Prototype

Eighteen

Why was the question Adrienne kept coming back to about Clay and the other dozen. What spotty knowledge she had of genetics had been picked up just since Clay's karyotype had been run, but it simply did not seem feasible that Helverson's syndrome could have remained undetected until six years ago, not when karyotypes had been run since 1956. Were it that rare, it seemed statistically unlikely that thirteen subjects would then be found in just six years, had this mutation been in the gene pool for centuries.

But suppose it were a more recent mutation, spontaneously arising within the last generation or two?

Such dramatically swift changes were not impossible. The higher incidence of hypertension among black Americans was now thought to trace back to the days of slavery, when the bodies of Africans in oceanic transit — chained below deck for weeks in sweltering holds and denied adequate water — quickly learned to retain vital salts rather than sweat them out. A swiftly adapted biological survival mechanism that, ironically, was now impairing lives rather than sustaining them.

But again, Helverson's: Why? What possible function could it serve? She could not, in good conscience, consider it an illness.

While a gross mutation, it was not a debilitating condition on par with Down's and Wolf-Hirschborn syndromes. There was no developmental abnormality as with any of several misprints affecting the sex chromosomes. So far as she could discern, Helverson's syndrome manifested itself — aside from benign facial-structure similarities, and such frequently reported quirks as resistance to sedatives and alcohol intolerance — in emotional and psychological affect. But detrimentally so: Its carriers seemed ill-equipped to contend with standard human stresses and interactions. If there was a common thread running through the dozen case studies, and now Clay's life, this was it.

Experience can override biology, she had assured him, but here the data challenged that precept. Among the thirteen, there was not a single exception to what looked to be a depressing rule.

All along she had wanted to believe that, as in countless other behavioral disturbances, genetics may have played a factor in predisposing someone to certain tendencies, but whether or not these were manifested was due to upbringing and environmental conditions. An authoritarian father, an abusive mother, a loveless home … one or more trigger mechanisms. A room packed with gunpowder may sit calmly for a lifetime, as long as it’s never introduced to a spark.

While she could not know everything about the first dozen, their backgrounds seemed to transcend even those broad criteria. One of the Americans, a twenty-seven-year-old named Timothy Van der Leun, whose home was listed as Indianapolis, was the son of a Lutheran minister whose family had cooperated fully in research, and had been found to be quite loving and healthy. Yet Van der Leun's life had been plagued by much the same turmoil as the rest.

While thirteen made a tiny research population by most lab standards, it was nevertheless difficult not to make sweeping conclusions based on available evidence. That extra chromosome did something to them. It heightened aggression and curtailed more tender emotions. It turned them into outsiders, adrift in societies for which they had more contempt than love.

What a find it would be if one were located whose life had taken a placid course. It would belie everything she was thinking while trying so hard not to. It would bury the notion that the stigma surrounding Helverson's was pure biological determinism. It would prove they were not prisoners of a rogue chromosome.

For that matter, what a find it would be if one were located who was female. More statistical unease.

If she allowed her intuitive right brain to leapfrog ahead of its logical left counterpart, it would almost appear as if something were deliberately guiding this. Some bored god shuffling molecular parts in a new configuration — there, let's see how this works.

She was big on theory, conjecture. Dutifully, she logged her evaluations of Clay in her notebook computer. She composed weekly reports and uploaded them to the mainframe at Arizona Associated Labs. She sought weekly feedback from Ferris Mendenhall, a link to the structure of Ward Five, almost distrusting his opinion that she was handling the case as well as could be expected from anyone.

She told them all how Clay professed to be more at ease with the world since having a trusted therapist to talk with, and they all found that of interest. She was just waiting for them to tell her to cut him off, therapeutically speaking; see if he reverted.

At his next Wednesday session, following Sarah's introduction to the others at Graham's, he was in fine form, low-key, and she gently worked her way around to a discussion of the possibility of a spontaneous mutation that had some as yet unexplainable reason behind it. Thinking this may be a good way, after another session or two, to reveal the existence of the others. Perhaps he would be strong enough now to handle the fact of them, their lives. Their sad lives.

She found his response to today encouraging, Clay as intrigued as if this were an evolutionary mystery to be solved, and he a smoking gun.

Her only real fear was ethical: In getting Clay to consider the possibility of some process at work here, rather than a random fluke, was she overstepping her bounds of authority? Dabbling in lines of thought for which she was unqualified?

No, that's the problem with science, there are too many delineations, she told herself in rebuttal. Too many specialists who can't let themselves see beyond their specialty. Too many experts dividing the material body from immaterial consciousness.

Western medicine was only recently beginning to admit what Eastern physicians had known for thousands of years: All things are one, connected, interdependent.

And most times she thought she would rather be boldly wrong than so narrowly timid she dared never stick her neck out.

The only drawback: You could never know how wrong you might be.

*

He came over Thursday afternoon, unexpected, unannounced, and, once she got a good look into his eyes, unbalanced. Clay stormed past her with a sheaf of papers clutched in one fist, trembling as he bristled from the core.

"Don't lie to me," he said, voice a raw crack of air. "I'll smell it from you this time."

She could feel it instantly, that same cold squeeze of her heart she'd known that day in her office when Clay had experienced a minor breakthrough, trembling with furies she did not wholly trust him to contain. He had become that Clay all over again, Clay at the breaking point, an atavism with the smell of the city wafting from his clothes.

Adrienne was acutely aware of the door at her back, how alone she was, Sarah off with Nina, doing Nina things, the two of them new friends, Nina probably asking for lessons, Teach me how to be a lesbian.

She shut the door, could not run now. She had expected this to be a smooth process? Setbacks were inevitable.

"Tell me what's wrong," she said.

"You held back from me. You held back information from me!"

Frowning, Adrienne stepped forward, inner alarms giving way to curiosity.

"Tell me if these places strike you as having anything in common." He could not stand still, pacing with the frightening deliberate monotony of a lion in a cage, back and forth between the sofa and the open bar that bordered the kitchen. "Los Angeles, Texas — death row no less — Indianapolis."

Her breath lodged in her throat.

"Seattle, let's see, that's it for this country, umm, oh yeah, Canada's got one."

One question huge, echoing: How had this happened?

"Two for Japan, the little fuckers probably build cars that blow up on impact" — wheeling on her then, screaming into her face — "Have you figured out yet what I'm talking about?"

Everything she had accomplished with him, the distances she had brought him in two months — Adrienne could sense them slipping away. Any danger from Clay was forgotten as soon as she recognized the hurt stamped upon every feature of his face. The ache, the sense of betrayal. The loathing. This must be the feeling of pulling someone to the brink of safety from a flood, and just as they rise cold and shivering from the murky depths, seeing them disappear once more, traceless in an eye blink, no second chances.

How? How?

Sarah? Could Sarah have copied some of this information and given it to him? Would she have? Surely not.

"All right, Clay, listen to me." She strove for reasoned calm that she did not possess. "I understand that you must feel — "

"No! No, you don't! I used to think you might, but you don't understand or you wouldn't have let me find out this way!" One arm trembled in the air, then he snatched up a cereal box from the bar — Sarah's breakfast — and hurled it across the kitchen. It struck the corner of the range hood, bursting like a boil, cereal showering across the stovetop and counter and floor. "There's twelve more and they're just like I am, they're all this way!"

She made herself take one more step in his direction. "Clay, show me what you're holding."

He threw them at her, most of the pages staying together in a sheaf that struck her full in the face. She started backward, more in surprise than anything; an unaccountable shame, like a slap in the face. When she rubbed a tingling spot at the outer corner of one eye her finger came back with a spot of blood, seeping from a tiny paper cut. It was an awakening — he might really do her harm.

"Calm down, Clay," speaking firmly, with neither anger nor trembling. "I do realize you're upset about this… " On and on, empathetic, soothing. She stooped to gather the stray pages, scanned them quickly, found them to be photocopies of the introductory overviews from each of the prior twelve case studies.

Adrienne looked up and saw him glaring, at last rooted to one spot. Not knowing if it was good or bad.

"Where did these come from?"

"I got them in the mail."

"And there was nothing else with them?"

He jabbed a finger toward the papers. "You haven't gotten to it yet."

She shuffled until she found it. The note posed only more questions; a skimpy cover letter, a single sentence typed near the top of a sheet of plain white paper: In case they haven't already told you, you're not alone in the world. There was no signature.

She was at a complete loss to explain this, the sort of thing that might be laughed off as a cruel joke were the information not available to such an exclusive few, all of whom should know better than to tamper with someone with such a vulnerable — and volatile — state of mind.

"Did you bring the envelope this came in?"

"No." His laboring breath seemed very loud to her; even his lungs sounded stressed. "No return address, if that's what you're wondering. The mailing label was typed. It was postmarked from Boston."

The city in which Helverson's had been discovered. The name of the lab escaped her at the moment, though she could not believe anyone there would perform such a grossly negligent stunt. People got hurt this way, someone learning too much, too soon.

"Why didn't you tell me?" he asked.

"I know you're feeling betrayed," she said. Trying to imagine such an all-inclusive betrayal: his family, the world, nature itself. And now me. "You may not believe me, but I hope you do. I was about ready to tell you, after another session or two. It wasn't a question of keeping this a secret from you, Clay. Never that. I was waiting until I felt the time was right — that you'd been stable enough, for long enough, that you could handle the news." Better than you're handling it now.

"Good idea!" he screamed. "Great fucking idea, wait and let somebody else do it, everybody knows except me, everybody but the mutant!"

For two months she had watched him wage his battles, those intensely private wars with himself, with his impulses, with fears and memories and truths. She had seen him emerge with victories, draw stalemates, and while he had at times been bested, always, always, she had believed he would in the end win out. Part of it was faith in Clay, the rest faith in her own dedication.

There could be no greater heartbreak, then, than to realize she may have been deluded. He might actually lose, helpless to save himself, she powerless to prevent it.

Clay grabbed one of the round-topped stools sitting at the bar, upended it so that he held it by the ends of two legs.

"They just decide they want to push my buttons" — he brought the stool crashing down against the bar — "see if that fucks me over too" — the stool's heavy wooden framework cracked apart, and he battered it down again, again — "this is just another experiment" — shrapnel and splinters rained, and the cushioned seat flew in a wobbly arc to slam against the far kitchen wall — "so you go back and tell them it worked! Adrienne!"

As the stool had broken apart, he'd been left with a little less in hand for the next downswing. She had moved neither to stop him nor to flee, for if old theories were correct, property destruction was a safety valve to keep him from committing assault. The bar now scarred, his surrogate Adrienne, perhaps. Or a stand-in for everyone he remembered poking and prodding his body and mind. He will not strike me, he will not strike me, he will not strike me.

He finally stopped, pieces of the stool scattered over ten-foot radius. Clay flung the last flimsy shards to the floor, then turned on her, breath heavy upon her face, furnace-hot and feral, the breath of a lion.

"Give me that," he said through clenched teeth, and tore the papers from her nerveless fingers.

To the door.

From outside herself, she watched Clay's stride and her own after him, mentally fumbling in her inimitable way with the proper things to say, out of textbooks and lectures and experience. All had fled; just as well. They would serve her no better than muteness.

"Stay out of my head," he told her, and didn’t look back.

*

She wished for so many things after that afternoon: at first, that Clay would cool down and return a more reasonable man, to resume where their sessions had left off. Later, as the days wore on, she simply wished that he would accept her phone calls.

Sometimes he would answer, and Adrienne took heart that at least he was not sitting home listening to it ring. Once he heard her voice, though, nothing could save the connection. His hang-ups were worrisome things by their very method. No receiver slammed back down in rage, as she might have expected. Instead, she could feel its pause midway between his ear and the cradle, as if he lingered deliberately, and each time she would think, This might be the one, just before he hung up once more, softly, scarcely a click. It was torture; he would know that.

She made irate phone calls to Ferris Mendenhall and Arizona Associated Labs, unsatisfying conversations that got her nowhere. No, no one had okayed a mailing of case overviews to Clay Palmer. They would check into it. Hang in there, be patient, see if he comes around, and if he doesn't, monitor him via his peer group if possible. A few times she came close to phoning MacNealy Biotech but quelled the urge. Hurling hazy accusations could only make a bigger fool of her than she already felt.

She checked with the others, with Erin and Graham, with Nina and Twitch. Twitch? She felt somehow unentitled to call him that, but didn't know his real name; perhaps none of them did. And all any of them could tell her was that Clay was making himself scarce from them, as well. Give him time, maybe he would come around; he always had before.

Don't you care any more than that? she felt like crying into the phone. He told me you were at least there for one another, you covered each other's backs and cauterized each other's wounds.

Then it occurred to her: Maybe they were doing exactly that. Maybe their apathetic voices were a shield erected around him, to keep her away.

She made several trips to his apartment, knocking on a door that he never answered. Sometimes silence from within, at times the chatter of televised news, no guarantee he was there but she knew he was, the evidence as indisputable as it was invisible. She could feel his formless and confused hostility radiating through the door: I hate you because I don't know what else to do.

Denver lay in the grip of deep autumn, winter on its way, but she felt frozen out already, every leafless tree a stark monument to a withdrawal so cold it burned.

Sarah held her through the lengthening nights, and often throughout each day, telling Adrienne, "You weren't wrong, you did nothing wrong, you got undermined by somebody you could never even have accounted for. Some jerk who wouldn't even sign his name."

Until one night, late, very late, the two of them in bed and setting aside books they both were too distracted to concentrate on, Sarah stroked her hair and Adrienne shut her eyes and curled against Sarah's side. It was safe here, in this warm nook.

"You know," Sarah said, "that I'd never want to usurp your authority with Clay. But … why don't I give it a shot?"

Adrienne lay very still, for a time content to listen to the wind moaning around the eaves, the frozen mountain wind. Finally she accepted the inevitable and nodded.

"Okay," she said, feeling not so much that she was giving up on Clay, as that she was giving him away.

*

In practical terms there was no such thing as neutral ground, not when he lived in this city and she did not. The whole of Denver was Clay's turf; she was just passing through. People were territorial that way, without even realizing. It would be a mistake to pretend otherwise, just because asphalt yielded no crops.

Sarah tracked him down to a part of town she supposed all cities had, where train tracks snarled together like stitches across a wounded earth, and blackened trestles stood weary from the generations; where vacant lots grew choked with weeds that were brown even in the bloom of spring; where low brick buildings sat rotted and scabrous from disuse. Relics, their windows in shards and once-proud faces scabbed and corroded, they were corpses awaiting the blessing of burial.

Sarah parked her car on an old gravel lot that the earth was slowly reclaiming, hunted a minute and found the rip in the chain link fence, right where it was supposed to be. She turned sideways to squeeze through, huddling in her down vest as she moved along a walkway of crumbling concrete, in the shadow of a smokestack.

She found the door that had been jimmied aeons ago, slipped into the abandoned factory. Dim hallways radiated a chill that must have taken years to seep into its walls. Along one, she found a pale rectangle, the ghostly afterimage of some long-removed time clock.

Clay was in the factory's cavernous center, as stilled as the chamber of a dead heart. From somewhere, an office perhaps, he had salvaged the metal framework of a surviving chair, sat surrounded by pits and the huge industrial bones that had once anchored vast machines before they'd been ripped out, sold or scrapped. The silence roared, and beneath it she could almost hear a dim echo of clattering gears.

"Hey. I know you," she said, her voice nearly swallowed, a prayer floating in a cathedral.

"Sarah." Clay sounded surprised, a little curious. Calm, though. Calm was good. She had hoped he would not feel invaded.

"You haven't, like, drawn a line I have to keep outside of, anything like that, have you?"

"No," almost a laugh, and he waved her over.

"Graham told me you come here sometimes." She found a spot on the concrete floor that didn't look too filthy, sat cross-legged. "He drew me a map."

"Better keep it, it may be worth something someday."

"Forgot to get it signed. Stupid, huh?"

His eyebrows nudged upward but he said nothing, as if too polite to agree. She sat looking at him for a few moments. Liked his face, always had. It was nothing unique, as she understood; at least twelve other guys out there had it, too. She had even peeked at the pictures just to see for herself how eerie something like that really was, faces from a hive identity, linked by a strange and darkly wondrous mystery of conception. Still, he made the face his own. Everyone wore their hurts and hungers a little differently.

"What did this place used to be?" She looked up, around. Weak sunlight filtered in from half a dozen skylights and windows.

"I don't know. It was here before I got here, to Denver. I just like to come. It's easier to think here, some reason. Quiet." He shrugged. "I never cared about knowing what they did here before. I don't care what they built. It's just what it is now. When you don't know, it feels like it's always been that way."

Sarah grinned. "Why ruin it, then?"

"Exactly. Look." He pointed, swept an arm from wall to distant wall. They were mottled in shades of gray, washed from ceiling down with accumulated water stains. Mineral traces and contaminants had left abstract patterns. "It looks like cave paintings from the Paleolithic era or something."

"Yeah," she said. "Yeah!" Scanning, embellishing with a tiny push of imagination. She pointed with a mittened hand. "There's a mastodon … and a wild stag."

"And there are the hunters."

"We need a fire," she told him. "And bones. And raw meat."

"Bones," he said, and sighed. Pointed toward the far corner, where shadows clung thickest. "There used to be some over there. Probably not human, but I don't know what. Graffiti too, I think some idiot cult used to come here for sacrifices."

It brought her plunging back, the late twentieth century — oh, that. Sad. Some of the magic fled already. Clay had a point about keeping willfully ignorant of the past.

"Did Adrienne send you after me?" he finally asked.

"It was my idea. But I told her first."

"She wants me back twice a week plus social calls, I guess."

"She'd like that. She thinks it's important. And for whatever my opinion's worth, I think so, too."

She watched the creases deepen across his forehead — this Clay Palmer, the one who stared at water stains on factory walls and saw cave paintings, who looked at them with such yearning he might really want to breathe the air of some primeval dusk and, by the light of fires, scratch pigments into rock. She tried to balance this Clay against the one who had demolished a bar stool in front of the woman she loved.

"Helverson's syndrome," he said. "What do you think caused it?"

Sarah laughed, hopeless, stuck her hands to either side of her head and rubbed furiously. "I don't know. This is not my area of expertise."

He smiled down from his chair, swathed inside a faded old army field jacket. "So who's here to know?" Losing his smile; she had noticed they were few and never lasted long. "I mean, we show up just within the last thirty-five years or so, it looks like, all around the world. Got more in common than probably most blood brothers have. I'm not saying it has any meaning … but there's got to be a cause of it."

Probably so. And all the more elusive for the fact that no one could ever know what it was, but could only guess. She tried to hold onto thoughts, conjectures, found them slippery as eels. But her own thoughts she could sort in time. Of greater interest, and importance, was what Clay made of it all.

"Last week Adrienne and I had a session the day before I got those reports. We were talking about the extra chromosome and how maybe it was a spontaneous mutation in some evolutionary way, for some reason. I figured that made as much or more sense as anything. After I got those reports … and after I'd been to your place … I went out and got some books on genetics. I've done a lot of reading on the subject the past week. A lot. Did you know that human beings have put about three and a half million new chemicals into the environment, things that don't exist in nature?"

That many? She wished she’d heard him wrong. "No."

Clay nodded. "Most of it's benign, inert, but still, you've got hundreds of thousands of potential mutagens. You know, wrong person gets too close, wrong time, that's it: You've got a misprinted gene. Maybe more. And the thing is, once mistakes go into the gene pool, you can't dredge them back out. They'll always be there, repeating through the generations."

Lifeguards at the gene pool, she thought, some strange word association, that's what we need.

"But that's not what I wanted to tell you about. Ever hear of the peppered moths in Manchester, England?"

She told him she never had, and he flashed an almost wicked smile: Oh, you'll love this.

"For who knows how long, there's been this big population of the peppered moth around Manchester. Up through the middle of the nineteenth century, ninety-nine percent of them were the same color, this pale gray shade, helped them blend with the tree bark so birds couldn't spot them very easily, come in and pick them off, eat them. The other one percent was gray-black. They think it was a mutant strain. But over the next fifty years, the percentages reversed, because during that time England's industrial revolution really got cranking, and around Manchester there were all these factory smokestacks covering the countryside with soot and crap. The trees and everything got darker, and the pale moths, they stood out like blinking lights, just about. The birds didn't ever have to skip a meal. But the moths adapted. The mutation took over to darken the species' color so they'd survive. There's even a name for it: industrial melanism. By the time the naturalists figured out what was going on, they realized it was happening everywhere industry was going up. And it wasn't just moths."

Silence; reflection. She was still envisioning moths and smokestacks and the confusion of marauding birds when Clay drew back in his chair, something like embarrassment crossing his face.

"Listen to me," he muttered. "I never used to talk this much. I guess that's one difference Adrienne made in me."

She saw her opportunity. Whether clumsy or not, Sarah knew she had better seize it. "You know, you could go back and work on a few more."

He was shaking his head even before she was finished. "I got into those sessions so I could find out about myself, what was wrong, if there was any hope I could change. Even after they found the extra chromosome I thought there was still hope, that maybe it didn't really make any difference. But I think, deep down, I knew better all along. And nothing against Adrienne, but I learned more from those reports than we ever could've gotten out of psychotherapy."

Sarah rose to her knees, feeling the grit and grime pressing through, and it was as if her own career's self-esteem were riding on this. Please, please, see that it's for your own good.

"Can you ever know too much?" she said. "What would it hurt to learn more?"

"There's no need for more. I know what I need to know now. I found out what I wanted to know all along." He bent forward, scarred hands twisting at the frayed collar of the field jacket. The look of resignation on his face could have broken the resolve of a priest. "The moths," he said. "The moths were what their world forced them to become. They were a product of their time and place, because that's what they needed to be to survive. I'm not any different, not really. I'm just one of those first fucked-up moths."

Don't say that about yourself, don't condemn yourself to that. It crossed her mind but she was losing her inner voice, her sense of how to plead her case. The worst person to argue with was the one who made more horrible sense than you knew you could. Much as she wanted to believe otherwise, optimism could rarely win against bitter experience.

"Thirteen moths, with the same face," he said, and laughed, a sad and hopeless echo in the chill, from steel and concrete, over the distant drip of pooling water. "I got another envelope from Boston today. Pictures this time. Twelve pictures."