Read Online Harbinger by Jack Skillingstead - Free Book Online

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.
    “How’s the world look to you now?” I asked.
    He grunted. “They couldn’t do the transplant. Your corneas degraded too rapidly.”
    “Sorry about that.”
    “It was an anomaly.”
    “Hmmm.”
    “We’ll try again, as soon as your regenerations are complete.”
    I swallowed sticky spit.
    “There’s a concern that some regenerated organs are not adaptable to transplant.”
    “So maybe one set of eyes is all you get out of me.”
    He grunted again. “We’ll beat the problem.”
    “Will we?”
    “Inevitably, yes.”
    I pictured him slouched in the wicker chair, staring possessively at me with my own eyes—my original pair, which they’d taken almost ten years ago. None of my harvested organs lasted as long as they would have had they been left in my own body.
    So it was horrible all right, but I’d stayed with the program. My dad’s heart had failed. In many ways Langley Ulin had assumed the role of surrogate father, and I had no intention of letting him down and letting him die. That didn’t mean I loved him like a father; far from it. Freud no doubt would have relished my cockeyed contradictions.
    It was dark under the thick gauze wrap, and a part of my mind clawed at the darkness, like something primitive and trapped. In a day or so the itch-tingle of regeneration would be driving me mad. Then, gradually, light would reenter my world, seeping in around the edges at first. In a few week’s time I would be able to see in a blurry approximation of normal vision. A week after that I’d have regained full ocular function. At which point—Ulin had just proposed—my corneas would again be harvested.
    “I wish I had my dog,” I said.
    “Your dog?”
    “Jeepers, my dog.”
    “Don’t you worry about that dog. My people take fine care of him, fine care.”
    I turned my head on the pillow, detecting a misfire.
    “Jeepers wasn’t ever lost, was he?”
    “Jeepers creepers where’d you get them peepers!” Ulin said. “Remember that one?”
    “Not really.”
    “Before your time.”
    “What about my dad?”
    “What about