chapter five
I tried but couldn’t find Nichole. Her father was dead. The wide lady in the purple housecoat who answered the door of Nichole’s former house failed to enlighten me as to her whereabouts. I had left Blue Heron with only the cash on hand, about two hundred dollars. These resources were rapidly being depleted by bus fair and motel rent. There were no Nichole Roberts in any of the state’s phone books available in the King County Public Library main branch. There was, however, one Adriel Roberts with a double listing, residence and business. I flipped to the yellow pages and found her ad. It had to be Nichole’s mother. Fortunes, Tarot Readings, Past Life Regression.
She had set up shop on 15th Avenue in Seattle’s funkiest community at the time, Capitol Hill. Third Eye Café was tucked between an East Indian restaurant and a counter-cultural cum revolutionary bookstore. The sign above the door of Adriel’s place looked hand-painted but not amateurish. An eye burning over a pyramid. Yin/Yang symbols on either side. In black script a listing of services provided. Including “organic espresso.” Under that, one word: Evolve.
I entered the shop. A young guy with cocoa skin wearing dreadlocks and a hemp coat turned toward me from a display of dreamcatchers. The coat was open. White letters on his black T-shirt read: EVOLVE. Was a theme emerging?
“Howdy,” he said.
“Hi.”
Adriel Roberts came through the beaded curtain behind a glass display case of Tarot decks and spirit stones. She wasn’t dressed like a hippie gypsy or Stevie Nicks or anything. She wore a white blouse open at the neck and pearl gray pants. A thin silver chain lay against her throat, kind of classy.
“Hello, Ellis.”
Like I’d been walking into her shop every Tuesday for the last ten years. In her mid-fifties now, she was still an attractive woman, and I could still see Nichole in her face. A stab of pure regret and loneliness pierced my heart.
“Hello,” I said. “You remember me.”
“I not only remember you, I’ve been waiting for you.”
“Uh, sorry I’m late, then.”
“You’re not late; you’re right on time.”
The hemp guy was giving me a closer look, a speculative look. Still friendly but with a shadow of reservation.
“This is Herrick,” Adriel Roberts said to him, gesturing to me. The guy’s face instantly transformed, lit up with wonder, and he put his hand out.
“Holy God, are you kidding,” he said.
“No, she’s not,” I said, taking his hand, which was big enough to engulf mine like a mitt. He didn’t start a squeezy contest, though. His grip was light as feathers. He held my hand almost reverently, not shaking it.
“Is this the one?” he said.
“The one what?”
“The one that was severed.” He lowered his eyes, suddenly sheepish, and released his grip.
“Actually it was my left hand,” I said.
He peered at my left hand, which of course was as ordinary looking as anyone else’s. I waggled it at him.
“Hey, it’s just a hand. They reattached it after an accident and it healed up. No big deal.”
He nodded politely, but the wonder didn’t leave his eyes.
Adriel said, “Marvin, don’t stare.”
He looked flustered. “Sorry.”
“I’m trying to find Nichole,” I said to Adriel.
“She’s married.”
Take that first stab of lonely regret and try it again, but use a bigger knife this time. Use a fucking rapier. Might as well dip it in venom first.
“Who—”
“Somebody boring but stable. I think his name is Dan. Doesn’t that sound about perfect for boring but stable?”
“Yeah, perfect.”
“I think he’s an engineer or something. He doesn’t drink much. People like him. He buys her things. They go to baseball games. No kids. Are you all right?”
She said all this while staring directly into my eyes.
“I want to talk to her.”
She nodded. “You should, of course.”
“Do you think she wants to talk to me?”
“Maybe. Shall I call her and see?”
“Please.”
“Marvin?” She turned to the Rasta man. “Be a doll and pick me up a gallon of soy milk.” She opened the register, took out a ten dollar bill, and handed it to him. He folded the bill and stuffed it in his pocket. He had hardly taken his eyes off me since Adriel Roberts introduced me as “Herrick.” By some inflective magic she had imbued my name with unwarranted significance. Now Marvin hesitated to leave. He looked from me to Adriel.
“What—” he started.
“Go ahead, Marvin,” she said.
“What’s going to happen now?” he asked.
Adriel smiled and placed her hand on his shoulder. She had to reach up pretty high to do it. “Everything is already happening,” she said. “It has been for a long time. Now that Ellis is back with us the process may accelerate, but that isn’t for us to decide.”
“I know. I just— I’ll get the milk.”
“Thank you.” She pulled him down and kissed him on the lips, tenderly.
As soon as he was gone, I asked, “What was that all about?”
Bestowing that sweet smile upon me, she replied: “Evolution.”
Nichole agreed to meet me at Westlake Park in downtown Seattle at noon the following day. I was there early, like by an hour. The park consisted of an acre or so of Italian stone surfacing bordered by the Westlake Retail Center, a Seattle’s Best Coffee franchise, and Nordstrom’s. Pine Street cut through the middle of the park and there was a steady flow of traffic. Also, plenty of hungry pigeons and one steel drum band, but they were presentable. I sat on a bench with a latte and listened. They were pretty good, but after a while it got sort of repetitive. The band, not the pigeons. Well, the pigeons, too.
At about five past noon I saw Nichole cross Pine Street and walk toward me. I stood up, leaving my cup of espresso on the bench. Nichole looked better than great, and very stylish in a black trench coat and beret.
“Nichole.”
“I almost didn’t come,” she said. “And then I did come, but really early, and I waited around watching you. I wanted to leave but I couldn’t. Now I don’t know what I want for sure. A hug, I guess.”
I put my arms around her and she crushed herself into me. In an instant my inner wall fell and my moat drained, and the poor little perinea fish were left gasping and flopping in the stinking mud. Also, as a bonus, Time was temporarily suspended.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You know about what.”
“Don’t talk about it yet,” she said into my chest.
“I won’t.”
We held each other, held each other, and then we weren’t holding each other, and Nichole had pulled back out of my embrace.
“Let’s have lunch,” she said. “If we do anything else we’ll get ourselves in trouble.”
“There’s trouble and there’s trouble,” I said.
“Don’t be charming. Just don’t.”
Shades of Jillian. Damn it.
She took me to The Palomino and we ordered a veggie thin crust pizza. She had a glass of Chablis and I ordered a Beck’s Dark, which was pointless, considering my enhanced physiology.
After the timeless hug at Westlake, Nichole hadn’t touched me once. I felt drawn to her by the same powerful magnetism that I’d experienced ten years ago, but if she felt anything similar she was playing it off.
“So you’re married,” I said.
She held up her left hand. A yellow gold wedding band and a fairly impressive diamond engagement ring.
“Yes,” she said.
“Do you love him?”
“You’re not going to start asking idiotic questions, are you?”
“Define idiotic.”
She gulped her Chablis.
“Roadhouse pussy,” she said, a little too loudly. It was her third glass of wine. The Palomino was crowded for lunch. Roadhouse pussy drew some stares.
“I was stupid.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know why I did it.”
“I’m sure I don’t know why, either.”
“She didn’t mean anything to me.”
“I know that.”
Our table was by the windows. The Palomino was four stories up. Nichole turned her face to the view. Her eyes were shiny.
“Then you just disappear,” she said, to the window.
“My dad—”
“I know about your father. I was at the service. You didn’t notice me. No, shut up. I didn’t want you to notice me. That’s not why I went. I just wanted to see if you were all right.”
“I’m really sorry,” I said.
“I never believed in magic,” she said.
“What?”
“I never believed in that soulmate shit, that transcendental love shit. That ‘meant to be’ shit. Then in one night I changed inside. I had a dream, and it was like a new memory of who I was and who we were together. Who we were supposed to be. Right away I fought it but I couldn’t, not really. It’s like I could fight but what’s the point? So I believed. And later I really liked running away with you. Those months when you didn’t write or call me and I didn’t even know where you were, it was like dying. Isn’t that stupid, considering at that point we had like less than one full day to call ours? Then you did call, and you needed rescuing. Do you know what that was like, getting that damn call? Oh my God. Even when we were holed up in that cheesy no-tell motel, I didn’t care. It’s like the future didn’t matter anymore, just the now, the now between you and me. Okay? So what if my parents were fuck-ups. So what if sometimes I felt like taking too many pills or cutting my stupid wrists. That didn’t matter anymore. I know I was a pain-in-the-ass chick back then. But eventually I would have gotten over that. I just needed time, you know? I needed time to flush Roy Hathaway and his ilk out of my soul. I needed time to grow out of that. You think a person can be happy and healthy all of a sudden? You didn’t give me enough time.”
“Nichole.”
“Shut up. Okay? Just shut up, I’m almost done.”
I shut up.
She was still looking out the window. Her red lips pressed together, suppressing a tremble. I saw the momentum go out of her. She turned to me and daubed at her eyes with her napkin.
“Anyway,” she said, “I’m married now. He’s a real nice guy, too. He treats me nice. He hasn’t got an ounce of charm, but he’s steady and sane and he loves me. That’s more than enough. You want soulmates and dreams, see my mother. She probably believes in that shit. I can’t really afford to anymore, you know?”
She stood up.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t talk to you. I thought I could but I can’t. Life really sucks, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.”
She touched my cheek with the back of her hand then walked away. Her eyeliner left black smudges on the white linen napkin. My moat flooded, but it was too late.
I was twenty-nine years old (now and forever?) and I possessed not one marketable skill with which to earn a living. I watched my meager funds dwindle, and I was too proud by half to contact Langley Ulin about the wages he’d supposedly been salting away for me those ten years I spent in the village. He had lied to me. The dream of my father and Jeepers had been more than a dream. I knew instinctively that what my dream-dad had told me was true. I was done with Ulin and he could keep his stinking blood money.
That left me without many options.
I decided to see what I could get on the open market for my miracle boy status.
What I got was laughed out of newsrooms of the Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Okay, I wasn’t actually laughed at, not to my face. But I got the idea. Of course, I had no proof. I was better received at the editorial offices of the alternatives, The Weekly, The Stranger, but even they declined to present my story. Langly Ulin’s status as a rich industrialist made him an attractive target, but again: I lacked proof. I lacked credibility. I was just some guy with a weird story and an ax to grind. In the end, I resorted to the lizard trick. Reluctantly. I knew in theory it would work. My eyes grew back with reliable predictability. So had my kidneys and a few other organs. The process would be the same for any other body part. Ulin’s medical types had confirmed this. My whole body was a lizard tail. Chop a piece off and watch it grow back. Theories are nice. Chopping things off isn’t.
I returned to the Times. There was a guy there who wrote a column called “Weird World.” He did local stories about the unexplained. Haunts and Big Foot and Mysterious Sink Holes. The column appeared in the entertainment section.
I appeared at Joe Keegan’s desk. He’d agreed to talk with me but made no promises about devoting any ink to my cause. I’d bypassed him on my first visit to the Times. I didn’t want to appear in the entertainment section. I’d wanted a legitimate news story, national interest. Maybe a book deal? Why not.
Well, at least Mr. Keegan worked for a legitimate newspaper.
His desk was in the newsroom. I sat in a chair next to him and we talked over coffee. Keegan was a young guy, about twenty-five. He had a bushy orange mustache and wore a blue work shirt, sleeves rolled above his elbows, a burgundy tie pulled loose, and a red Kangol cap, Kangaroo forward. During the forty-five minutes or so that I spilled my guts he constantly tapped the eraser end of a yellow pencil on his thigh.
When I finished I said, “What do you think?”
“It’s got a nifty local angle, and it’s original, all right. But to tell you the truth it’s a little outside my line. What we like to do is stuff where no one is going to come at the paper with a lawsuit in their hot little fist. That’s why I don’t pick on Mrs. Bill Gates and her secret seances, for instance.”
“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.