“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.”
chapter four
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.
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.
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