Prototype

Six

Her weekend passed too slowly after that, her Sunday shift crawling except for the hour-long session with Clay, their fifth. She was a victim of her own growing obsessions, and they murdered time while leaving its bloated corpse in her way.

Monday morning she went back in on her own time and flagged down an impromptu meeting with Ferris Mendenhall. The man himself was easy enough to work under, but she had always hated his office. Bare of wall and devoid of personality, it always gave her the impression of having just been moved into, or about to be vacated, with the decor boxed away. She wondered what it meant, if Mendenhall had never felt himself long for this office, this position.

"I'm trying to be as ethical as I know how," Adrienne said, "and not bypass hospital hierarchy."

From across his desk, for the most part clean as a windswept plateau, Ferris Mendenhall eyed her. He was a lean man in his mid-forties whose white coat tended to flap upon his frame like a clipper's sail, and had no upper lip that she had ever seen. It remained hidden behind a drooping moustache that curled down with lazy bravado, a relic of a bygone age. If the sunburned pate visible through his thinning hair had been covered by a cavalry officer's hat, he might well have been dashing.

"This should be interesting," he said.

"How long would you estimate that Clay Palmer might be here before you start getting some real pressure to discharge him?"

"Clay Palmer…" Mendenhall leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers. "This would be the patient with the broken hands?"

"Yes."

"Given that he came in under dual admission, so to speak, I'd say at least a few weeks." He frowned with his deep-set eyes; it looked perilously close to bureaucratic scrutiny. "Why?"

Adrienne took a deep breath. "I'd like your support with something as regards his case. Let me preface this by stating that he needs more help than he's likely to get here, unless somebody takes extra initiative. He's from Denver, and twice he was committed there for observation and, I assume, some rudimentary treatment" — this she realized she had said with disdain — "and it certainly didn't come close to meeting his needs. He needs more intensive therapy than he's had an opportunity to get."

Mendenhall rolled his chair back up to the desk. "This is not a county hospital for charity cases, and his insurance matter hasn't been resolved yet, although it doesn't look like the policy carrier has much ground to stand on. Still, if he needs months or years of therapy, refer him to County Services, where someone can deal with him on an outpatient basis."

"That's not good enough," she said, and shook her head. "For a couple of reasons. First, he isn't from here. If he were discharged, he'd have no place to stay. And even if he did, his dexterity's so limited by those casts that, he is, for most practical purposes, helpless. Which means he'd have no choice but to return to Denver, and honestly, I don't think he can even afford a bus ticket."

Mendenhall fiddled with his moustache, a sad Monday-morning look about him. "And reason number two?"

"I'm making progress with him. In our midweek session last Wednesday, he made a specific request that I help him. Send him elsewhere, and not only is he forced to start over with someone new, but the trust that I've established with him is completely shattered. Which can't help but impact the way he views the next therapist who tries to work with him." Adrienne scooted to the edge of her chair. "Ferris, it's my most sincere recommendation that discharging him anytime soon would be disastrous. Take one look through his file, and factor in what brought him here the night he was admitted, and you'll see that his violent outbursts have been getting worse over time. He's stabilized now, but he's still in a very precarious state of mind."

Mendenhall swiveled in his chair and stared for a moment at a file cabinet across the room. Upon it sat an iron casting of a Remington sculpture, horse and rider frozen in a moment of pure, perfect panic as, below, a rattlesnake hung poised in defiance. A curved symmetry rippled through the horse; it could either soar or collapse.

He swiveled back to her. "Unless his insurance carrier gets more cooperative, the administration will never allow him to stay here for any protracted length of time, and they are not swayed by arguments such as this, Adrienne."

She knew this, of course. Administrative logic was cold and precise and devoid of heart. There was compliance with the Hippocratic oath, yes, and they could not have turned Clay away at the door. Moreover, though, there was a bottom line. Too often the two pursuits were incompatible.

Nor was she entirely above it. Why else was she here, rather than at County? Every fourteen days she cashed her check from here and not once thought it too high a reward.

"I'm not asking for an indefinite stay," she said. "Before long, I may be able to work out a solution where Clay Palmer can be discharged and I can continue to treat him."

One of Mendenhall's eyebrows creaked upward. "And this would come about…?"

"You might as well know it now" — she paused, with a curt nod — "I recently applied for an independent grant to study male aggression." Talking herself in deeper by the minute. Certainly she was committed now to taking action over the next day or two.

Mendenhall's face seemed to glaze with incredulity, each pore constricted, each hair a stiffened bristle. "You will not bring your personal agendas to this ward, and expect to be automatically accommodated."

"I don't see anything here as being mutually exclusive. While my first priority is the welfare of my patient, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that, in a case like this, I have no auxiliary interest in it at all." Adrienne leaned forward and relinquished Clay's file onto Mendenhall's desk, pecked it with a fingernail. "Just go through his file and see if you can find fault with a single thing I've said."

"I'll do that."

The skirmish was hers. Now, to press the advantage. And hope it was not too much, too soon.

"I'd like your permission for a simple test on Clay that may seem a bit out of the ordinary. I'd like to have his genetic karyotype run."

Mendenhall looked as if he had bitten into something sour. "What possible use could you have for that?"

"Specifically, to check him for a double-Y genotype."

Mendenhall began to laugh, short hitches of breath that rippled his moustache. "There's never been any conclusive correlation between a double-Y and aggressive behavior."

"I'm aware of that. But it's not been disproved, either."

Double-Y's possessed an extra male chromosome, an anomaly whose 1961 discovery had led to its carriers being regarded as "supermales." Subsequent studies caused a sensationalized fear of genetically predisposed criminals, but this was largely the result of sloppy research methodology: Subjects in influential studies in Great Britain and Sweden had been culled from mental institutions and prisons, rather than from the general population.

Mendenhall grabbed the file and shuffled to general patient data, scanned it quickly. "No indication of subnormal intelligence — hmm, to the contrary. Height only average." He closed the file and met her with quizzical eyes. "How could you possibly suspect he's a double-Y?"

"I don't," Adrienne said. "He does."

Mendenhall groaned and rubbed his crinkling forehead. "And he got this idea from where? Movies, or TV?"

Adrienne shook her head. "Neither. Clay has a collection of books about serial murders and criminal abnormality. He first read about the double-Y in connection with Richard Speck — "

"Amateur speculation. Speck didn't even have a double-Y."

"Well, I gather most of the books Clay has, if not all, are more sensationalistic than scholarly in nature. But to be fair, I even looked it up in one of my old academic texts, and it was in error, too."

"Is he fixated on this?"

Adrienne nodded. "To an extent. He mentioned it in our third session and didn't much dwell on it, and once I'd explained that he shouldn't consider himself a candidate for it — because of his intelligence and height — I didn't think it was significant. But he brought it up again yesterday."

She silently cursed all scientists and exploiters everywhere who, with half-baked brains, trumpeted baseless conclusions that served only to inspire panic, like ripples across a calm pond. She no longer paid attention to the latest findings of dietitians who announced new reasons to scorn old foods. They would undoubtedly be contradicted soon enough, and hopefully go to their graves someday with all the obscurity they deserved.

How much more fundamental, if less widespread, was the fear generated by those who attached stigmas to abnormal variations of body and mind? Such deviations were so deeply borne that, to those affected by them, it was like giving them cause to loathe their own bodies.

"I think if we have his karyotype run and supply him with picture-perfect proof that he's not a double-Y," said Adrienne, "it'll help alleviate the anxiety he's feeling over it. And free him up for the things that do matter."

Mendenhall sat with pursed lips and frowning eyes, while the desktop held his gaze. "What kind of expenditure would this be?"

Always the cost; alleviation of misery was next in line. "If you want a dollar figure, I can't say. But negligible. It's a very routine, simple screen. We can't do it on the premises but we can keep it local: the Genetics Center of Arizona Associated Labs."

He progressed from pursed lips to gnawing at the inside of one corner of his mouth. "Find out how much. I can't give you the authorization until I know."

Adrienne smiled, a thin, shrewd, dealmaker's smile that just managed to conceal her irritation that he did not wholly trust her word.

"Thank you, Ferris," she said, and knew just when to leave.

*

The psycho ward didn’t allow televisions in the rooms — this was a surprise? On or off, TVs were notorious for implanting thoughts into heads. Clay had conversed with few of his ward mates, but enough to conclude that as far as most were concerned, denying them unlimited video access was wise. There was a large set in the dayroom, but it usually remained under the control of the staff, and whoever feared its influence — the home of the cathode-ray gods, perhaps — did not have to come near it.

Clay, however, soaked it up whenever he was able.

A tie to home; whenever he was home the TV was always on, although he didn't know why. It commanded attention, if not respect. He viewed it not as entertainment, but as a conduit of information. He could wire in with optic and auditory nerves; pipe in news and documentaries, commentary both rational and apocalyptic. He could define the state of the world in any given half hour, and it was always maddened.

Fringe shows on syndication and cable access were best, the gleam on the cutting edge of media psychosis.

It took him a week of attempts, whenever TV security was lax, to locate The Eye of Vigilance, coming out of a Phoenix station. It had a late-night time slot in Denver, but early-evening here. Curious. Perhaps in Arizona it met with a wider receptive audience.

Clay's rational side found that mildly scary, while the deconstructionist rejoiced — one more sign of Armageddon.

The Eye of Vigilance was the half-hour province of one Milton Wheeler, who lorded over his airwaves from behind a polished oak desk, and whose introductory fanfare announced to sycophants and heretics that he was "appointed by God as the conscience of the nation." No one knew if he really believed this or not, but it never hurts to call in the big guns.

There was much that made him rabid, and this stocky fellow with wagging jowls and manicured hands and his glasses slightly askew railed against it all with varying degrees of eloquence, sometimes with guests at his side, sometimes taking phone calls, and he was absolutely full of shit. This was, for Clay, the main attraction. Milton Wheeler was an idol in the making and could not lose. If he lived, the far right would eventually canonize him. If he were killed, then he would be its martyr.

Though for all Wheeler's propagandizing, Clay found that every now and again he did make an eerie kind of sense.

Monday evening, mid-October, an epiphany:

"A stranger is just an enemy you haven't assessed yet," he said, and the studio audience murmured its agreement.

"Did you hear that?" It was the patient in the chair beside Clay, forty years of twitches mellowing under medication. She always held two fingers as if they clamped a cigarette.

"Yeah," said Clay.

"Do you believe that?"

"I think so. Don't you?"

She pointed at the TV with her two fingers that never did anything alone. "That fat little man wants to be Jesus. Only he's too heavy, he'd tear loose and fall off the cross. That's why he's so pissed off all the time."

Clay cocked his head, staring at the screen, considering this. He half-shrugged, half-nodded. It was as good an explanation as any for what motivated the man. "But they make better nails now."

"Well, somebody needs to go tell him, then." She brought her fingers to her lips and, with no cigarette to puff, scratched her chin. "Are you busy now?"

"I'm waiting," he told her, inspired by the unlikely wisdom of Milton Wheeler and this woman's messianic imagery, "for a table to be prepared for me in the presence of my enemies."

"Oh," she said. "Okay."

Clay watched until a nurse came along and noticed what was playing and switched to something less volatile, so he returned to his room and endured sundown — hated cusp of transition and advent of shadowed menace. The world stopped at the window, but the barrier was only glass and metal. Everything had a melting point.

A stranger is just an enemy you haven't assessed yet.

He had learned this lesson early in life, had merely failed to qualify it so succinctly. And fathers and mothers are never so honest as to prepare their malignant offspring for the social abortion the world is sure to perform on them.

But, inquisitive Adrienne, doesn't everybody wake up one day to realize his childhood was never the norm? Statistically speaking, neither mean, median, nor mode.

Doesn't everybody blame himself for failure to fit in, by deed if not conscious admission, and self-inflict the punishment due? A razor blade makes fine slices on arms and legs and torso, but a penknife is even better, thicker of blade and duller by increments; the skin resists its pressure before giving way, and the sensation is so much more real. And blood makes splendid ink with which to write indictments against oneself.

Doesn't everybody get together to compare scars for severity, frequency, aesthetics?

Doesn't everybody?

Of course not. Only the survivors.

He learned early in adolescence that life was nothing if not full of dichotomies. High school stank of contradictions, and what is high school but a model of the greater world? Even in rebellion there is conformity, while even among outcasts one can find refuge.

He and his friends of that era banded together mostly by default. The despised and the rejected, the hated and the brutalized, they auditioned one another with bravado or indifference or threats, almost by instinct, and found kindred souls in their solitude. Athletes and scholars, socialites and thespians … they were none of these, looking upon those who were with scorn. In time Clay realized they did so mainly because, as deviants who felt too much or too little or looked wrong, they had no choice. They resented what they could never be, what they would never be allowed to be. I rejected you first, they seemed to scream inside, and most fooled themselves into believing it was true.

Clay learned to appreciate the irony: Even among their small, pitiful ranks he did not wholly belong.

For he alone recognized the fundamental truth that people seem to function best when they have someone to hate. Nothing else stirs blood so energetically, or heats such emotion. Nothing else motivates with such ferocity. Nothing else flickers so brightly in dying eyes.

Crusades had been launched and wars declared, lands besieged and races exterminated, because someone had refined their hatred of the different, of the other, into something they could wield as effectively as a weapon. It was progress.

And there were times when Clay wondered, if there really was a God, if He hadn't created the world because He’d already known He would hate it.

These things the teenage Clay understood, day by day, year by year. Every fresh scar carved upon his body, and drop of blood spilled, and each tear that squeezed free of his eye, just seemed to confirm it.

Tears…? Even these. A world ignored may react with indifference, but a world hated seeks its own revenge.

A stranger is just an enemy you haven't assessed yet.

With the sun fallen beyond window and horizon, Clay moved across the room to stare out into the night. The ceiling light still burned, and the glass just beyond the chain mesh became a ghostly mirror that floated against the black. There hung his face and shoulders, little more than outlines; a faint glimmer of each eye, the suggestion of his mouth, his nose; the rest obscured.

There, against the night: a stranger to himself, a living portrait of the enemy within.