Prototype

Thirty-Three

Adrienne was proud of herself. Up before nine, a shower and a hurried breakfast in the room, twenty minutes on the road to Kendra Madigan's home, and not a single derisive comment the whole time. She was either growing up or becoming inured to this odyssey of Clay's. Certainly her stake in it had dwindled with each day and passing mile, until there were moments when she felt like little more than a concerned bystander.

"It's after ten," she said along the way. "What do you want to bet there's a supervisor or two in Tempe who'll be wondering where I am before the day's out?"

"It's Monday morning," Sarah chimed. "Do you know where your job is?"

Kendra Madigan lived in a quiet neighborhood with a great many trees. The homes were modern but tried not to be. A screened porch here, a row of columns there, a backyard gazebo visible up the block … small touches of an elder South that appeared stapled onto the new, rather than serving as parts of a genuine whole.

She answered her own door, which briefly took Adrienne by surprise. Subconsciously awed, perhaps, that the woman had thrice published controversial — and best-selling — books on the shadowy layers of the human mind. Didn't people of her ilk employ assistants to dispose of such trivialities as doorbells? Kendra Madigan didn't, and that made her somehow more real, more — dare she entertain the thought? — potentially likable. But even charlatans had their charms, did they not?

She looked much as Adrienne recalled from her appearance in Tempe, if sporting a touch more gray in her closely trimmed hair. At the moment she wore light yellow sweat-clothes that fit her impeccably. Her skin was richly black and she was in her late forties, given to posture and a gait that Adrienne persisted in seeing as statuesque. She did not so much walk as glide, would not so much sit as levitate.

"I do remember your face now," she told Sarah while leading them in. "Those occasional letters you wrote? I never could quite put a definite face with them, but let me tell you, you're who I hoped you would be."

"Letters?" Adrienne said.

Sarah blushed, caught in the act. "I bought my own stamps."

Kendra Madigan turned to Clay, even before introductions were formally made. Very smooth, Adrienne observed. Drawing him in at the first possible opportunity.

"When I lectured at the ASU campus," she told Clay, "they gave a reception that afternoon. Boring things, horrible things, most everyone standing around engaged in intellectual pissing contests, but if they're meeting your fee you do feel an obligation. At this one, one of the grad students was … well, let's describe him as very vocal in his condemnation of me, on theoretical grounds."

"He was being an asshole," Sarah translated.

Kendra bestowed a luminous smile. "And you're the one who doused his flame by managing to spill two brimful glasses of champagne into his lap. I remember well, it was the highlight of the afternoon. I never complimented you as I should've, though. You almost made it appear accidental."

"Looks like I left too early that day," Adrienne said, and it felt as one of those rare bittersweet moments in which you glimpse a lover in a light all her own — Sarah, wholly apart from Adrienne, as if there might not have been an Adrienne, ever. Just Sarah alone, acting on impulse and later neglecting to recount the story. She wished she could have seen it, Sarah delivering comeuppance, sophomoric though it was. She should have been there.

Kendra led them through the house, charming, disarming, a weaver of spells. From a distant room a grandfather clock intoned a solemn half-hour stroke — ten-thirty. As they passed a broad, open stairway that led to the second floor, Adrienne grew curious to see her bedroom, her private bath; see the real mistress of the house. Was she a closet sloven?

A rec room ran along the back of the house, and here Kendra took their coats, hanging them in a closet. She sat for a moment to unfasten strangely hooked collars from around her ankles, then pointed to a metallic framework in one corner that Adrienne had assumed was used for chin-ups.

"I was doing my morning gravity inversion when you rang," she said. "Fifteen minutes per day. Wonderful for facial skin, they say, and I'll vouch for that. But now I hear it puts dangerous blood pressure on the eyes. They never cease finding the ghastly side effects, do they? Beautiful or blind, why does it have to be such a choice?"

Clay shrugged. "Either way, your back should hold out fine."

"Yes. Yes," she said, as if never having considered this. "In life there are few constants, but that must be one of them. You're absolutely right."

She maintained the small talk for several minutes, and to Adrienne it was apparent that she was attempting to set them all at ease, especially Clay. Had they slept soundly? Where were they staying? Some fierce weather they must have come through farther north. Obviously their situation deviated from the norm she would be used to, with no time to work leisurely around to a protracted session. Now and again, to Clay alone she would direct a question or two, fairly innocuous, subtle in its probing; gaining a feel for the way he answered, how he responded to her.

Adrienne focused primarily on Clay during such exchanges, her first occasion to watch him relating to another therapist. She began to wonder if she'd not been too hard on herself, too preoccupied with her failure to deliver grand miracles to see evidence of the smaller ones that had been wrought over their months of effort. For this was not the same Clay she had first encountered, who tested his therapist as an adversary. This was not the Clay who had suggested she compensate for his inability to masturbate.

This was a Clay Palmer who was open to trust.

And if he could trust, he had hope.

Kendra requested they follow her down a hall to her office, and what a far cry it was from those Adrienne was used to. Sarah had grown wide-eyed and loose-necked, shuffling a slow pirouette, staring with a naked and grasping wonder at the masks that lined the walls. Here were faces of ritual that, Kendra told them, predated all texts, all histories, faces dipped from wellsprings of myth. Masks from the Old World and the New, from both hemispheres; from Mexican village to Borneo rain forest, from Inuit ice field to African bush. Faces for death and for life, faces for healing, for the supplication of implacable nature, faces for the appeasement of gods whose names she would never hear. And while Adrienne rationally knew that behind those empty eye sockets lay nothing but walls, she still felt watched.

The eyes of the world were on them, and the eyes of time, as well.

"Let's sit down," Kendra said.

There were just enough chairs. Her attention now fell squarely on Clay. She asked if he had ever been hypnotized before. He had, a few years ago, by a psychologist in Minneapolis, and had gone under with ease. This was no surprise — highly intelligent people usually did.

She explained the underlying principles of what they would be doing throughout the day, the procedures used. Some of the background he'd already heard from Adrienne and Sarah — the notion of the collective unconscious, a deep pool of archetypal images and fundamental human knowledge, transcendent of culture and unfathomably ancient, that resided in the evolved mind the same as a history of function resided in other organs. A fellow Jungian, Kendra could not believe that the human psyche was blank at birth.

Clay listened without impatience, as if he had heard none of it before. Just a sharp crease of expectation across his contoured face, the face of someone poised on a windswept brink, awaiting signs and sigils that would mean something to him at last.

And if at times it sounded ludicrous, that the collective unconscious could be tapped by hypnosis, even conversed with, there was no doubt that Kendra Madigan passionately believed in what she was doing, to the extent that she was willing to risk arrest. She had no license to possess or dispense psychoactives.

It was this willingness to put her neck on the line that made Adrienne's reservations harder to voice. Still, she could not remain compliantly silent. Someone should play the devil's advocate, so Clay could make as fully informed a choice as possible.

"If you've already accessed the collective unconscious," Adrienne said, "and it's what it's theorized to be — an aggregate species knowledge — then what's the point of putting anyone else through the process? Aren't you going to get the same basic results every time?"

Kendra smiled as if enjoying the challenge — ah, a worthy opponent. "I did, at first, until I started to refine techniques. Regardless of the commonalities we carry around inside us, each of us is still an individual. We can relate to universals through an individual perspective. I've found that, by the time subjects can speak of what's being confronted, by the time the information is routed through the verbal areas of the brain, they're usually imprinting it with their own uniqueness. Their deepest self-knowledge that most are never even aware of."

"They can see their purpose in an overall scheme, then?" concluded Sarah.

Kendra nodded. "I believe many can, yes."

"And suppose a subject is in a fragile state of mind," said Adrienne, "and may not be equipped to handle the knowledge. Do you bear the responsibility for what happens to him?"

"Yes," she said, quite firm. "But just so we know where each of us stands … what kind of responsibility do you have in mind?"

"I know your methods. They can't be free of danger." Adrienne drew her composure and fingertips together in one calm movement. "If you harm him in any way … I'll have you up for review."

Kendra nodded once more, and Adrienne had to give her this: You could not ruffle this woman. "You'll do what you must."

Clay stirred in his chair. "Adrienne, how old am I?"

She started, not expecting this. "Twenty-five."

"An adult, right? Now let me get this straight: Back in Tempe, you told a group of researchers that I was sane, that I was competent to make my own decisions, and that you'd testify to it in court, if it came to that. Is that right?"

Her mouth was going dry. "Yes."

"Then butt out."

It was so brusque, Adrienne wasn't even sure she'd heard him correctly, until Kendra spoke up, an unlikely ally.

"Clay," she said sharply, sternly, eyes piqued with a hint of what must have been a fierce demeanor underlying her calm grace. "This woman is concerned enough about you to accompany you more than halfway across the country. If she and I have a professional disagreement, that's fine, I'm accustomed to them. But I would appreciate your respect for her concern. She's earned that."

Well, blow me down, Adrienne thought, fairly astounded. She watched Clay lower his gaze, chastised. He turned to her, a crease showing between his eyes.

"Sorry," he said softly. "But this is important to me. So trust me. I want to do this. I have to."

Adrienne nodded, resigned. It did not imply her blessings.

Kendra had him swallow a pair of tablets — psilocybin derived from Psilocybe mexicana mushrooms, she explained, one of nature's numerous keys to unlocking psychological doors. In general, her best results had come from using psilocybin, although some subjects seemed to react more favorably to mescaline.

She sent him to the bathroom to sheathe his penis in a Texas catheter. The tube coiled out of his jeans, down to a urine bag that he hung from a special hook on the chair. This would be no brief hypnosis, she cautioned, and subjects often voided their bladders — sometimes from simple prolonged need, other times from loss of sphincter control while plunging deep into more turbulent regions.

Blinds drawn, the room was dimmed until the masks seemed to float around them like ancient nobles peering through the dusk. Clay sat in his chair, a voyager breathing deeply to calm himself. Kendra set before him a small portable table, on which stood a pyramid of black plastic and metal, as tall as a hardback book tented spine-up. When she toggled a switch recessed into its back, a socket in front began to pulse with soft light. Adrienne could not see the bulb itself — probably a good thing — only the languid strobing across Clay's face, shadow/light/shadow/light, his impassive features in continual alternation.

"I want you to stare into the light, Clay, the center of the light." Kendra's voice was cultivated and practiced, as smooth as a perfect lullaby. "There's only the light … and the sound of my voice…"

For minutes she lulled him onward, the set of Clay's eyes — frequently so hard and wary — softening with glazed surrender. Don't go, Adrienne almost said, an inexplicable sorrow coursing through her, as if he were leaving the room, the country, the year, with a risk that he might never return whole.

Kendra gradually took him through his life in reverse, leapfrogging a year or two at a time. "Where are you now?" she would ask, and he would answer in small, soft syllables: at home … at school … looking at my baby sister who forgot how to breathe. Days of pain and sorrow, yet they rarely disturbed the serenity of his countenance. He knew peace in this inner realm.

Adrienne felt an elbow nudging her side; Sarah nodded toward the door, the hallway, a question in her eyes. They stepped out as quietly as possible, pulling the door closed.

"I know you're here as a prisoner of circumstances," Sarah said, "but can you at least entertain a slightly open mind?"

"I don't know. I'm … I am trying." She tried to step away for a moment, gather her thoughts. "It's easy to be seduced by the novelty of it … but I don't know." She spun on her heel to plant herself before Sarah again. "Don't you think I want to believe in what she says she can achieve? I do. I do. But I'm concerned about what it could do to Clay. And a part of me still thinks no, this is too simplistic. The collective unconscious? There isn't even agreement that there is such a thing."

"But you believe it exists."

"Yes."

"And you believe it can emerge in dreams, right?"

Again she agreed, recalling what had, above all, convinced her. A case documented by Jung in Man and His Symbols, in which a fellow psychiatrist had brought him a booklet handwritten by the man's daughter, given to her father as a Christmas present. She was but ten, the vignettes she had written a series of a dozen dreams she'd had while eight years old. The dreams were filled with imagery and symbolism she could never have been aware of on any level but intuitive: dreams of death and regeneration, of beasts devouring creation, of dancing pagans storming heaven. She had dreamt the myths of the world.

A year after committing them to paper, she had died. In her dreams, so unlike those of a child, it was as if some hidden cleft of her mind had known what was imminent.

"Yes," said Adrienne. "I believe it does."

"Then it's there. For you, it's there." Sarah clasped both of Adrienne's hands between her own, rubbing. "And if it emerges in dreams, it's because it has a need to. And if that need is there, well … who's to say it might not flow toward another outlet if it's made available?"

"Maybe you're right. I want you to be right." She stepped forward, into the safer harbor of Sarah's waiting arms. I want you to be right, I want it there, waiting for us on the other side of consciousness, saying, I was here all along — you just never asked me until now.

Perhaps she was not nearly so opposed to Kendra Madigan and her techniques as she was to the idea of turning Clay over to someone who could offer him something she could not. It could have been anyone and she would have found a reason. We healers, what a territorial breed we are. Like the missionaries of different faiths who vie for the privilege of being first to convert the savages.

"Let's go back in," Sarah said, then gave Adrienne's hands a kiss and, holding firm, led the way.

The regression continued, Kendra Madigan taking Clay back to a loose and liquid awareness of prenatal existence, for which he seemed to have few words, although body language spoke with its own eloquence. He folded into a fetal position while scooting deeper into the curve of the chair, gently rocking himself back and forth, as if cresting the buoyant waves of a warm ocean.

"Now I want you to go back even farther, Clay," Kendra said, "back before there ever was a Clay. You'll remember if you let yourself. But you can't go straight back, because there's only so far you can go in that direction … only so much Clay can remember on his own because there wasn't always a Clay. But you're part of something much older. So you have to find a new thread to follow. You still have to keep going back … but sideways this time. Do you understand what I mean by that?"

His head raised a fraction. "Yes…"

"That's glorious, Clay, that's wonderful. Now … I'm going to leave you for a while, but I'll be back. I'm going to leave you to find your own way. I want you to follow the paths that open up, and listen to the drums. Go where the drums lead. Deeper, and deeper … and deeper…"

Kendra pulled away and reached for a remote control. With a few pecks of her finger there came from hidden speakers a low and steady rhythm, hypnotic in its own right. It thumped like echoes off a canopy of green, woven with the brown of ancient boughs. Adrienne found herself drifting with it, a timeless resonance taking root in heart, in bones, in soul.

She watched as Clay slowly uncoiled from his fetal position, lowering both feet to the floor again, and his hands to his sides, rolling his head limply back until he appeared to stare into the ceiling, beyond the ceiling. His jaw drooped, slack, then he came forward again, slumping while his head nodded toward his chest. It took several moments before she realized the rise and fall of his breathing was synchronizing itself to the drums.

Nearly ninety minutes had passed since Clay had first gone under. Kendra murmured parting reassurance to him, then shooed them from the room.

"He's responding," Adrienne said in the rec room, "he's responding to something in there, in that state. And even I could feel … something."

"Oh yes." Kendra settled luxuriantly into a nearby lounger, raised her feet. "Powerful stimuli, aren't they?" Suppressing a warm laugh at the expense of, Adrienne surmised, the intrigued skeptic.

"How long will you leave him alone?"

"I'll check on him from time to time, but I won't resume any real contact for two to three hours."

Sarah had found her way to the inversion bar, hanging upside down by bent knees. The tips of her long braids whisked at the mat beneath. "It's not really new, Adrienne, what she's doing in there, you know? It's pretty damn ancient."

Kendra nodded. "Simple shamanic techniques, mostly. And those go back thirty, forty thousand years, it's believed. The drumming, the use of natural hallucinogens? You'll find them in nearly every primitive society the world over. They all came up with the same methods, independently, and the reason they've been around so long is because they work, girl. My main contribution is to put a more modern slant on the way they're applied. I give someone a pill or two so he doesn't have to gobble a handful of mushrooms or peyote that might make him sick. Instead of a live drummer to maintain a trance beat, I have it on compact disc, set to repeat until I turn it off. The main reason I start the hypnosis before the psychoactives have a chance to take effect is that when they do, I want the subjects carrying in as little baggage from the outside world as possible. Then after someone's under? It's just a matter of investing enough time to pick around the way any trained shrink might." She spread her hands. "Who's ready for lunch?"

They ate, they talked, they spoke of how some of the most effective techniques for healing the body and plumbing the mind came from ancient traditions. Only recently had modern medicine begun to turn its head around to the past, taking fresh looks at methodology long since dismissed as superstition and folklore, and recognizing their legitimacy.

Throughout, Kendra was never far from another trip into her office to check on Clay. He maintained a stable condition: sitting comfortably, with deep, even breathing. Later in the afternoon she decided it should be time to proceed, and again they gathered before him.

As it went on, Adrienne felt her hands grow cold even though the house was warm; felt herself prickle every time she considered that it was not really Clay's voice she was hearing. It was something else, speaking through his throat. Something that filled each of them and surrounded them every day of their lives, that predated them, and would survive them and everyone they would ever know and never meet.

He spoke with the voice of millennia.

Adrienne listened, clutching Sarah's hand and thinking, no, it just couldn't go this far, Clay could not be regressed to a level of cellular and genetic and evolutionary awareness, yet he was, he was, and she began to bite her lip, for that which he had sought all along might be coming loose, buried like an ancient vase that desert winds were scouring free. Please … let him be strong…

And what a coward she was — she would never have had courage enough to look this in the face and ask the question that demanded an answer that would have to be lived with forever:

"What is it inside you, Clay, and the others like you, that makes you different from everyone else?"

*

He was Clay, and he was Not.

In oceans of salt and aeons, where the coils of serpents gave birth to worlds, he floated — cell and zygote, embryo and fetus, past and future. He was in the plankton that fed the fish that fed the bird that fed the wolf that fed the man that fed the soil. In the mud that silted along ancient rivers, in the dust that fell to earth from a billion skies beyond.

He was all.

He was nothing.

He was aware.

for i am not like others

not like others

not like others

Yet all things were but strands of the same woven thread.

Following, then, where timeless rhythms led, he stood upon a plain where grasses flowed like green seas, where distant acacia trees grew tall as knowledge … here on the savannah, where the earliest men and women learned to stand tall, to stride, to see beyond an old horizon.

It lived, this land. It breathed. It took no notice.

Yet into him it flowed, and he knew.

The beasts of the land were driven by compulsions bred into them by spans of time that saw the birth and life and death of stars: to expand their territories, to consume, to squeeze their progeny from gaping wet wombs, and this they did until they met their limits. For nature abhors imbalance even more than a vacuum.

The lion feeds upon the gazelle, for if it does not, the land cannot support the gazelles to come.

And he knew that it was systemic perfection this way, plants and predators and prey alike fueled by a singular sun. Then he witnessed the coming of that which did not belong, borne by the Age of Man and Machine, and he understood that an organism fueled by petroleum will crush any and all fueled by the sun, for what is petroleum but millions of years of sunshine stored?

Thus the balance becomes paradise lost.

Kill the lions, the gazelles are doomed to breed themselves to extinction. Prey need predators, it is the nature of the beast. For unchecked growth leads to far worse than tumors.

He watched, then, the death of the savannah, as grass burned into fields of gray ash, and the trees shed an exodus of leaves that left them blackened skeletons curling stark against a sky gone yellow-brown with haze. His skin sloughed in layers of molt and decay, flesh uncoiling to ribbons to strands of the double helix, where all things were written, the most ancient of texts, yet could not revisions be part of the plan?

For what are mutations but defense mechanisms to ensure survival by resistance.

Survival? And he — Clay, yet Not — wondered: But whose?

He saw it crawl over a horizon that burned with the imminence of gangrene and graves, where living twitched to the teeth of starving scavengers, where forsaken prayers flowed, corrosive as bile steaming beneath a dying star.

It was immense, black as shadows and gossamer thin. It was a living night, far from the reach of the sun.

what's wrong with me? he screamed to whatever might listen. for i am not like others

not like others

not like others

biological override, he thought it told him, and he began to cry, for he thought he understood his part now, a role he never wanted to play in any god's creation, no matter what the name of the god, when the worst impulses of a species become a written imperative

And as the savannah shriveled to a blackened crisp around him, as he heard the death wails of distant cities, he began to piece together the simple logic that had eluded him long enough:

with no natural enemies, it is inevitable that we become our own

It would make a fine epitaph.

*

Clay was sobbing even before Kendra brought him back over the brink of consciousness, mid-evening by now, and Adrienne watched him cross the threshold from the inner worlds to the outer. Thinking, Welcome back, and oh, poor Clay, what did you learn there at the end, and can you ever see things out here the same way again?

One look into his newly opened eyes and she knew she need not ask to know the answer; only wondering, with her own heart feeling so suddenly sunk, how would his feel?

I've lost him. God damn her, I have lost him forever.

They began to converge upon him, reaching with hands gone tender with concern, but he would have none of it. Backing away, lurching out of his chair and dropping to one knee with muscles gone stiff from hours of disuse, Clay screamed at them not to touch him. He was dragging the half-full urinary bag behind him like a distended organ. He ripped the tube free and hurled the bag across the room, where it slammed into the wall with a splash of liquid. A gray ceramic mask with black-rimmed eyes and a grotesque stitched-over mouth was jarred loose from the impact, and fell to crack into fragments on the floor.

"Are you satisfied now?" Adrienne snapped at Kendra, the woman's eyes grave, but what an awful time for I-told-you-so's.

Clay pushed past them, dropped to the floor amid cold urine and broken shards to find the biggest piece, as if his violently trembling hand was made for it.

He managed to carve two jagged lacerations down his face, from temple to jaw, before they stopped him. It was much longer before they were able to stop the bleeding.

The tears might go on indefinitely.

*

Back at the motel she and Sarah got him settled in for the night, slipping him two tranquilizers from a bottle she had no legal right to, technically, but what hospital did not bend pharmaceutical law so long as privileges were not abused?

She considered taking one, too, but didn't, in case Clay would later need her alert. If she did not understand in full what he'd haltingly told her, told Sarah, it had been enough to convey agonizing generalities: what Clay was, or believed he was, or hallucinated himself to be — one of a vanguard of intraspecies self-destruction, spewed out by a world under the gun.

She and Sarah slept back-to-back, as if the reality of their own drawn faces was too much for one night. Sarah rose before her to a blood-sky dawn, drawing sustenance from air like ice, and went to check on their baleful companion of the road and vision quests. Through sleight of hand, Sarah had kept his key last night, just in case.

"He's gone," Sarah came back to report, quietly, with a grinding finality. Quick to laugh and quick to love, she had never been one to cry for no good reason. But when she found one, tears could come in a deluge.

Adrienne sat up, drawing the covers around her to the neck, as tight as a shroud, and shut her eyes when Sarah said it again, this time like an accusation aimed at herself.

"He's gone."