that in real life. He had loved Jeepers in his own taciturn way but wouldn’t tolerate getting licked at like that. I laughed at the sight, and when I laughed it was a real sound, and I was walking clumsily, like a drunk or a somnambulist, in through the open door of my cottage.

An hour later I walked back out, leaving the contract on the kitchen table with the fancy Lacrosse pen lying on it, nib aimed at the empty signature line.

I thought about calling Jillian, waking her up, but knew I wouldn’t have considered it if I hadn’t needed a ride out of town. That was a little too mercenary even for me. Besides, I was no damn good at good-byes.

I tried but couldn’t find Nichole. Her father was dead
. The wide lady in the purple housecoat who answered the door of Nichole’s former house failed to enlighten me as to her whereabouts. I had left Blue Heron with only the cash on hand, about two hundred dollars. These resources were rapidly being depleted by bus fair and motel rent. There were no Nichole Roberts in any of the state’s phone books available in the King County Public Library main branch. There was, however, one Adriel Roberts with a double listing, residence and business. I flipped to the yellow pages and found her ad. It had to be Nichole’s mother. Fortunes, Tarot Readings, Past Life Regression.