SWNOVELS Chapter 14.
14. The Blind-man’s arms, extended wide,
Harry Osborn had retreated into his childhood. He began to follow the diet his aunt had suggested with results he had expected since his aunt was not prone to lying or exaggeration. Harry kept looking at the business card his cousin had sent him. It was on his coffee table with his Garbage Pail Kids cards. Harry kept his Garbage Pail Kid cards in plastic collectible sleeves. Although they were strewn about the coffee table haphazardly, his Garbage Pail Kids collectible cards protected from bending, moisture, and most everything else except fire. Harry took his cousin’s business card and placed it into one of these sleeves thinking…
‘…did cousin Michael think this nickname or gangster name through all the way…Moe Rrain sounds like Maureen…is he transgender…transsexual and trying to slowly ease his family into calling Michael, Maureen…or does this have something to do with the United States Marine Corps…’ he continued to think sitting on his sofa twirling this business card in his hands, then placing it among the Garbage Pail Kids cards and then picking it back up again.
Harry noticed a bone growth on his wrists and ankles. This growth wasn’t bursting through the skin but the skin grew with it. The lateral portion of his ankles and wrists. With his hands outstretched and his thumbs-up, these were more than bone spurs and pointed down. As they might grow…so that the ankle and wrist growths might join somehow.
These plastic trading cardholders were loaded from the top so that they were not completely waterproof or weatherproof but they were better than no protection at all. Harry Osborn’s Garbage Pail Kids cards were in almost no danger at all.
Harry had been making use of his home gym equipment, the diet advice, and copious amounts of sunlight from his backyard deck.
It was a time when people debated about this event, time, or place of ever having existed or having taken place…in those far off times where days were not as important as the events that we are not sure even took place…one of the Osborn ancestors bought most of the island in the East River but gave a small portion of it to the US government for a park to commemorate Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Amberson Osborn had given this portion to the US government before they could enact Imminent Domain and take the land. So Amberson had never named the island and so he allowed his island to be named in honor of FDR as Roosevelt Island…and make himself look like a Patriotic American Son… But he was far from it… Far from a true believer in the American Dream… Far from being anything but an opportunist seeking to conceal his murderous calling from the public. So, the public…those in his social circle would never entertain the idea he was the man who was framing ‘the Yankee’… It would never cross their minds that Amberson Osborn was capable of doing deeds as those wrongly attributed to ‘the Yankee’.
Harry stood in the summer’s breeze on his estate on Roosevelt Island soaking up the sun in through his olive drab skin. He began his exercise routine with mountain biking. He had a helmet but rode across his estate without a shirt covering his green skin as this might be the only place where no one might see his family’s curse. It had been known…to many. But before this almost vegetarian diet, like Amberson, Norman, his siblings, Harry, and his siblings, the Osborn family’s curse was one typified with green skin, isolation, and an aversion to sunlight. But the sun and little to no food that came from any animal did their body very well.
At the end of his bike ride, Harry stood in a way to mimic da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man imagining a link between the growths on his wrists and ankles…suddenly he could see what nature and the Osborn curse intended for his body.
Harry’s eyesight had improved and he knew that he wasn’t becoming a human rendition of a bat but of a flying fox. Bats use echolocation to hunt for insects at sunset…while flying foxes are vegetarians feasting on the fruits of southeast Asia.
A human variant of a flying fox…but could Harry’s grandfather somehow introduce flying fox genetics into the formula when he had that accident on the day of the NBC/RCA television broadcast those years ago.
The Osborn family had never known Amberson to be a fan of the zoo. But it is not outside of the realm of possibilities that NYU was doing experiments with flying foxes and fleas are renowned as spreaders of blood-borne diseases… Genetic material is carried in the blood and the flea could have fed on a flying fox and jumped to Amberson…this might seem like a stretch…but Harry would often follow up his bike ride with a bit of Yoga…some weight lifting and then a swim.
Yoga is a stretching exercise…in a world where a flea bite and science experiment accident introduced genetic variations into a family’s bloodline.