Prototype

Three

Even in her off-hours, of which there were many that weekend, Adrienne frequently found her thoughts turning to Clay Palmer, and the mysteries buried inside him: poisons in need of draining, psychological boils awaiting the lance.

On Friday, Ferris Mendenhall had okayed the removal of Clay's restraints. Later that day he'd prescribed a regimen of lithium to get Clay stabilized and defuse any aggressive tendencies he might still harbor. He was already on pain medication for his hands, but Mendenhall preferred taking no chances; for someone who liked to use his fists, those casts were tantamount to giving him a pair of bludgeons.

Shortly thereafter the tide of paperwork began.

The name and other information Clay had given her had been verified and his records accessed from two Denver-area hospitals. All dated from the past four years, though along with these came records from Minneapolis, compiled over the several years prior to his relocation to Denver. On Sunday, Adrienne came in to her office an hour early to go through it all, uninterrupted.

Eleven times over the past seven years he had made trips to emergency rooms; stitches in his shoulder, his thigh, his cheek; a few broken bones — ribs alone, three times — and once a dislocated elbow. In Minneapolis he had thrice been brought in for alcohol poisoning. Twice in Denver he had been involuntarily committed for a week of psychological evaluation, then released. Lithium had been prescribed once before, and Carbamazepine another time, in an attempt to combat poor impulse control, but there was no follow-up to see how these affected him, or even if he had taken them on any regular schedule.

One scribbled note caught her attention: Some resistance to Thorazine.

The dry understatement of the weekend.

In his evaluations, Adrienne found brief passages of interest: Professes an inability to form close interpersonal attachments yet still speaks with affection of a small number of friends … reports frequent sleep disturbances, with insomnia and night terrors most common … exhibits preoccupation with undergoing vasectomy … spent 5 1/2 hours in apparent self-induced trance this afternoon but emerged with full knowledge of break — schizophrenia not indicated … body exhibits scars from self-mutilation but all appear to date from patient's teens, with no recent manifestations visible.

Still, the bulk of it was simplistic and cursory and nothing she hadn't already surmised from having spent ten minutes with him the morning after a violent spell.

If only his mind had been treated as thoroughly as his body. Typical.

Since it had required the police to get him to the hospital in the first place, Adrienne also had the local force obtain a transcript of his record from Denver. It was nothing she didn't already expect: primarily a history of petty violent altercations in which he was lucky enough that no one was seriously injured. On three separate occasions he had done a month or two of jail time for misdemeanor assault. Fined for discharge of a firearm in his apartment. Some property damage, as well. Arrested last year for demolishing a BMW with a length of pipe; charges dropped due to lack of evidence. Arrested three years ago for breaking four glass display-case windows in a convenience store; charges dropped because of failure to establish positive ID.

And where there were records, odds were there were incidents never reported.

I didn't finally kill someone, did I? he had asked.

No. He hadn't. But the probability that he was headed in that direction was too likely. One slip of his broken hands the other night, and a jagged shank of exposed bone could easily have opened someone's jugular or carotid.

Prime objective: The last thing she was going to do was repeat the mistakes of her predecessors. It wasn't enough to look over Clay Palmer for a few days, pronounce him competent to deal with the outer world, prescribe some pills he may not even bother taking, and send him back into the feeding frenzy of modern society.

She closed the files.

Adrienne tapped a fingernail on her desktop and took a long look at herself, the mirror inside. This growing interest in her mysterious wandering pugilist wasn't merely a therapist's concern, was it? Admit it — the clinician was rising up within her too. Clay Palmer was part of an entire fascinating field ripe for study, something she had long been interested in, if not always actively. Sometimes the field seemed prevalent enough without having to seek it out. She’d grown up within a culture of accelerated war and its glorification, had been educated in a time when a campus rape no longer came as a surprise when announced on the morning news; she now lived in an age when in so many factions it had become socially acceptable sport to beat others half to death because of their ancestry or who they liked to sleep with or what god they prayed to, or didn't.

She could wallow in statistics and never tire of them. Ninety percent of violent crimes were committed by men. Each Super Bowl Sunday, domestic violence against wives and girlfriends made a leap averaging forty percent. The previous year, twenty-five percent of all deaths of males aged fifteen to twenty-four were by gunshot.

Why? She really wanted to know. Testosterone could shoulder only so much of the blame.

God bless — in a wholly non-denominational way — every woman who actively crusaded in opposition to violence against other women; but too many took such statistics and hammered them into a license to condemn all things male. It couldn't be that simple. Their outrage was understandable, but nothing was ever understood that way, much less resolved.

If she was seen as sympathizing with the enemy, so be it. Not every blow, regardless of the recipient's gender, was struck out of purely evil intent. She had observed too many perpetrators of violence an hour or two after the act, shedding genuine tears of anguish and resembling nothing so much as little boys, bewildered at what their growing bodies had been capable of.

Sometimes they hurt, too, these bringers of pain. They deserved to pay for their acts, yes, but how much better for everyone if they lived in a culture in which they were better able to understand such destructive impulses in the first place, and learn to master them. Preventative medicine — no crime, no victim.

Adrienne had to wonder if her renewed fascination with violence in men didn't coincide with the dissolution of her marriage and the subsequent lapsing — for the time being, at least — of the hetero side of her sexuality. Since she had initiated divorce proceedings against Neal, she had gone to bed with only one other man, a dreadful one-night stand born as much of wine as of desire. Since moving to Tempe, and with Sarah's eventual entrance into the picture two and a half years ago, she'd not even had any real impulse to make it with another man.

Was she sufficiently distanced from intimacy with men that now they had assumed the fascinating aura of creatures to be studied? Perhaps so. Live in a rain forest, and you take it for granted; live in a city, and that forest exudes a powerful allure to the explorer of terra incognita.

And for some explorers, there is no territory so enticing as that which can kill them.

Adrienne checked the time. A quarter past four. On duty and she didn't even know it. She picked up her phone and buzzed down to Ward Five.

"This is Dr. Rand," she said. "Could you have an orderly bring Clay Palmer up for his session?"

*

When Clay arrived, Adrienne almost had second thoughts about turning down the orderly's offer to linger behind; in his eyes was the implicit end of the offer — just in case, you know. It would have sent a poor signal, though. She wanted Clay to trust her? She had to trust him.

He looked drawn, tired, but reasonably well. Good color beneath his fading sunburn and nicks and bruises. He had been recently shaved, so most of that scruffy drifter quality had been sacrificed to the razor. The casts made the visible portion of his arms appear deceptively thin, the lean, ropy arms of a gangly teenager. His eyes flicked about the room, taking in decor here, books there, the layout in general. Cataloging, almost. She had met veterans of recent wars and skirmishes who did much the same: came into a room evaluating it for weapons and for cover. She briefly wondered if a military stint in his background had been overlooked, then decided no. He'd had no time, not with that file she'd just read.

"Where do you want me?" he asked.

She gestured. "Whichever you prefer. I just want you to be comfortable."

He chose the couch over either of the two plush chairs set before it, but would not recline; sitting, instead, with his back to the wall while she took a chair. She eased into the session with small talk — how are you feeling, fine, how are your hands, fine — the little opening moments that could either be a cautious dance or a subtle sparring match.

She asked if he would mind if she recorded their conversation, and he said no. From her desk she took a small Sony, about half the size of a paperback book, and placed it on a table adjacent to them, set it rolling. She never understood counselors who used voice-activated recorders; even the duration of a pause could sometimes be more telling than words.

"This is the part where we start talking about my sex life and toilet training, isn't it?" His streamlined face was half-turned her way, his eyebrows mock-inquisitive arches.

"Only if they seem relevant."

"I'd say they are. These casts?" He lifted them, ponderous weights from which mere fingertips protruded. "I can barely aim myself steady enough to hit the toilet." A self-effacing little grin of embarrassment, but something about it rang hollow. "And I definitely can't whack off. Can I count on a little relief from you?"

"The last time I checked, that's not in my job description," she said. At times such as this she wished she wore glasses; nobody looks more like they mean serious business than someone tugging off glasses with one hand. She continued, voice even-tempered and professional: "A remark like that is way out of line and we both know you're aware of that. Dirty little propositions quit shocking me a long time ago, so if it's all the same to you, I'd rather get past that phase of your evaluation of me. Good enough?"

He did nothing for several moments, then grinned lazily down toward the couch with a single conciliatory nod. Whatever test that had been, it appeared that she'd passed.

So proceed.

"Neither of us brought this up on Friday morning, when we first spoke, but there's something I'm still wondering about. Not that it's necessarily important — more for my own curiosity. What brought you down this way from Denver?"

"I just wanted to get away by myself for a while."

"You wanted to be completely alone, then." More a statement of clarification than a question. You had to be careful with direct questions; too many and a session could turn into an interview that yielded facts, but ignored the richer vein of feelings.

"I wanted to get away from everything I was familiar with. So about a week and a half ago, I just left. You know how you go for a walk to think, to clear your head."

"If you wanted to be alone, you could have locked your door and not answered it, and unplugged your phone."

He cleared his throat, uncertainty shifting across his face. "I knew that wasn't going to be enough. Sometimes that is enough, it works … but it's a very passive way of going about it. Sometimes you need that distance. It didn't even seem right to drive it. So I didn't."

Adrienne eased forward in her chair. "Eight hundred miles is quite a walk to do some thinking."

"I had a lot to think about."

"And what was that?"

"Besides, I was hitchhiking some of the time. The way I see it, that's not cheating, that's allowed."

She said nothing — let the silence weigh upon him until he decided to do something about it. Her question hung there and he was perfectly aware of it; she could tell in a flicker of eye contact. What she could not yet discern was if his evasion was genuine, or one more little game.

Clay slid forward on the couch. The hospital robe bunched beneath his legs and he stood. Wandered across the office to stand before her print of Metcalf's The White Veil while she looked at his back, framed against the tranquil snowscape.

"Impressionism, right?"

"Yes."

"French or American?"

"American."

He nodded, still presenting his back to her. "I know this guy who's an artist. His work … it's nothing like this. He doesn't see the world this way."

"Is this a friend of yours?"

Slowly, Clay turned his back on the scene and returned to the couch. She decided his evasion, as well as his lengthy contemplation, were genuine.

"Friend is an outmoded concept, isn't it? Graham … I get along with him, I wish him well, I like his work. We … we protect each other in a way. But I wouldn't even think of dying for him, so I don't think I'd make a very good candidate for friend, no."

Adrienne nodded. She could tell, for the time being at least, that the way to Clay's psyche was going to be a serpentine path. He did not seem to mind ruminating philosophically about matters, but dealing bluntly with his own feelings was a thornier task. She'd have to start out reading him mostly by his reactions to things. Pick away here and there and see what flaked away, like rust.

"Why don't you describe Graham's work to me. The things you like about the way he sees the world."

Clay shut his eyes a moment, moved as if to run one hand through his hair, then stopped. Her breath caught in her throat for an instant. A concussion, that's all he needed right now.

"His work doesn't present the world like that," waving one cast toward The White Veil. "Fuzzy, soft focus … diffused. Even though that's a winter scene, it's still warm. Why do you have it hanging there, anyway? That world's dead. Is this supposed to be some kind of memorial?"

She frowned. "'That world's dead' — I don't quite understand what you mean by that."

"Artistically, I mean. Been there, done that. Let's look at something relevant." Perhaps she was on the right track — Clay was starting to appear rather captivated. "Who honestly needs a snowy hillside anymore? It means nothing in terms of anyone's life. Maybe it meant something when it was painted, but now it's completely devoid of relevance."

"Some would say beauty exists for its own sake, regardless of its time."

"But most of the time it doesn't mean anything. It's like Marx's take on religion: an opiate. It's a false pat on the head to tell you not to worry, everything's fine."

"So, what you're saying about Graham's work is that it reflects, say, a harsher truth that you find to be more real."

"Right." He nodded. "Right. It's not metalwork, but a lot of it looks that way. Even though he uses oils, mostly, oils and acrylics. Looks very metallic. His paintings, they're ugly as hell, but it's that bizarre kind of ugly where you can look at it and find a perverse beauty, know what I mean? They look filthy, most of them. Not pure and clean like that." He spared another long look at The White Veil, then seemed to dismiss it with a shake of his head. "I don't mean filthy in a pornographic sense. I mean the way metal looks before … I don't know … before it rolls through a Detroit factory and gets shaped and smoothed out and painted and waxed. Raw metal."

Her eyes narrowed as she tried to summon a composite of the feelings such paintings must evoke. Something about them conjured a cold and harsh sense of brutality. "What kind of imagery in them do you recall?"

"Oh … gears. Girders. Smokestacks. Twisted bridges that don't go anywhere. Piles of scrap iron." Clay bit into one corner of his mouth. "Graham calls them post-industrial landscapes. His studio and apartment, all those paintings around … he once called it the junkyard of the world."

"And this is a world of … what?" She was curious. Decay? Progress in rampant decline? Fill in the blank.

He thought for a moment. "A world of barriers. I mean, what's metal for, if not keeping things in their places?"

Adrienne recalled the condition of Clay's clothing the other night, when he had been brought in. The boots caked with dust, both inside and out, the dusty jeans and jacket and shirt. With mild dehydration and sunburn on top of it all. The obvious conclusion was that he was not long out of the open desert.

"That world reflected in Graham's paintings," said Adrienne, like the sliding of a gentle probe. "Is that the world you wanted to get away from for a while?"

He didn't answer, not for a minute, maybe more. One never realized how much time was compressed into one minute until hearing it tick away, waiting for a reply in a dead-silent room. She took care to watch his face for the emotions it betrayed, and clearly he was wrestling with those barely understood compulsions that drove him.

"I guess it was," he finally admitted, as if it were some sort of moral defeat. "But everybody needs that, sometimes, so I don't know how much you can read into it."

Enough, she thought. In this society the call of the wild was rarely answered in much less than a Winnebago. Or at least with a backpack and four-wheel drive. Clay's had been a much more primal response.

"This need must have been considerably stronger in you than in most people, wouldn't you say?"

"Probably." He shrugged, apparently unconcerned with pursuing a comparison. "I was on the road, hitching and walking, close to a week. The desert? I guess I came into Tempe about three days after I got off the road completely, but I didn't want to stay long, I still wanted to keep going." He wet his lips. "Do you know what it's like to walk for three days and not see asphalt?"

Adrienne shook her head. "No, I don't, really. Maybe you could fill me in."

Clay tilted his head back, gazing at the ceiling, through it. "Something gets stripped away. It's hard to say what it is, exactly, but it leaves you. And you're not sorry to see it go. The only things you hear are things that have already been making noise for a few million years. You regress … part of you hits this embryonic state. It's easier to pick yourself apart this way. To look inside and do some serious thinking. That's what it's like."

"If you went out there to do some soul-searching," she said, "were you able to walk away with any conclusions?"

"One big one, for sure: Jesus must have gotten really hungry after forty days."

Okay, she deserved that. She knew better than to ply him with such a direct question. One observation, though: Whatever the trip had represented to him, likely it had been a failure.

And his choice of mythic analogy was interesting, on second thought. Maybe she could work with this after all.

"Jesus went into the wilderness to confront — and ultimately overcome — a devil. In very loose terms, do you think it's possible you were doing the same thing?"

He rolled his eyes. "I don't have a messiah complex and I don't have delusions of grandeur."

Adrienne nodded, conceding. "But you do have a sense of the mythic. Friday morning? 'Clay Palmer … of the Gehenna Palmers'? You may have been joking, just as you said, and then again you may have been telling me in a very subtle way that your earlier family life was hell. Either way, the mythic element is there." The Jungian disciple in her, browsing the storehouse of the collective unconscious: those basic elements and symbols that resonated in humankind the world over, regardless of culture. "You don't need a messiah complex or delusions of grandeur to relate to a story about a journey of confrontation and self-discovery. Or to go on one."

Eight hundred miles he'd come, but clearly he had been more concerned with seeking a goal, rather than running from something behind him.

"Was that what this trip was all about?" she asked. "Your own journey of self-discovery?"

Clay Palmer may have been a stranger, but as she watched him honestly try to wrestle with this one, she realized that some evasive shadow in both their souls was quite similar. How well she understood that mysterious lure of the desert, its siren song of hot gusts and desolate winds, chilly nights, and the harsh, unforgiving fact of its very existence. It had pulled her away from the city of her birth at a time when her entire life had been in flux.

And while she couldn't see it from her bedroom window, she at least knew it was there.

Her transition had been made, of course, via all the socially acceptable routes. New job, new house, new friends, and, if a bit less orthodox, a new love. Clay, however, had stripped away all such niceties until only an elemental core remained. And what was this inside her — an amusing twinge of jealousy over the purity in his method?

"Confront this, Adrienne," he finally said. "I don't fit into the world, and it took a long time, and it still isn't easy, but I finally started trying to accept that. Fine. But that doesn't mean I don't think somebody or something, somewhere, still owes me a damn good explanation."