Free Harbinger by Jack Skillingstead Page A

said.
    We were alone in the kitchen of my cottage. My dark glasses lay on the Formica tabletop. So did a fresh ten year contract, virtually identical to the last one, and a Lacrosse pen. My eyes wouldn’t stop watering, but that was okay; it was a good sign.
    “You’re unhappy with the current arrangement?”
    “Maybe.”
    “I’ve mistreated you in some way?”
    I wiped my Niagara eyes. “No.”
    “What new terms do you propose?”
    “Simple. The truth. From your lips.”
    “The truth regarding what?”
    “My father.”
    “You already know all that.”
    “I don’t think so. My dad and I didn’t have the greatest relationship, but it’s never made sense that he would essentially sell me to you. I know he felt guilty about it, but why did he do it in the first place?”
    Ulin sighed. “Back then I had my feelers out, my people watching everywhere for medical anomalies. Of course I funded—and continue to fund—life prolongation and rejuvenation research around the world. But my feelers have always been out. I believed in the possibility of you or someone like you appearing one day. Call it intuition, or a dream, if you like. Those Seattle doctors didn’t know what they were dealing with, but my people recognized a green flag when they saw one. Preternaturally accelerated healing, and even the hint of organ regeneration. Fantastic.”
    Ulin coughed into his hand and picked up his red can of Coke, sipped, and put the can back down.
    “Well,” he continued, “you were a minor, so we needed your father’s help. We required your exclusive cooperation. We couldn’t afford to let the world find out about you.”
    “Yeah, I understand your motives,” I said.
    “Your father was a principled man,” Ulin said. “But everyone can be moved. His lever, ironically, was surgery. Heart valve replacement. Congenital defect discovered later in life. He had no medical insurance, and besides: most insurance companies wouldn’t have covered the procedure, not in 1974. Back then such a procedure was considered experimental.”
    “You promised him a valve replacement for signing me over to you.”
    “Roughly, yes.”
    “That’s fairly slimy.”
    “A matter of business negotiation.”
    “He didn’t last long. What did you give him, a lemon?”
    “He never underwent the surgery.”
    “Why not?”
    “He refused it after you ran away. He spent the final months of his life searching for you. I believe he intended to tell you everything and hope you would agree to cooperate of your own free will. If not he was prepared to accept the consequences and die. Some of this is conjecture. But the picture is clear enough, don’t you think?”
    I remembered that night in Long Beach, when I ran. And later a phone ringing endlessly in a lifeless house. The rest I shut out. Or tried to shut out. Flies.
     

    *
     
    That night I experienced something like a dream but not a dream. I was lying in bed. Claws scratched at the bedroom door. I got up in my boxers and T-shirt and opened the door. Jeepers stood there, his eyes like white marbles. My eyes were fine, the water works shut off, in crystalline focus. Now that he had my attention, Jeepers turned and padded away, and I followed him.
    He waited at the front door. I opened it for us and we went out. The air was perfectly still. My bare feet whispered on the lawn. Then the sidewalk was cold and hard, and Jeepers was trotting, claws clicking jauntily on the cement, and I started jogging after him. The dog’s nose was in the air. I looked up and saw a Glinda bubble drifting serenely above and ahead of us. Something moved inside that bubble but I don’t think it was a good witch; it wasn’t anything I could make out, just a shadow, like what you might see through the translucent skin of an insect egg.
    The bubble led Jeepers, and Jeepers led me. We arrived at an open expanse of blue grass with an orderly copse of trees in the middle. Orderly? They formed a perfect ring. Each tree