Harbinger (6 page)

Her lips dusted with white powder.

So I was eighteen. That meant the contract or whatever my dad had signed as my legal guardian was no longer enforceable. I picked up the phone and made my first long-distance call since moving to Bremerton. Fifty miles or so due east a phone rang in the house where I was once a baby, and no one picked up.

It was time to go home and straighten out whatever was straighten-out-able about my life. I didn’t bother giving notice at The Wild Boar. They paid me in cash, and I kept my earnings in an envelope taped to the frame of the motel bed. Walking out of room seven for the last time, I left the door open.

Half a dozen newspapers littered the porch of my North Hill house, each rolled up tight and bound with a rubber band. My dad’s Plymouth sat under the carport on tires with low pressure and shallow tread; I knew how they felt.

The back door key was in its usual hiding place in the garden under a cement gnome my mother had years ago placed there in one her infrequent capitulations to suburban kitsch.

Inside, it was the smell and the flies that confirmed what I already knew: I was an orphan. Can an eighteen-year-old “adult” be an orphan? I certainly felt like one. Dad lay in his bed, and a week ago he probably would have appeared to be sleeping. Now he just looked like what he was: a corpse. Something switched off inside me. If it hadn’t switched off it would have shaken me to pieces. I turned away.

Jeepers was gone. I looked in every room but he wasn’t in the house. Probably a good thing. Some time later I found myself, in some kind of shock, slouched on the living room sofa. For all I knew Nichole was back at her father’s house two blocks away, but I lacked the will to go see. Who knows how long I would have sat there? It was twilight when someone knocked on the door, a sound so startling in the ticking quiet that I jumped. Whoever it was knocked again.

Somehow I directed my body to stand up. At the front door I hesitated. Someone was out there, only a few feet away. Opening the door would also open the next part of my life, and I wasn’t sure I even wanted a next part to occur. In my mind I saw myself standing there like a zombie while the mystery knocker went at it again. That was too depressing.

I opened the door.

Standing on the porch was an ordinary man of about sixty (I later learned he was seventy-two), taller than me, maybe six foot and change, fit and handsome with well-defined features. A soap opera “distinguished gentleman.”

“Hello, Ellis,” he said.

“Hello.”

“My name is Langley Ulin. We need to talk.”

“What about?”

“Many things.”

“I can’t really talk to you right now, Mr. Ulin. My dad—”

“What about him?”

“He’s dead and I don’t know what to do. I don’t even know what to do.”

“Where is he?”

“In his bed.”

Ulin turned slightly and made a gesture with his hand. There was a car parked in front of the house, a black limousine with darkly tinted windows and a boomerang antenna on the rear deck. At Ulin’s gesture the front passenger door opened and a bald man in a blue blazer got out and started walking toward us.

“Yes, Mr. Ulin?” he said. His head was very pink.

“This young man,” Ulin said, indicating me, “is concerned about his father. Please go see about it. End of hall. Is that all right, Ellis?”

I shrugged.

The bald guy went down the hall. I stepped out on the porch with Ulin. The evening air was cool and clean, especially after the fetid atmosphere inside the house.

“Do you know my dad?” I asked Ulin.

“Yes.”

I was so out of it that the weirdness of this conversation did not even strike me. After a couple of minutes the bald guy returned wearing the same neutral expression.

“Passed on,” he said.

“Thank you, John.” And to me: “My most sincere sympathy.” And back to John: “Please notify the proper authorities and wait for them here. Is that all right with you, Ellis, if John waits in your house?”

“I guess so.”

“Good. Now why don’t you and I go for a little drive and discuss things.”

“Shouldn’t I wait, too?”

“It isn’t necessary. John will deal with matters properly, for now. Don’t worry.”

Ulin’s voice was almost hypnotically unperturbed and soothing. He sounded so reasonable, a voice of mature and empathetic authority. The kind of voice the dead man in the house had once upon a time possessed. I had to go with that voice.

The interior of the limo was another world. A privacy screen separated us from the driver. Ulin directed him by speaking into a microphone grill built into the door frame. “Go ahead, David,” he said into the grill, and the big car pulled onto the road. In the passenger compartment I barely sensed the forward motion. Diminutive fans cycled the air. The light was soft and intimate—theater light. We sat on plush rolled leather. For a while we drove in silence, then Ulin said, “You’re father was a stubborn and principled man.”

I looked at my hands.

“I didn’t know him well or long,” Ulin went on, “but I could tell he possessed a deep vein of personal integrity. Unfortunately it did not end up serving him well. We had a business relationship, Ellis, and when it happened that he was unable to uphold his end of the arrangement your father refused to accept my offer to fulfill my end until he could make good. Do you know what the object of our arrangement was?”

“I was the object, I guess. I don’t understand it, though.”

“To put it simply, I’ve been waiting my entire life for someone like you to appear,” Ulin said. “And I always knew you
would
appear, eventually. I knew it in my gut.”

“What’s so special about me?”

“We believe your unique physiology holds the key to indefinite longevity.”

I wasn’t really following him. My mind had returned to hunker over the memory my father. I shouldn’t have left him alone with a stranger.

“I want to go back home now,” I said.

“Of course.” Speaking into the grill: “David? Young Mr. Herrick would like to go home.”

The car made a turn.

“You’re alone in the world now, Ellis. Have you considered what you will do with yourself? I’m in a position to offer you an opportunity you’d be reckless to refuse.”

I kept looking out the window for Jeepers, remembering how dad brought him home a couple of months after the accident that killed my mother and brother. Remembering, as Mr. Ulin put it, how alone in the world I was now.

“I want to go
back
.” I said.

“But we are back, Ellis.”

The car pulled onto the shoulder and stopped. The driver opened my door, and I saw my house. There was a police car parked in the driveway behind the Plymouth. Before I got out, Ulin handed me a card. “Call,” he said. “Things were handled badly before. Don’t make a hasty judgment based on past experience. You can sign your own contracts now.”

I stuffed the card in my pocket without looking at it and climbed out of the limo. The bald man passed me on the way up the walk. He nodded but said nothing. Inside the house a female police officer with a clipboard was waiting for me.

By noon the following day I was completely overwhelmed. Calls had to be placed, legal issues dealt with, papers signed, decisions made. Adult decisions. I looked in the mirror and didn’t see an adult. A couple of times I picked up the phone and started to call Nichole, but couldn’t bring myself to dial the number. I’d betrayed her. And worse, I’d betrayed something bigger than her, some mystic bond.

I looked at the card Langley Ulin had given me. It was thick gray cardstock with a series of burgundy numbers embossed on it. A phone number, nothing else. Impulsively, I picked up the phone again and dialed. Probably I would have hung up after a couple of rings. I was that iffy. But it didn’t get to a couple of rings.

“Hello, Ellis.”

“Hi.”

“How are you handling things?”

“Not that great,” I said.

“Yes, I understand.”

That voice. So comforting.

“I’m—” My throat tightened with emotion.

“Ellis, why don’t you let me handle the arrangements.”

I breathed out.

Two days later I was sitting on a folding wooden chair next to Mr. Ulin in the little cemetery in north Seattle where my mother and brother were already buried and where my father was about to be interred. Dad’s casket rested in front of us on a covered frame work. I was uncomfortable in my new black suit. Besides us, there were about twenty people in attendance. A few of them looked vaguely familiar. Everyone must have thought Ulin was my uncle or something. I had no real uncles, and the one aunt I was aware of lived in Massachusetts and wasn’t anywhere in sight. Aunt Sarah was a little intense about funerals. She had stayed at my house for a couple of weeks after my mom and brother were killed, and was mostly hysterical the whole time, which had frightened me. I’d mentioned that to Mr. Ulin, and maybe that was why she wasn’t there. I said, in a low voice, “Who are all these people?”

“Friends of your father. Former co-workers, for the most part.”

Afterwards the men all shook my hand and the women gave me brief consoling hugs. Some of them said they remembered me from when I was a baby. It started to rain. Everyone left. Mr. Ulin and I sat in the limo.

“Home?” he said.

I was staring out the open window, across the grass, at my father’s casket. Now I’d seen my entire family put in boxes. I never again wanted to get within a hundred miles of a funeral. Never.

“Or would you like to come with me now?” Ulin said.

I looked at him. “Come where?”

“First to a facility in Oregon. No, nothing like that hospital you were in.”

“What kind of facility?”

“A medical research facility. There will be some tests and a few invasive procedures. I can’t promise you won’t be uncomfortable at times. But after that, if things appear as promising as I believe they will, you can come and live very comfortably in a little coastal village for a while. Perhaps a long while. You’ll have everything you could want or need.”

“Would I
have
to live there?”

“For a time. It’s a controlled environment, Ellis. A safe environment. You would be my employee. Everyone in the village is an employee, or a relative of one. And of course you will be very well paid.”

“For doing what?”

“That would be largely determined by the results of the tests I mentioned. Essentially we’d be harvesting various organic samples.”

My mind skipped over that one. I looked out the window. The casket gleamed darkly in the rain. A couple of guys in work clothes stood discreetly off to the side, waiting for us to leave. I wished I could talk to Nichole, but she felt gone to me, as gone as a dead person.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”

“Good choice, Ellis.”

The smoked glass window slid up and the car began moving.

Snapshots:

—My first ride in an airplane, and me glued to the window of the Lear, watching the world I’d known my whole life shrink away into dollhouse irrelevancy.

—My first view of the “medical research facility,” thinking it looked like the Adams Family Mansion, from the outside, anyway. Inside it was as modern and gleaming as any hospital. The weirdness of that contrast.

At the end of the week, after being probed, siphoned, sliced, diced and microscopically examined, I found myself sitting in a conference room with a bunch of serious men and women in business attire. There were pictures of me on the walls. Big color photographs ten times life size of my post accident, preoperative body. Dr. Jane gave some kind of lecture while she walked around with a pointer and, well, pointed. It was weird sitting in my jeans at that big mahogany table with all those adults looking at me splattered over the walls. I drank my whole glass of water and reached for the urn to pour another. My hand was shaking.

“In short,” Dr. Jane concluded, “complete regeneration of damaged and removed tissue, including the entire spleen.”

“In short, Doctor,” Langely Ulin said, “Ellis Herrick is a God damn miracle.”

The God Damn Miracle woke up one morning ten years later
and noticed his dog was dead. I’d stopped aging the previous summer, at twenty-nine, and now Jeepers had stopped aging, too. Maybe my approach seems superior, but give it a couple hundred years.

Yes, Langley Ulin had restored to me my beloved border collie Jeepers. But in retrospect Ulin was probably responsible for the dog’s disappearance in the first place. I’d wondered why Jeepers wasn’t in the house when I discovered my dad’s body. Or if not in the house why he hadn’t been posted at the back door, whining to get in. Because that’s what dogs do. Unlike most humans, they are loyal to the core.

Until I’d arrived at Ulin’s quaint village of Blue Heron, Oregon, I’d felt uneasy and insecure about the whole thing. Then I’d opened the door of my new cottage and Jeepers had leaped at me, all tongue, tail-wag and bark.

Contract sealed.

This morning in 1985, however, I jingled Jeepers’ leash and he remained motionless on his pillow-bed by the kitchen door. I jingled again, waiting for Jeepers to raise a weary eye, make a huffing noise, and gamely stand up on arthritic legs. He was old but he still loved to get outside and walk and sniff around at stuff, especially down on the beach where there were plenty of especially ripe odors.

But Jeepers didn’t move. I hunkered beside him and placed my hand on his cold head, confirming what I’d known since walking into the kitchen. Jeepers’ fur was liberally threaded with silver and had been for years. I stared at the silver and the black hairs and the mostly white eyebrows, and my eyes teared up and I had to get out.

Empty leash in hand, I opened the door on a crisp autumn morning. Late morning. I was due at the Clinic and probably should have skipped walking the dog, anyway. Today they wanted to take my eyes. Again.

Blue Heron was a caricature of a village. White picket fences dividing putting green lawns, chalky nondenominational church steeple rising above postcard elms, etc. Every inhabitant of the village was an Ulin Industries employee. So was I, the only difference being that my whole job was to give at the office. And give, and give, and give. Langley wanted to live deep into the future, and I was supposed to get him there. He had a
vision
; I had endlessly replenishing organs and various glandular excretions. I guess that made us even.