Prototype

Twelve

They left Tempe at the end of the week, the first weekend in November, Adrienne's car packed modestly considering her plans for an indefinite stay, ample room up front for herself and Clay. He had passed Friday night at her house without incident, so they could get started all the earlier, before dawn.

Northeast into the sunrise, the road soon blazed with desert fire, while at its other end beckoned mountains that would outlast them and their every hope and dream and granule of dust in death — gods of rock, the face of nature's indifference.

"As long as you can avoid it," Clay said, "could you not take the interstate? I hate the interstate."

"I'll try," she said. An atlas lay curled and wedged in the gap between their seats. Eight hundred miles. She had sworn to herself that she would do her best to avoid any conversation that resembled session work. In the car, it could be too much confined to too small an area, too pressurized.

Still, this seemed benign enough.

"What's wrong with the interstate?"

"I didn't touch an interstate after I left Denver." He stared ahead toward the corona of the rising sun. "I came on secondary roads. They're more interesting. Something about them seems true. If you keep off the interstates, you tend to see the people who travel for its own sake."

Gently, slowly, Clay was squeezing a rubber ball, therapy for muscles long unused. In the hospital he had seemed to relax after she'd told him that no one would challenge his discharge. She had been able to talk him into waiting a couple of days so he could leave with hands unburdened.

Just to see his hands at all seemed foreign, as if he should have remained in those twin casts forever. Both hands and lower arms had that unnaturally pale, pasty quality that skin sometimes takes on beneath a cast. His hands themselves, now emerged like chrysalids, shone with the angry red of new scars from the compound fractures.

Hands were so very vital, so telling of a person and the life led. And here now were Clay's, new to her, some facet of him once concealed, now revealed. She could glance at them — squeezing the ball, thumbing through the atlas, at rest — and wonder things she'd not considered before: They had known brutality, but had they ever known tenderness? He claimed to dislike being touched, but did he use them to caress, or stroke, or bring pleasure to someone else? Were they ever held, fondled, kissed? Such simple acts, but those who were denied them must be terribly lonely.

So much ground they had yet to cover.

"You never told me you were a lesbian," he said, miles later.

Adrienne had been waiting for that, in one form or another. "I never saw it as being relevant." She did not bother correcting him: You're half-right, at least, just caught me on that side of the pendulum's arc. If it served to discourage any transference of misdirected sexuality, all the better. "That's not suddenly going to be a problem, is it?"

"No. It was just a surprise. You know the way we fill in the blanks for people we don't know much about, and imagine things." He tired of squeezing the ball and took to tossing it, catching it, one-handed, over and over. "I noticed you never wore a ring, but I pictured you … I don't know … trading off sleepovers with some businessman, somebody like that. Not another doctor. I don't think you could stand another doctor."

Patients. Sometimes they could pick up the damnedest things.

"But it was good to be surprised," he went on, still tossing, catching. "Things like that remind me not to take anything for granted. Is this bugging you?" Holding up the ball, suddenly.

"A little."

Clay went back to squeezing. "It's easy to see why you were attracted to Sarah. It's like big parts of each of you are things the other isn't."

She weighed this a moment. Last night Clay had spent little time in actual conversation with them, quiet and withdrawn mostly, spending at least an hour sitting in the gathering darkness on the patio, alone, watching night seize the backyard. Still, it would have taken little observation, she supposed, to decide who was the extrovert and who the introvert, who made sure the bills were paid on time and who planned the parties.

They might have been friends, Clay and Sarah, under other circumstances, or at least as close to friends as he thought he could be. Adrienne knew it, just knew they shared elements of a common core, had at one point watched them briefly converse and resonate like both prongs of a tuning fork. He had already spent a couple of minutes enchanted by the rainstick, then set it aside while wandering over to a bookcase filled predominantly with Sarah's titles, mostly anthropology texts and compendiums of multicultural mythic beliefs and the like. He scanned the spines, finally removing one from her small collection of art books.

"Salvador Dali, you like him?" he asked.

"Oh, are you kidding?" Sarah said. "He's only about my favorite twentieth-century artist. Adrienne and I were in Florida last year, and for two days I was inconsolable until we got over to St. Petersburg to the Dali Museum."

Watching from the kitchen, Adrienne caught the brief and uneasy hesitation with which Clay opened the book, flipped through pages. Close as Sarah was, it could never have escaped her.

"What, you don't like him?" she asked, looking that way she sometimes did, as if she'd be crushed if the answer was no.

"That's not it." Replacing the book, bruised brow furrowing beneath its bandage. "He hits too close to the bone sometimes. I … there are nights I have dreams like this. A lot, really. Some of those pieces, they're like home movies."

Sarah looked enthralled, respectful. "Some people take drugs to see that clearly and make those leaps of connection, and don't even get close."

Clay nodded, then looked at Adrienne in the kitchen doorway. "And some people prescribe drugs to make it stop."

Sarah looked at Adrienne, too, and burst into laughter, clapping a companionable hand against Clay's upper arm — he didn't flinch, Adrienne noticed — Sarah's unexpected and sincere delight even bringing a smile from him. The two of them, just standing there sharing what felt even worse than a private joke. Am I reading this right? she'd thought. They just met and they're ganging up on me? Turning away, finally, momentarily petulant and grumbling something about Dali being the Liberace of modern art.

Or was it just an irrational twinge of jealousy, made even more confusing by her not knowing which of the pair of them had caused it?

Regardless, it had passed.

Behind the wheel, sun now higher and yellow, lifted from the fiery red desert bath of its rising, Adrienne gripped harder and tuned in the highway. In retrospect, how pointless that small flare of anger now seemed. Despite the virulence of the yearnings that had driven him south to begin with, Clay had instinctively been right about one thing:

The road could heal.

It rolled on, grinding morning and afternoon and evening into dust that was taken by the wind. The land northeast was no less barren than the desert, just barren in a different way, brown hillsides dotted with pines. They climbed from the low Arizona altitudes into the higher reaches of mountain country, and the temperature must have slid more than thirty degrees. Denver often had its first snowfall by this time of year.

But the freeways and streets were clear and dry when they reached them that night. Clay directed her through the urban maze and the atlas was forgotten. Many more miles and her nerves would have whined like the highway beneath her tires. Earlier she had accepted his offer to share the driving; without his help she doubted they could have made it in one day's haul. She had taken care to consult the maps as to when they traded, to make sure he wouldn't be driving in cities. As long as he was on the open road, the danger seemed minimal that a stranger’s carelessness would shove him into blind rage and mechanized retribution.

The neighborhood to which he directed her seemed, so far as she could discern with her directional sense dulled by hours of monotony, close to the heart of the city. Houses built tall, decades ago, three stories to accommodate all the offspring of families vast and prodigious, when big families were the norm in a younger city and a younger nation. They would be lonelier dwellings now, interiors gutted and rearranged and walled off into isolated compartments for one or two, who might never even know the names of those living beneath the same roof. The walls would no longer recognize the sound of laughter from sprawling holiday gatherings, and the music that followed family feasts would only be an echo lodged in some aged rafter.

Adrienne parked at the curb, idling, headlights shining upon a tree just before the car, one of a blockful whose stark branches scraped at the neighborhood's sky, defiant and gnarled like the fists of gods who had been forgotten to death.

"What next?" whispered Clay.

"You go in, you take a hot shower, and you sleep in your own bed for a change."

"Right." He looked unconvinced, turned in his seat and facing her but half of him thrown into shadow. "That's not what I mean."

"I know."

It'll be all right, she wanted to soothe him. Something about him in this moment made her want to push aside all formality of the therapist-patient relationship — or was it now researcher-subject? — and reassure him as a friend.

"We keep going," she finally said.

"You're in my world now." He spoke as if regretting the fact. "I'm not in yours. It could make a difference."

"I'll try to find a neutral corner."

A thin smile touched the half of his mouth she could see, and while he said nothing she could almost hear him anyway, what he must have been thinking: There is no such thing as neutrality. We just fool ourselves into thinking some regions are immune to our influence.

"You're going to need some time to settle back in and readjust to being home. And I don't want to push you. But we need to decide on a day for me to call you and see when we should start our sessions again."

"Just give me the rest of the weekend, that's all I should need. Try me Monday afternoon." He laughed mockingly. "I guess I still have a phone."

"I can find my way back if you don't."

He nodded. "There's … someone … she's used to this kind of shit out of me. She probably came by and brought in my mail. If I'm lucky maybe she opened the bills."

It was the first real indication of a woman in his life. In therapy he had been evasive around the issue, more comfortable discussing past relationships than those of the present.

"What's her name?"

"Erin."

"I think I should hear more about Erin sometime soon."

"Why stop there? You'll probably meet her before long." He grabbed the rubber ball, bounced it once off the windshield and caught it. "My hands ache." Pocketing the ball in his jacket. "I'm going now."

After watching him recede up the walk, between a gauntlet of shabby hedges, to let himself into the house, Adrienne sat for a couple of minutes, until a light winked on in a third-floor window. She caught sight of his silhouette framed beneath a peaked eave, leaning there as he stared out into the night and the city, from his cage or his refuge, whatever home had now become.

Only when she saw a curtain glide before the window did she drive away.

*

Adrienne backtracked, having noted on the drive to Clay's, the hotels along the way. Saturday night, alone in a strange city, at the tail end of 800 miles, she was not about to be finicky.

She checked in with one bag of essentials to get her through the night, leaving the car in the hotel's parking garage, where she hoped it would be less likely to be broken into. Her gold card was deposit enough for an indefinite few days until she could arrange for something more permanent. She would be routing the bill to Arizona Associated Labs for reimbursement anyway.

Exactly what her hospital was getting out of the arrangement had not been made clear, but the lab must have made a persuasive offer to Ferris Mendenhall and his overseeing administrator. The hospital was essentially loaning her out as a freelance consultant, with AAL picking up her salary and supplying a staff psychologist to pick up the slack left by her absence. As well, AAL had agreed to cover her housing expenses, and then, so long as they were happy with her results, there was the possibility of a bonus once she had completed her evaluations and observations of Clay in his regular environment. Not surprisingly, treatment was the lowest priority on their agenda, something for her discretion.

The question of where this sudden influx of money was coming from, precisely, Adrienne had not heard asked, but she was assuming that AAL would be cannibalizing it from other projects that had already been funded. Diversion of funds was an everyday occurrence in many scientific communities. Where budget lines were loosely defined, there was a lot of flexibility in how they were used, or abused.

The ultimate irony: She had gotten her grant after all, with the blessings of Ward Five.

She was settled into the hotel room by midnight, filling the tub for a steaming bath to soak away road sweat, road nerves, the late-night blues of being too far away from the one she loved. Never would a bed seem any bigger and more desolate than tonight. The TV played softly, a sad companion.

While the faucet gushed water, she phoned and Sarah answered. Here I am, here's my number, I miss you already, and even though I don't want to bring it up, I'm sorry if I acted like a bitch last night because I felt you and Clay were conspiring to judge me for what I do.

"When are you going to start hunting down someplace real to live, then?" Sarah asked.

"As early as possible." Adrienne peeled away her socks, threw them toward her small suitcase, and curled her legs beneath her on the bed. She had planned on checking into the availability of condominiums for rent, with everything furnished.

"You know," said Sarah, "I got to thinking today, with the kind of schedule I've been keeping lately, I could join you, you know. I mean, that is, if you'd want me underfoot all the time — "

Want her? Want her?

" — bailing me out of jail every other night, maybe, am I talking myself out of this?"

Adrienne clutched the phone with both hands and shut her eyes and smiled, as if prayers she didn't even know she'd prayed had been answered. "How soon can you make it?"