Prototype

Seven

Adrienne proved to Mendenhall's satisfaction that a simple genetic karyotype would break no hospital bank account, even if insurance balked, and she was given clearance to have it run.

That Wednesday afternoon she came in early, escorted Clay down to the lab where a tech sampled his essences: a few hairs plucked from his scalp, and, to be thorough, a bit of blood drawn from his arm. Quiet and still, she gazed down as he submitted to the needle, watched it pierce skin, watched the vial fill with ruby brilliance. On his bared arm were the ghosts of old scars, five or six, white, emphatic like accent marks in a private language.

"Today's the thirteenth," he said, "isn't it?"

"Right." She found it fairly remarkable the way he kept track without a calendar.

"Maybe that's a bad omen." Clay frowned as the lab tech pressed a cotton ball over the violated vein.

"You never seemed superstitious before."

He raised his arm for a minute, as instructed by the tech. "And maybe I'm not serious."

Sometimes, she had to admit, it was not easy to tell.

The samples were packaged and sent across town by courier, to Arizona Associated Laboratories' bio-med division, on University. It was out of her league, but a fascinating procedure nonetheless. As she understood, it involved taking a cellular sample — a hair follicle, say, or plasma — and chemically treating it to suspend the movement of the chromosomes in cells undergoing division at that moment. The cells were then squashed and smeared across a glass microscope slide and stained to improve visibility. The inventory of chromosomes in a single cell's nucleus was then photographed through the microscope, after which each chromosomal image was cut from the print, sorted according to size and structure, matched into corresponding pairs, then pasted into a composite photo.

Any gross abnormality such as an extra Y sex-chromosome could not escape detection. The karyotype was a living diagram.

They would wait, they would see, and she would prove his fears groundless.

Later that afternoon, his session, on schedule: October sun slanting through the window, and the insistent whisper of the tape recorder, tiny cassette reels spinning to immortalize Clay's silence from the couch.

Eventually: "You were looking at the scars, weren't you?" He wore the long engulfing sleeves of a robe but proffered both arms anyway. "I noticed that."

"Yes. They caught my eye."

"What did you think of them?"

"I don't know as I thought anything about them, per se." Which was a lie, a little professional white lie; allowable, even expected. She had continued to see those pale, thin remnants of past slashes long after his sleeve had gone back down, wondering how they would feel beneath her fingers. There was nothing sexual about it; just the imagined tactility of hardened ridges. If there were enough of them, intersecting, they might feel like a chaotic web in which he chose to protect himself.

"Scars are benign, of themselves," she went on. "Where you're concerned, what interests me is the story behind them. The events and emotions that put them there."

"We've been over that before."

Nodding toward him, very slightly, with upraised eyebrows. Body language, when the words themselves might have been too harsh: You brought it up. He appeared almost sheepish.

"Twinkle, twinkle, little scar," Clay said. "You hadn't seen any of them before. I just wondered." Biting his lip then. While he usually seemed to resent it when she left him to stew in his own silence, he was handling it better with every session. "It was sport, I told you that, I think. Didn't I? Sometimes it was just endurance. Sometimes it was a rehearsal for something worse that I never ended up doing to myself."

"Suicide, you mean."

"I thought about it a lot."

"But not anymore."

He sat back against the couch. "It's been a few years." Contemplation, like shuffling through a photo album with nothing but grim black-and-whites: crime scenes and accident victims; his young life. "Maybe it just didn't seem romantic anymore. You can get jaded about anything." This struck him as amusing. "Self-destruction can get kind of old and pretentious if you keep after it long enough. If you don't eventually off yourself, you're just a poseur."

Adrienne found herself tracking down an intriguing line of thought that Clay would, naturally, be too blind to see about himself. "So you put down the knife one day and decided, No more."

"More or less."

"Yet you've received several scars since then."

Clay raised his head fractionally, wary — somewhat amused but tempered with something grimmer, as well, some spiny little paranoia. "So?"

Tightroping over the session once again, hoping instinct still served her well — that he was ready to be confronted with the obvious and could deal with it.

"So is it possible that you put away your knife, but turned the same task over to others … one of whom might be willing to do a more thorough job?"

Sun at her back and the soft, soft sound of the cassette. She was never more aware of it than at moments such as this, when words and eye contact and even the air in the room congealed.

"Death wish, huh?" Clay's grin was shy and menacing by turns, depending on the tilt of his exquisitely contoured head. Biting his lip as he watched her with narrowed eyes, as if one moment hating her for finding him out, congratulating her for it the next. "Did it ever occur to you that maybe I decided I liked feeling other people's skin give way under my hands instead of my own?"

A lie. No, not exactly, more a rationalization. A defensive barrier thrown up hurriedly, enough to block her but not sturdy enough to fool her. Clay would know that, wouldn't he?

"That sounds like something that would come from a predatory outlook. From what I've seen about you, what I know about you, and the incidents that have gotten you into trouble, you don't fit the predator mold."

He stared down toward his casts. After three weeks they had gotten dingy, the pristine white given way to a more lived-in look. "I guess," he said, and looked at her in surrender, even embarrassment, "I just overreact."

Gently, Adrienne nodded. She had been sitting with one knee draped over the other, leaning back, relaxed or trying to at least give that impression, but now she dropped both feet to the floor and slid forward, edge of the seat.

Oh, what she could learn from him, given the time and the freedom.

"Whether they realize it or not, people usually overreact because they're feeling threatened. And not always by anything so obvious as three gang-bangers trying to relieve them of the last of their cash."

While she left this with him, Adrienne combed mental files. Trying to call up those incidents in which Clay's impulses got the worst of him. The destruction — merely mindless, or cannily directed? — he could leave in his wake. Shattered glass doors in convenience store coolers; BMW pounded halfway to the scrapyard with a lead pipe; parking lot rammings of the cars of cocky drivers with more insurance than sense. Yes, there had been fights too, but were his incidents of vandalism sudden ventings of rage to keep him from harming others? Or unconsciously chosen symbols of a world he despised?

Clay shifted back and forth on the couch — all at once he just couldn't get comfortable there. So he left it, wandered across the room until he could sag against the windowsill and stare out at a world he'd not been part of for nearly three weeks.

"I thought about trying to become a Buddhist once," he said to the glass, to a world that would never hear him, "because they always seem so peaceful. That was very appealing, I thought it might help." He had begun to rhythmically strike his casts together, clunk clunk clunk, hammer and anvil, harder, louder — how must that feel vibrating through his knitting bones? Then he stopped. "But it's so passive, I just … I couldn't.

"But I did read this story that made so much sense. A story about Buddha. Someone came up to him, trying to figure out what it was about him that made him so wise, so in tune. They asked him, 'Are you a god?' He said, 'No.' Then they tried again, 'How about a saint, are you a saint?' Same thing, 'No.' Finally had to ask, 'Well, what are you, then?' And Buddha said, 'I am awake.'"

Adrienne smiled. It was a beautiful little fable and for a moment she thought how much Sarah would love it, its profound simplicity. But Clay had not shared it in delight, and she watched as he knocked his head against the window, eyes shut, breath fogging the glass.

"You related to something in that story," she said.

"I woke up one day, or month, or year — who knows how long it took, these things never just come over you full-blown, it takes time. I mean, I know there's something seriously screwed up about me, too, but … I started seeing everything around me for what it was. And I realized it was all I could do to stand it, living in a world where everybody seems satisfied with so little. I'm not talking about material things, I mean their lives. Give them their little ruts and they're happy. Or maybe not, but they settle for it, because they don't know any other way out. And nobody encourages them to find it."

Adrienne dared not interrupt his flow, watching as he drew himself together, stood taller, squarer at the window.

"It's all just part of the grand mediocracy," he said.

"Mediocrity, you mean?"

Clay shook his head. "Mediocrity is a quality. Mediocracy is the process that perpetuates it." He must have noticed her vague uncertainty. "The word, I mean, I made it up."

She nodded, and liked the word a great deal.

He explained: "In a democracy, the people are in charge. Theoretically. In an autocracy, it's a despot. In a theocracy, the church rules. So, in a mediocracy…" He left it open, passing it to her.

"Society is ruled by that which is mediocre," she finished, feeling a click within, a reversal of roles. He had become the lecturer and she the pupil.

She had wanted to learn from him? Of course. She had just thought she would remain in charge the whole time, and in a small way hated to lose the moment when she saw him turn again, back to the window, to stare. Hated world, intolerable world, world that rejects and is rejected.

"I'm awake," he whispered, "but all it does is hurt."

*

She thought of ruts over the next couple of days. How easy to fall into them, how difficult to recognize them from inside. Was she living in one as of late?

She worked, she treated patients. She came home, she slept. Books, always there to be read, nonfiction mostly, biographies and psychology texts, the occasional mystery. Her parents had retired two years ago to Prince Edward Island and she faithfully wrote them every other week. Now and again, a drive into the desert to watch the dawn, and feel the warming embrace as the newborn sun scorched the purity of land, to remember why she had come down here. Anything else? No, not much of note.

And she had to admit that, were it not for Sarah, it might sound dreadfully sterile. Sarah was a live-in safeguard against things becoming too routine. Sarah who prodded, "See this? Let's go here," and, "Look, look who's playing, you're coming with me, aren't you?" Sarah never had to prod very hard. Adrienne wanted a social life, but the world was geared to those whose nights were free. It was her schedule — how the hell was she supposed to have a real social life when she didn't clock in until four in the afternoon?

Re-evaluation often came out of unlikely inspirations: this time a patient who had brought her back face-to-face with the reasons she had gone into psychology in the first place.

Ruts meant no new purpose, no fresh goals. And so, that night after work, following the session with Clay, she stayed up until four completing her initial letter of proposal for a possible grant to study male aggression. She had already been to the university psychology department to see what was available, found herself drawn to one involving correlations between violence and authoritarian backgrounds. Perfect.

Of course, with the pace of funding agencies, both state and federal, she stood almost no chance of getting approval in time to take advantage of Clay's presence in Tempe. He would be long gone, discharged. There was no reason to expect Ferris Mendenhall to approve his stay for that long, assuming Clay would even want to stay.

Still, it didn't mean that, were a grant approved, she might not be able to make later contact.

Without exaggeration, Clay Palmer was unlike any other patient she had ever treated. She'd had ample contact with sociopaths and schizophrenics, and with patients whose maladaptation to the world had turned them into dysfunctional wretches. In their company Clay would fit, but he was the first of them to speak so rationally as a theoretician.

The mediocracy. Would Friedrich Nietzsche have spoken similarly, in this day and age, had he found himself in the asylum at the age of twenty-five?

Note to herself: See if there was anything available on the treatment Nietzsche had been receiving at the end of his life. It had been, after all, during the dawn of the psychoanalytic method.

Now, if she could just get the results of the karyotype so they could put that behind them.

Adrienne had been expecting it to arrive without ceremony, by courier perhaps, finding it in with her mail some afternoon when reporting for her shift.

The last thing she had expected was the Friday phone call from Arizona Associated Labs, ten minutes after her arrival. The voice on the other end was bewildered and excited in the same breath.

The results were nothing Adrienne had heard of before.

Worse, they were nothing the caller had ever seen.