Prototype

Twenty-Three

They got him home and he stayed put, and, to Adrienne's great relief, accessible. No more avoiding her phone calls, he promised; back to his sessions. His latest bout of wanderlust had been aborted after just thirty-three hours, and she and Sarah were the only ones who even knew he had been gone.

It felt like more than a secret. It settled within her as a grim and ugly pact shared by conspirators who had buried a body by moonlight, who had smoothed the earth over as best they could, and swore an oath.

Thankfully, however, it had not literally come to that.

She had bought the Sunday edition of the Fort Collins Coloradoan from a vending machine before they had left town, and found nothing on the assault in the record store. She picked up the next day's edition in Denver and learned that, whatever his transgressions, Clay was no killer. The CSU junior he'd attacked had been hospitalized with a skull fracture and lacerations; not good, but a long way from a murder victim. The police had only the vaguest description of his assailant, and she reasoned that, if they investigated much at all, they would concentrate locally. What reason would they have of suspecting the assailant to be a drifter? How many drifters, in the winter, went shopping for cassettes?

Clay conformed to no pattern.

He'll get away with this, she thought. He'll get away with this because I let him.

Adrienne got him, under some protest, to resume taking lithium; got him another bottle to replace those he had flushed. She got him to agree to three sessions in six days — a crisis schedule, but surely this qualified.

She did not shy away from his attack on the student. In the eyes of the world they might pretend it never happened, but not with each other. She had him dissect it, analyze his feelings at each stage; they took it apart until they could scrutinize the incident frame by frame, like a shaky film of an assassination.

She hammered away to reinforce the notion that he had a conscience, and since it was operable after the fact he should be able to employ it beforehand. It would require that he make an effort to pause before acting on impulse, and imagine having completed whatever he might be tempted to do. Carry it to its ends: Who would be hurt, who would suffer? He should close his eyes, if need be, and feel his way through the pain that lay in wait for everyone; better to summon forth imaginary guilt than render the real thing necessary.

Neither did she ignore Clay's new hypothesis that he and the others were social malignancies. Although the more she gave it thought, the more it seemed that Clay had intuitively hit upon something that made a bit of sense on a literal level, as well as metaphorically. Biochemically, some people simply were programmed for violence, and the surroundings in which they grew up could have a tremendous influence.

She knew that aggression had a chemical basis. In the brain’s vast web of circuitry, behavioral messages were relayed by chemicals known as neurotransmitters, two of which — serotonin and norepinephrine — regulated aggression. In studies, men whose spinal fluid was found to have high levels of serotonin, which carried inhibitory messages, routinely scored low on aggression; those higher in norepinephrine were correspondingly more aggressive. That was why Clay had been prescribed lithium in the first place; it worked by boosting serotonin levels. She was not convinced it was wholly effective on him — it did not work on psychotics and calculating predators — but it could not hurt.

Yet it was those environmental factors that really intrigued her. It had been proven that a child's early surroundings could even influence his biochemistry. Young boys from homes in which they faced situations that provoked aggressive responses were often found to have begun adapting to that environment: Their systems had begun to produce less serotonin, more norepinephrine.

They were gearing up to survive.

So why not take a wild leap and superimpose that process upon a much larger picture? Suppose the bodies — the very genetic encoding — of human beings were responding to the colossal pressures exerted by a world whose rate of change was increasing exponentially.

Was it so mad a thought? It had taken a billion years for the brains of the first vertebrates to evolve into the intelligence of primates. In a mere two million, self-aware humanity had developed and assumed dominion. From common ancestors, the Australopithecus and Homo genera diverged, the former dying out, a failed lineage, while the latter thrived. Homo habilis learned to use tools, and was replaced by Homo erectus, who mastered fire and hunting, who was in turn replaced by Homo sapiens, who mastered all else after emerging perhaps 40,000 years ago. Within the past 6000, modern civilization had arisen; the past 4500, enduring architecture. The past three hundred, the industrial age. The past fifty, nuclear fusion. The past thirty, the ability to set foot on another celestial body. And since then had come the manufacture of artificial hearts and fiber-optic filaments, and the development of laser microsurgery.

All this, while the DNA of Homo sapiens was still ninety-nine percent identical to that of the chimpanzee.

With such a wrenching burst of development, might not a genetic whiplash like Helverson's syndrome at least be feasible?

Adrienne had heard it said that Homo sapiens had ceased to evolve because there was no more need. The end goal served by evolution is success in breeding, and certainly that success was indisputable. Homo sapiens had become not only the most successfully prolific species on earth; it had become the sole species possessing the ability to destroy itself.

Perhaps those who claimed that modern humanity didn’t need to evolve any further were just being smug about their top rung on the ladder. Maybe they'd not considered that more fine-tuning would become necessary to psychologically adapt to the world that had emerged out of their unchallenged dominion.

Grand schemes; even bolder conjecture. But she had heard no explanation for Helverson's syndrome that made any more sense, so she would at least entertain it.

Grand schemes. Bold conjecture. And an indifferent nature that encouraged diversity and variation, so that to the victor would belong the spoils.

Still, in the end, it came down to individuals, who struggled to be born, struggled to live with the differences that made them mutants among their own kind, and who struggled against the death that waited for them all. Who struggled mightily, even nobly, regardless of who had made them, and how…

And why.

*

At the end of the week, Sarah came home late in the afternoon with a ring in her navel. Giddy and hyper, she could have climbed walls, could have dazzled distant stars with the gleam in her eyes.

She finally stood still long enough to pose with legs braced wide, leaning back with her hips and belly thrust forward as she tugged up her black T-shirt, the ominous Club Cannibal shirt she used to sleep in. "Don't you love it?"

Adrienne stared.

Sarah's navel was centered like a pearl in the firm lush swell of her belly, and the ring was skewered through its thick top lip, a simple uroboros of silver. The surrounding skin was red and inflamed, but not as much as Adrienne might have expected. A few thin streaks of dried blood were left on her skin.

"I had it done at this piercing gallery Nina goes to for her ears, and it was so great, they're really serious about what they do there, and look at it as a ritual, and they play whatever music you'd like while it's being done, and they talk to you and hold your hand, and whoever's hanging out at the time can watch if you don't mind."

Adrienne blinked. "Did you?"

"Did I mind?" Sarah was incredulous, then broke into a broad smile. "Of course not, I sort of liked that I wasn't going through it alone. When people are watching it's like this encouragement to endure the pain better, it's this support system even though they're mostly strangers you'll never see again." She had scarcely paused for breath since walking in. Sarah let the shirt fall loosely back into place while twining up against her, running her hands along Adrienne's sides and breathing heavily through parted lips. "But I can't tell you how much I wanted your tongue on me when it was happening, I could have come all the way to the ceiling."

And when they kissed, she was so deep and forceful; Adrienne had never been kissed like that by another woman, not even by Sarah in the past, a brutish kiss that she had thought the ploy of men. It weakened the knees, and then Sarah tore away with wet mouth and a wild back-toss of her head, and swept across the room to collapse upon the sofa.

"They told me this happens to some people, they'll get this incredible endorphin rush for the next three or four hours, it's just like a drug, and wouldn't you know, I'm one of the lucky ones!" She laughed and drummed her fists upon the sofa, her feet upon the floor, then parted her legs to slide both hands down along her inner thighs. Eyes focusing back on Adrienne, alight with an all-consuming hunger. "There's still time, let's go to bed, we have to go to bed, if we don't I'm going to explode."

So they did, and Adrienne went into the bedroom and undressed as if half-outside herself: This isn't me, this is just a shell, and the real me is across the room watching. For the first time in their relationship the sex reminded her of nights in her marriage when she had submitted not out of any genuine desire, more that she didn't have the will to say no, because there was nothing else she had to do.

Their lips and tongues and fingers lacked for no heat, but five minutes in she knew what the problem was: She had been left behind. Sarah was soaring, on a high all her own, and both the blessing and the curse was that Sarah was too far aloft to notice. They had to be careful not to grind upon her stomach, but still Sarah was electrified and wild, so sensitive a feathery touch could turn her convulsive with rapture. Her head would thrash side to side, its cascade of thin braids became whips. And with Adrienne's mouth buried between her thighs, never had Sarah's legs felt more powerful as when they clenched together, as if to crush the head that had brought her so shudderingly far. She had become more than mortal; it was like making love with a force of nature. To deny her anything she wanted would be to risk death.

Somewhere in the shadow of it Adrienne lay exhausted. There might not even be enough air in the room for them both. How sore she would be tomorrow. This would be how the servants of savage deities would feel: beloved meat, knowledgeable and privileged, but meat nonetheless.

In the interim, one tiny misgiving had grown, and burst from her mouth before she even knew it would.

"If you didn't want to go through that piercing alone," she said, "then why didn't you take me along? I didn't even know you were planning on doing it."

"I don't know. Nina was there, and…" She turned onto her side, facing inward. Calmer now, what a relief. "I didn't want to bother you. You had a session with Clay earlier."

"You couldn't have waited until I didn't?"

"You had your work, and … and I had mine."

Work. She'd really said that.

Adrienne's hand stole over to Sarah's belly, touched the hot red skin around her navel. The ring. A bit of clear fluid was oozing from the piercing. For weeks, Sarah would daily have to doctor this with antiseptic until it healed.

"This was work to you."

Sarah nodded. "I wanted to know what it was like, getting a body piercing. Ears don't count, everybody does their ears, that's nothing."

"Your thesis."

"Yeah." Sarah grinned, salacious and heavy-lidded. "There's no rule saying I can't enjoy it, too. What, don't tell me you don't like it. You like it, don't you?"

Her gaze tracked to Sarah's navel again. It drew the eye naturally, and part of her wanted to lower her mouth to it, trace her tongue around the little folds, like tiny pudenda, taste the metal. Too soon, though, let it heal. Yet the ring felt intimidating. Neither of them wore a thing at the moment, yet it seemed as if Sarah were more naked, somehow, her bared body all the more emphasized. Naked and strong.

"I like it," she whispered. "I just wish I'd been there."

"Don't be mad" — stroking Adrienne's hair — "I had to do this for myself. For them, too, it's so much more prevalent a part of their culture. Graham has nipple piercings — I bet you didn't know that about him, did you? Nina told me that Twitch went in twice to get his cock pierced and chickened out both times." She laughed. "Erin was there too. This afternoon. I had her tape it."

Videotape, too. Why hadn't she just sent out invitations?

"I understand why they do it now," Sarah said, the carnal beast sated for the time being, the inquisitive Sarah emerging. "It's an experience you just can't compare with having your ears done. These people — Nina and Twitch and Erin and Graham and Clay, and the others I've met at the clubs and all around — they're so low in the social strata, they're forced to assert some control in their lives in other ways, and this is one of them. You never feel more alive and in control of yourself as when you trust someone else to run a piece of sharp metal through you. I never would've believed how strong that feeling comes through when you're lying there if I hadn't done it myself."

Adrienne tracked a finger through the sweat between Sarah's breasts. "It sounds like a rite of passage."

"That's exactly what it is. You know what they are out there? I mean, think about them all, at the clubs, and on the streets. It's tribal. They don't formalize it, but it’s still a tribal society." Sarah rolled onto her back, staring upward. "I miss the ceiling fan from home. That always feels so good now." A shrug. "That's all most everyone is these days, just a collection of isolated tribes, finding more and more reasons to be suspicious of each other. In primitive cultures there's only room for one view, really, just to survive, but ours … hundreds, thousands maybe. And we're not any different back home in Tempe. All our friends, just about, are just like us. You, me, them, we're this little tribe of muff-divers."

Adrienne frowned. "Don't confine me like that, all right?"

"No, I guess I can't, can I?" Sarah propped herself up on her elbow. "Because you can't make the commitment. You've still got one foot on the other side of the fence."

Her voice sounded hurt all of a sudden, and angry, and where was this coming from?

"And you tell me I have trouble making up my mind?"

"I —" Adrienne tried. Anything she could say would be wrong, but silence would be worse. "I never pretended to be something I wasn't. It's the way I am. My inclinations just didn't fall exclusively one way or another."

"Oh, that's so analytical," Sarah groaned. With her hair still in those braids, she looked feral and wounded. "You know, there are times you seem one step removed from your life."

And it didn’t bear arguing about, for there was no right or wrong here. Each of them was what she was, and true to that; made differently, and perhaps only half-compatible, and it was that other half that could potentially bring so much pain. Pain over what one might long for, that the other could never be.

As quickly as she had launched into it, Sarah drew back out. With downcast eyes and creased forehead, she squirmed in closer to Adrienne's side, radiant with body heat and sheer presence, one arm thrown across Adrienne's shoulders, one leg draped across Adrienne's knees. She might have no words left; her body would say all. That was the thing about arguing naked: There was nothing behind which to hide, only raw truth.

So Adrienne lay in her possessive embrace, even returned it, but felt alive with questions. What will happen to us? — this was the big one. How will we see each other in a year, or two, or five? It could work between us, always, but will our hormones let it?

They left the bed later. When neither felt like cooking, Sarah volunteered to go for Chinese take-out. A peace offering, it felt like, her suggestion made almost sheepishly, I know how much you love Chinese.

The condo suffered for her absence, some vitality missing, and Adrienne tried to fill the void with music, turning the stereo louder than it needed to be.

She sat on the sofa with one leg folded beneath her, holding the rainstick that was supposed to remind her of San Francisco, and had when at first, but no longer did. New meanings had supplanted old. She turned it end to end to end, listening to the delicate showers. Whether or not Sarah had covertly intended it, the sound now conjured up her more than anything, from her wide knowing eyes to her peasant feet, and everything between. The gift had become the giver.

And what might the giver become? Adrienne had been worried at first by this evolving Sarah, with the whiplike hair and the navel ring and the penchant for new friends more pessimistic than those she had at home. But these were only affectations. She was the same Sarah, just doing what she had been schooled to do: live amongst the savages, and take them to her heart.

It was entirely possible that the fear on display in the bedroom had manifested itself backward, that her own issue was not whether this was the same Sarah or some darker twin. Perhaps fear of abandonment lay in both their hearts, and only one of them had courage enough to admit it.

She's so alive and absorbs so much more than I do. There, it was good to admit it. In a year's time, or two, or five, will I seem like enough for her? That's the question.

But nobody could answer it now, and sometimes the best anyone could do was sit and listen to the rain. And in lieu of the real thing…

Make her own.