“She has secret seances?”
“Who knows? That was just a for instance. Example given. Right?”
“Okay.”
“Langley Ulin. It’s not an immediately recognizable name, but that can be even trickier. Look. I don’t want to blow you off. Your story is cool. I mean it. Otherwise am I going to sit here and listen to the whole thing? No, I’m not. But I’m the newbie around here. I get plenty of latitude for my attitude, but that’s because my editors think I’m a joke. I’m not a joke, but perception is everything. The other thing is, I’m not Kolchak. I’m not on the Night Stalker beat. I’m not committed to Art Bell country. But it’s an in? You know how tough it is to get your own column? At my age and experience level?”
“Pretty tough, I guess.”
“Forget about it. So bottom line? I’m not pissing off my editors with any exposés on rich industrialists. I like you, man. But you know what? I wish you were sitting there telling me you were a werewolf or something, and telling it with the same level of sane sincerity that you told the re-gen story. That I could write up, post-haste. And it wouldn’t hurt if you sprouted some bristles, right?”
He laughed, good natured as hell. I laughed, too, in the spirit of things. Then I reached into my coat pocket and withdrew the little butcher’s hatchet I’d bought that morning at Kitchen Stuff. Keegan’s eyes went big and round and his laugh dried up, but he kept smiling.
“Oh, man. What’s that for?”
He looked around the newsroom, and I knew I had only seconds. Did newspaper columnists have “panic” buttons under their desks just like bank tellers and Seven-Eleven clerks?
“Take it easy,” I said. “I’m not a maniac, and this isn’t the ax I’m here to grind.” I turned it in my hand. The fluorescent light gleamed on the flat, silky face of polished steel.
“So why don’t you just put it down, huh?” Joe Keegan said.
“I’m not a maniac, and I’m not a werewolf, either,” I said. “So I can’t sprout bristly hair out of my forehead and grow fangs for you. But I am what I am, just like Popeye. And I can do the lizard trick.”
“The lizard trick?”
I smiled. Queasily, I suppose. “Yeah,” I said. “You know, you chop a lizard’s tail off and it grows a new one.”
“Oh, man. Don’t do that, Mr. Herrick, okay? Really don’t do that.”
I put my left hand on the desk, pinky finger extended. The regenerated one that I’d already lost once.
“Oh, shit.” Keegan’s face drained of color. Probably it looked like my face. “Help,” he said, but his voice came out squeaky and broken. A woman typing away on her computer a couple of desks to Keegan’s left snorted without looking up from the yellow notepad from which she was transcribing.
“Trust me, Mr. Keegan,” I said. “You’re going to be glad I did this.”
“Shit.”
I held my breath and brought the blade down with authority. Oh, man. Keegan got off a good hearty scream. Blood sprayed across his desk and speckled his computer’s keyboard and his blue shirt and made black spots on his burgundy tie.
“You saw me do it,” I said, then chopped at the severed digit until it was a ragged mess unsuitable for reattachment surgery. It was bloody Grand Guignol in the Seattle Times newsroom. By then Keegan wasn’t the only one screaming. I dropped the little hatchet, and the clang of it hitting the floor was far away and dull down a swoony corridor, and I fell out of my chair, and fell and fell, the corridor now a bottomless elevator shaft.
My next fully cognitive moment occurred in a hospital emergency room. My hand was numb with local and a doctor was sewing the end of my stump. the anaesthetic lasted about half as long as I needed it to. Each needle poke became a brilliant flash of pain. I bit down on my tongue. There was a policeman standing by the privacy curtain.
Insert three days in the mental ward under observation, a mandatory psych evaluation, a couple of group sessions, some pretty bad meals, and release back into the world. I was deemed not a danger by an overburdened system. And I wasn’t a danger. I had no desire to repeat the lizard trick.
I had the tingle.
When I walked out of the ward, Adriel Roberts and the Rasta man were waiting for me.
“I thought you might need a place to stay,” she said.
I’d checked out of my no-star motel before my last visit to the Times.
“I guess I do,” I said. “But—”
“No buts. I’ve plenty of room. Marvin will drive us. I don’t drive.”
Being mostly broke, I wasn’t in a position to protest. She had a big two bedroom apartment on the top floor of a brick building a few blocks from her shop on Capitol Hill. It was loaded with dreamcatchers, surrealistic artwork, tasteful modern furniture by Dania, and cats. Too many damn cats. She shared her bedroom with Marvin, I discovered. My bedroom was really her business office. There was a desk with a gooseneck lamp, a wooden file cabinet, and an adding machine. There was also a comfy sofa, and Adriel made me feel more than welcome, despite the weirdness of the arrangement.
I holed up and watched my pinky grow back. It took about a week this time. I snipped the stitches out myself with a pair of nail clippers. The tingling sensation grew intense. The end of the stump began to elongate. It was very tender and I had to be careful of bumping it. The first knuckle formed almost over night. It was amazing.
“Holy God,” Marvin said one morning at breakfast towards the end of the week. I’d been avoiding him as much as possible. I didn’t like the way he seemed to regard me as some kind of Sign. Adriel was down at the magic shoppe or whatever it was.
“It’s not much to do with God,” I said, just to be contrary. I had no idea what it had to do with.
“Holy God is just an expression,” Marvin said.
“Yeah, I know. What I’m saying is I don’t have much to do with God, so I doubt my finger does, either.”
“What’s it feel like?” Marvin asked.
“Very tingly and kind of painful at first.”
“You want to smoke a joint?”
“At nine o’clock in the morning?”
He shrugged. “Time isn’t real, it’s just something we make up and then build clocks to remind us of what we meant.”
“Mornings are real.”
“That’s pretty true, yeah.”
“Anyway, I’ll pass on the joint for now, thanks.
“Okay.”
“Marvin, can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Why do you look at me like that all the time?”
“Like what, Mr. Herrick?”
“I don’t know. Never mind. What about the Evolution thing, tell me about that.”
He smiled. “Consciousness evolution. I kind of understand it but probably not enough to really explain it to you? Plus it’s weird me trying to tell you what it’s about. You should ask Adriel. She’s the expert.”
“What’s so weird about you explaining it to me?”
“Because you are it.”
“I’m consciousness evolution?”
“You’re like a pointer, the way Adriel says it. A compass needle aiming at true consciousness.”
I flexed the fingers of my left hand. My pinky was almost back to normal. The only thing missing was the nail. I finished my toast and coffee.
“Can you drive me downtown, Marvin? I have to see a guy.”
“Sure.”
The guy was Keegan at the Times. Keegan and anyone else who had been there on chopping day. Security tried to stop me but I dodged around and bolted into the newsroom and made it to Keegan before they could catch up and grab me. Keegan jumped out of his chair when he saw me. Two security types grabbed me by the arms, but I managed to slip my left one free and stretch it out for the columnist to look it.
“Keegan, you saw me do it!” I shouted.
“Keep that lunatic away from me!” he yelled at the guards.
I closed my fingers into a fist except for the pinky, which I
left extended. The newsroom was in pandemonium. Then I saw it in Keegan’s eyes. The guards got my arm pinned again and one of them snapped a pair of cuffs on me, but it didn’t matter now.
“Wait wait wait,” Keegan said as they started to drag me away. I’d ceased resisting.
“Let me see his hands,” Keegan said.
I had a guard on each arm. They turned me around. Behind me, Keegan said, “What are you, some kind of magician?”
“I told you what I am.”
“Which hand was it, it was this one, right?” He touched my left hand.
“The pinky finger,” I said.
“Fuck me,” Keegan said. A lot of other people came over and looked at my finger.
“It must be a prosthetic,” somebody suggested.
“Bullshit,” somebody else said. “That’s flesh and blood.”
“So they reattached the one he cut off.”
“I don’t think so,” Keegan said. “He chopped that one to pieces. I saw him do it. Hey, Herrick.” His hand was on my shoulder. “I’ve got the exclusive, right?”
“You’re the man,” I said, then the guards escorted me out. The SPD showed up and I was arrested, but I didn’t put in much jail time. The Times made my bail, and the Associated Press made me famous. I gave Keegan more than an exclusive for the paper. I collaborated with him on a book. He turned out to be a competent enough writer. I gave him some good stuff to work with. “Regeneration Man” was a skinny little book in manuscript, and Keegan proceeded to shamelessly pad it. By the time the book was published I was already the subject of intensive medical research at the University Of Washington. In a way it was like being in Langely Ulin’s clutches all over again. I put up with it because of the money from the book sales, mostly.
But all that happened later. Friday I was booked into jail and then processed out again within a matter of hours.
“I want to buy you a drink,” Keegan said when we were on the sidewalk in front the Public Safety Building. “Then we can talk business.”
“I don’t drink much. I told you about the alcohol.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“We’ll talk it through on Monday. Thanks for posting my bail.”
He looked panic stricken. “You’re not going to skip out, are you?”
“Keegan, I want my story told. Believe me. Why the hell do you think I chopped my own finger off right in front of you? I’ll come in Monday, don’t worry.”
“Where are you staying? You need a place to crash?”
“I’m with friends, I’m okay.”
“This is big,” Keegan said. “If even half of what you told me last week—”
“It’s all true. And there’s more. But it’ll keep over the weekend. Thanks again for bailing me out.”
I shook his hand and started walking away. He called after me: “Herrick!”
“Yeah?”
“This is big.”
I laughed.
*
Friday night Adriel prepared a celebratory dinner of rice, tofu, hummus and pita bread. It was the sort of banquet Gandhi might have enjoyed looking at if not actually eating. Following dinner Marvelous Marvin put some Cat Stevens on the turntable and lit up a joint as fat and brown as his thumb. The three of us passed it around, and to my delighted astonishment I felt the vapors mellow my alpha waves in an agreeable fashion. Evidently my body metabolized dope the same way everybody else’s did. Hallelujah!
“Your life is about to change,” Adriel said, lotus-legged on the floor next to the sofa, her head haloed by candle light.
“It’s already changed,” I said. The dope was making me, well, dopey. I giggled.
“There’s big change for everybody coming, and you’re part of it, Ellis.”
“Groovy.”
Marvelous Marvin laughed. I did another dopey giggle, then all of us laughed.
“Hey,” I said, suddenly remembering. “What’s all this consciousness evolution malarkey about?” Except it took me three or four tries to get the word “consciousness” to come out with the right number of syllables in the right order.
“Yeah, tell him,” Marvin said. “I know what it is but I couldn’t say it right, you know?”
I laughed.
“Our planet is dying, Ellis,” Adriel said. “And it’s not a natural death. It’s humans. And there’s some really bad stuff coming up, because we can’t get unstuck from our primitive, tribal thinking. Our monkey thinking, basically. The Harbingers are going to help us evolve to a higher stage of consciousness by filling the world with pointers, hints and clues. Impossible things for people who are ready to take notice and expand their minds with the possibilities of limitlessness. You’re an important pointer, Ellis. You’re crucial. The Harbingers told me.”
“You’re damn right I’m crucial,” I said.
“Man, you are high,” Marvin said.
“Very astute, Marvin. Very.”
We all laughed some more. The beautiful mother of my lost soulmate, Rasta man, and miracle boy. Especially miracle boy. Smoke dat ganja!
Some time later I was lying on my sofa in the office bedroom, staring at the shadowed ceiling, my mind alternately crawling with visions and just plain crawling. It was one of those oatmeal ceilings they used to spray on. To me it looked like the surface of a hostile planet. Strangely I began to imagine an intricate network of graphite-colored tubes interconnecting with silver saucepan domes, a whole city network of these things planted on Oatmeal World. As a kid I used to play with my mother’s sauce pan lids, and I loved science fiction, so I guess that’s where it came from. At some point the image attained a greater reality. It became deeper, dimensional. I felt like I was above the ceiling in an orbiting vehicle, not lying on the sofa looking up. Lids and tubes focused into richly detailed structures. Specks of light moved across the surface of Oatmeal World, and I was drifting above it, drifting in free fall, zero-G. I felt vertiginous. It was all coming out of me and was me, wholly. I began to fall toward it, which was somehow like plummeting inward. I picked up velocity. The surface of Oatmeal World stood out in relief, a ravaged terrain ornamented by the complex works of man. A city of infinite meaning. Then Adriel Roberts touched my thigh and I tumbled out of my vision and back to the sofa.
“Ellis, are you all right?”
I swallowed and couldn’t speak for a moment. She was sitting on the sofa beside me, wearing a shiny robe or Kimono thing, her hand still resting on my thigh, her hip against my leg. In the dark she was Nichole. But I couldn’t move.
“I’m—” I croaked.
She tilted her head, that same way her daughter had, an expression of encouragement and curiosity and understanding. Her hand caressed my thigh, but I was mostly oblivious to it.
“I’m scared,” I said.
Her hand paused. “There’s nothing to be scared of.”
She was wrong about that.
chapter six
Twenty years later I was living in suburban Everett, Washington. My home was a tract house, a sixties-era rambler with gingerbread trim around the porch and a cute little satellite TV dish on the composition roof. I called myself Jack Ellis. Joe Keegan’s book Re-generation Man had been a success back in 1984. A unique success, as it rode the New York Times best-seller list in both the fiction and nonfiction categories, for three weeks and nine months, respectively. Bona fide medical investigation out of the University of Washington is what bumped the book over to the nonfiction side of the list. Keegan had been covering his bases with his folksy “What if . . .” style. The book generated a lot of money, but I’d signed a wonky contract and wound up far from rich. Of course there had been plenty of people who wanted to buy various organs out of my theoretically inexhaustible supply. But I opted not to ramble down that particular path.
Eventually I withdrew from the world, changed my name, and went to ground. Every once in a while somebody managed to track me down. These people arrived in three types: those who wished to harvest me, those who wished to worshi
p me, and those who wished to kill me. That last, I guess, just to prove it could be done. (I always assumed it could be done; all the would-be assassin had to do was deprive me of an organ I literally couldn’t live without for even five minutes, say my brain for instance). Since I couldn’t always tell the types apart at first glance (unless they happened to be wearing an “E” T-shirt), I kept a loaded 9mm Parabellum around.
I supplemented my income in a small way by working in a Mill Creek Starbucks. Plus it was nice to get out of the house and out of my head for a while each day. I liked my co-workers. They were all young. At twenty-nine I was the oldest employee at that particular café. And of course no one knew how old I really was.
I intuited someone was watching me before I saw who it was. My radar was always on. There was that vibe. I had started feeling it at work and at home, which was a bad sign. Someone had found me and he was being cagey about it. The Evolution-ites weren’t cagey. They’d come right up to me and want to touch my hand, that kind of shit. The harvesters were usually desperate and you could spot them quick.
But I hadn’t spotted anyone.
That left category three. Damn it.
Then one day I pulled a double-tall-skinny for this guy and I knew it was him. My stalker.
Just knew it.
He was a middle-aged man, hair receding to strand a ridiculous tuft. Incipient jowls. Eyes with luggage, like he lived on espresso. Off-the-rack sport coat. Clunky gold ring on the first finger of his right hand. A small paunch. He held a newspaper but studied me closely while I made his drink. I snapped a lid on the cup, called it out, and placed the drink on the pick-up counter, which was shaped like an oversized painter’s pallet. The stalker reached for it and I caught his eyes and saw . . . something unhappy.
“Thanks,” he said, which in this case was like code for: I’ve got your number, asshole.
He picked up his espresso and walked out of the store. I watched him cross the street and climb into a tobacco brown Taurus. I couldn’t see the plate from where I stood.
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