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.
The stairwell was just as antiseptically clean as the rest of the hospital. I took the steps two and three at a leap, my good right hand sliding down the rail. The door above me banged open. The orderly’s big shoes stomped and echoed after me.
“Hold up!” he kept saying, “Hold up, kid!”
The hospital was only three stories. I came out in the lobby. A woman at the admissions desk looked my way but didn’t say anything. She had been talking to a guy in a charcoal suit and black tie. I hesitated then broke for the door under the green EXIT sign, hit the crash-bar, and was out.
There weren’t any guard towers or search lights. Machine gun fire did not strafe at my heels. A sweep of grass bordered by a low wrought iron fence lay before me. The fence lacked even a token coil of razor wire.
I vaulted the fence and crossed the road into pine woods. They’d brought me here in a private ambulance, a long morphine-saturated ride. I recalled sitting up as we passed through a small town shortly before arriving at the hospital. So that nameless town was my goal.
I tramped along, paralleling the road, and I felt every pebble, root and twig through the soles of the cotton slippers. Behind me voices suddenly rose. My breath and I halted. Three flashlight beams crossed and jiggled in the wooded distance. No bloodhounds, though.
I moved farther away from the road, found some dense brush, and balled myself up in it, white face hidden behind my arms. The hospital clothes were dark green. I waited and hoped for the best.
A man passed within a dozen yards of where I hid. I risked a peek. A flashlight beam swung and bobbed, seeking, but it never touched me. I remained in my hiding spot a long time. There were no more voices or flashlights.
I called Nichole collect from a payphone outside a 7-11 store in Shelton. It had taken me forever to get there and it was almost morning. I had no idea what day of the week it was. All I was counting on was that Nichole’s father would be passed out on the sofa, that he wouldn’t answer the phone.
Nichole picked up on the fourth ring and accepted the charges. She sounded wide awake.
“When the phone rang,” she said, “ I just knew it was going to be you. Isn’t that weird?”
“Yeah.”
“So where are you, and how are you, and why didn’t you ever call me before now?”
“I’m in Shelton,” I said. “I need you. And Nichole? I need some clothes, too. Any kind of clothes.”
“I’m there,” she said. No hesitation. “I got a nine a.m. class,” she said, a couple of hours later when she picked me up in her dad’s Mercury. I’d been waiting for her in a park. A police cruiser had passed through the park once, but that was it. Otherwise it had been me and the jungle gym, and now I was grateful to be sitting in a comfortable car with the radio playing and a beautiful girl in the driver’s seat. My girl.
“You’re in college, huh?” I said.
“Not really.” She lit a Winston with the
dash lighter. “It’s just community college. Killing time college. Fuck it. You look like an escaped mental patient. How’s your hand? I can’t believe what happened.”
I showed her the hand, and she looked a little disappointed.
“I thought there would be, like, Frankenstein stitches and all.”
“There were but the scars faded.”
She looked more closely. “But there’s no scar.”
“I know. It’s weird. I think that’s why they had me in that hospital. That and the finger.”
“What finger?”
I told her about the pinky. “Holy shit,” she remarked. Then: “Are you going to be in trouble?”
I shrugged. “My dad signed some papers, but they can’t force me to stay. Nichole? Thanks for coming.”
“Jesus, no problem. What else was I doing? Hey, your stuff’s in the back.”
I twisted around to look. My brother’s duffel coat was neatly folded on the back seat. There was also a blue sweatshirt and a pair of beat up Nikes. I teared up at the sight of the coat. “How’d you get this?” I said, grabbing it.
“Your dad doesn’t always lock all the windows when he goes out. I should have snatched some jeans, too, but I got scared.”
“You’re the greatest. Don’t worry about the pants.”
A car passed us slowly, and the driver, a man in a sport coat, looked over.
“We better go,” I said.
Nichole put her cigarette in the ashtray and moved the shifter into Drive. I felt okay again, because I was with my girl and that’s all I wanted.
That first day we drove for hours. Nichole seemed to pick roads and highways and exits at random. She smoked a whole pack of cigarettes. She told me how her mom finally moved all the way out of the house and how awful it was now, and how her dad never had more than two words to say to her. So I told her about how my dad signed me up to be some kind of guinea pig without even asking me first. It was hard for me to follow a critical line on my father for long, though, because I could see him in full 3-D vision.
“What do you mean 3-D vision?” Nichole asked.
“I mean I can see things from his point of view. I know how tough it’s been for him, losing his stupid Boeing job and my mom and brother.”
“Well, you lost them, too. Except for the job.”
“I know.”
“So why does he get a special pass to be an asshole?”
I winced inwardly. “He’s not really an asshole. Not a total asshole.”
“My dad’s a total asshole. And my mom’s a flake.”
Steering with her left hand, she felt the empty pack of Winstons with her right, crackling the cellophane, making certain the pack was empty.
“My mom’s a complete fucking flake,” she said, throwing the crumpled pack into the passenger footwell.
We slept on the sand in Long Beach, Washington. Nichole had brought a couple of sleeping bags. We zipped them together and snuggled into them behind a driftwood windbreak. Bonfires blazed up and down the beach. Silhouetted figures holding beer bottles capered before orange and yellow flames. Smoke chugged into the night sky. We were part of it and remote from it at the same time.
We had been talking a lot, but now in the double bag we stopped talking. The stars were diamond hard. So was I. Well, not diamond hard. But pretty damn hard. It was my first unequivocal erection since my operations. Of course there had been the physical trauma of the accident followed by the deliberate trauma of scalpel and stitch. But lying in the bag with Nichole I realized that I’d also been depressed, maybe even clinically depressed. And now I wasn’t. Just like that. It had been like the ambulance ride to the first hospital. The medics had stanched the blood gush from my wrist with a tourniquet. I’d kept staring at the soaked gauze wrapped over my stump, and I knew a piece of me was gone. Even in my deep fog of pain, I knew I wasn’t whole and never would be again (at that point I hadn’t known they’d put my hand in a cold box right in the same ambulance or that there was a chance surgeons could successfully reattach it). A profound sadness and sense of loss had descended upon me—and abruptly lifted the next day when I saw that I had my hand back.
Nichole had been severed from me for three months.
“Hmm, down boy,” she said in the bag, reaching into my underwear and taking me in her hand. I whimpered a little, but in a manly way, of course.
“Do you know why I invited you into my room that night?” she said.
“Not really.”
“Because it was like I remembered I knew you.”
She fell asleep first, all tangled up with me in the hot bag, her head snuggled against my chest. I gazed at the stars, the taste of Nichole still on my tongue, the smell of our sex enveloping us like another bag. I fell asleep with the minute knitting of muscle and tendon tingling in my pinky.
In the morning I woke before Nichole. The sky was a pastel suggestion of lime. I watched Nichole’s sleeping face and I took her hair into my fingers. I used my left hand because the right one was trapped under her shoulder. It was a few moments before I realized that all my fingers were working, that I’d regained, in my last sleeping hours, the full function of my hand. And for the first time in weeks the tingle-itch was absent. I held the hand up to the pale dawn and flexed the fingers experimentally. Then I stared at the pretty sky and waited for Nichole to wake up. She did, but it was a while before I realized it. What clued me in finally was her mouth kissing my mouth. Her breath was sweet even at that hour—sweet enough, anyway.
“Where were you?” she said.
“Right here.”
“I don’t think so. Your eyes were open, but you didn’t hear a word I said, did you?”
“Sometimes I kind of zone out,” I said. “Mom called them my autistic vacations.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” But I didn’t want to think about my mother, so I asked Nichole what she wanted to do.
“Let’s go see my flaky mom,” she said.
It turned out Nichole’s driving had not been all that random. Her mother was in Long Beach, staying in one of the cottages a friend of hers rented to the tourists.
“I’m warning you,” Nichole said. “She’s a total flake.”
I said thanks for the warning.
The cottage was charming in a deliberate way. Cedar shake walls, flower boxes under the windows overflowing with color. A porch with two Adirondack chairs angled toward the sound if not the sight of the ocean.
At the slamming of our car doors Mrs. Roberts appeared. Standing on the porch she looked like some kind of gypsy queen in a diaphanous purple skirt (through which the good shape of her legs was visible), bright paisley scarf, hoop earrings, African bracelets that clicked woodenly on her wrists, and so forth.
“There’s my baby! she cried, then added, turning to me, “And who’s this? Your baby?”
“Mom,” Nichole said.
“I’m Ellis Herrick,” I said.
“Oh my God, the boy in the accident?”
“Yeah.”
She looked at my left hand then at my right.
“It’s this one,” I said, holding up the left.
“It looks so normal.”
“It’s pretty normal,” I said.
“Ellis just got out of the hospital,” Nichole said.
“And they wouldn’t give you your pants back?” Mrs. Roberts said to me, staring at my baggy hospital greens.
“I left in kind of a hurry.”
“Well, both of you come in. I’ve got tea, wine, and cannabis. English muffins, too.”
“Jesus, Mom,” Nichole said.
I had tea but really wanted a Pepsi. Nichole also had tea, and her mother lit up a joint. She embarrassed Nichole, and I could see why, but I liked Mrs. Roberts. Her features were similar to her daughter’s, and at forty-five or whatever, she was practically as beautiful. Plus the dope didn’t make her act sloppy or stupid. It seemed to enhance her.
“You have the most astonishing aura, Ellis,
” she said to me, and I had to ask what an aura was. She described it as an “energy nimbus” that glows off everyone but is invisible to those who aren’t willing to look at them. Nichole rolled her eyes, but I was interested.
“What do you mean not willing to look? People just see or don’t see stuff, right?”
“The eye is a physical organ,” Mrs. Roberts replied. “It will see whatever there is to see in the strictly physical realm.”
“Uh huh,” I said.
“But there are realms other than the physical, Ellis.”
“Like other dimensions?” That was me and my science fiction fetish.
She drew thoughtfully on the remaining scrap of a joint, holding it in a fancy silver roach clip.
“Other dimensions, yes,” she said. “A Master recently told me that everything is simultaneous. Don’t you find that profound?”
“Everything is simultaneous?” I said.
“Very profound, mother,” Nichole said.
“What’s a Master?” I asked.
“Actually, this one referred to himself as a Harbinger, not a Master.”
“A harbinger of what?” I asked.
“Consciousness evolution. I saw him out on the beach one night. About a month ago. I saw him with my physical eyes, but I think he was existing simultaneous to the physical. He came down out of the sky in a big bubble, like Glinda the Good Witch? Remember Glinda in The Wizard Of Oz?”
“Sure,” I said. “I remember.”
Nichole and I exchanged looks. See? Nichole’s look said: a total flake. But I was recalling my soap bubble dream of a few months ago.
“What did the Harbinger thing look like?” I asked Mrs. Roberts.
She laughed. “That was so odd. When I saw him I was actually scared for a minute. He looked like an old larch tree we had in the backyard of my house when I was a kid. A big old gnarly larch tree. Let’s order a pizza, kids. I’m starving.”
Nichole and I slept in the cottage that night, but not in the same bed, or even the same bag. I doubt Mrs. Roberts would have objected, but Nichole whispered to me that it would be too “creepy” with her mother right in the next room.
There was only one bed in the cottage anyway. So Nichole slept on the sofa and I unrolled the sleeping bags on the floor, one on the bottom for extra padding. In the dark the air was salted and the ocean surf a constant susurrus calling me out.
Harbinger Page 3
