Harbinger (3 page)

It was fascinating, outside of time. The glitter of glass and blood. The way the Greyhound had ended up, right angles to the direction it had been traveling when it struck us. The people on the bus, their boiling states of anxiety and confusion and fear, the driver’s paralyzing shock as he stared at the body in the street (mine?). Hathaway’s pickup had jumped the curb and struck a power pole. I got nothing from him. Dead air.

I wanted to explore every detail. I wanted to
see
. I was like a baby in a bassinet. A nice well-fed baby—a being of pure experience, absorbing every facet of the world.

That was me: Baby Ellis. Goo goo—
gah
!

It did seem strange that I couldn’t depart from this one place, intriguing though the place may have been. Weren’t the dead supposed to be able to ghost around unfettered by physical limitations?
Was
I dead?

Here came the cars and trucks with pretty flashing lights. And a crowd was gathering. I recalled that Ray Bradbury story, where it’s always the same crowd, appearing out of nowhere at accident scenes, eager to claim a new member. Was that my fate, to die and join The Crowd?

And wasn’t it strange that there should be trees among the people. Eight foot tall, leafless trees swaying out here in the middle of the intersection. I saw my brother speaking with one of them. Jeremy was smoking a cigarette, just like he used to do in life, holding it between his thumb and first two fingers, the glowing end turned inward when he pulled it away from his lips.

I wanted to see my mother, too. All of a sudden I wanted desperately to see my mother. I was the baby in the bassinet and I began to cry.

At once emotion overtook me, drowning my sublime detachment. And then pain. Unimaginable pain. Something inside me—upper left abdomen—was on fire. There was a dreadful pulsing at my wrist.

Noise burst upon me. Sirens. Jet engines. People yelling, hard shoes gritting on pavement.

The smell of gasoline and scorched rubber. I lay on my back, staring at the washed-out star field, my omnivision lost. A soap bubble the size of a Volkswagen Beetle drifted above me, and a shadow moved inside of it.

Someone touched my arm and I screamed.

I had a cartoon hand
. Bandaged, wrapped and gauzed to outsized proportions. And endlessly throbbing, itching. For the first few days they kept the room subtropical. Okay, a slight exaggeration. But it had been hot in there. The doctor told me that heat was necessary to keep the blood vessels dilated and prevent clotting after my “hand replantation.”

Now more than a week had elapsed. The room was cooler, but I still found it stiffling. I had a new scar on another part of my body, as well, where they’d cut a vertical seam starting just below my breast bone through which they had reached in to remove my ruined spleen. That one hurt, too, and itched. Inside. Which was strange, according to the doctor.

I was heavily drugged and drifting in and out of soft-focus reality. During one drift cycle the room was empty and then it was not. Over by the moon-glazed window something loomed like a tree with twisted branch arms and legs. I lifted my head off the pillow, blinked slowly, and the tree was a gnarly man. One more slow shutter blink and watery morning light was flooding the room and rain was tick-ticking on the window.

A doctor I’d never seen before came in. She was tall and thin with a narrow blade of a nose and black framed glasses.

“I’m Dr. Jane,” she said, and proceeded to read my chart and examine my war wounds. My brain slogged around in a swoony bath of nausea juice. I focused on her lapel pin, blue enamel with the stylized letters:
UI
in silver.

Dr. Jane partially unwrapped my hand, snipping first with a small pair of scissors. She breathed mostly through her nose, a quiet rasping. The rasping halted for a beat when she revealed my wrist and forearm scars, which had already faded, making the stitches stand out like an unnecessary violation of flesh. Her breathing resumed until she got to the “bud.” The bud shouldn’t have been there. Even I knew that. The surgeon had amputated the ragged stump that had once been my pinky finger. But instead of a blunt termination of flesh and bone and a sutured sneer there was now a one-knuckle-high node of pink regenerated finger. It had torn the sutures and their ends stuck out like black bristles. Dr. Jane actually gasped. I wanted to hear her do it again, so I pulled my shirt up to show her my splenectomy scar, which was nothing more than a dim pink line. I’d pulled the stitches out myself in my spare time. She stared, touched it with her index finger. Then she wrapped me up again and went away. She should have seen my face a week ago, right after the Nova’s windshield had tried to turn it into a Picasso portrait. Not one scar remained.

The pain continually expanded beyond my drug protocol’s ability to cancel it. No one knew it at the time but my body was metabolizing the pain killers at a super accelerated rate. It would be years before I discovered on my own that
smoking
drugs was the only effective way of vectoring the effects into my pain centers—physical
and
emotional. And forget about Zing, that was fifty years or so off in my endless future.

So I was awake, writhing after a comfortable arrangement of limbs and torso, when “they” came for me. The sheets were damp. I felt a little desperate. But past experience had taught me there was no point in buzzing the nurse. Nothing would persuade them to administer any more percodan ahead of the appointed hour.

The two men who entered my room wore tailored suits and didn’t look like hospital staff. Little blue and silver pins winked on their lapels.
UI.

“Good,” one of them said. “You’re awake.”

“It hurts,” I said. I felt reduced. A child.

One suit turned to the open doorway. “Nurse,” he said, and a young woman I recognized as part of the overnight staff came in.

“Morphine,” the suit said. He said other things, too, regarding dosage and whatnot, but I latched onto the one word like a life-preserver in a sea of pain.

The other suit was taking down the side of my bed and disconnecting me from a saline drip. I worked up some spit and asked, “What’s going on?”

“You’re being transferred to a private facility.”

That made no sense, but then the nurse appeared with a hypodermic needle brimming with sweet if temporary relief, and I ceased to care what did or did not make sense. She looked uncertain and held the hypo as if she’d never touched one before. But she did as she was told and found a vein.

I processed the drug, and “they” administered two more shots during the course of the long drive.

A private hospital and a private room, all tan and antiseptic smelling, a picture of red poppies on the wall and a narrow window that overlooked the garden where I was allowed to stroll, discretely escorted, in the mornings. I had the TV and whatever books and magazines I asked for, but my door was locked at night.

Three months.

Then one evening a key tuned in the lock and an orderly let my dad in.

“What’s the occasion,” I said, not meaning to sound nasty but sounding that way anyhow.

He winced and I wished I could take it back. He pulled off his cap and held it in the fingers of both hands, turning it nervously. Being seventeen I couldn’t exactly apologize.

“Dad, I want to go home.”

He nodded. “They think you should stay.”

“I
know
that, but why? Look at me.” I hopped off the bed, spry as a cat. I flexed my left hand as if squeezing an invisible rubber ball. The fingers were a little jerky and weak, especially the pinky, but they worked better than they had at first and the articulation improved on a daily basis. Plus the pinky is a pretty useless digit to begin with, and this one didn’t even have a right to exist. The pain was over, and I was used to the constant tingling and itching inside my hand and abdomen. It was a very weird sensation, but that was all.

Dad nodded again in that tired, beaten way that had come over him, and I wanted to scream. When I was a little kid and there were four of us in the family instead of two and he had a good job, my dad had been strong and funny and full of life. But that guy was long gone. Dad was probably about fifty now but acted like the dragging end of seventy.

“The thing is, Ellis, it’s because you’re doing so good that they want you to stay.”

“I don’t get it.”

“The doctors say you aren’t healing right.”

“But I feel great!”

“Yeah. But they think you shouldn’t feel so great. Or I mean that your healing is abnormal. I’m not saying it right, you’ll get the full picture from that lady doctor. But they say it’s important, what’s happening to you.”

I stared at him. “What’s important about it?”

He started walking around the room. “You know, this place is pretty nice. Not everybody gets treated like this, especially when there’s no insurance. You have to think about that, too.”

“I just want to get
out
of here.”

He nodded again. That nod. Even when he was there he was absent.

“The thing is,” he said, “I signed papers that say you have to stay for a while.”

“What? Even if I’m not sick I have to stay? I’m not staying here.”

“Well  . . . The way the doctor’s put it, it’s best for you to stay a while longer.”

“That’s bullshit, Dad!”

He stood with his back to me, staring out the window at the night garden, his head bobbing slightly. Silver hairs curled down the back of his neck; he needed a cut.

“I guess I could talk to them, but I already signed the papers. I mean it’s a done deal.”

“I don’t care about any papers.”

“You’re still a minor, for another six months anyway.”

“Dad?”

He turned around. “What’s the big deal?” he said. “You’re out of school, this place isn’t that bad, is it? Can’t you just relax? It’s like a vacation or something. Don’t they treat you good? I know they do.”

“I’m not staying here six more months!”

“Nobody said six more months.”

“
You
just did.”

“I didn’t mean it like you were going to be here that whole time.”

“What
did
you mean?”

He put his cap back on. “I got my shift in the morning.” He worked the grill at an IHOP on Pacific Highway. It was one dead-end job after another since Boeing laid him off. “That doctor will explain it better,” he said. “And I’ll talk to them about the papers, I’ll do that. If it bothers you so much.”

Suddenly I didn’t want him to leave. I didn’t want to be left in this dreadful, lonely place by myself. I touched his shoulder and he turned back to me.

“Dad—”

My tears started. Dad was never any good with tears. Fumbling in his back pocket he said, “I’ve got something for you. I’m not supposed to give you stuff like this, but the hell with it.”

He handed me a square, white envelope, the kind that holds a greeting card. The only other thing he’d brought me in the last three months was my high school diploma, which he’d mounted in a cheap frame and propped on my bedside table. My name and home address were printed on the front of the square envelope in blue ink. It was from Nichole Roberts. The post date was more than a month old.

“Why aren’t you supposed to give me my mail, Dad?” It was hard to keep the anger out of my voice.

“We’ll talk tomorrow, with the doctor. I got to go.” He fussed with his cap, patted my shoulder, and left. I waited for the usual click of the lock being engaged, but it didn’t come.

I tore the envelope open. From its shape I’d expected a Get Well card (and it would have been my first), but this was a Miss You card depicting a harlequin sitting cross-legged holding out a pair of ballet slippers by the laces, a forlorn expression under the white makeup. Inside it said:

I guess this will be my last letter, Ellis. I’m not even sure why I bother, since you haven’t answered any of the others. I wish you’d at least tell me what’s going on. Your dad won’t talk to me. I’ve been to your house, and I know he’s in there sometimes, but he doesn’t answer the door. Am I such a pariah?
(only Nichole could use a word like ‘pariah’ and not sound self-conscious).
Anyway I hope you’re all right. I guess that’s all. I just hope you’re all right.

Her signature appeared under a scribbled heart.

So it was time to check out. I’d been thinking about it for weeks. What had stopped me, always, was the idea that there was nothing waiting for me. In retrospect that is exactly the way Langley Ulin had
wanted
me to feel. I’d thought obsessively about Nichole, but her silence finally wore me down to a lethargic nubbin. After reading her card I was suddenly restored to a number 7 Ticonderoga with a needle sharp point, and I was ready to pencil myself back into life.

I had no street clothes. The staff provided me with flimsy tie-in-the-back “gowns” to sleep in plus one pair of baggy hospital greens and cotton slippers for my morning strolls, which is what I was wearing at the moment.

I let myself out of the room. The corridor was empty, the other doors shut. A stainless steel caddy was parked by one of those shut doors, stacked with neatly folded towels. Down there at the far end of the corridor was an elevator. I started walking toward it. Before I got there it dinged and the doors slid open and disgorged an orderly type with a ring of keys in his fist.

I quickly diverted to the stairs, trying to look purposeful as hell, like I was one of the staff. Maybe I could have pulled it off if I’d been older and dressed in real clothes.

The orderly reached out and hooked my arm. He was big and round, with a flat-top crew cut. He smelled like some nasty cologne “Hold up,” he said, and I wrenched loose and ran for the stairs.

He was big but I was fast. In the stairwell visions of every prison escape movie I’d ever seen flashed through my mind. Wailing sirens, search beams crisscrossing the “yard,” armed guards in the towers, and slobbering bloodhounds snarling and straining at their leashes.