Free Harbinger by Jack Skillingstead

she said, accepting the cup of French roast I handed her.
    “What if I don’t go?”
    She shrugged.
    “What would happen?” I said.
    “Mr. Paranoid. Nothing would happen. You’re not a prisoner. You’re not Number Seven.”
    “Six.”
    “Whatever,” she said.
    “I know, I know,” I said. “I’m an employee with full benefits.”
    She sipped her coffee. “So don’t go,” Jill said. She grinned. “What do you want to do instead?”
    “Can we go for another drive?”
    “Sure. Where to?”
    “I don’t care. Anyplace outside the village.”
    Anyplace turned out to be Portland, a three hour drive. We had dinner in a Chinese restaurant. I got around okay. My eyesight had steadily improved but was still poor. The DMV would have declared me legally blind, but what do they know? In the restaurant I removed my dark glasses. The place was crowded, the whole city was crowded by Blue Heron standards.
    “You look kind of nervous,” Jill said.
    “Yeah.”
    “So  . . .?”
    “It’s just my Chinese restaurant look.”
    “I see.”
    “Okay—I am nervous. I feel truant. Two days in a row.”
    She giggled. “Do you want me to write you a note to get back into the village?”
    “I think my mother has to do that.”
    “Right.”
    “Jill, you’d be honest with me, wouldn’t you?”
    “Honest about what?”
    “About us. About why you want to spend so much time with me.”
    “Oh, brother. Don’t go there, please don’t. I thought you were getting over that.”
    “I’m trying to get over a lot of things. Let me ask you something. If I stood up right now and walked out of this place without telling you where I was going, what would you do?”
    “Probably call an ambulance?”
    “Why?”
    “Because you can hardly see and you’d wind up getting yourself run over by a truck.”
    I laughed. “Good answer.” I pushed my chair back and stood up, dropping my napkin on the table.
    “Hey—”
    “Relax, I’m just going to the men’s room.”
    “Do you want me to—?
    “No, I can find it all right.”
    I negotiated my way between the tables. Things were pretty blurry. Each table had a little red lantern with a candle. To me they were like a fuzzy, pulsing star field. I put my dark glasses back on and asked a guy in a white coat which way to the restrooms. He steered me in the right direction. At the end of the corridor there was a green blur above a crash-bar door. EXIT. On impulse I walked to it, shoved the bar, and found myself outside in the cold night of Portland.
    I picked my way around to the sidewalk. Traffic zoomed by. Towers of light all around, city cacophony. I took my glasses off and rubbed my eyes, blinked, rubbed them some more. Squinting, I could just make out the façade of the restaurant. The Jade Dragon. I moved down the sidewalk until I encountered a bus-stop shelter. I sat on the bench and waited, but not for a bus.
    The minutes passed, maybe twenty of them. A vehicle pulled up in front of me, the door opened, and a man climbed out. I tensed, but it wasn’t a UI goon come to round me up. The man sat on the bench next to me, the car drove away, and moments later a bus arrived. The man stepped into it but I declined to board.
    After a while I stood up and wandered down the street, feeling lost. And then I was lost. Finally I asked a passerby to steer me towards The Jade Dragon. By the time I got there more than two hours had elapsed since I ducked out the back. Jill was gone, and I was alone, except for my deflated paranoia. Fear by any other name. I was my own goon, a depressing realization.
    “Ellis!” It was Jillian, waving from her car. I got in and we drove away from there.
    “I was so scared,” she said. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”
    I made all the appropriate noises of apology and contrition and tried to keep the self-contempt at a minimum. It was a long drive back to Blue Heron.
     

    *
     
    “I want to renegotiate my contract.”
    “I see,” Langely Ulin