Prototype

Nine

Ryker, from Arizona Associated Labs, came clean with Adrienne later that week. She still wasn't sure what to make of the fact that he had for days — days — sat on what could have the most significant impact yet on Clay Palmer's case.

Had it been a deliberate lie, or simply a withholding of facts for the sake of convenience, while Ryker and company figured out how to best address the situation for their own ends? Her guess leaned toward mercenary origins. The competition for leverage in medicine, particularly in research, was no less cutthroat than in most other private-sector ventures simply because human welfare was involved. There was also funding to consider. Funding meant the chance for greater accomplishment, which in turn meant prestige, and led to funding greater still…

They'd led her to believe that they thought Clay was the first of his kind, the first gross chromosomal abnormality discovered in over two decades — news that would have penetrated their world like a ricocheting bullet. Could they really have expected her to believe that they — immersed in the science of genetics — had not immediately recognized that this was not the case?

The bottom line?

While the numbers were tiny, there were others.

Clay was not alone in the world.

Ryker followed up his phone call apprising her of this shock with a package of records compiled on the others found to have a third copy of chromosome twelve.

The defect had been discovered six years ago, in the genetics division of a Boston research center named MacNealy Biotech, and had been christened Helverson's syndrome after the first scientist to document it.

Known cases prior to Clay were at an even dozen: five in North America, one in Venezuela, four across Great Britain and Western Europe, and two in Japan. Not all, however, were still alive. The Venezuelan, who had worked in the north coast oil industry, had committed suicide last year. A British soldier of fortune had been killed in Central America. As well, one of the Americans was on death row in Texas, following a string of gas station robberies that had left three attendants dead…

And Adrienne could see the pattern forming already, another aggression linkage to rival, even surpass, the panic button pushed by the discovery of the double-Y.

Still, one look at the overview was enough: Based on the few known cases, the hope that Helverson's syndrome was totally benign was not encouraging. Statistics on the group were broken down to demonstrate over and over generally maladaptive patterns. There was an inarguable trend here toward explosive temperaments, random acts of impulsive violence, self-destructive tendencies, and, to a lesser extent, schizophrenia. It cut across every national boundary and appeared independent of such variables as ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and education.

Interesting, though, how every last one was male, with none older than thirty-five. As well, she noticed another unifying factor: All came from industrialized countries. This said little in itself — the technology to map out chromosomes was far less prevalent in third-world nations, although more was being done in such places all the time as static local populations were found where various disorders plagued large numbers of the people. Such closed-system settlements constituted living laboratories in which to trace genetic disorders through multiple generations. Perhaps, in time, some agrarian society would yield its first Helverson's subject. Until then…

Here they were. Like bad omens.

In reading the overview, it was easy to forget that each one was a person who appeared to have undergone his own variation of Clay's life. They had been afflicted and did not even know by what, much less why.

Did they all feel the pain of the outsider, who does not even fit on a molecular level, and did they reprogram that pain into anger? Did they go through each day with heartbeats and brainwaves out of tune with those of the masses? She saw their lives as testament to a cruelty in nature that went beyond ill intent: nature's profound indifference, giving periodic mutant rise to her variants, then leaving them to struggle and thrive, or wane and die, on their own.

It caused her to stop and stare at the skin of her bared forearm, its smooth and pale underside. There, deep within, written in protein codes 100 trillion times over: herself. What guarantee did she have that there was nothing concealed in that text of life and death, hidden like a bomb in a skyscraper, ticking, waiting for its moment? Waiting to burst into terrible flower — tumors or breakdown of systemic function, something that might leave her mind intact while her body withered, or steal the mind while the body housed its deterioration for decades to come.

She was no less susceptible to the indifference of nature than any of them.

It made her all the more eager to set the overview aside, to quit thinking of them as a faceless aggregate and view them as individuals. She began to open each separately sealed case study, files and medical records and interview transcripts and photos.

One…

After another…

After another…

And it became obvious that there was at least one physical manifestation of Helverson's common to each of them.

They looked as if they could be brothers.

By the third one Adrienne wasn't even reading, just tearing into the files to get at the pictures, spreading them out into rows. All of them stared up from the tabletop like a bizarre family reunion. Variations, to be sure: hair color, eye color, skin tone. But structurally, the resemblance was eerie, all of them much like Clay: the subtle arch and curve of bones made streamlined, contoured as if to lean into wind; small bladelike noses and firm chins, and jawlines that curved efficiently around; watchful eyes, wary, few of them smiling. It was even noticeable beneath the more overtly Asian traits of the two Japanese.

They were not unattractive — to the contrary, in most cases — but taken together, they could not help but be unsettling. And in the smooth contours of their faces, so perfect in image after image, there was something almost reptilian about them—

And damn it, she was regarding them as a group again.

Yet it was so hard not to. Like brothers, as if some father with wanderlust had, thirty-five years ago, began to circle the globe and sow the seeds of a deviant progeny. His sperm somehow overpowering the theoretically equal influence of maternal genes, to leave these women's wombs growing with children solely of his creation.

Again, she was letting her imagination roam too far. Further reading showed that even such an astronomically low possibility as a common father had been ruled out. Genetic testing was nothing if not precise in ascertaining parental lineage, although the remote possibility of some very distant common ancestor had not yet been ruled out. For the time being, though, they had only chromosome twelve in common.

She was brought back to thoughts of Down's syndrome and the stunning resemblance between most of those who bore it. Short and stocky, with slanted eyes and similarly shaped heads, frequently affectionate like eternal children, they had always struck her as brothers and sisters of their own extended family, beyond the claims of blood kinship. They were their own; apart, yet linked.

And here, now? Before her?

The opposite of Down's?

Was it such a farfetched notion? For, in time, didn't nature strive to balance everything with its polar counterpart?

Nature did, so often, exhibit a love affair with symmetry.

*

She monitored Clay daily after having broken the news of the karyotype to him. Physically he would be fine, his bludgeoning of the window having caused nothing worse than some damage to the cast and a hairline fracture in a healing carpal bone, while the claw marks on his torso had been bandaged.

He emerged from sedation uncommunicative, less sullen than simply withdrawn, and gradually coming out of that within a few days. He was showing improvement by the time Adrienne learned of the others, although she had decided to withhold that from him until he was back on more stable emotional ground. Naturally he would want to know what they were like. Understandably, he would find the truth of no encouragement.

"I accept it," he finally told her, during their next Sunday session. Looking drawn and pale, too many weeks away from a sun that he apparently needed, like a tonic, from time to time.

And she told him that was important, accepting the fact of Helverson's, as long as he wasn't accepting some preconceived notion that it rigidly predestined his life. Nature, nurture, the debate had raged for centuries, and would likely never be settled to the satisfaction of everyone. It was important he keep in mind that he was more than mere proteins and programming.

"Do you think it's possible we know when things are wrong with us?" he asked. "Deep, fundamental differences that set us apart. Even if we don't have names for them, or even know where to point in ourselves … we just know? You think so?"

"Obviously you do," she said, turning it back.

He glared for a moment, and she saw the faces of the others buried in him, as if he carried ghosts. "Can't we have sixty seconds of conversation without you deflecting it around into some therapeutic proverb?"

Adrienne blinked. Very good, Clay. It was actually a boost to see him rise up like that. If he hadn't gotten some of his fighting spirit back, he wouldn't have cared.

"I think," she told him, slow enough to measure every word, "some people have a greater self-awareness than others … and I think it's possible that could extend to the physical or chemical makeup of their bodies."

"Thank you," he said, with a rare smile of victory. It faded soon enough, replaced by a look of haunting recollection. "I never told you why I came down this way."

"You told me you had a lot of thinking to do."

He nodded. "But why then? Why up and decide one day that I needed it more than I did the day before?"

"Something happened?"

"Something I saw." Clay took a deep breath, leaned back with his eyes shut in their darkened hollows, saying nothing until he began to bite his lower lip. "I don't hold jobs well," he began at last. "You probably guessed that already. But for the past year or so I worked for the Department of Sanitation in Denver. And that was all right, I got along okay doing that. I guess I've lost that one now, too, though.

"When we'd finish the pickup rounds and haul the truck back to the dump, sometimes I'd go wandering around all those mountains of trash. Everything the city was retching up, there it was. We could poke through it, and if there was anything we wanted, it was ours. Most of the time I wasn't even looking for my own benefit, I was looking for stuff for Graham. Remember Graham?"

"The artist." It had been weeks since Clay had mentioned him.

Clay nodded, sat straighter. "I'd bring him things I thought he'd like to use, for inspiration or whatever. Scraps of metal, bits of machinery. He's doing something with power tools and appliances and things like that, but he won't tell anybody what it is, so I'd just grab anything that looked halfway interesting.

"So there it was, one afternoon, the middle of September, one of those days when you can barely feel it, but there's a chill coming. And I was scouting around this one edge of the dump where I probably shouldn't have been, because that's where the cranes were working. They lower those scoops, like big swinging mouths from metal dinosaurs, and rearrange the piles. They'd tell us it's dangerous to get around, but what the hell, that's when you can turn up the most interesting junk.

"I came around one side of this smelly mountain, saw where part of it had fallen away, where there was this little hollow. I just stopped, and stared.

"There was a dead man in there. Not like he'd been dumped and that was the most convenient place they could find. I think he'd been killed there, maybe even some kind of ritual thing. His wrists, they'd been spread out and tied to something half-buried in the trash — the legs of an old desk, it might have been. There he was, just slumped down, sitting in all this dried blood. He'd been gutted, all this stuff strewn out of his abdomen. Not random, either, there was order to it. But none of it seemed human to me, because he'd been there long enough for it to start drying out, so what it really looked like, to me, was pipes and tubes and conduits, like that. I'd never seen anybody's plumbing before, and that's what it's like. Meat machinery. So there he was, all dirty white, and not moving — plastic bags and paper and just general shit hanging off him. And all I could do was stare."

Adrienne had to force herself to breathe. Imagining the scene for herself: an eviscerated man and the carrion stench that must have surrounded him, in the shadow of a valley between mountains of trash, while smoke from refuse fires churned overhead, machinery swaying in the background. She was seasoned, and rarely was she forced to conceal genuine repugnance, but this was one of those moments.

"The sight of him," she said, "it didn't … upset you."

"It was repulsive. But you can't deny it: What's repulsive is also fascinating. I kept staring because it didn't seem real. Five or ten minutes, it must have been. And then one of the cranes swung over, and the whole hillside came avalanching down on him. Buried him completely. So I walked away."

"Without reporting it to anyone?"

He shook his head. "Except for whoever put him there in the first place, I guess I'm the only one who knows he's there."

Clay didn't say anything else, seeming distanced from that afternoon, describing it almost as if it had happened to someone else. She tried to use the growing spotlight of silence to coax more from him, but this time it wasn't working.

"What was it about the experience that made you feel you had to leave home for a while?"

He stared down, as if answers were to be found on the floor. "I'd been looking at him for a minute or two, trying to figure out how long he'd been there. Overnight, I was guessing. And then I had to stop and think: Well hell, where was I last night? For a few seconds, I didn't know. No memory, nothing. I came out of it after a minute, and I knew I hadn't done it. But that didn't make me feel relieved, not really, because I started thinking, Well, if it wasn't me, maybe it could have been, and could I really do that to someone, if I went out of my head? It was like getting slapped in the face, and hearing somebody tell me, 'You've got a lot bigger problem than you ever thought.'"

Adrienne pulled herself out of it a little at a time — a vague feeling of uncleanness, the clash of values in how she could never have left a murder victim behind, a secret buried by a city's refuse — and likely Clay never knew she was trying so hard not to judge. She spoke again of predatory ethics versus the conscience he obviously had somewhere within, if not always accessible. Spoke of the way people could latch onto symbols of their guilt over events entirely unrelated. He was no killer. Was he?

Not yet.

"When you told me about my chromosomes," he said, mouth curling down, "that about did me in. But I asked, didn't I?"

Adrienne noticed that he was actually trembling. Another peek into vulnerabilities only rarely glimpsed. It reminded her of pets owned when she was younger, taking them to a kennel or the vet; thrust into circumstances beyond their understanding, their warm furry bodies seeming smaller as they huddled, gripped by fear's seizure. Her heart would break, always.

Clay, trembling.

"But I remembered a few weeks ago I said I'd keep talking to you because it could be one more step toward understanding myself. That's why I'm here now. I might not always like what I find out, or even take it very well … but all I want to do is stay in this for the duration."

*

The quest for self-knowledge was a noble endeavor, as she saw it, but it didn’t exist in a vacuum. Clay could look within, and she could show him where, could help dry the tears when what he saw there seemed too ugly or hopeless to bear.

But it had gone beyond that now: Clay one of the rarest genetic commodities in existence, one of less than a dozen living known Helverson's syndrome lab rats on the globe. What had been a routinely simple, balanced doctor-patient dyad was opened up to accommodate new strangers with degrees, with hypotheses, with agendas of own, and a never-ending catalog of questions.

Who comprises his biological family?

Has he any brothers, sisters?

Any children that he has fathered?

Any somatic deviations noted — physiological, biochemical, neurological, and so forth?

Any pronounced differences in his healing faculties?

What behavioral patterns are exhibited when he is confronted with a controlled battery of stress-inducing stimuli?

May we have additional tissue samples?

More, and more, and more.

Specialists all, geneticists with concentrations in development and population and other fields, along with their affiliate researchers in mutation's other ramifications, they made the cross-town pilgrimage from Arizona Associated Labs to see the new prize. Paying heed to the protocol of hospital hierarchy, they were warmly received by Dr. Ferris Mendenhall, who conferred with Adrienne, who in turn approached Clay, partly on their behalf, partly for his own: "They want to learn more about you — they'll be able to find out more than I or anyone else on this hospital staff can."

"It doesn't mean they'll be replacing you, does it?" seemed to be his main concern.

She shook her head. "No. You'll just have busier days here, is all."

Clay shrugged. "That doesn't sound entirely bad, you know."

Adrienne smiled, forcing it, this time touching him on one cast and the thin fingertips protruding from its end. They felt cold before he drew them away. Cold as her silly sense of loss, forced to share, forced to work and play well with others whose interest in Clay was based on his status as an oddity — and really, shouldn't she be beyond this sort of petty resentment?

That doesn't sound entirely bad…?

I do hope you can still say that by the time they decide they're through with you…

If they ever do.

*

Bad? No, not at first, nothing that distressed him, pained him, certainly nothing that bored him. It was all new. The body, oh, they were big on that, poking, prodding, charting, loading him into machines that ground electronically around him and bombarded him with radiation, magnetic fields, whatever could be used to peer inside without the aid of a scalpel. Not that they were far away from that particular violation either.

Blood and hair samples, tissue scrapings, urine specimens — here you go, have one on me. Humans make such wonderful resources, for they are always renewable.

He laid his brain open to them — these doctors who had no need for names, they were just the tall one, the stubby one, the one with clammy hands, the one with the mole on her cheek. With every day that passed, Dr. Adrienne Rand accrued new dimensions of reality by comparison. These others, they were inquisitive to the point of farce, comical in their seriousness, surreal in their relentless clinical precision. They were Nazis.

But if even one could train a penlight on some previously shadowed corner inside him, to illuminate a malignant growth he could squash like a vermin, it might all be worth it.

He free-associated, looked at Rorschach blots, composed extemporaneous stories to accompany flash cards. They measured his intelligence with a battery of tests, qualified his personality traits with the MMPI, inquired of his sex life and his dreams.

They described situations for him and asked how he would react. You are confronted by a mugger on the street. What do you do?

I'd try to tear the asshole's head off. How do you think I ended up here, genius?

You are alone after work in an office and realize your boss has left his filing cabinet unlocked. Somewhere in one drawer, you know that there is a file containing employee evaluations. What do you do?

I'd make copies of all of them and sell them to whoever wanted a look at their own or anybody else's.

You are told by someone you love and have lived with for two years that she is leaving you. How do you react?

Can we … can we stop for today?

What do you do?

What do you do?

What do you do?

It was better than working, he supposed: regular hours but no one whose approval he was trying to maintain. Just be himself and they were satisfied. Although it wasn't as if he was drawing a paycheck, was it? And here he was, exerting as much effort as any of them. They would go back to their labs flushed with success, having peeled back another layer … but only because he had agreed to show it to them. That should be worth something, shouldn't it? For with every day that passed, it felt less and less as if he were going to get much benefit out of this at all. They were happy to see him only because of what he was, not who, and his problems were only buzzwords in their terminology.

This was no arrangement of mutual beneficiaries.

And then the gene meddlers led him down the primrose path of the past, to shove it into his face. He was the son of his mother and father, all right — but still with his own secrets yet to be explained.

They had arranged for his parents to be screened back home in Minneapolis, the both of them eager to yield up their tired blood for the sake of a son neither seen nor heard from for four years. There had been no sign of Helverson's syndrome in either of them. Naturally. Their DNA had been free of taint, the both of them pure and unadulterated specimens. Proud veteran and loving home-maker, these two were suburbia, they were America at its finest. Fascist and alcoholic, they were every self-perpetuating shame concealed and denied behind a picket fence and a gingham curtain.

Of course they had checked out fine — they had no need of chromosomes gone awry. They were ruined in so many other ways.

Did they tell you about the dead ones? Clay considered asking. The weaker ones, my brothers and sisters that died in the crib, or never drew a single breath outside the womb at all? They let you in on that family legacy?

Not asking, fearing the answer. Imagining ghouls in lab smocks dispersed in a cemetery, seeking the powdery old bones of babies dead for twenty years. Here's a shovel — we'll expect the karyotype by tomorrow afternoon.

And then the inevitable. Here was a scenario better than any fabricated stress test:

You have spent the last four years of your existence trying to amputate yourself from a spawning ground of hypocrisy and ineffectuality and meaninglessness. You have tried to tell yourself that you have no love left for them, that they forfeited it long ago in ways they could never possibly imagine. You know they tried to kill you one screaming nerve at a time. You were the abortion that lived. And now they want to see you, your parents want to see you. What do you do?

What do you do?

What do you do?

I tell you to go to hell. And then…

I cry.

*

Clinicians, even in his dreams —

meat-metal god-puppets in caverns of iron, deep, deep, where boilers thump and steam-jets hiss scalding clouds that condense to drip from tiny screaming mouths, and gray-cheeked faces of slag pile fetuses heaped halfway to ceiling

in lab coats of rust they welcome him, Clay, star patient, welcome to the convulsion factory: you are meat, you are nerve endings, and you are ours

the examination table a vast slab, corrosive with its crusted layers, black on red on gray, runneled with fluid runoff troughs, and here they spread him, arms and legs akimbo, Dr. Mengele, I presume? and in he leans with trigger finger spastic, Clay pinned by rivet-gun crucifixion, wrist, wrist, ankle, foot, the peg nails burning molten red to sear flesh to bone to charred marrow

girders like steel bone, clanking down from ceiling and up from floor to hold him in place, organic straps tightening across his forehead/throat/ribs/hips/knees, becoming one with the slab in symbiotic bondage —

and he feels the pulsing shudder of gears, turn, turn, grind, ratcheting the slab to lengths never hinted at by its cold hard solidity

clank

clank

screams drowned out by piercing bone-saw whine in his ears as they hack at him with tools growing from their limbs like phallic pistons, we will penetrate you in 100 trillion orifices

a stranger is just an enemy you haven't assessed yet

pierced a thousand times over with razored syringes whose plungers slide back to draw blood flowing like rust-water clots

what do you do? what do you do? what do you do?

tearing one hand free to leave half his palm behind, bleeding and welded to the slab, throbbing hand a brute weapon now, to lash at tormentors with sallow alloy skins

even as fragile bones crack under strain

even as the slab rends him into component parts and his last sensation is a collision between machine and heavy clubbed hand

and blood sprinkling in his eyes with a caustic burning like acid baths and bitter autumn rains —

*

A nurse found him collapsed in the hallway some twenty feet from the door of his room, bleeding and barely conscious. The gash on his forehead took twelve stitches.

I've got to get out of here — this while they were sewing him up, and it felt like the clearest thought he'd had in days.