Prototype

Twenty-Two

She wasn't sleeping as well in Denver as she normally did in Tempe, at least not lately. When the phone rang, somewhere in the depths of the condo, it had no trouble ripping her from sleep, while Sarah dozed like a log, unfazed.

"Probably for you," Adrienne murmured.

She rolled out of bed, got her footing. Sought her robe that hung over the back of a chair, heavy flannel in deference to her first real winter in years; it looked like a horse blanket. Sarah pretended to find it a turn-on, dubbed it lingerie from Frederick's of Iowa.

The phone continued to shrill as she fumbled toward it in the dark. Maybe motherhood was like this, anything to quiet the noise in the dead of night, return to stasis. In the back of her mind she'd always thought she would like to give it a try, but now had to reconsider. A trial run like this and she felt more resentment than anything. Maybe she had no business taking care of a child; no business taking care of anyone.

Eleven or twelve rings, and she found the phone. How much more malevolent they sounded by night, by early morning, at — she squinted at the clock glowing in the kitchen — four-thirty in the morning? She said hello and waited, heard nothing but distant traffic, down the street or halfway around the world.

Then: "Adrienne?"

She straightened against the wall, everything coalescing into a phosphorescent pinpoint that burned like a welder's torch. Clay. Unaware, she wrapped the spiral cord around her free hand as if she could hang onto him that way, reel him back in.

"I'm glad you called," she said.

"Uh huh." His voice sounded thin and strained. "Can you come get me?"

"Sure." Automatic. "Where are you?"

"I think I might have killed someone."

*

Sarah had offered to drive but Adrienne more than wanted to, she needed to. It would leave that much less of her mind free for dread, for every second-guess that floated in from the dark in that predawn hour when nothing seems the same. When love feels sweeter and illness incurable.

Leaving a city behind, a weaving route of on-ramps and merge lanes; Sunday's dawn yet to come and Denver felt dead. Clouds had stolen in overnight to muddy the sky. Adrienne had to consciously stop herself from gnawing at her lower lip. She would show up in Fort Collins looking as if she'd been punched.

I think I might have killed someone.

What if he was right? He would be lost then, to himself and to her, even to his kind; another statistical casualty. If he really had become a danger, she should turn him in. While the doctor-patient relationship was nearly as sacrosanct as that of priest and confessing sinner, she had an ethical duty to the public's safety.

Ah, but she had bent ethics already. If the relationship was that confidential, what was Sarah doing coming along now; what was Sarah doing with full knowledge in the first place?

I am losing all my touchstones, she was forced to admit. I'm out here with only my conscience for a guide, and it's rebelling at nearly everything I used to think was sacred. Because none of that works this time.

She’d come to the conclusion that she was doing Arizona Associated Labs’ dirty work. Their invasion of privacy under a pretense of providing care. And while those to whom she reported seemed satisfied with what she was sending in, the joke was really on them. She was not even giving full disclosure anymore.

Clay's outburst in which he demolished the bar stool? She had never told them, for fear she might be removed from the scene, that it was getting too dangerous; not in AAL's mercenary view, but possibly Ferris Mendenhall might rescind his cooperation in loaning her out. Likewise she had downplayed how extensive his break with her had been; feeding the hope, keeping it alive, Clay may come around any day. Much of the conversation in the abandoned factory, which Sarah had recounted for her, Adrienne had relayed as if it had been held with her instead, informally. See, I'm still getting some results. Clay's tale of the peppered moth, oh, how they had loved that analogy. She was hip-deep in an ethical quagmire, but unable to convince herself that it was not justified on the most vital level: saving Clay.

If his chromosomes broke the rules, couldn't she?

"Things can't go on like this," Adrienne said, "not if he's going to derive any benefit and get control over himself."

Sarah sat bouncing her knee, holding a mug of coffee whipped together before they had left. "What else can you do that's that much different?"

"I don't know. It's the circumstances, mostly. They don't feel right to me. We dumped him right back into the same life that was creating most of his problems."

"Maybe he'd have problems no matter where he was."

"Maybe." Adrienne nodded. "Probably. If he's really hurt someone up there, it might be possible to commit him now, but…"

"But you really don't want to."

"I don't think it would help at all, I think it'd be giving him the final excuse he needs to destroy himself. I keep thinking I can make some difference." She scooted down in the seat, easing off her guard now that they were out of Denver; skinned a hand through her hair and looked at a couple of gold silken strands that came free. Great, on top of everything else I'm losing my hair. "I'm wondering now how far I'll go just to try to keep myself in place. I've already held things back at my own discretion, I've twisted things around. Do I draw the line at outright lies?"

After she no longer had access to Clay at all, how many more weeks — days, even — before she began fabricating entire reports, to keep from being recalled home? Turn his case history into fiction, just to avoid giving up on the idea of being part of it?

Sarah's hand, warmed from the mug, found its way to hers; lingered and gave a squeeze before withdrawing.

"Have you thought of hypnotherapy for him?" Sarah said.

"Not seriously, no." It was nothing for which she had ever trained. And while it had its merits, she had reservations that it would even be appropriate. Uncovering a forgotten past was not the issue, and posthypnotic suggestions generally worked better on concrete behavior patterns, not overall ways of relating to the world; thou shalt not smoke, thou shalt not eat to excess.

"He's big on finding out what that chromosome triplet means, you know," Sarah said.

"Trisome."

"Hmm?"

"It's called a trisome."

"Whatever." Sarah gulped at her coffee. "I don't think Clay cares half as much what it's called as he does finding out why it's happening."

"Well, don't we all."

"And not just to him, but to each of them. You know, ever since I talked to him in that factory —"

The factory; now there was a blister to poke. Clay had let Sarah share his inner sanctum when he probably would have waved his chair at Adrienne until she retreated. Jealous? Hell yes.

" — and he told me about the moths, that whole biological and environmental agenda under the surface, you know who I've kept thinking about?"

Adrienne gripped the wheel. This could only be weird. "Who?"

"Remember Kendra Madigan?"

She drew a blank for a moment, and then it hit her, hit her hard. "You've got to be kidding."

"No. I'm not. It might be an interesting thing to try with him, if he'd want to."

Adrienne, shaking her head, was adamant. "Interesting. That's a blithe way to put it. Especially when something like that is likely to do more harm than anything."

But this was Sarah she was talking to; typical Sarah, who now and then clung to the oddball and superstitious because she wanted to believe in a shortcut, and she would not be dissuaded. They saw eye-to-eye on much, but here they parted company.

They had heard of Kendra Madigan even before she had come to Tempe for a lecture and debate at the university a year and a half ago. She had been written up in a one-page article Sarah had seen in Newsweek, and Psychology Today had humored her if nothing else.

A professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a practicing hypnotist and psychologist, Kendra Madigan had written a book in which she claimed to have pioneered a hypnosis so deep it was possible to access the collective unconscious, the species memory that transcended the individual. No one of much note took her seriously, dismissing the technique as so much New Age hokum, although they stopped short of accusing her of fraud. She was, at worst, deluded, her ideas all the more controversial for her use of natural hallucinogens on some subjects. Predictably enough, her reception at Arizona State had been mixed, both enthusiastically pro and skeptically con.

Naturally, Sarah had been enthralled.

"You know what it's like?" Sarah asked. "It's like you're just giving lip service to Carl Jung, and not really putting your money where your ideology is. How can you anchor yourself in Jung like you do and deny the collective unconscious?"

"I never said I was denying it. Did I ever once say that?" Adrienne gripped the wheel harder. This was good, actually. Kept her from dwelling on Clay. "I think it informs most people on a preverbal level, symbolically, maybe in dreams. But you can't convince me someone can give it a voice and ask it questions. That comes close to being as ludicrous as psychics who claim they channel twenty-thousand-year-old entities."

"Oh, forget it." Sarah drew together with a frown. "We've had this argument before."

"It's not an argument, it's a discussion."

"Whatever it is, I'm not budging."

Good for you, Adrienne thought. One of us should be sure of herself.

She took her eyes off the highway as dawn struggled, let her gaze drift left, to the mountains. Great vast ranges of rock and earth, they looked so tame from here. Snow-drenched peaks sat wreathed in cataracts of cloudy mist like Olympian dwellings.

It was right that Clay had come this direction. Had she been forced to track him, she would have known instinctively. Deserts and mountains, the refuges of hermits … these called to him with a voice clearer than that of any human being. He professed to be an atheist but she was not convinced he meant it, seemingly compelled to touch something so great it might destroy him. Or maybe it was because he was so inefficient at destroying himself. Either way, he was a believer in search of a higher power.

They picked their way through Fort Collins, following the sketchy directions Clay had provided; found a route that led out the other side of town, to the northwest, toward the foothills at the base of a mountain drive. The city had thinned to its barest elements, the final fringes before civilization ended.

He had called from a pay phone at an all-night diner and gas station, a rustic outpost set amid generations of pines. They found him inside at a booth, as far from the other early diners as he could get, everyone under a warm comforting miasma of pancakes and cinnamon rolls, coffee and sausage gravy.

Clay said nothing as they approached, laced his hands around a steaming cup; she wondered how many times it had been filled, if that glaze in his eyes was due to caffeine or something deeper.

Adrienne slid into the booth across from him.

Sarah hitched her mittened thumb back over her shoulder. "Why don't I head over to the counter awhile, okay?"

"That's all right," Clay said, "you can stay."

"No," Adrienne said, looked at Sarah. "Go on, it'd be best if we were alone."

She complied, and Clay raised his head, his eyebrows, in mild surprise at her take-charge mood. He looked dreadful, paler than during his final visits, with days of stubble and his hair falling toward his eyes, sweaty and matted from two nights beneath the stocking cap beside him.

"If you called me because you need a taxi," she said, "then I'm afraid I may have to leave without you. If you called me to talk … I'm here."

It came close to an ultimatum, tough talk, but the time had come for that. It was the push of the crowbar that got the story started, interrupted by a waitress, and she took coffee only. He told her about Friday night, some pitiful encounter with Erin. She tried to listen with professional distance but things had gone too far. She pictured the two of them on that floor, too crippled to even hold each other — the most heartbreaking image she had yet associated with him, worse even than the authoritarian abuses by his father; worse than the boy given permission to cry, just the once, for his dead baby sister and discovering he could not.

He told her of hitting the road again, of walking into Fort Collins. Of the record store. And there was remorse in his voice, his eyes; genuine remorse, held in check of course, but present, and that was something to cling to.

"I just kept hitting him," he whispered. "I don't know why."

And as long as he felt bad about it, that made it all right? No, it didn't. Some kid whose worst offense was poor public-relations skills was dead or hospitalized. Yet all she could do was analyze how Clay might be kept in the clear. He had paid with anonymous cash; the shop's only other customer was behind him and would give a poor description; he had worn gloves and left no prints on the plastic carousel. He might never be connected with this.

But if he was, and it came out that she had decided to shield him from the consequences, she could lose her license and might even face prosecution. She shut her eyes.

I am aiding and abetting a felony. She was making a value judgment of ghastly proportions: Clay's crime was less than would be the crime of sending him to prison.

Neither of them spoke for a minute or more. She looked at him sitting there in his ancient field jacket and the layers beneath, saw him as a mountain man driven by the snows down from his chosen isolation. Unfit for society once he got there, living by some simpler brutal law hardwired into his brain.

"After you broke off our sessions, there was something that occurred to me, that I wanted to tell you," she said. "But you wouldn't let me. I'd been listening to tapes of old sessions, and going through your file … and what I wanted to tell you then was: You may think you have no control over yourself, but you do. Because with all the conflicts you've been in, you could've killed somebody … yet you haven't. I wanted to tell you that you must've had something inside that was holding you back. Even if you never believed it was there, Clay, it was."

"Was," he repeated. "Did you hear yourself?"

She nearly winced. "Clay, I don't know what applies anymore. Whatever it is you've done, I don't even know how bad it is." She drew in tighter with a smoldering and unexpected anger. He was turning into her career's most spectacular failure. They taught you not to take such things personally, although doctors did it anyway. "But I'll tell you what I do know: Ever since you started getting those envelopes from Boston, you've acted as if you've completely given up on yourself. You. Have given. Up."

He stared into his coffee, swirling it. "Well, you know, a minute ago I thought I even heard my doctor talk about my little internal lifeline in the past tense."

"Am I your doctor?"

It was as blunt a demand as she'd made, and quieted him; he wouldn't be accustomed to that tone of voice. He set his cup down and she saw the child in him, fleetingly, still tethered to stakes more than twenty years old.

"Yes," he surrendered.

There was no triumph in hearing it. No relief. Worse, for a moment she thought she might have hoped he'd say no. Coward.

"Am I going to jail?"

"I don't know," less an answer than a sigh. I am not proud of myself, any way I turn, I am not going to feel proud of myself. "Maybe we should wait and see what you've done before…" Before what? Rationalizing it any further? "Before deciding that."

"Thank you," he whispered, and she could not recall him ever having said that before.

"There's something we need to air right now," she said. "This case, it quit being remotely normal a long time ago. I'm not even sure when that happened, probably before you left the hospital, and since then it's only gotten more deviant. I've gone out on one limb after another, I've done things I swore I'd never do, I'm doing them right now —"

Adrienne caught her tongue. Clay wasn’t the one to tell this to; she should be talking to a fellow professional, should be on the phone with Ferris Mendenhall the way recovering alcoholics call their sponsors. She had gone too far. And was not prepared to stop.

"What I need to know from you is this: What do you want?"

Clay looked only perplexed.

"In the beginning you wanted an explanation about why you react to things the way you do. You wanted understanding. For better or for worse, it looks like you got it. No thanks to me, for the most part, I realize that. But that can't be all. I refuse to believe that's all there was motivating you. So if I'm still your doctor, what else is it you want?"

Clay scratched at his stubbled chin, then looked at her with the smile of one who hopes for the return of lost loves, resurrection of the dead; things that can never be.

"I want to live in a different world," he said.

"I can't help you with that."

Nodding, Clay sighed. "It's a loveless world, you know."

This she denied, pointing toward the counter, where Sarah sat with her back to them, picking at a plate of something; braided and unlike anyone else around, all the shift workers, the early rising sportsmen.

"I am in love," she told him quietly. "Deeply in love. It's the best and most healing thing in the world. But I wouldn't be in love if I didn't allow myself to take that risk."

"I won't deny that." He chose his words with care, as if taking refuge on the safer ground of theory. "But institutionally, it's still a loveless world. The way we're taught to survive, get ahead, to prosper? You can't tell me that love plays any part in that." Frowning now. "That confused me for the longest time, when I was younger."

There he went again, making sense. She was still trying to cobble together a response when Clay went rampaging on. He may have given up on himself, but he never quit trying to root out an explanation.

"What do I want?" He grunted a tiny laugh. "Think about this: What do you think cancer wants?"

She had come to dread these asides. They felt as if he were taking her by the hand and leading her through minefields. Any moment an unexpected truth might explode in her face, while his path was so oblique she could never see them coming.

"You know what cancer is, don't you? It's rapid growth, is all it is, there's nothing magic about it. Cells start multiplying too fast, and so they form their own mass. It gets so, it's like the mass has a mind of its own. It doesn't fit in with the rest of the body but it wants to live anyway. And the more it thrives…" he said, leaving it open for her.

"The more the body suffers," Adrienne finished. The coffee began to curdle in her stomach like a sour pool. Cancer. He was comparing himself to cancer.

"Tumors," he murmured, his eyelids drifting. Had he gone the entire night without sleep? "If that's the way it goes in the human body, why not the body politic? They've decided now that the world's just one big complex organism anyway. So why shouldn't it get cancer? Everybody else is these days." He groaned. "I think it all just started growing too fast one day. Everything. Everybody. So tumors were inevitable, social tumors. Serial killers. Mass murderers. I'm just part of a new kind of tumor that got squeezed out of it all."

Adrienne breathed deeply, everything inside her crying out to be ill. The coffee had gone toxic, while even the scent of food had become oppressive, nauseous. She imagined all the Helverson's subjects, in united voice, reciting their manifesto: We are the cancers, the aberrations unable to serve the whole organism. We are the tumors birthed in decay and nourished on rot.

To which she could think of only one rebuttal.

"A tumor can't change its nature, Clay. A human being can."

"In theory," he said. "If a tumor had self-awareness, do you think it would want to kill its host? I don't think it would, it'd want to come to some coexistence." Pondering now, the dawn of new thoughts. "And maybe that's what I want…

"A separate peace."