Quicksilver by Dean Koontz
Draw your chair up close
to the edge of the precipice,
and I’ll tell you a story.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
PART 1
GETTING TO KNOW ME
|?1?|
My name is Quinn Quicksilver—or “Cue-Cue” to the mean kids when I was growing up—but I can’t blame my parents because I don’t know who they are. Soon after birth, I was abandoned on a lonely highway, seven miles outside of Peptoe, Arizona, where 906 people pretended that the place where they lived was actually a town. Swaddled in a blue blanket, nestled in a white bassinet made of plastic thatching, I had been placed on the centermost of three lanes of blacktop, where I was found shortly after dawn.
Although you might think that this was about as bad a start in life as one could have, I assure you it could have been worse. For one thing, this was coyote country. Had one of those creatures found me, it wouldn’t have suckled me as did the wolf that saved abandoned Romulus, the founder of Rome, but instead would have regarded me as a Grubhub delivery. I could also have been run over by an eighteen-wheeler and turned into paté for vultures.
Fortunately, I was found by three men on their way to work. The first, Hakeem Kaspar, was a lineman for the county, as in that Glen Campbell song I’ve always found lovely but weird, though at the time I was discovered on the highway, I hadn’t yet heard it. The second, Bailie Belshazzer, worked as head mechanic at one of the country’s first wind farms. The third, Caesar Melchizadek, was a blackjack pit boss in an Indian casino.
According to a newspaper story at the time, Hakeem tucked me snugly in the passenger-side footwell of his electric-company truck and drove me to the county sheriff’s office, with Bailie and Caesar following in their vehicles. Why they felt it necessary that all three should turn me in to the law, the newspaper didn’t say. This was all I knew of those men until, years later and running for my life, I visited one of them with the hope of learning some small detail that might be a clue as to who and what I am.
With a safety pin, a small envelope was fixed to the blanket in which I was wrapped. Neither Hakeem nor Bailie nor Caesar had dared to open it, evidently because they had watched too many years of CSI shows and feared that they would smear the kidnapper’s fingerprints. Either they thought I had been snatched by some fiend who lost his nerve and left me to the mercy of fate on that hot morning, or they figured someone had nabbed my parents and were demanding a ransom from me. When the sheriff tore open the envelope, he found only a card on which was printed QUINN QUICKSILVER and my date of birth.
In those days, no one in the state of Arizona had the surname Quicksilver. Nevertheless, everyone at once assumed that was my name. I have been saddled with it ever since. Of course, quicksilver is another name for the liquid metal mercury, which was named after the Roman god Mercury. He was the messenger of other gods, valued for his tremendous speed; the guy could accelerate like crazy. And though Quinn is a variant of Quentin, it also derives from the Latin quintus, which means “fifth” or in certain contexts “five times.” So perhaps it wasn’t my name, but a cryptic message meaning “accelerate five times,” though you will not find this advice in any book about caring for a newborn any more than you will find the instruction “marinate in olive oil with basil leaves.”
I then became a ward of the county, the youngest ever dropped on that childcare agency. No foster family was willing to take in a three-day-old whose only possession was a soiled swaddling blanket and who had, in the words of Sheriff Garvey Monkton, “strange blue eyes and an eerily direct stare for such a tiny little cocker.” Consequently, I was sent out of county to Mater Misericordi?, an orphanage run by Catholic nuns in Phoenix.
By the time I was six, it became clear that I was not adoptable. Among adoptees, infants are the most desirable age-group, and they are usually placed in stable homes faster than you can say coochy coochy coo. This is because babies are generally cuter than older kids, with the possible exception of Rosemary’s famous baby, but also because not enough time has passed for them to be screwed up by their birth parents; each grinning infant is a personality waiting to happen and therefore amenable to being sculpted into a reflection of those who adopt him. Although I was cute enough and willing to be shaped like clay, there were no takers for Quinn Quicksilver.
My failure to find a forever home was not for a lack of trying on the part of the good sisters of Mater Misericordi?. They are as indefatigable and cunning as any order of nuns on the planet. They designed a marketing plan for me, prepared a fabulous PowerPoint presentation, and sold me to prospective parents as aggressively as Disney sells animated films about princesses or adorable animals, all to no avail. Years after the fact, I learned what explanation some would-be adopters had given for taking a pass on me; but perhaps I’ll share their comments later.