Prototype

One

After the calm, Adrienne looked in on her patient, up from Emergency and now in his room. He was at such peace, and she marveled: The difference between the countenance of a devil and that of an angel is sometimes nothing more than sleep.

It was an archaic association, the kind she would always have to keep to herself. How many fellow psychologists, colleagues and mentors alike, would frown upon such medieval terminology? Angels, devils; good, evil; black, white… no such things. The modern age had sounded the death knell for such absolutes.

There existed but chaos and order, illness and health.

But if the metaphor fits… apply it.

The patient, peaceful now, lay beneath the precautionary restraints across his bed. He was, so far, without name, without history. He was nothing but symptoms and wounds. An IV line snaked into one arm to boost fluid levels; he was suffering from mild dehydration. He had been brought in without ID, and the police had been unable to take fingerprints even after he’d been sedated into sleep: Both hands were heavily stitched, splinted, and bandaged.

Adrienne held little hope for a lucid talk with him tomorrow. Only someone suffering from extreme personality disturbances would not only break his own hands on another’s face, but continue to pummel away until jagged fragments of his own metacarpals protruded from his hands in compound fractures.

The patrol officers who had brought him in earlier tonight, in restraints, told her that he had been picked up on the east side of Tempe, at a shopping strip. That he had spent a good deal of time in the Arizona desert seemed a reasonable deduction. There had been sand and dust inside his boots, with his jacket and jeans heavily coated as well. According to the police, witnesses to the altercation that had landed him here said that three skateboard thugs had tried to relieve him of his wallet as he was leaving a Tex-Mex stand. All three of them, ironically, had been brought in as even more deserving emergency cases.

Comical enough in its beginnings, Adrienne supposed: The kid who’d snatched the wallet from their John Doe’s hand had been knocked from his skateboard by a well-aimed sack of tacos to the head. After which the victim had become the aggressor. He had snatched up the upended skateboard and used its flat, wide top to shatter its owner’s nose.

The melee was joined at once by the other two, valiantly altruistic musketeers, the both of them — in their own eyes, at least. Adrienne well knew that boys in their late teens listened far more readily to testosterone than to common sense.

And they had paid dearly. Between the three of them, their tally of injuries was headed by a broken jaw, two broken noses, nine missing teeth, one shattered elbow, two ruptured testicles, a skull fracture, thirteen broken ribs. One would be urinating blood for days. Then there were the punctures and lacerations caused by the bones protruding from John Doe’s hands.

Adrienne, as a staff psychologist, had not treated them, had scarcely even seen them. Her understanding of the hapless trio’s fate was mainly appraisal from colleagues working the night shift. While grievous injuries they were, Adrienne found it difficult to sympathize. Three-on-one was such an act of vicious cowardice. She despised the pack mentality — an evolutionary carry-over, perhaps, still buried in the primal brain, but a behavioral anachronism. Like a burst appendix, it could cause only misery. Surely human beings were better than that, somewhere within, weren’t they?

Apparently their John Doe, bruised and battered but the last one on his feet, had attempted to lurch away from the scene, and even then had needed two police officers to subdue him. His bone-razor hands were secured behind his back and in he came, 9:22 P.M. this September midweek night. He was an immediate code blue, all available able-bodied personnel converging on the ER entrance to make sure he hurt no one else or did no more damage to himself. His hands may have been bound, but he had feet. And teeth. And a seemingly bottomless reservoir of ferocious energy — adrenaline, most likely. A later blood test checked negative for presence of drugs.

Drugs had, in the end, been their only recourse to stop him. He nearly had to be submerged in Thorazine before it took effect.

Adrienne had witnessed, had felt an unexplained sorrow after the final plunge of the needle into exposed arm, a drama played out by nearly a dozen participants — oh, here was a pack in action. Watching John Doe’s struggles dwindle to twitches, and the fury fade from his eyes as they shut, yet even then still seemed to hate, she had thought of animals she’d seen on documentaries beyond number: fine and noble predators such as lions and tigers and panthers, enraged at the sting of the dart in their hip, and given to spectacular acrobatics even as consciousness ebbed. At the end, wobbly and confused, they invariably seemed like nothing so much as cubs, clumsy and mystified. And then they fell.

John Doe… where did you come from, and where were you going? And what demons followed you within?

Demons in, of course, a wholly figurative sense.

She kept that to herself too.

Adrienne had but a half-hour remaining on her shift, and it went peacefully enough. Midnight came and she knocked off duty but had little desire to leave the hospital. Ensconced in her office, she rang home and got the machine; left a message that she had a patient for whom she wanted to be on-site whenever he came around, and would probably be home later in the morning.

Silence, then. Was any place so quiet as a hospital office after midnight? Off came her shoes and she wiggled her feet for a moment, felt full circulation restore; then she cranked the Levolor blinds into a barrier and raised her slacks’ legs to peel away her knee-highs.

She dropped to sit on the couch. That was the great thing about her chosen career — always a place to sleep. Adrienne shut her eyes and did some slow, deep breathing, let the day and tonight’s shift ease out of her one lungful at a time. Directly across the office, centered between packed bookshelves, she kept hung a large square print of a landscape from early American impressionism, Willard Metcalf’s The White Veil. She regarded it as mildly hypnotic, so serene she could nearly hear the whisper of its falling snow. It was easy to lose herself in the painting every time, wander down its blanketed hillsides to the valley below, and even the bleakness of its bare trees seemed softened beneath a milky gray sky. Such a glaring contrast to the stark desert landscape that surrounded her waking world, and she supposed that was a large part of its appeal. Perhaps she was being quietly obstinate.

Adrienne reached over the couch and took down a Navajo blanket from the wall clips that held it in place. Off with the light, and she curled herself on the couch. Reached behind her head to unbind the straight blond hair she kept pulled back while on duty, and let it fall to just above her shoulders.

Beneath the blanket, she held her gaze across the office to the painting, pale luminescence in the office gloom. Let it sink in, be the last thing she saw before sleep, and perhaps she would dream of snow. The virgin autumn of late September was still plenty warm here, but winter was on its way, and still she would miss the winters of the north. Desert winters were never satisfying, in the schema of the birth-growth-death-rebirth cycle of the seasons.

She slept, and dreamed instead of ice, and factories where straggling drones stoked desperate, feeble fires until the last embers died, and then the drones fell, until they too lay frozen.

Buzzing, persistent and harsh enough to pierce sleep: her phone. Adrienne pushed aside the blanket and took several reeling steps to her desk and answered, barely coherent.

“Doctor Rand?”

“Mm. Yes.” Blinking, widening her eyes, alternately; focus had to be somewhere.

“This is Beth Weatherford, down on five. You wanted to be notified as soon as your John Doe from last night came around?”

“Right, right, right…” Adrienne cleared her throat; could not yet make sense of her clock. “What time is it?”

“It’s about seven-fifteen.”

“What kind of emotional state is he in this morning?”

“Well, he’s… quite calm, really. He’s very lucid and aware.”

Interesting. Adrienne thanked her, said she’d be down in a few minutes, asked to have an orderly make sure there was a chair in the room. Even before the phone was cradled she was reaching for the small curved combs she used to hold her hair back. She kicked into her shoes, and while she never much liked the white coat, better that than it being so obvious she had slept in her clothes.

Down on five, Adrienne smiled briefly at the nurse who had buzzed her from the duty station, clicked a brisk walk down the hall. While some found Ward Five a nightmare zone, rarely did it bother her. It took a special breed to work here, amid the crises and breathing cautionary tales of lives in implosion. The schedule of the outside world and the pulse of circadian rhythms meant nothing here. Rooms might rebound with despairing moans and nonsensical conversations at any hour of the day.

Room 532. She knocked, entered. Wished, for a moment, that she’d thought to hunt for the breath spray somewhere in her desk drawer. Her mouth tasted stale.

Room 532, and its sole occupant… she found them both eerily calm, as if they belonged on another floor entirely. Certainly, the man’s behavior and countenance were polar opposites of what they had been last night.

“Another new face,” he said.

She smiled, hoped it came across as disarming. “That’s odd. It looked like the same old thing to me this morning.”

A bit lame, as wit went, but at least he didn’t roll his eyes. Adrienne contended that, just as the first crucial five years of a child’s life could set the tone for the remainder, the first several minutes of exchange between patient and therapist could determine everything to follow. Even minor missteps could blaze trails along terribly wrong paths.

She pulled the chair over from the wall, near the bed. Best to get to the same eye-level as soon as possible. Nobody liked dealing with someone towering over him the entire time. A tape recorder might be intimidating this soon, as well, and anyway, she didn’t plan on covering ground any more complicated than what could be served later by memory and quick jottings in the notebook she slipped from her pocket.

“How are you feeling this morning?”

He shrugged with a tilt of his head and a constricted twitch of his shoulder. Beneath the restraints criss-crossing the bed, it was about all the body language he could manage.

“My name’s Adrienne Rand,” she said. “I’m a psychologist on staff here. I was on duty last night when you were brought in.”

He nodded, almost matter-of-factly, gave a small sigh. Rolled his head away for a moment, to stare with flat eyes toward the window. Beyond the chain-link window guard and spots on the glass, there was nothing to see, nothing but brightening sky.

Lying there, calm, he looked smaller than he had when first brought in last night. Certainly too small to have inflicted the kind of damage he had on three assailants, and then require two police officers to subdue him. Average height and build, skinny hipped; she wondered how well he’d been eating lately. Black hair of moderate length, wildly unkempt now, with days’ worth of beard stubble. His head and bruised, sunburned face were characterized by a curiously sleek appearance, with both contoured cheekbones and jawline that swept around to either side of his skull. It seemed a face engineered to lean into the wind, to cut resistance, to slice ahead. Adrienne found a strange beauty in it. As faces went, this one was fascinating. Last night’s figurative assessment as she watched him sleep still held: His could be the seductive face of an angel or a devil. A single stroke by the artist — or a vandal — could tilt it in favor of one or the other.

“Do you know where you are?”

“If it’s Friday, then this must be Tempe. Or didn’t you have geography in mind?” His voice was low and even. Not inviting, but neither was it hostile. He tilted his head toward the meshed windows. “If those are any indication, I’d say I’m in a psycho ward. How’m I doing so far?”

Day, city, and facility. She nodded. “Three for three.” She took a deep breath, tried to minimize the swell in her chest on the inhale. The spotlight was definitely on; without being too obvious about it, this man was sizing her up… her every move, every word. And if he’d had a way of picking through her every thought, no doubt he would be exercising that option, too.

“How much do you remember about last night, about why you were brought here? Do you have any recollection at all?”

Hooded gray eyes, lids drifting shut. For a moment they clenched as fiercely and tightly as fists. “I didn’t finally kill someone, did I?”

Finally? He remembers something, definitely. “No, you didn’t kill anyone.”

He relaxed. “Well that’s good news.”

“How much do you remember about last night?”

“I remember losing my temper, but I’d say I was provoked. And I still never got to eat my tacos.” He laughed, weakly. “Once the police got me here, hauled me out of the car… gets kind of fuzzy. I don’t remember you.” Suddenly those watchful gray eyes flashed upon the door. “Have I been charged with anything?”

“Not yet, not that I’ve heard.”

“Think I will?”

“I couldn’t say one way or the other, I’m sorry. Given the degree to which you… defended… yourself last night, I’m sure the police will at least be interested in some follow-up before any decision is made.”

He rolled his head to face the window again. There, for the first time: what seemed to be a glimpse of genuine emotion, an ache in something far deeper than the shattered hands encased in heavy casts.

“As I said,” she went on, “I was there when you were brought in last night. Both your hands had sustained compound fractures. It was necessary to give you Thorazine to prevent you from hurting yourself any more, or someone else.”

“Did you shoot me with it?”

“No.”

“You just watched.” A flat statement, almost an accusation, then he smiled directly toward her with something like twisted pride. “It took a lot, didn’t it?”

Adrienne hesitated, then agreed. “We thought you might have pocketed the first dosage. There was no discernable effect, really.”

“It just takes a lot. I don’t know why.”

Definitely something to look into, once she had access to his case history, more background. He certainly didn’t speak as if he were any stranger to the receiving end of crisis intervention.

“When you were brought in, you had no identification with you. So as far as who you are, I’m afraid I’m going to have to start from scratch. Could you tell me your name?”

“Clay Palmer.” His mouth ticked. “Of the Gehenna Palmers.”

She frowned. “Gehenna?”

“That’s a mythical name for hell. It’s a joke.”

“And where is your home, Clay?”

“Home…” He looked at the ceiling, as if attempting to define the term. “I always thought of my home as my shell of skin. That way I’m never lost. But that’s not what you mean. Is it?”

“This time I did have geography in mind… but we can get around to that later, too.”

“I’ll bet.” He eyed her with a flicker of wicked mirth; he’d just baited her and he knew it. Whether he’d done it deliberately or not was the only thing that wasn’t clear. “I’m from Denver.”

After she got his address, he reeled forth a social security number and his birth date without any prompting. She’d have to double check later, but for now, would take his word for it that he was twenty-five years old.

“You did considerable damage to yourself last night, Clay. I wonder if you could tell me what was going through your mind at the time?”

“You mean what I was feeling?” Laughter, harsh and incredulous. “I’d say I was feeling extremely pissed off. Adrienne.”

“Lots of people feel pissed off. Some of them even act on it. Very few of them go so far as to break their own hands.”

He gazed down along his body, the casts engulfing his lower arms. “My hands, yeah, I miss them this morning. At the time, they were just… means to an end.”

“What end was that?”

He sighed, looked very stricken and exhausted all at once. “I don’t know… conquest?”

She took a quick breath and decided to steer this thing back to case history. “Had you ever been attacked like that before? That you remember?”

He let a small, ironic smile twist one corner of his mouth. “Like that, three-on-one… no… I don’t — no, definitely not.”

She had wondered last night, immediately upon learning the particulars of his case. Because his fight hadn’t ended when all three assailants were on the ground, had it? In some convolution of his brain, he had seen reason to fight the police and emergency room personnel, too. Every reaching hand belonged to an enemy.

Not uncommon, though. When trauma had wrenched a life to its foundations, some people simply withdrew from all but the most overt stimuli. They could not differentiate foe from ally. She recalled the case of the jogger gang-raped and beaten in Central Park. Even having been clubbed unconscious, the woman had flailed about and fought the trauma-center team while on the table.

But therein lay the difference: Clay Palmer had successfully fought his assailants and still gone past the brink of shutdown.

What had happened to him in the past, to generate such fear, such virulent rage? What lay buried like a bomb in that mind?

“Clay, is there anybody you’d like us to notify, that you’re here, that you’re safe?”

“Nobody. Adrienne.”

Mental note: He was baiting her again, that name thing. The last two times she had called him by name, he’d turned around and done likewise, though in deliberately obvious fashion. Not quite sarcasm, not quite as afterthought… more like he was letting her know he wasn’t going to be swayed by attempts to buddy up through co-opting his first name. She couldn’t blame him, actually. Often as not, she associated the tactic with creepy salesmen she didn’t want to deal with at all, much less buy from.

“Any family or friends in Denver, or locally…?”

“I said nobody.”

Adrienne nodded. “If you change your mind, I’ll be happy to take care of it for you. And convey any message you might like to pass along.”

“Even if it’s obscene?”

She maintained a level gaze, even returned his earlier wry smile. “I’ll let discretion play the better part of judgment.”

“Just checking. Probing the bounds of your honor.” For a moment his gaze roved about the room, this cheerless and spartan chamber, and through his eyes she sought the human being behind them. When he wasn’t looking at her, wasn’t playing the role of guardian at the gate of his privacy, he seemed to drift upon small painful currents within. If only she could see him free and unencumbered, observe how he moved, how he sat. How he might enter a room and commandeer it for his own, or find its most sheltered corner and make it his harbor. The body told much… but his was silenced. And in its restriction, it was as if his eyes were compensating by what they communicated, like sharpened hearing to the newly blind.

But this she knew: He would not be the type who found it easy to ask for help. Which didn’t mean he was not without other questions: “How old are you?”

Adrienne saw no harm in answering. “I’m thirty-four.”

“Baby boomer, huh?”

She couldn’t help but smile. “Just barely. In that bulging demographic chart that looks like a pig in a python, I’m pretty much at the pig’s curly little tail.” And on that cusp, Adrienne supposed, she did not truly belong to the body proper. Cut off the pig’s tail, and it may squeal, but it will never miss the thing. She was a vestigial appendage, with no generation to call her own. She lived in the temporal gulf between those who came before and those who followed.

“The boomers,” he said. “Our civilization’s last big gasp of self-indulgence. At least I know my place.”

“And where’s that?”

“I’m with the people on the side, holding the shovels.” Clay Palmer cleared his throat. “Are we through?”

“Yes. I think that’s enough for now.” Adrienne stood, put away her notebook. “About all we’ve done this morning is introduce ourselves. We’ve talked a bit about last night… but there’s a lot that led up to last night that we never touched on. I think we should, and… I hope you feel the same. And I hope you’ll want to continue talking with me later this weekend.”

“Maybe,” he said. “But no touching. I don’t really like being touched. No touch therapy.”

“All right.” Adrienne nodded. Interesting: could indicate a past history of abuse, emotional withdrawal. “I think we can work around that.”

He raised his hips and torso, pushing up off his shoulders until his body surged against the restraints. The twin casts lay along his sides, chunky anchors of white plaster. “Can you do something about getting these straps off me?”

She would first have to get an authorization from Ferris Mendenhall, the psychiatrist who oversaw all Ward Five treatment, but her own recommendation would be that Clay no longer needed to be restrained, for his own protection or anyone else’s.

Still, not to forget: He had broken his own hands and used the ends of snapped bones to lacerate three faces. What damage might he be capable of inflicting with those casts, if he set his mind to it?

It was nearing eight o’clock, and Mendenhall should be in by now. It was his call.

“I’ll look into it immediately,” she said.

Sometimes it was a relief to defer responsibility.

Two

Adrienne was back in her own driveway by nine o’clock that morning, sitting behind the wheel for several moments after killing the engine. On the dry wind rode the creeping burn of the day. An all-nighter — sleep in her office notwithstanding — and still she found something decadent about dragging wearily in at this hour. Only the motivations had changed over time. Fifteen years ago it would have been the inevitable final surrender after a binge. Now, just more overtime devoted to a classic type-A personality’s drive to alleviate the sufferings of humanity. By fifty, her lock on sainthood should be clinched.

She left the car, started for the front door.

Adrienne called it home, but after two years it still took some adjustment. Two floors of stucco topped with red-tile roofing, on a lot whose lawn was suitably sparse, as per desert climes, and at least one palm tree visible from nearly every window. Each time she came rolling down the street she expected to see a burro tied up out front.

Adrienne’s own tastes ran more toward colonial and Victorian, but upon first setting foot inside when they’d looked at it, Sarah had loved it, and felt instantaneously at home here in that impulsive, predestined way she had about her sometimes. Adrienne figured, in her heart, that her own love would grow.

Still waiting. By now, she was probably up to at least an amiable affection for the place.

Sarah was in the front room when Adrienne came through the door, looked up from her book and brightened immediately. Uncurled from her cross-legged perch in the cushioned rattan chair that hung in one corner.

“Hiya,” she said, and met Adrienne halfway to kiss hello, good morning, whatever they had skipped the night before. “Guess who missed you last night.”

“You got my message, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I got your message. I was just feeling needy.” Sarah gripped her by the shoulders and steered her gently toward the sofa. “C’mon. Sit, sit, sit, sit.”

Adrienne shut her eyes and smiled and let fatigue overwhelm her, began to feel tired all over again. Let Sarah take charge — some indulgent pampering now and then was good for body and soul. Sarah stayed behind her, reaching across the back of the sofa and down to the shoulders that felt cramped and unnatural after sleeping on the office couch, and maybe from all that residual tension from her first encounter with Clay Palmer. With this one she wanted very much to tread wisely.

“Let it out, let it out,” Sarah said, then nipped her on the ear. “Can you come out and play tomorrow? I think it’s in your own best interests, you’re looking too serious this week.”

“Tomorrow being, what… Saturday?”

“Gasp — she’s in touch with modern timekeeping after all.”

Adrienne made a show of inner debate, but a day out on her day off sounded like a tonic she would be wise to self-prescribe. “Since it’s you, and since you asked,” she said. “What do you have in mind?”

Sarah was digging with strong and nimble fingers for each and every muscle at the base of Adrienne’s neck. “I was thinking Swiss coffee and a French film and Greek food. It’ll be very multicultural and don’t you dare say no.”

“Multicultural? You know you’re showing a definite centrism toward Western Europe.”

“Shut up. Who’s the anthropologist here?”

Sarah wrapped up her ministrations and slapped each of Adrienne’s shoulders simultaneously, as if swatting the bottoms of newborns. Her shoulders sang, they hummed, they throbbed with vitality restored, and Sarah crawled over the back of the sofa to drop beside her.

Sarah was so physical sometimes, she came close to being overpowering — not by intimidation, more that to be around her was to risk either exhaustion by proxy or feelings of inadequacy. She had entirely too much life-force to contain; would throw herself into anything and everything that drew her interest and contend with the bruises or broken heart later.

Sarah was slim and straight above the waist, with lushly curved hips below. She had a round face almost too small for her eyes, and mismatched lips that somehow went with her body: the top one thin, the lower, heavy and ripe and delicious, the both of them bracketed by smile lines that inscribed her mouth like soft little parentheses. Her full black hair she brushed irregularly, and she scuffed around on wide peasant feet, a legacy from a barefoot childhood. At twenty-nine, Sarah still distrusted shoes.

They molded together well, Adrienne four inches taller, and when they embraced, every gentle swell in one seemed to meet with a corresponding hollow in the other. Side-by-side they looked to be complementary opposites, Sarah very much the child of a fecund earth, while there was something mildly Teutonic about Adrienne… in the fine blond hair, so very straight, and the murky blue eyes; in the height that once caused her to slouch until the boys caught up, then began to surpass her. But it worked; together they worked, and Adrienne had recently decided she loved Sarah enough that it ached.

She supposed that was a good thing. To gauge the quality of life, there often seemed no better barometer than the measure of its pain. I’ve seen the highs, I’ve seen the lows, now how about I linger upon the middle plateaus awhile and sort it out?

“I came up with another maybe for my thesis this morning.” Sarah beamed with the enthusiasm that inevitably came when something dawned upon her, its avenues of possibility yet to be explored. “Want to hear it?”

Adrienne laughed. “How many will this make, anyway?”

“Five. Want to hear it?”

“I’d rather hear that you’ve made up your mind.”

Sarah jabbed out and pinched her along the ribs. “Do you want to hear it or not?”

Adrienne slid down onto the sofa and flung off both shoes. “Dazzle me.”

“Retention in American society of old world customs by Asian immigrants.” She frowned. “That’s still too simplistic for the final approach. But I think it’s something I could really devour. Plus it’s something that feels contemporaneously relevant, you know… not just something I can get eggheaded about that doesn’t address anything going on right now in our own backyard.”

“Asian immigrants,” said Adrienne. Nit-picking, but sometimes that’s what Sarah needed; she tended to view panoramas at the expense of details. “You know Fishbine will make you narrow your focus.” Her faculty adviser in the doctoral program at Arizona State University; generally easygoing but he tolerated no shotgun approaches and had no patience with indecision. At least he was not prone to imposing his own research needs on the agendas of his students; Sarah was fortunate in that respect.

“I know he will. Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai… I have no idea which one I’d end up preferring.”

“You wouldn’t prefer one above the other, that’s why you can’t make up your mind.”

Sarah leaned back and probed Adrienne’s thigh with her toes. “We only get one full life… if that much. Is it my fault if it all looks so interesting?”

“You and your experiential smorgasbord.” Adrienne smiled, grabbed Sarah’s foot, and began to massage it, digging her thumbs into the arch where she knew Sarah liked it best. “I wish I could extract that mania from you and inject it into about half the patients I see. We’d cure thousands from depression.”

“And make millions.” Sarah shuddered, froze, held her foot still. “Right there… yes. Yes!” She hurled herself backward along the length of the sofa and threw both arms across her face with a satisfied groan. “What would you inject into the other half?”

“Probably your hedonism.”

“Rome fell,” she said, and groaned again, “but what fun it must have been at the time, you know?”

A few minutes later Adrienne got up to change into shorts and a T-shirt. They breakfasted on the back patio, grapefruit juice and day-old muffins from a favorite bakery. When Sarah returned to her chair in the front room and her book — an autobiographical account of a Japanese woman’s transition and adjustment to life under the thumb of American culture — Adrienne showered away the last of her night’s shift. Let her at least make a clean break before it all began again at four o’clock this afternoon.

Sarah had left the bedroom blinds down after rising, to keep the sun out, so the room was still cool. The unmade bed sat in a low frame, and Adrienne crawled into it, set the alarm for two-thirty, although she might not need it at all; how one human body could be so tired but not sleepy still made little sense to her.

Staring up then, focusing on the slow hypnotic revolution of the ceiling fan, whirling, whirling, as if to lift the entire room away. Like Dorothy, cast on the winds toward Oz. It beat counting imaginary sheep.

Alone in the bedroom on days like this, sleep could never be too quick in claiming her; days warm outside and cool in, the sun glowing brightly around the edges of the drawn blinds, and filling every crack until it became more than light, it was a luminescent presence trying to assert itself and intrude.

And did it ever take her back.

Three years and chump change ago, she had been a different Adrienne Rand. In fact, she’d not been Adrienne Rand at all, but Adrienne Wythe, a name now entirely foreign to her. Marriage had been, well… adequate, certainly. She recalled relishing the assurance of someone being there to come home to, and in turn to be there for someone else. In that sense her marriage was certainly secure; but then again, so are prisons, so there you are.

Why, with all the training and fieldwork to hone those skills in pinpointing everything wrong with a stranger’s life, was her own inner vision confined to hindsight? The paradox of the trade, she supposed. She and Neal never should have married; went through six months joined by love, and the rest by inertia alone. Like a pair of asteroids that never once touch, yet still hurtle through the black voids in tandem, linked by their own peculiar gravity.

In those days even her base of home and career was different. She had been born in San Francisco, and it seemed perfectly reasonable to expect she would eventually die there, or at least across the bay in Oakland. In the meantime, S.F. General was apt to provide all the therapeutic and research opportunities she could want. She showed a particular flair for handling violent types, and S.F. General indulged her; there was no shortage.

Adrienne had never put much credence in fate. Fate was just a convenient, catchall term for moments of truth when the laws of probability met in random collision, and left people to pick their way through the wreckage. And so it had happened, over a week’s time, that the staff of S.F. General fell by the dozens to a nasty strain of summer flu. Long hours, lowered resistance — enter the virus, stage left, and her turn came. Simple cause and effect, but how tempting to believe the universe that day was plotting. Whether to try to crush her in disillusion, or liberate her at last, Adrienne had yet to decide. The universe was funny that way.

No matter. In the long run, she was glad it had happened.

She timed her commute home between bouts of wretched upheaval and pulled into the driveway in time to christen it with bile. Ahead of her was Neal’s car, the Nissan sitting there alone — what’s wrong with this picture? This time of day? Perhaps he had fallen victim to the same viral prankster, and she decided she’d best enter as quietly as possible. Neal ill was Neal near death, to hear him moan on about it.

As it was, such consideration became quite unwarranted. Once in the house, Adrienne had tiptoed halfway up the stairs to the second floor and the bedroom before her ears conceded the obvious: Neal was not alone.

They had no idea Adrienne was there, apparently no idea she could be there, ever. Their abandon was total, and for at least a full minute Adrienne watched from the hallway. Who the woman was, she didn’t know, and even after she had the name days later, it was no one Adrienne had heard of. Healthy, though, and even Neal seemed possessed of a certain robust exuberance that he otherwise lacked in their own bedroom encounters. They were on their knees, the woman lowered to elbows as Neal coupled with her from behind, the both of them golden and glowing in shafts of sunlight that pierced the room through drawn blinds. They looked like an ad for vitamin E.

My bed. That’s my bed, Adrienne had thought. Perfectly calm, ungodly calm, every thought and impulse under control. Shouldn’t I at least hate them and start screaming?

She left the hall, quietly, and eased down the stairway and back out the front door and stood for a few moments overlooking a lawn so green and smooth a golfer could have used it for putting practice. She disconnected a hundred-foot coil of garden hose from the lawn sprinkler, then reattached the regular nozzle head. Went back in the house, trailing the hose after her like some snake that just kept coming, sliding through the doorway and up the stairs.

Neal and the mystery woman still didn’t notice she was there, not until she unleashed the fury of the hose upon them. It was the most humiliating form of coitus interruptus she could devise on the spur of the moment, wetting them down not like husband and mistress, but rather a pair of mongrels rutting on the front lawn.

After that day, she refused to see him without having first consulted a lawyer about it. And whenever, in the ensuing battle over communal property, she was prone to despair with frustration over Neal’s own legal firepower, one recollection of him on his side, legs kicking impotently, screeching apologies and clutching his privates from the bruising force of the spray, was usually enough to bring a smile. And perspective…

Still more of which came later when she realized that the whole of northern California had a taint, and might for years to come. Too lush, too hilly, too many secret enclaves in the land itself where she might run to contemplate the changes wrought in her life, only to find she was hiding from herself, as well.

She wanted — needed — a simpler, less cluttered environment for a while. The austerity of the desert beckoned, clean and wind-scoured, like a cleared foundation on which to rebuild. Arizona would do nicely, and if she wasn’t yet convinced she wanted to die here, she nevertheless owed this place debts she could never pay.

Here was where she relearned that love need not stifle, nor grow complacent; that passion need not grow stale. That you really could link hands and hearts with another, whose life became a precious complement to your own. As long as there was love, there was life, and Arizona was just fine that way.

Sarah was from here, after all, and that counted for much.

The ancient Middle East wasn’t the only place where saviors walked in the desert.

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.”

Four

Days passed, bones began to knit…

And itch. In years gone by there had been summers in which he had lain naked and brooding on forest floors, or near the shores of lakes, and as he invariably would have forgotten mosquito repellent, they would come near to consuming him alive. They would leave him covered with a raw quilt of bites that he would scratch until blood welled and he was left almost mad with the screaming constancy of sensation.

The itch of skin, the itch of bone. Between the two, he preferred the former; the latter was agonizingly more than skin deep. Would that he had the ability to turn inside-out, or plunge a hand deep within, and scrape along every hidden channel that plagued him.

But he would get through it. No one could itch forever.

Of the pills prescribed to stabilize his expected mood swings, Clay wondered if they didn’t work more by power of suggestion than by anything else. Perhaps he was just on a natural remission as far as those tendencies were concerned. There were no threats here; more than anything, he was surrounded by a routine that stultified by its blandness, boredom. But if slipping pills down his gullet in daily rations made them feel safe, fine. He knew better. If he had to kick, or bite, or swing those casts like weighty gauntlets, he knew he could, without hesitation.

And what would Dr. Adrienne Rand say then?

It would be a blow to her, all the time she’d put in on him thus far. Given past experience with the prior skull dabblers who had shown him to their couches, the burden of proof that she wasn’t just going through more motions was definitely on her shoulders. And she had held up all right. He knew the difference by now. Familiarity had bred a general contempt for most of her ilk, but for now he was willing to grant that she had a genuine core of human interest. “Help me, Adrienne,” he could cry, like a child awakening in the night, and she would come running.

Not that she was free of self-indulgent curiosity. This too he could spot when she posed questions, or lit up with fascination at some minor revelation he thought insignificant. She had an agenda as mercenary as it was irrelevant to him, but as long as she kept humanity in the foreground he would not begrudge her the rest.

"You’ll win some shrink, somewhere, the research grant of a lifetime,” Uncle Twitch had told him last year, mostly joking but not entirely, and it had been one of those rare occasions when Graham had actually laughed.

Right out of the psychoanalytical starting gate, Adrienne put him on twice-weekly sessions, Sundays and Wednesdays, and would periodically pop by for brief visits. Spot-checks?

As faces went, he supposed hers was the only one he looked forward to seeing in the hospital; the rest were drones and human dross. Adrienne Rand, though, brought with her this pinched look of interest, as if his room wasn’t just one more stop along the hall. He appreciated that she never exuded patently false cheer. For what it was worth, perhaps she was of more inherent honor than most who wore the Homo sapiens designer tag.

She was tall, only an inch or so under his own five-nine, and with her blond hair pulled back, and the seriousness with which she took his case, it soon became entertaining sport to fantasize her into roles he doubted he would ever tell her about. He saw her in black Nazi leathers and crimson lipstick, a Goddess of Pain and Humiliation who ruled the halls of an unspeakable clinic unknown to the medical mainstream. She would carry a riding crop for effect, and an ominous black bag filled with painful instruments of exploration. A well-greased glove might slide down his throat as she sought to tear out his heart, or up his rectum in search of secrets dirtier still. It might very well be the only thing before which he would have to lie helpless…

Just idle thoughts. Everyone needed diversions while on the mend.

In truth, she gave him no encouragement that such fetishes were part of whatever twisted upbringing she would call her own, so he settled for satisfying her endless curiosity about his past.

He told stories, random synaptic firings with no apparent pattern, and he noticed that the more he remembered, the less Adrienne spoke. She did not have to; she was sucking it out of him with her eyes and her presence alone.

So here it is, Dr. Adrienne Rand. Surely you’ve heard whining tales of misfits before, but if it means that much to you:

Doesn’t everybody have parents who go through life looking at each other as if they both have made a horribly wrong turn somewhere in the distant past, but cannot recall precisely where? Probably it is easier, in the day-to-day, to pretend it never happened than to do something about it. One can fall for years before striking bottom, and it doesn’t take nearly the effort of one minute of climbing.

Doesn’t everybody have a father who was nearly forty by the time he got around to siring offspring? A father who proudly fought with the Marines in Korea and let no one forget it, and who saw his firstborn as a prospective little soldier to be marched around and around within the house on peculiar drills? Three hours is forever when you’re five. Left, right, left, right, and don’t you dare cry, you little pussy, if you cry I’ll smack you and your mother, and you’ll watch. He learned to toe the line, and by the time he was old enough to understand the omnipresent television show called Vietnam, and listen to his father’s armchair Pentagon rhetoric about everything that was being mishandled there, young Clay’s big fear in life was that it would all end before he was old enough to ship over.

Doesn’t every father hold his kid’s hand over the gas-stove burner, an exercise in discipline?

Doesn’t everybody have a mother whose eyes deaden with every increase in breast droop and hip expansion, and to whom vodka is a wretched god that gives and takes away? A mother who, too often, cries herself to sleep on a sagging couch and clutches her child to her heart and, with reeking breath, murmurs promises of tomorrow? We’ll go away, for the rest of our lives, but remember, you can’t tell Daddy, it’s our own special secret.

Doesn’t everybody have brothers and sisters who failed to survive? He was first, the eldest, therefore the strongest. His survival seemed perfectly natural at the time, as one crib death and then three miscarriages claimed all others who might be called siblings. He recollected his small, solitary celebrations with root beer and a hidden cache of firecrackers, because he had outlived yet another.

How insular, this world of childhood, when anything might be perceived as the norm.

“How old were you when your sister died?” Adrienne asked, a Wednesday afternoon in her office. He actually looked forward to the sessions more and more. They were the two hours per week when he felt farthest from his itching bones.

“I was five,” he said. “It’s one of my first real memories. I can’t say for sure, but something about that day had a real Sunday-afternoon feel to it. I think we’d been to church… and I remember a roast smell, all through the house. Beef roast, that was always Sunday food. Special. Family day, you know. All God’s children love a good roast.”

He looked at Adrienne in her chair, legs crossed at the knee, where her interlocked fingers rested. All she did was nod, but he knew her nods by now, could differentiate among them. Yes, she was saying, go on, tell me more. Feed me.

“I remember my mother, her voice at first, coming out of the nursery and down the hall. High, very high, and loud. Like she was trying to talk, but something was clipping frequencies from her voice, so it was just this… this sound… this creepy sound. Crying, but uglier, just… nonsensical. Like the sound of chaos, if chaos could grieve. I’d never heard anything like that before. It scared the hell out of me. I just stayed put on the dining room floor — I was playing with a toy truck — but even though I was scared, what I really wanted to do was run down the hall and see why she was making that noise. Because whatever it was, if I saw it and I didn’t scream, I knew I’d see something I’d never seen before. I didn’t know what… maybe like a god suddenly showed up in there or something. It was Sunday, remember.”

“Was this the first time your parents were forced to explain death to you?”

Clay nodded. Memories were like dominoes, one tripping another tripping another, until all lay flat and inert. “My father sat me down on the back stoop with him that evening. The sun was going down. One of the neighbors was grilling steaks, must have been. That smell of meat again.” He shook his head. “The backyard seemed bigger at twilight. It always scared me then, I thought it was changing on me. I couldn’t trust it, it wasn’t the same place I’d play during the day. I, umm… I guess I must have asked where they’d taken Amy. It was the only time I can remember seeing him cry. Actual tears on that leathery, pitted face — it seemed so wrong. He told me God sent some people to take Amy away, because He needed more angels.” Clay laughed. “I think that was the extent of my father’s theological understanding. And if he thought he was giving me comfort, he couldn’t have been more wrong. I sat there wondering, if it was that easy, what was to stop them from coming for me the next time?

“‘At ease,’ he told me. He actually said that, ‘At ease.’ And then he nodded and told me, just this once, it was okay to cry if I wanted to. I sat there and tried, but nothing happened, so I told him I’d save it for later. He put his arm around me and said he was proud of me for that.”

“For staying strong, you mean.”

“Not so much strong, as in control. Control, that was a very big issue for my father.” He supposed it still was. He had neither seen nor spoken to nor corresponded with either parent since leaving Minnesota four years ago. His father would be sixty-four now; there was no reason to believe him dead. Men like that never died before living a full lifespan and more, inflicting their share of misery on the world. “Maybe that’s what shook him up most about my sister’s death. And my mother’s round of miscarriages after that. It must have been her drinking that did those. She was probably so toxic inside, nothing could live for very long. He used to hit her but she wouldn’t stop. Everything was way the hell out of his control. Maybe that’s what first taught me that something could be out of his control. It was… liberating. So I became the miscarriage that lived.”

It was his fourth session with Adrienne when that came out, and shouldn’t he be feeling at least some relief from such confessions? One would think so. These rancid old memories, he’d not called them up for longer than he could remember. They were episodes in the life of a Clay Palmer he no longer recognized, a family that wasn’t truly his. The most he felt during it all was some minor uneasiness now and then, never any real pain.

Quite the contrary: There could be fun in this, as if he were a boy, with a boy’s usual fascination with morbidity, and he had found a bloated roadside carcass to prod and turn over, and whose distended cavities he might examine to see what squirmed inside.

There was no real pain linked with telling Adrienne of the child he had been, the slings and arrows withstood. Doesn’t everybody know small boys, late to grow, last to be chosen, first to be punched and spat upon when childhood begins its rites of stratification? Some boys simply grow up magnets for fists and spittle, some subtle thing indefinably strange about them. Such tormented boys radiate their otherness from every pore and cell, a phenomenon everyone recognizes but none can qualify. It might as well be debated why the sun rises in the east.

Yet why such variance in their adult selves, when all have been much the same victims? Some grow stunted, some straight and true, while others grow like lone pine trees on the sides of barren mountains, twisted by winds into ghastly shapes that are freaks of nature, one of a kind, fundamentally abhorrent.

Were these the boys who learned to bite in self-defense? Who smiled, bully-blood on their lips and chins, at bigger boys who for the first time knew pain and tears and their own high-pitched shrieks? Were these the boys who, no longer tormented, were shunned instead, abandoned to sit alone on green playgrounds with their sack lunch or a book or their own thoughts, the object of sullen loathing and — admit it — fear?

In his experience, in his humble estimation, they were.

For doesn’t everybody stumble across their own survival mechanisms deep within, as if inscribed upon tablets that cannot be read, yet are nevertheless comprehensible? The most ancient languages are learned by instinct.

This was his world, the one into which he had been born, the world that had penned its inarguable natural laws upon his heart, then demanded obedience or death.

How odd, then, that his fellow citizens had passed so many laws against what seemed to come most naturally.

But maybe it was him, all him, all wrong. At times he fretted about his heredity, some hideous genetic mistake inside, as had once been attributed to mass-murderer Richard Speck. Adrienne told him he need not worry, such claims had been mostly sensationalism. It was more vital that he focus on what he could control, could understand.

And it came about fifty minutes into this, his fourth session in her office. Two full minutes of silence passed before he fell back into his present self from the past, and realized his broken bones did not itch. They would later, surely they would, but for now it was like realizing there was an end to the routine that had so quietly engulfed him.

He would be discharged soon, would be on his way. Back to Denver, yes… but where?

This was solitude; this was the loneliness spoken of by hermits isolated within crowds. This was the desolation that old Eskimos must feel when sitting on the ice, abandoned by family and waiting to die.

Clay’s breath began to come in spastic hitches; his throat constricted and felt suddenly raw. Worst of all was the scalding presence of tears before he even knew they were on their way. It was a low and brutish thing to do, but he could not stop himself. His body, loathsome thing that it was, was betraying him for reasons of its own. He was clueless, and spilling forth from within.

“Shit. I don’t — don’t understand this,” he choked out. How grotesque his voice was.

Adrienne was there for him, as much as she could be, leaning forward to press a tissue to his fingertips. He looked at it for a moment before letting it flutter to the floor. If he was going to cry, then let it soak him.

His sudden perspective on the office was that of a vandal. So much to break, so much to shatter into fragments that would cascade with enough noise to drown out tears. What release destruction could bring. He felt the urge resonate in bone and fiber, nerve and cell. It crawled within his arms, trembled within his legs; it wrapped around his heart and sang inside his blood.

He clenched shut his eyes, wrapped himself with both arms, until it passed as surely as a seizure.

He looked at Adrienne and realized she knew. She read it all in his face and her fleeting wisp of fear was as palpable as a scent. She had placed her faith in lithium and it had failed her, whereas his resolve had triumphed…

If only this once.

“Help me,” he whispered.

And this, too, might happen but once.

Five

By sunset, everyone at the party had finished eating and now tended to amiably drift from one conversation to another. Adrienne found herself at the edge of the rear deck with Sarah, seated, content to watch the multihued glory of the melting sun. The back of Jayne and Sandra’s house had a western exposure that opened onto a desert panorama, an ascetic flatland where spilled the day’s blood, rich and rubied.

It was the kind of house, kind of location, that she would have preferred, had Sarah not hungered to remain closer to the heart of Tempe and the campus. She could look at this sight every evening, never tiring of it, for it would never be the same twice. This realization pricked her heart with a tiny stab of loss: How many sunsets had she missed already in her life that she could never retrieve?

Sarah propped her feet on the wooden railing; from her lap she took a bowl of apple slices soaking in a splash of white wine, and placed it in Adrienne’s lap. “Be my wench. Feed me,” Sarah said with a grin, then tipped her head back, opened her mouth expectantly.

“You look like a baby wren,” Adrienne said and played along. One cool, crisp slice after another, dripping with wine — she set each on Sarah’s tongue and watched them slide past her lips. Drops of wine plinked soft as new rain and began to trickle down Sarah’s cheeks. Adrienne leaned in with flickering tongue to kiss them away.

“Are we creating a spectacle?” Sarah asked.

Adrienne looked over her shoulder to the house and sliding glass doors, open now, looked at the small milling groups. No one was paying attention. “Yes,” she said anyway.

Sarah half-groaned, half-laughed. “Good.” She returned the kiss with sticky, sweetened lips. “I knew I could turn you into an exhibitionist if I had enough time.”

Years before, when married, Adrienne would watch women who put on such public displays with men, and was usually tempted to suspect them of ulterior motives. Showing off, or using one man’s attentions to attract another; something about them seemed terribly self-conscious, like exhibitions of plumage or twitching haunches during mating season.

Now she was willing to accept that such things had been done, at least some of the time, simply for the carnal joy of it, and that she had been jealous of others’ freedom to do something in full public view that she herself would never have done. Sarah had been more instrumental than anyone in changing her mind, just by being Sarah. She got like this whenever and wherever the mood struck; in private or not, it never mattered.

They had met after Adrienne had been in Tempe for half a year, and had sat next to each other at an evening guest lecture at the university. Nothing short of broken legs would have kept Adrienne away. The speaker was once a student and protégé of Erich Fromm. Adrienne adored Fromm, whose theoretical stances on social psychology, along with the more mythically oriented stances of Carl Jung, had driven stakes into the heart of much of what she found lacking or simplistic in Freud. Jung and Fromm comprised the two mighty pillars on which she had built her own outlook.

Adrienne had arrived as early as she could and sat third row center in the lecture hall. Two seats over sat a woman who doodled in a notebook and, minutes later, kicked off both shoes and propped her dirty bare feet upon the back of the seat before her. Adrienne could not decide if she was rude or just ill-bred.

And what wide, strong feet they were, too. Adrienne couldn’t help but stare, fascinated by the sturdy bone structure, the power in the high arch, the light tracery of veins, then the sudden thought of every place they must have carried this woman throughout her life. She was possessed of an abrupt desire to touch them, stroke them. The woman caught her staring, and Adrienne tried to look away, but too little, too late.

“At my day job,” said the dark-haired woman, leaning in, very deadpan, “I tread on grapes.”

“Oh.” Adrienne was brought up horribly short, never before at such a loss for words. Shouldn’t she say something, at least? “I shrink heads.”

She’d blurted it out before she realized it, and red could not even begin to describe the color blooming across her cheeks.

The woman smiled, wide and delighted; Adrienne next caught herself staring at her full lower lip, as moist and ripe as some enticing fruit.

“A genuine modern primitive,” the woman said, reaching out to shake Adrienne’s hand. “I never would have guessed.”

The lecture ended as, if not a total loss for Adrienne, then near enough, an hour and forty minutes of concentration shattered. The amplified voice wafted past her like a breeze she was only fitfully aware of, while instead consumed by every aspect of the woman she was to later know as Sarah Lynn McGuire. The sound of her breathing, the etching of her pen across page after page of notebook paper. No movement, from a shift in her chair to a sweeping of hair from her eyes, was too minute to escape notice. Adrienne felt progressively warmer throughout this exercise in torture, bathed in an imagined cloud of pheromones, while the object of a desire she’d not even realized she had was less than three tantalizing feet away.

Now this was going to take some introspection.

She had long acknowledged herself to be bisexual, if latent these days. It had been years since she’d had any kind of sexual relationship with another woman, and even those had been fleeting, sandwiched between lengthier affairs with boyfriends. First had come a handful of tentative high school encounters, more confusing than anything, wherein offbeat flirtation had led to hesitant kisses and experimental touches in the cars or bedrooms of friends, after which she would retreat to the solitude of her own room in the middle class fortress of her parents’ home, and sit without moving, aware of the fearful throb between her legs, as insistent as an accusation. It never quite felt wrong enough to frighten her away from a next time.

With college came greater assurance, and the consummation of what had previously been mere sex-play. She possessed her own life there, as did the women she occasionally met who wanted to be more than friends, and they had all the time needed to explore. It was no longer experimentation, this she recognized right away. The light touch of a nipple beneath her fingertips, the grinding undulation of a gently swelling belly against her own, the musky taste of petaled labia and budlike clitoris upon her tongue… she took to these as naturally as she had taken to men and their rougher, more singularly directed passions. Neither seemed to possess a clear advantage over the other. She was either neatly divided into halves, or, conversely, unified into a perfect whole. Omnisexual? It had an intriguing connotation.

Still, there had been no one of like gender in her life since graduate school, and she had come to think of her lack of sexual differentiation in lovers as a phase she’d outgrown. In eighteen months of preliminaries and seven years of marriage, Neal had never even realized she was bi. Although after his philandering and their divorce, she’d thought of sending him a card — Guess what, I like pussy too — but it seemed a childish and spiteful thing to do.

Not to mention no longer applicable.

Or so she had believed, apparently erroneously. Her reinvention of self in Tempe had apparently brought the past. Adrienne credited the desert, naturally. Those winds and infrequent rains, no telling what buried treasures might wink anew in the dawning sun after a night’s erosion.

What greater proof did she need? For there she was, trapped in a lecture hall with her sweat and her hunger and a stranger. Going on thirty-two years old and her heart pounding as if fifteen, while she had no way of knowing if the woman seated within her reach shared even a remotely similar orientation.

Fortunately, Sarah had taken pity on her, had made the first overture. Perhaps she smelled the frightful conflict that must have exuded from Adrienne’s every pore and left her terrified to initiate further talk — but not too paralyzed to accept Sarah’s invitation to go to The Coffee Plantation for lattes.

And within a week Adrienne had reaffirmed for herself that which archaeologists have always known: buried treasures are far more beautiful and valued the second lifetime in which they see the sun.

The apple slices were gone and Sarah had drunk the wine from the bowl by the time the sun was down, nothing but a defiant rose-red rime thinned across the horizon. The party was coasting, mellow, and Adrienne wondered if they would ever get around to singing “Happy Birthday” to Jayne.

“Remember the code blue I told you about, from a couple of weeks ago?” Adrienne asked.

“How could I forget a wandering desert madman?” Sarah ran a finger in the bowl and licked the traces of wine from the tip. “Such a classic, and it had to be you. You had to remind me, didn’t you?”

Adrienne frowned. “You wouldn’t have been feeling privileged if you’d seen him brought in. It would’ve almost made you sick. He’d beaten his hands to splinters, don’t forget.”

“Sorry.” Sarah’s face of contrition. “It was just so vivid, you know?”

“I know, I know. There is something about it, isn’t there? But there’s something about him…” Adrienne sighed and waved her hand in frustration. “On one level I’m completely baffled by this guy. He doesn’t act quite as he should.”

She was breaching all manner of ethical considerations in discussing Clay Palmer. Still, there wasn’t a doctor or nurse she knew who adhered to expectations of patient confidentiality to the letter of the unwritten law. They all blabbed when they got home, and rationalized it by citing their discretion: What’s a little sacrifice of confidentiality between bedmates?

“He sounded pretty distraught to me,” Sarah said. “How’s he supposed to act?”

“Anybody who’s that problematic with aggression is going to resist counseling to some degree, if not exhibit outright hostility. I’ve never treated anybody like that who was very cooperative. Never.”

“And he’s not fitting that pattern?”

“No. He’s not. But he should. His background is textbook. I had him pegged as growing up in an authoritarian home, and I couldn’t have been more right. The poor kid’s father was an ex-Marine, and used to make him run drills when he was five and six. When he had a paper route, the father wouldn’t even break down and take over for him when he was sick — he’d follow him to make sure he still did the job, but he wouldn’t help. That was the father’s way of instilling a sense of responsibility.”

Sarah’s face soured. “Sounds like a real bastard.”

Adrienne nodded. “It goes on and on like that. A lot of the patterns are the same from case to case, but it never seems to screw up any two people in the exact same way.”

“But this one’s different even beyond the variations?”

“I think so. It’s odd — in spite of all my expectations to the contrary, he’s been surprisingly cooperative. That’s not to say he made it easy all along. He started out digging at me with a few barbs. Our first session he suckered me into one of the more cleverly segued propositions I’ve gotten.”

She caught a tiny pinching between Sarah’s eyebrows; perhaps she shouldn’t have mentioned that. She had overlooked the subtle associations that might trigger in Sarah, the kind of thing she was usually sensitive enough to avoid. While Adrienne was as happy with her as she’d ever been with anyone, she knew that Sarah held deep worries that could not be easily soothed, for they were not entirely groundless. While everyone worries to some degree about their mate leaving them for someone else, here it was compounded by Adrienne’s ability to vacillate between either sex. This Sarah could not do, and while she hid her anxieties well, still Adrienne understood that she held a clear advantage. Should she decide to return to a more traditional relationship someday, there was little Sarah could do to fight it. There were times this lay between them like a silent threat, barely acknowledged but biding its time.

Adrienne stroked the backs of her fingers along Sarah’s leg and went on. “All along, I felt he really wanted my help but would be too proud or too threatened to admit it, even if he didn’t have to come right out and say so. But he proved me wrong there, too. ‘Help me.’ Those were his exact words.”

As she drew in closer to Sarah’s side, she remembered the apprehension that washed over her just before those words had left Clay’s lips. She had watched him going through his emotional contortions, and there had surfaced within him a killing rage that thickened the air in the office. Every muscle had tensed and every doubt had surfaced: She had been wrong to trust him, been wrong to believe Ferris Mendenhall competent to prescribe an adequate dosage of lithium. She saw the wreckage that Clay could make of her office, and her. She saw her own obituary.

And as his seizure passed, there had swept through her an exhilaration she’d thought must surely be reserved for daredevil feats. Skydiving, ski jumping… anything where survival was left to fate.

This, more than anything, had taught her the addict’s rush.

“There’s something I’m not seeing yet in this guy,” Adrienne murmured. “There’s something in him that I’m missing.”

“Then you’d better find it before long. You won’t have all the time in the world with him.”

“Tell me about it.”

It was her one great fear in this case: Soon, word would come down to her that Clay Palmer was well enough to be discharged. He need not sit around until his hands healed and the casts were removed. While obligated to provide a certain measure of care, the hospital would fund the costs of a transient assault victim for only so long without squawking and demanding his release. He had insurance, a group employee policy, but the claim was being contested because, in leaving Denver, he had walked away from his job.

Of course, she had a certain measure of control, as well. His physical evaluation was out of her hands, but his psychological well-being was her responsibility. As long as she said he wasn’t ready to be released, that might be enough to keep him around.

“What I’m most worried about,” said Adrienne, “is if he decides he wants to go back home. There’s no way I can justify any follow-up then.”

“Have you thought about…?” said Sarah, almost teasing, dangling a possibility like tantalizing bait.

“What?” Adrienne met her eyes. “Come on, what?”

“Now think.” Sarah nestled in closer as a chilled breeze began to blow in off the darkening desert. Adrienne curled one arm up around her shoulders and slowly ran her splayed hand through Sarah’s tousled mane.

“Ow,” Sarah said. “Your fingers are sticky and you’re pulling my hair.”

“Good.” A cruel smile played over Adrienne’s lips and she drummed her wine-tacked fingers. “What are you getting at?”

Sarah twisted her head around until she could bite Adrienne’s hand, bearing down lightly with a grin until the hand relented.

“Don’t tell me I haven’t caught a little jealous pining in your eyes whenever the subject of my thesis comes up.”

Adrienne pinched Sarah’s nose. “If you’d decided on a subject, you mean.”

“You know what I’m talking about. You love independent research, and the fact that it’s going to consume my life before long digs at you, doesn’t it?” She demonstrated by gouging her fingers into Adrienne’s ribs, her most ticklish spot. “Right?”

“So what if it does? You’re a presumptuous little bitch, you know that?” As she was running out of bodily places to torment, name-calling seemed a viable alternative.

Sarah grabbed both of Adrienne’s hands and held them tight. “Then do something about it. What, the great healing motivator in my life can’t see the obvious? If you’re that intrigued by what makes him tick, run an end sweep around the hospital, go to the university psych department, and put in for some grant money so you can treat him as your first research subject.”

“And what makes you think I haven’t already moved in that direction?”

Sarah flashed her sweetest smile. “Because if you had, you wouldn’t have been so insufferably mopey about him five minutes ago. You would’ve been bursting.” She arched her eyebrows, smug and satisfied, and leaned in nose-to-nose. “Right?”

“Right,” Adrienne confessed.

She stretched out her legs to prop her feet on the railing beside Sarah’s, and together they watched the darkness thicken across the desert, waiting for someone to come and tell them how antisocial they were being. It was a birthday, after all.

Six

Her weekend passed too slowly after that, her Sunday shift crawling except for the hour-long session with Clay, their fifth. She was a victim of her own growing obsessions, and they murdered time while leaving its bloated corpse in her way.

Monday morning she went back in on her own time and flagged down an impromptu meeting with Ferris Mendenhall. The man himself was easy enough to work under, but she had always hated his office. Bare of wall and devoid of personality, it always gave her the impression of having just been moved into, or about to be vacated, with the decor boxed away. She wondered what it meant, if Mendenhall had never felt himself long for this office, this position.

“I’m trying to be as ethical as I know how,” Adrienne said, “and not bypass hospital hierarchy.”

From across his desk, for the most part clean as a windswept plateau, Ferris Mendenhall eyed her. He was a lean man in his mid-forties whose white coat tended to flap upon his frame like a clipper’s sail, and had no upper lip that she had ever seen. It remained hidden behind a drooping moustache that curled down with lazy bravado, a relic of a bygone age. If the sunburned pate visible through his thinning hair had been covered by a cavalry officer’s hat, he might well have been dashing.

“This should be interesting,” he said.

“How long would you estimate that Clay Palmer might be here before you start getting some real pressure to discharge him?”

“Clay Palmer…” Mendenhall leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers. “This would be the patient with the broken hands?”

“Yes.”

“Given that he came in under dual admission, so to speak, I’d say at least a few weeks.” He frowned with his deep-set eyes; it looked perilously close to bureaucratic scrutiny. “Why?”

Adrienne took a deep breath. “I’d like your support with something as regards his case. Let me preface this by stating that he needs more help than he’s likely to get here, unless somebody takes extra initiative. He’s from Denver, and twice he was committed there for observation and, I assume, some rudimentary treatment" — this she realized she had said with disdain — “and it certainly didn’t come close to meeting his needs. He needs more intensive therapy than he’s had an opportunity to get.”

Mendenhall rolled his chair back up to the desk. “This is not a county hospital for charity cases, and his insurance matter hasn’t been resolved yet, although it doesn’t look like the policy carrier has much ground to stand on. Still, if he needs months or years of therapy, refer him to County Services, where someone can deal with him on an outpatient basis.”

“That’s not good enough,” she said, and shook her head. “For a couple of reasons. First, he isn’t from here. If he were discharged, he’d have no place to stay. And even if he did, his dexterity’s so limited by those casts that, he is, for most practical purposes, helpless. Which means he’d have no choice but to return to Denver, and honestly, I don’t think he can even afford a bus ticket.”

Mendenhall fiddled with his moustache, a sad Monday-morning look about him. “And reason number two?”

“I’m making progress with him. In our midweek session last Wednesday, he made a specific request that I help him. Send him elsewhere, and not only is he forced to start over with someone new, but the trust that I’ve established with him is completely shattered. Which can’t help but impact the way he views the next therapist who tries to work with him.” Adrienne scooted to the edge of her chair. “Ferris, it’s my most sincere recommendation that discharging him anytime soon would be disastrous. Take one look through his file, and factor in what brought him here the night he was admitted, and you’ll see that his violent outbursts have been getting worse over time. He’s stabilized now, but he’s still in a very precarious state of mind.”

Mendenhall swiveled in his chair and stared for a moment at a file cabinet across the room. Upon it sat an iron casting of a Remington sculpture, horse and rider frozen in a moment of pure, perfect panic as, below, a rattlesnake hung poised in defiance. A curved symmetry rippled through the horse; it could either soar or collapse.

He swiveled back to her. “Unless his insurance carrier gets more cooperative, the administration will never allow him to stay here for any protracted length of time, and they are not swayed by arguments such as this, Adrienne.”

She knew this, of course. Administrative logic was cold and precise and devoid of heart. There was compliance with the Hippocratic oath, yes, and they could not have turned Clay away at the door. Moreover, though, there was a bottom line. Too often the two pursuits were incompatible.

Nor was she entirely above it. Why else was she here, rather than at County? Every fourteen days she cashed her check from here and not once thought it too high a reward.

“I’m not asking for an indefinite stay,” she said. “Before long, I may be able to work out a solution where Clay Palmer can be discharged and I can continue to treat him.”

One of Mendenhall’s eyebrows creaked upward. “And this would come about…?”

“You might as well know it now" — she paused, with a curt nod — “I recently applied for an independent grant to study male aggression.” Talking herself in deeper by the minute. Certainly she was committed now to taking action over the next day or two.

Mendenhall’s face seemed to glaze with incredulity, each pore constricted, each hair a stiffened bristle. “You will not bring your personal agendas to this ward, and expect to be automatically accommodated.”

“I don’t see anything here as being mutually exclusive. While my first priority is the welfare of my patient, I’m not going to sit here and tell you that, in a case like this, I have no auxiliary interest in it at all.” Adrienne leaned forward and relinquished Clay’s file onto Mendenhall’s desk, pecked it with a fingernail. “Just go through his file and see if you can find fault with a single thing I’ve said.”

“I’ll do that.”

The skirmish was hers. Now, to press the advantage. And hope it was not too much, too soon.

“I’d like your permission for a simple test on Clay that may seem a bit out of the ordinary. I’d like to have his genetic karyotype run.”

Mendenhall looked as if he had bitten into something sour. “What possible use could you have for that?”

“Specifically, to check him for a double-Y genotype.”

Mendenhall began to laugh, short hitches of breath that rippled his moustache. “There’s never been any conclusive correlation between a double-Y and aggressive behavior.”

“I’m aware of that. But it’s not been disproved, either.”

Double-Y’s possessed an extra male chromosome, an anomaly whose 1961 discovery had led to its carriers being regarded as “supermales.” Subsequent studies caused a sensationalized fear of genetically predisposed criminals, but this was largely the result of sloppy research methodology: Subjects in influential studies in Great Britain and Sweden had been culled from mental institutions and prisons, rather than from the general population.

Mendenhall grabbed the file and shuffled to general patient data, scanned it quickly. “No indication of subnormal intelligence — hmm, to the contrary. Height only average.” He closed the file and met her with quizzical eyes. “How could you possibly suspect he’s a double-Y?”

“I don’t,” Adrienne said. “He does.”

Mendenhall groaned and rubbed his crinkling forehead. “And he got this idea from where? Movies, or TV?”

Adrienne shook her head. “Neither. Clay has a collection of books about serial murders and criminal abnormality. He first read about the double-Y in connection with Richard Speck — ”

“Amateur speculation. Speck didn’t even have a double-Y.”

“Well, I gather most of the books Clay has, if not all, are more sensationalistic than scholarly in nature. But to be fair, I even looked it up in one of my old academic texts, and it was in error, too.”

“Is he fixated on this?”

Adrienne nodded. “To an extent. He mentioned it in our third session and didn’t much dwell on it, and once I’d explained that he shouldn’t consider himself a candidate for it — because of his intelligence and height — I didn’t think it was significant. But he brought it up again yesterday.”

She silently cursed all scientists and exploiters everywhere who, with half-baked brains, trumpeted baseless conclusions that served only to inspire panic, like ripples across a calm pond. She no longer paid attention to the latest findings of dietitians who announced new reasons to scorn old foods. They would undoubtedly be contradicted soon enough, and hopefully go to their graves someday with all the obscurity they deserved.

How much more fundamental, if less widespread, was the fear generated by those who attached stigmas to abnormal variations of body and mind? Such deviations were so deeply borne that, to those affected by them, it was like giving them cause to loathe their own bodies.

“I think if we have his karyotype run and supply him with picture-perfect proof that he’s not a double-Y,” said Adrienne, “it’ll help alleviate the anxiety he’s feeling over it. And free him up for the things that do matter.”

Mendenhall sat with pursed lips and frowning eyes, while the desktop held his gaze. “What kind of expenditure would this be?”

Always the cost; alleviation of misery was next in line. “If you want a dollar figure, I can’t say. But negligible. It’s a very routine, simple screen. We can’t do it on the premises but we can keep it local: the Genetics Center of Arizona Associated Labs.”

He progressed from pursed lips to gnawing at the inside of one corner of his mouth. “Find out how much. I can’t give you the authorization until I know.”

Adrienne smiled, a thin, shrewd, dealmaker’s smile that just managed to conceal her irritation that he did not wholly trust her word.

“Thank you, Ferris,” she said, and knew just when to leave.

The psycho ward didn’t allow televisions in the rooms — this was a surprise? On or off, TVs were notorious for implanting thoughts into heads. Clay had conversed with few of his ward mates, but enough to conclude that as far as most were concerned, denying them unlimited video access was wise. There was a large set in the dayroom, but it usually remained under the control of the staff, and whoever feared its influence — the home of the cathode-ray gods, perhaps — did not have to come near it.

Clay, however, soaked it up whenever he was able.

A tie to home; whenever he was home the TV was always on, although he didn’t know why. It commanded attention, if not respect. He viewed it not as entertainment, but as a conduit of information. He could wire in with optic and auditory nerves; pipe in news and documentaries, commentary both rational and apocalyptic. He could define the state of the world in any given half hour, and it was always maddened.

Fringe shows on syndication and cable access were best, the gleam on the cutting edge of media psychosis.

It took him a week of attempts, whenever TV security was lax, to locate The Eye of Vigilance, coming out of a Phoenix station. It had a late-night time slot in Denver, but early-evening here. Curious. Perhaps in Arizona it met with a wider receptive audience.

Clay’s rational side found that mildly scary, while the deconstructionist rejoiced — one more sign of Armageddon.

The Eye of Vigilance was the half-hour province of one Milton Wheeler, who lorded over his airwaves from behind a polished oak desk, and whose introductory fanfare announced to sycophants and heretics that he was “appointed by God as the conscience of the nation.” No one knew if he really believed this or not, but it never hurts to call in the big guns.

There was much that made him rabid, and this stocky fellow with wagging jowls and manicured hands and his glasses slightly askew railed against it all with varying degrees of eloquence, sometimes with guests at his side, sometimes taking phone calls, and he was absolutely full of shit. This was, for Clay, the main attraction. Milton Wheeler was an idol in the making and could not lose. If he lived, the far right would eventually canonize him. If he were killed, then he would be its martyr.

Though for all Wheeler’s propagandizing, Clay found that every now and again he did make an eerie kind of sense.

Monday evening, mid-October, an epiphany:

"A stranger is just an enemy you haven’t assessed yet,” he said, and the studio audience murmured its agreement.

“Did you hear that?” It was the patient in the chair beside Clay, forty years of twitches mellowing under medication. She always held two fingers as if they clamped a cigarette.

“Yeah,” said Clay.

“Do you believe that?”

“I think so. Don’t you?”

She pointed at the TV with her two fingers that never did anything alone. “That fat little man wants to be Jesus. Only he’s too heavy, he’d tear loose and fall off the cross. That’s why he’s so pissed off all the time.”

Clay cocked his head, staring at the screen, considering this. He half-shrugged, half-nodded. It was as good an explanation as any for what motivated the man. “But they make better nails now.”

“Well, somebody needs to go tell him, then.” She brought her fingers to her lips and, with no cigarette to puff, scratched her chin. “Are you busy now?”

“I’m waiting,” he told her, inspired by the unlikely wisdom of Milton Wheeler and this woman’s messianic imagery, “for a table to be prepared for me in the presence of my enemies.”

“Oh,” she said. “Okay.”

Clay watched until a nurse came along and noticed what was playing and switched to something less volatile, so he returned to his room and endured sundown — hated cusp of transition and advent of shadowed menace. The world stopped at the window, but the barrier was only glass and metal. Everything had a melting point.

A stranger is just an enemy you haven’t assessed yet.

He had learned this lesson early in life, had merely failed to qualify it so succinctly. And fathers and mothers are never so honest as to prepare their malignant offspring for the social abortion the world is sure to perform on them.

But, inquisitive Adrienne, doesn’t everybody wake up one day to realize his childhood was never the norm? Statistically speaking, neither mean, median, nor mode.

Doesn’t everybody blame himself for failure to fit in, by deed if not conscious admission, and self-inflict the punishment due? A razor blade makes fine slices on arms and legs and torso, but a penknife is even better, thicker of blade and duller by increments; the skin resists its pressure before giving way, and the sensation is so much more real. And blood makes splendid ink with which to write indictments against oneself.

Doesn’t everybody get together to compare scars for severity, frequency, aesthetics?

Doesn’t everybody?

Of course not. Only the survivors.

He learned early in adolescence that life was nothing if not full of dichotomies. High school stank of contradictions, and what is high school but a model of the greater world? Even in rebellion there is conformity, while even among outcasts one can find refuge.

He and his friends of that era banded together mostly by default. The despised and the rejected, the hated and the brutalized, they auditioned one another with bravado or indifference or threats, almost by instinct, and found kindred souls in their solitude. Athletes and scholars, socialites and thespians… they were none of these, looking upon those who were with scorn. In time Clay realized they did so mainly because, as deviants who felt too much or too little or looked wrong, they had no choice. They resented what they could never be, what they would never be allowed to be. I rejected you first, they seemed to scream inside, and most fooled themselves into believing it was true.

Clay learned to appreciate the irony: Even among their small, pitiful ranks he did not wholly belong.

For he alone recognized the fundamental truth that people seem to function best when they have someone to hate. Nothing else stirs blood so energetically, or heats such emotion. Nothing else motivates with such ferocity. Nothing else flickers so brightly in dying eyes.

Crusades had been launched and wars declared, lands besieged and races exterminated, because someone had refined their hatred of the different, of the other, into something they could wield as effectively as a weapon. It was progress.

And there were times when Clay wondered, if there really was a God, if He hadn’t created the world because He’d already known He would hate it.

These things the teenage Clay understood, day by day, year by year. Every fresh scar carved upon his body, and drop of blood spilled, and each tear that squeezed free of his eye, just seemed to confirm it.

Tears…? Even these. A world ignored may react with indifference, but a world hated seeks its own revenge.

A stranger is just an enemy you haven’t assessed yet.

With the sun fallen beyond window and horizon, Clay moved across the room to stare out into the night. The ceiling light still burned, and the glass just beyond the chain mesh became a ghostly mirror that floated against the black. There hung his face and shoulders, little more than outlines; a faint glimmer of each eye, the suggestion of his mouth, his nose; the rest obscured.

There, against the night: a stranger to himself, a living portrait of the enemy within.

Seven

Adrienne proved to Mendenhall’s satisfaction that a simple genetic karyotype would break no hospital bank account, even if insurance balked, and she was given clearance to have it run.

That Wednesday afternoon she came in early, escorted Clay down to the lab where a tech sampled his essences: a few hairs plucked from his scalp, and, to be thorough, a bit of blood drawn from his arm. Quiet and still, she gazed down as he submitted to the needle, watched it pierce skin, watched the vial fill with ruby brilliance. On his bared arm were the ghosts of old scars, five or six, white, emphatic like accent marks in a private language.

“Today’s the thirteenth,” he said, “isn’t it?”

“Right.” She found it fairly remarkable the way he kept track without a calendar.

“Maybe that’s a bad omen.” Clay frowned as the lab tech pressed a cotton ball over the violated vein.

“You never seemed superstitious before.”

He raised his arm for a minute, as instructed by the tech. “And maybe I’m not serious.”

Sometimes, she had to admit, it was not easy to tell.

The samples were packaged and sent across town by courier, to Arizona Associated Laboratories’ bio-med division, on University. It was out of her league, but a fascinating procedure nonetheless. As she understood, it involved taking a cellular sample — a hair follicle, say, or plasma — and chemically treating it to suspend the movement of the chromosomes in cells undergoing division at that moment. The cells were then squashed and smeared across a glass microscope slide and stained to improve visibility. The inventory of chromosomes in a single cell’s nucleus was then photographed through the microscope, after which each chromosomal image was cut from the print, sorted according to size and structure, matched into corresponding pairs, then pasted into a composite photo.

Any gross abnormality such as an extra Y sex-chromosome could not escape detection. The karyotype was a living diagram.

They would wait, they would see, and she would prove his fears groundless.

Later that afternoon, his session, on schedule: October sun slanting through the window, and the insistent whisper of the tape recorder, tiny cassette reels spinning to immortalize Clay’s silence from the couch.

Eventually: “You were looking at the scars, weren’t you?” He wore the long engulfing sleeves of a robe but proffered both arms anyway. “I noticed that.”

“Yes. They caught my eye.”

“What did you think of them?”

“I don’t know as I thought anything about them, per se.” Which was a lie, a little professional white lie; allowable, even expected. She had continued to see those pale, thin remnants of past slashes long after his sleeve had gone back down, wondering how they would feel beneath her fingers. There was nothing sexual about it; just the imagined tactility of hardened ridges. If there were enough of them, intersecting, they might feel like a chaotic web in which he chose to protect himself.

“Scars are benign, of themselves,” she went on. “Where you’re concerned, what interests me is the story behind them. The events and emotions that put them there.”

“We’ve been over that before.”

Nodding toward him, very slightly, with upraised eyebrows. Body language, when the words themselves might have been too harsh: You brought it up. He appeared almost sheepish.

“Twinkle, twinkle, little scar,” Clay said. “You hadn’t seen any of them before. I just wondered.” Biting his lip then. While he usually seemed to resent it when she left him to stew in his own silence, he was handling it better with every session. “It was sport, I told you that, I think. Didn’t I? Sometimes it was just endurance. Sometimes it was a rehearsal for something worse that I never ended up doing to myself.”

“Suicide, you mean.”

“I thought about it a lot.”

“But not anymore.”

He sat back against the couch. “It’s been a few years.” Contemplation, like shuffling through a photo album with nothing but grim black-and-whites: crime scenes and accident victims; his young life. “Maybe it just didn’t seem romantic anymore. You can get jaded about anything.” This struck him as amusing. “Self-destruction can get kind of old and pretentious if you keep after it long enough. If you don’t eventually off yourself, you’re just a poseur.”

Adrienne found herself tracking down an intriguing line of thought that Clay would, naturally, be too blind to see about himself. “So you put down the knife one day and decided, No more.”

“More or less.”

“Yet you’ve received several scars since then.”

Clay raised his head fractionally, wary — somewhat amused but tempered with something grimmer, as well, some spiny little paranoia. “So?”

Tightroping over the session once again, hoping instinct still served her well — that he was ready to be confronted with the obvious and could deal with it.

“So is it possible that you put away your knife, but turned the same task over to others… one of whom might be willing to do a more thorough job?”

Sun at her back and the soft, soft sound of the cassette. She was never more aware of it than at moments such as this, when words and eye contact and even the air in the room congealed.

“Death wish, huh?” Clay’s grin was shy and menacing by turns, depending on the tilt of his exquisitely contoured head. Biting his lip as he watched her with narrowed eyes, as if one moment hating her for finding him out, congratulating her for it the next. “Did it ever occur to you that maybe I decided I liked feeling other people’s skin give way under my hands instead of my own?”

A lie. No, not exactly, more a rationalization. A defensive barrier thrown up hurriedly, enough to block her but not sturdy enough to fool her. Clay would know that, wouldn’t he?

“That sounds like something that would come from a predatory outlook. From what I’ve seen about you, what I know about you, and the incidents that have gotten you into trouble, you don’t fit the predator mold.”

He stared down toward his casts. After three weeks they had gotten dingy, the pristine white given way to a more lived-in look. “I guess,” he said, and looked at her in surrender, even embarrassment, “I just overreact.”

Gently, Adrienne nodded. She had been sitting with one knee draped over the other, leaning back, relaxed or trying to at least give that impression, but now she dropped both feet to the floor and slid forward, edge of the seat.

Oh, what she could learn from him, given the time and the freedom.

“Whether they realize it or not, people usually overreact because they’re feeling threatened. And not always by anything so obvious as three gang-bangers trying to relieve them of the last of their cash.”

While she left this with him, Adrienne combed mental files. Trying to call up those incidents in which Clay’s impulses got the worst of him. The destruction — merely mindless, or cannily directed? — he could leave in his wake. Shattered glass doors in convenience store coolers; BMW pounded halfway to the scrapyard with a lead pipe; parking lot rammings of the cars of cocky drivers with more insurance than sense. Yes, there had been fights too, but were his incidents of vandalism sudden ventings of rage to keep him from harming others? Or unconsciously chosen symbols of a world he despised?

Clay shifted back and forth on the couch — all at once he just couldn’t get comfortable there. So he left it, wandered across the room until he could sag against the windowsill and stare out at a world he’d not been part of for nearly three weeks.

“I thought about trying to become a Buddhist once,” he said to the glass, to a world that would never hear him, “because they always seem so peaceful. That was very appealing, I thought it might help.” He had begun to rhythmically strike his casts together, clunk clunk clunk, hammer and anvil, harder, louder — how must that feel vibrating through his knitting bones? Then he stopped. “But it’s so passive, I just… I couldn’t.

“But I did read this story that made so much sense. A story about Buddha. Someone came up to him, trying to figure out what it was about him that made him so wise, so in tune. They asked him, ‘Are you a god?’ He said, ‘No.’ Then they tried again, ‘How about a saint, are you a saint?’ Same thing, ‘No.’ Finally had to ask, ‘Well, what are you, then?’ And Buddha said, ‘I am awake.’”

Adrienne smiled. It was a beautiful little fable and for a moment she thought how much Sarah would love it, its profound simplicity. But Clay had not shared it in delight, and she watched as he knocked his head against the window, eyes shut, breath fogging the glass.

“You related to something in that story,” she said.

“I woke up one day, or month, or year — who knows how long it took, these things never just come over you full-blown, it takes time. I mean, I know there’s something seriously screwed up about me, too, but… I started seeing everything around me for what it was. And I realized it was all I could do to stand it, living in a world where everybody seems satisfied with so little. I’m not talking about material things, I mean their lives. Give them their little ruts and they’re happy. Or maybe not, but they settle for it, because they don’t know any other way out. And nobody encourages them to find it.”

Adrienne dared not interrupt his flow, watching as he drew himself together, stood taller, squarer at the window.

“It’s all just part of the grand mediocracy,” he said.

“Mediocrity, you mean?”

Clay shook his head. “Mediocrity is a quality. Mediocracy is the process that perpetuates it.” He must have noticed her vague uncertainty. “The word, I mean, I made it up.”

She nodded, and liked the word a great deal.

He explained: “In a democracy, the people are in charge. Theoretically. In an autocracy, it’s a despot. In a theocracy, the church rules. So, in a mediocracy…” He left it open, passing it to her.

“Society is ruled by that which is mediocre,” she finished, feeling a click within, a reversal of roles. He had become the lecturer and she the pupil.

She had wanted to learn from him? Of course. She had just thought she would remain in charge the whole time, and in a small way hated to lose the moment when she saw him turn again, back to the window, to stare. Hated world, intolerable world, world that rejects and is rejected.

“I’m awake,” he whispered, “but all it does is hurt.”

She thought of ruts over the next couple of days. How easy to fall into them, how difficult to recognize them from inside. Was she living in one as of late?

She worked, she treated patients. She came home, she slept. Books, always there to be read, nonfiction mostly, biographies and psychology texts, the occasional mystery. Her parents had retired two years ago to Prince Edward Island and she faithfully wrote them every other week. Now and again, a drive into the desert to watch the dawn, and feel the warming embrace as the newborn sun scorched the purity of land, to remember why she had come down here. Anything else? No, not much of note.

And she had to admit that, were it not for Sarah, it might sound dreadfully sterile. Sarah was a live-in safeguard against things becoming too routine. Sarah who prodded, “See this? Let’s go here,” and, “Look, look who’s playing, you’re coming with me, aren’t you?” Sarah never had to prod very hard. Adrienne wanted a social life, but the world was geared to those whose nights were free. It was her schedule — how the hell was she supposed to have a real social life when she didn’t clock in until four in the afternoon?

Re-evaluation often came out of unlikely inspirations: this time a patient who had brought her back face-to-face with the reasons she had gone into psychology in the first place.

Ruts meant no new purpose, no fresh goals. And so, that night after work, following the session with Clay, she stayed up until four completing her initial letter of proposal for a possible grant to study male aggression. She had already been to the university psychology department to see what was available, found herself drawn to one involving correlations between violence and authoritarian backgrounds. Perfect.

Of course, with the pace of funding agencies, both state and federal, she stood almost no chance of getting approval in time to take advantage of Clay’s presence in Tempe. He would be long gone, discharged. There was no reason to expect Ferris Mendenhall to approve his stay for that long, assuming Clay would even want to stay.

Still, it didn’t mean that, were a grant approved, she might not be able to make later contact.

Without exaggeration, Clay Palmer was unlike any other patient she had ever treated. She’d had ample contact with sociopaths and schizophrenics, and with patients whose maladaptation to the world had turned them into dysfunctional wretches. In their company Clay would fit, but he was the first of them to speak so rationally as a theoretician.

The mediocracy. Would Friedrich Nietzsche have spoken similarly, in this day and age, had he found himself in the asylum at the age of twenty-five?

Note to herself: See if there was anything available on the treatment Nietzsche had been receiving at the end of his life. It had been, after all, during the dawn of the psychoanalytic method.

Now, if she could just get the results of the karyotype so they could put that behind them.

Adrienne had been expecting it to arrive without ceremony, by courier perhaps, finding it in with her mail some afternoon when reporting for her shift.

The last thing she had expected was the Friday phone call from Arizona Associated Labs, ten minutes after her arrival. The voice on the other end was bewildered and excited in the same breath.

The results were nothing Adrienne had heard of before.

Worse, they were nothing the caller had ever seen.

Eight

She tried to banish the word from her mind. Such an ugly word, rife with connotations unfair to a victim of biology’s whims and nature’s passion for variety. Still, the word lingered, applicable, technically correct.

Mutation.

No wonder she had detected such a thrill in the voice of the geneticist who had called with the news. He had been looking at something so unusual its implications weren’t even understood.

That weekend, Adrienne spent every free moment poring over genetics texts to give her at least some working knowledge of the subject, conversational footing in a science where even most M.D.’s were lacking. She burned both midnight and noonday oil, barely needing sleep. Sarah did not resent this in and of itself, only that for once Adrienne refused to share that which was consuming her. Tough. Sarah miffed was only a temporary condition, and this business of chromosomal mutation was just a bit beyond the usual pale of lives gone astray.

The core of the human animal, Adrienne knew, was written out in a seemingly endless sequence of protein codes, three billion base pairs in all, linked into the twining dual strands of a double helix, one of nature’s most elegant structures. Three billion links in the chain of DNA, an identical text found in the nucleus of nearly every cell in the body. She found mind-boggling the sheer numbers and the infinitesimal scale on which they existed. Scaled-up analogies were the only thing that helped her grasp the enormity of the miracle. One she found especially vivid: It was as if a rope with a diameter of two inches and a length of 32,000 miles was neatly arranged within an organic vessel the size of a domed stadium. Behold, a single nucleus.

The rope, however, was not of continuous length. Human DNA was apportioned among forty-six chromosomes, two of which, the X and the Y, determined gender, the remainder existing in twenty-two matched pairs. Every trait of structure and function and bearing that characterized one as a human being — as well as an individual among the world’s billions — was encoded in the 50- to 100,000 genes found along the chromosomes. Most of the time, when anything went wrong on a genetic level, what and where was a mystery, although the number of genes associated with specific diseases and defects was increasing all the time.

Of genetic disorders, she learned there were around 3500. Among those, a mere twelve were so obvious they could be sighted off a karyotype at a glance.

Among them were conditions such as Klinefelter’s syndrome and Turner’s syndrome and others afflicting normal gender designation. Too many X chromosomes, or not enough. Then there was the XYY male genotype that had provoked such hotly contested debate.

Down’s syndrome was also among this dozen, whose mentally retarded and physically impaired progeny carried a third copy of chromosome twenty-one, instead of the normal pair.

Twelve abnormalities, all unique.

But then there was Clay Palmer, who exhibited a thirteenth not even in any book she consulted: a triple set of chromosome twelve.

This was most unexpected.

And very, very new.

“How does this manifest itself in my patient?” she had asked.

“That’s the wrong question. It’s premature,” she was told by a geneticist named Ryker. “Inasmuch as I can’t even tell you what this means.”

In the physical nature of the defect, it was most obviously closest to Down’s syndrome, an identical glitch but involving a different pair of chromosomes. Clearly, Clay Palmer exhibited none of the symptoms characteristic of Down’s. He was highly intelligent, physically healthy, with no skull deformation or slanted eyes, no indication of heart disorder.

Chromosome twelve. Here too were located genes associated with hemolytic anemia, lipoma, myxoid liposarcoma, type-one vitamin D dependency, and —

Acute alcohol intolerance.

This could be a find. Clay had been hospitalized more than once for alcohol poisoning.

Her weekend was lost in a density of specialization and the vast interior landscape, never without a book, reading wherever opportunity presented itself: kitchen, office, bathroom, behind the wheel while stopped at traffic lights, on the sofa while failing to realize that for the past ten minutes Sarah’s feet had been in her lap. In learning there was safety, for to set the books aside was to remove the diversion and nakedly confront the fact that she was absolutely petrified.

Because what does it mean? What does this mean in terms of his body and his mind?

In her hospital sat a young man who by turns sought to tear himself and other people to pieces, the worst of his impulses held in check by a fragile grasp on the hope that he might learn to become something better. Whether a noble quest or a fool’s errand, Clay Palmer had seemingly yet to decide, but the outcome was largely up to her. If she was correct, Clay might only be months away from committing the ultimate irrevocable crime, after which intervention would become a moot point. His future would consist of prison, or death.

He had looked to her for help. And she was going to have to look him in the eye and tell him the truth, along with the words she hated most of all:

I’m sorry… I don’t know.

And how inadequate these words sounded to her ears. Who, though, among healers of body and mind, felt adequately trained in dealing out disappointment? Who felt comfortable admitting there were syndromes beyond their expertise, beyond even their knowledge? What pompous pretenders they all were at times. Their understanding of the totality of human life was barbarously crude, not far beyond using leeches and trephining holes into the skull to release evil spirits.

When Clay looked at her, it was with the same lost melancholy another’s face might have worn after being told a parent had died, or a sibling, a favorite grandparent… someone who had always been there, now gone. It was the face of downward spirals, and Adrienne pictured Clay sliding helplessly along a coil of double helix.

Thirty-two thousand miles. He might never hit bottom.

“It’s me, then.” His whisper was as soft as the sound of a knife on a throat.

His room felt cold for no good reason, or was she the only one who noticed? It was Monday afternoon, hell of a way to start the week — you seem to be coming along nicely in our sessions, and by the way, did you know you’re a freak of nature?

“I thought it was something I could work on, try to beat,” he said, “but it’s me…”

“Clay, please listen, there’s no reason to believe that. It’s too early to conclude what effect this might have on you, or even if it has one at all.”

“It’s me, it’s me,” and his voice curled into a low chant of loathing, “it’s me,” weighted forearms beginning to clash against each other, the casts striking as hammer and anvil, each blow harder than the last. Eyes wide, an acute madness brought on by knowledge — he had looked into deformity and found himself staring back. Black hair in tangles that fell into his eyes, he burned upon a pyre of his own fears, and she had no way to assuage them.

“It’s me and it’s in every fucking cell in my body!” Clay screamed.

He was off the bed before she realized what he was doing, lurching across the room to the far wall, throwing himself whole-bodied into a murderous swing at the chain link over the window. The cast — his right — rebounded with an atonal twang of metal, and he battered away at it again as she went for the door, holding it open, nodding into the hall while in they came, the enforcers of the asylum she’d had waiting just in case. He was code blue all over again, and succeeded in impacting the chain link with enough force to drive it into the window behind. Glass shattered, but if he wanted shards he was out of luck, nothing had fallen inside, so he sagged down the wall while turning on himself. Reddened fingertips hooked just beyond the ends of the casts, ragged nails in need of trimming. Clay seemed to regard his body as something hideous beyond tolerance, head straining on neck as if to distance itself from torso. With those heavy, clawed hands he ripped at the T-shirt under his robe, shredded through to the skin beneath.

He tore.

He tore.

The orderlies were on him before he knew they had entered the room. Arms seized, he was dragged away from the wall, sobbing. His last recourse at venting the corrosive rage was to snap, and try to bite.

Convulsing and nailed to the floor by other hands, enforced cruciform pose and raw bleeding stomach and raked chest and old ribbed scars from older hatreds turned inward, he met her eyes just once…

Then followed the needle all the way to his arm.

As many times as it took.

It was the curse of the evening shift: One could never get off at midnight and have enough time to drown workday sorrows in a long night of binge drinking. She’d be lucky to get in three rounds before last call.

Home, then, home and a bottle. Nobody could run her out of home before she was good and ready.

Adrienne turned on the stereo before pouring the first drink, volume low because Sarah was already asleep upstairs. Music had its charms, a companion that never judged failures. She could listen to the enchantment of Celtic song and believe in the magic of beautiful dark-haired women with the throats of angels.

She found the note in the kitchen, taped to the freezer door, where she wouldn’t miss it. Sarah’s expansive, loopy hand:

I invented a new drink tonight: the peanut butter daiquiri. It sticks to the roof of your liver.

Are you smiling?

I love you and I think you’re working too hard.

Adrienne peeled it away from the door — smiling, yes — and brushed it with her fingertips, some new kind of Braille, seeking love, any connection. Such mementos she kept in a small box upstairs, always meaning to get around to sorting them and giving them a proper scrapbook home, but never finding the time.

Her drink of choice tonight was gin over ice with a squeeze of lime. She carried it to the sofa and sank into both.

And what of Clay, this late hour? Calmed out of his senses, strapped into his bed in case he was feigning stupor, or woke up cranky. Three and a half weeks of lithium might as well have been breath mints, for all the good it had done him. Given enough of a trigger, he could have exploded at any time.

Still…

He had not.

So which had been the greater force within him: self-control, or medication? Her every assumption about him was now in a tenuous new light. Oh, she could talk, all right, could spin textbook reassurances in accordance with proper methodology: no reason to believe his genetic condition had anything to do with behavioral affect, cognitive defect, emotional maladaptation, nothing to indicate any connection at all…

And it would have been miraculous if this had reassured him. She wasn’t even fooling herself. This was simply beyond all understanding.

Adrienne got a second drink and returned to the sofa with the rainstick kept propped in one corner. It had been made in the shadow of the Andes, a meter of thin Normata cactus. While dead and drying, its spines had been pressed into the hollow body, which some peasant artisan had then filled with pebbles and fragments of bone, before sealing the end.

She upended it slowly, like an hourglass, and listened to the cascade of pebbles and bone over delicate spines, a rippling sound like a sweet July shower. Sarah had bought this for her for their first month’s anniversary, after Adrienne’s passing remark that she missed the rains of San Francisco.

Prayers for rain; the Diaguitas of Chile used rainsticks to serenade their gods. In more superstitious moments, she fancied she could do likewise: serenade elder gods of the mind, summoning the spirits of Jung and Fromm; prayers for a deluge of insight.

“Paper didn’t say anything about rain.”

Sarah slouched in the doorway to the hall, frowzy-headed and squinting against the light. She wore rumpled socks and a T-shirt that fell to mid-thigh, promoting some den called Club Cannibal, on the Ivory Coast. She braved the light and came on in.

“I woke you, I’m sorry.”

Sarah, waving it off, half-asleep and squinty, shuffled around the sofa to lean over and wrap her arms around Adrienne’s shoulders. Their heads knocked lightly together, black hair on blond. She felt the tender press of lips to her neck.

“You look whipped,” Sarah murmured.

Adrienne fought it, finally shut her eyes and nodded. “I’m sitting here second-guessing myself. It takes some effort.”

Sarah kissed her again and came around to join her. Adrienne set aside the rainstick, listened to its final trickling.

“Are you ready to talk to me?”

Here again was that breach of ethics, that forbidden sharing of privileged information. She had often compared her profession with religious vocations and their inevitable crises: priests who doubted, nuns who lusted, vice versa. Encouraged to seek guidance only from others in the same fold, they would get such a narrow perspective in return, wouldn’t they? Such myopia had never made sense to her. Sometimes you needed a confessor from beyond your own circle, if only to remember there was another world out there, with other ways of thinking.

So she told: Clay and the test, the results and his reaction. Feeling no better, but less alone, and less alone can be a lot.

“You had an obligation to tell him,” Sarah said. “There’s no way around that.”

“I know that" — Adrienne was gesturing more emphatically than she realized — “but it’s the timing, I thought he was strong enough to deal with it, I really did. I completely misjudged it, the chance he’d revert back to an earlier state where he’d try mutilating himself.”

“But look at the kind of news it was. Do you think there’s a good time to hit somebody with something like that?”

Point well made. Perhaps the true measure of her progress with Clay would be how well he acclimatized himself to the test results over the next several days — not his immediate devastation.

“And consider this: You’d have to tell him eventually. If you told him it came back normal and then admitted you’d been lying, no matter how well-intentioned the reason, how do you think he’d feel then?”

“Betrayed. Maybe manipulated.”

“You’re damn right he would. I would.”

You would, wouldn’t you? And you’d be furious about it, too. A part of Sarah was like Clay, on some rudimentary level. Odd how it had never occurred to Adrienne before. Impulsive, a bit untamed, now and again given to fanciful rumination, Clay was like Sarah would be with all the restraints chipped away, leaving only a core of desperation, confused hungers, and panic-stricken rage.

“So isn’t all you can do, really,” Sarah said, “is help him come to terms with that news?”

“It doesn’t seem enough.”

“Sure it is. People can deal with some ungodly stressful situations, as long as they know what they are. It’s when they don’t know what they’re up against that they start to break down.” Sarah scooted close enough to drop both hands onto Adrienne’s thigh. “That’s why there’s myth, to help people deal with those unknowns that are just too threatening to leave unknown.”

“But Sarah, that’s the problem here: an entire huge unknown area just opened up and swallowed us both. I had to tell him because his condition might be significant to his problems… and because it’s going to attract a lot of attention to him that I don’t think he’s going to want at all.”

“And that’s what you’re most afraid of. You know that, don’t you?”

Adrienne frowned at her. What?

“Losing control. Having him taken away from you.”

Objections rose: He’s my patient; I just want what’s best for him. But of course it was true: She felt she was most qualified to make those judgments. Was this why doctors could squabble so over patients as if they were territories instead of people? With flags of conquest and discovery speared into their bodies? To surrender to someone else’s authority, then, was weakness and retreat.

“That doesn’t make me selfish, does it?” Adrienne said.

“We’re all selfish, it’s what motivates us.”

As if to prove it, Sarah braced her hands on Adrienne’s knees and leaned forward to kiss her, hungry greedy mouth at her own and bright eyes continuing to stare as she held the kiss. Wide mouth breaking into a broad smile then, wanton, just before she drew Adrienne’s lower lip in and bit. Neither hard nor soft, bordering on that delicious threshold of tender pain.

Hands next, meeting before each went to the other body, to shoulders, and to breasts with straining nipples, and to bellies flexing with quickened breath, and to groins; so much moist heat. From her own, from Sarah’s, Sarah so easy to get to, naked beneath the T-shirt but for panties. Sarah straddled her lap, then rose on knees, pulling Adrienne’s head roughly to her, and Adrienne drew back, opened her eyes to see the shirt, its tribal mask design staring at her. Whereas it had been funny before, now she found something ominous about it. The mask, the unchanging face created to hide the real one, the countenance that could not be reasoned with.

“Take that off,” she whispered fiercely, and Sarah peeled it, cast it free, not even suspecting. It struck the rainstick, sent it falling to the rug for one last sprinkle of pebbles and bone.

She’d have been happy to let it happen there on the sofa, or to slip to the floor and spread each other wide upon the rug, but Sarah’s plans were otherwise. This was to be no quickie. Adrienne let Sarah pull her up, to her feet, up to the bedroom and down on her back again, where the last of the clothing came off.

They embraced, they rolled; teeth bit and lips soothed, and tongues traced wet trails from mouths to breasts to navels to cunts and back again. Their hands were slippery, drenched with one another’s dew. Adrienne bent her back across the bed, slid her hands along Sarah’s risen inner thighs and lowered her head, peeling Sarah open with fingers and tongue. Tasting her damp and hot, teasing her with pointed flicking tongue tip, tickling her with soft blond hair, at last plunging her mouth into the wet fire.

And when Sarah came, it was hard, loud, powerful hips flexing and thighs clamping onto Adrienne’s head. Then Sarah went scrambling for the night table where they kept their toys. Adrienne heard the scrape of the drawer, all aching mouth and wet face, gasping for breath as she saw Sarah coming for her — not empty-handed. No choice in the matter, just Sarah sculpting her onto knees and elbows, leaning across her back and wrapping one arm down and around her middle, with the other working the phallus into her. Roughly, but not without love, and Adrienne was about to strangle on her own cries. It was like being violated, willingly, and if she said to stop, Sarah would, but Sarah’s power came from knowing it would never happen.

Adrienne looked back over her shoulder, saw Sarah first in profile, then as she turned to meet her eyes: Sarah in sweaty gleaming heat, with clenched teeth and furious stroking arm. For a moment she imagined the face from the T-shirt over Sarah’s own, cannibal mask leering down; surely the symbol of what was going on here, the message implicit in every grinding twist of her hand…

You are mine, and so is control, and I will devour you and I will savor the taste of everything taken because you wanted to give it all along.

The body could never lie.

Nine

Ryker, from Arizona Associated Labs, came clean with Adrienne later that week. She still wasn’t sure what to make of the fact that he had for days — days — sat on what could have the most significant impact yet on Clay Palmer’s case.

Had it been a deliberate lie, or simply a withholding of facts for the sake of convenience, while Ryker and company figured out how to best address the situation for their own ends? Her guess leaned toward mercenary origins. The competition for leverage in medicine, particularly in research, was no less cutthroat than in most other private-sector ventures simply because human welfare was involved. There was also funding to consider. Funding meant the chance for greater accomplishment, which in turn meant prestige, and led to funding greater still…

They’d led her to believe that they thought Clay was the first of his kind, the first gross chromosomal abnormality discovered in over two decades — news that would have penetrated their world like a ricocheting bullet. Could they really have expected her to believe that they — immersed in the science of genetics — had not immediately recognized that this was not the case?

The bottom line?

While the numbers were tiny, there were others.

Clay was not alone in the world.

Ryker followed up his phone call apprising her of this shock with a package of records compiled on the others found to have a third copy of chromosome twelve.

The defect had been discovered six years ago, in the genetics division of a Boston research center named MacNealy Biotech, and had been christened Helverson’s syndrome after the first scientist to document it.

Known cases prior to Clay were at an even dozen: five in North America, one in Venezuela, four across Great Britain and Western Europe, and two in Japan. Not all, however, were still alive. The Venezuelan, who had worked in the north coast oil industry, had committed suicide last year. A British soldier of fortune had been killed in Central America. As well, one of the Americans was on death row in Texas, following a string of gas station robberies that had left three attendants dead…

And Adrienne could see the pattern forming already, another aggression linkage to rival, even surpass, the panic button pushed by the discovery of the double-Y.

Still, one look at the overview was enough: Based on the few known cases, the hope that Helverson’s syndrome was totally benign was not encouraging. Statistics on the group were broken down to demonstrate over and over generally maladaptive patterns. There was an inarguable trend here toward explosive temperaments, random acts of impulsive violence, self-destructive tendencies, and, to a lesser extent, schizophrenia. It cut across every national boundary and appeared independent of such variables as ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and education.

Interesting, though, how every last one was male, with none older than thirty-five. As well, she noticed another unifying factor: All came from industrialized countries. This said little in itself — the technology to map out chromosomes was far less prevalent in third-world nations, although more was being done in such places all the time as static local populations were found where various disorders plagued large numbers of the people. Such closed-system settlements constituted living laboratories in which to trace genetic disorders through multiple generations. Perhaps, in time, some agrarian society would yield its first Helverson’s subject. Until then…

Here they were. Like bad omens.

In reading the overview, it was easy to forget that each one was a person who appeared to have undergone his own variation of Clay’s life. They had been afflicted and did not even know by what, much less why.

Did they all feel the pain of the outsider, who does not even fit on a molecular level, and did they reprogram that pain into anger? Did they go through each day with heartbeats and brainwaves out of tune with those of the masses? She saw their lives as testament to a cruelty in nature that went beyond ill intent: nature’s profound indifference, giving periodic mutant rise to her variants, then leaving them to struggle and thrive, or wane and die, on their own.

It caused her to stop and stare at the skin of her bared forearm, its smooth and pale underside. There, deep within, written in protein codes 100 trillion times over: herself. What guarantee did she have that there was nothing concealed in that text of life and death, hidden like a bomb in a skyscraper, ticking, waiting for its moment? Waiting to burst into terrible flower — tumors or breakdown of systemic function, something that might leave her mind intact while her body withered, or steal the mind while the body housed its deterioration for decades to come.

She was no less susceptible to the indifference of nature than any of them.

It made her all the more eager to set the overview aside, to quit thinking of them as a faceless aggregate and view them as individuals. She began to open each separately sealed case study, files and medical records and interview transcripts and photos.

One…

After another…

After another…

And it became obvious that there was at least one physical manifestation of Helverson’s common to each of them.

They looked as if they could be brothers.

By the third one Adrienne wasn’t even reading, just tearing into the files to get at the pictures, spreading them out into rows. All of them stared up from the tabletop like a bizarre family reunion. Variations, to be sure: hair color, eye color, skin tone. But structurally, the resemblance was eerie, all of them much like Clay: the subtle arch and curve of bones made streamlined, contoured as if to lean into wind; small bladelike noses and firm chins, and jawlines that curved efficiently around; watchful eyes, wary, few of them smiling. It was even noticeable beneath the more overtly Asian traits of the two Japanese.

They were not unattractive — to the contrary, in most cases — but taken together, they could not help but be unsettling. And in the smooth contours of their faces, so perfect in image after image, there was something almost reptilian about them—

And damn it, she was regarding them as a group again.

Yet it was so hard not to. Like brothers, as if some father with wanderlust had, thirty-five years ago, began to circle the globe and sow the seeds of a deviant progeny. His sperm somehow overpowering the theoretically equal influence of maternal genes, to leave these women’s wombs growing with children solely of his creation.

Again, she was letting her imagination roam too far. Further reading showed that even such an astronomically low possibility as a common father had been ruled out. Genetic testing was nothing if not precise in ascertaining parental lineage, although the remote possibility of some very distant common ancestor had not yet been ruled out. For the time being, though, they had only chromosome twelve in common.

She was brought back to thoughts of Down’s syndrome and the stunning resemblance between most of those who bore it. Short and stocky, with slanted eyes and similarly shaped heads, frequently affectionate like eternal children, they had always struck her as brothers and sisters of their own extended family, beyond the claims of blood kinship. They were their own; apart, yet linked.

And here, now? Before her?

The opposite of Down’s?

Was it such a farfetched notion? For, in time, didn’t nature strive to balance everything with its polar counterpart?

Nature did, so often, exhibit a love affair with symmetry.

She monitored Clay daily after having broken the news of the karyotype to him. Physically he would be fine, his bludgeoning of the window having caused nothing worse than some damage to the cast and a hairline fracture in a healing carpal bone, while the claw marks on his torso had been bandaged.

He emerged from sedation uncommunicative, less sullen than simply withdrawn, and gradually coming out of that within a few days. He was showing improvement by the time Adrienne learned of the others, although she had decided to withhold that from him until he was back on more stable emotional ground. Naturally he would want to know what they were like. Understandably, he would find the truth of no encouragement.

“I accept it,” he finally told her, during their next Sunday session. Looking drawn and pale, too many weeks away from a sun that he apparently needed, like a tonic, from time to time.

And she told him that was important, accepting the fact of Helverson’s, as long as he wasn’t accepting some preconceived notion that it rigidly predestined his life. Nature, nurture, the debate had raged for centuries, and would likely never be settled to the satisfaction of everyone. It was important he keep in mind that he was more than mere proteins and programming.

“Do you think it’s possible we know when things are wrong with us?” he asked. “Deep, fundamental differences that set us apart. Even if we don’t have names for them, or even know where to point in ourselves… we just know? You think so?”

“Obviously you do,” she said, turning it back.

He glared for a moment, and she saw the faces of the others buried in him, as if he carried ghosts. “Can’t we have sixty seconds of conversation without you deflecting it around into some therapeutic proverb?”

Adrienne blinked. Very good, Clay. It was actually a boost to see him rise up like that. If he hadn’t gotten some of his fighting spirit back, he wouldn’t have cared.

“I think,” she told him, slow enough to measure every word, “some people have a greater self-awareness than others… and I think it’s possible that could extend to the physical or chemical makeup of their bodies.”

“Thank you,” he said, with a rare smile of victory. It faded soon enough, replaced by a look of haunting recollection. “I never told you why I came down this way.”

“You told me you had a lot of thinking to do.”

He nodded. “But why then? Why up and decide one day that I needed it more than I did the day before?”

“Something happened?”

“Something I saw.” Clay took a deep breath, leaned back with his eyes shut in their darkened hollows, saying nothing until he began to bite his lower lip. “I don’t hold jobs well,” he began at last. “You probably guessed that already. But for the past year or so I worked for the Department of Sanitation in Denver. And that was all right, I got along okay doing that. I guess I’ve lost that one now, too, though.

“When we’d finish the pickup rounds and haul the truck back to the dump, sometimes I’d go wandering around all those mountains of trash. Everything the city was retching up, there it was. We could poke through it, and if there was anything we wanted, it was ours. Most of the time I wasn’t even looking for my own benefit, I was looking for stuff for Graham. Remember Graham?”

“The artist.” It had been weeks since Clay had mentioned him.

Clay nodded, sat straighter. “I’d bring him things I thought he’d like to use, for inspiration or whatever. Scraps of metal, bits of machinery. He’s doing something with power tools and appliances and things like that, but he won’t tell anybody what it is, so I’d just grab anything that looked halfway interesting.

“So there it was, one afternoon, the middle of September, one of those days when you can barely feel it, but there’s a chill coming. And I was scouting around this one edge of the dump where I probably shouldn’t have been, because that’s where the cranes were working. They lower those scoops, like big swinging mouths from metal dinosaurs, and rearrange the piles. They’d tell us it’s dangerous to get around, but what the hell, that’s when you can turn up the most interesting junk.

“I came around one side of this smelly mountain, saw where part of it had fallen away, where there was this little hollow. I just stopped, and stared.

“There was a dead man in there. Not like he’d been dumped and that was the most convenient place they could find. I think he’d been killed there, maybe even some kind of ritual thing. His wrists, they’d been spread out and tied to something half-buried in the trash — the legs of an old desk, it might have been. There he was, just slumped down, sitting in all this dried blood. He’d been gutted, all this stuff strewn out of his abdomen. Not random, either, there was order to it. But none of it seemed human to me, because he’d been there long enough for it to start drying out, so what it really looked like, to me, was pipes and tubes and conduits, like that. I’d never seen anybody’s plumbing before, and that’s what it’s like. Meat machinery. So there he was, all dirty white, and not moving — plastic bags and paper and just general shit hanging off him. And all I could do was stare.”

Adrienne had to force herself to breathe. Imagining the scene for herself: an eviscerated man and the carrion stench that must have surrounded him, in the shadow of a valley between mountains of trash, while smoke from refuse fires churned overhead, machinery swaying in the background. She was seasoned, and rarely was she forced to conceal genuine repugnance, but this was one of those moments.

“The sight of him,” she said, “it didn’t… upset you.”

“It was repulsive. But you can’t deny it: What’s repulsive is also fascinating. I kept staring because it didn’t seem real. Five or ten minutes, it must have been. And then one of the cranes swung over, and the whole hillside came avalanching down on him. Buried him completely. So I walked away.”

“Without reporting it to anyone?”

He shook his head. “Except for whoever put him there in the first place, I guess I’m the only one who knows he’s there.”

Clay didn’t say anything else, seeming distanced from that afternoon, describing it almost as if it had happened to someone else. She tried to use the growing spotlight of silence to coax more from him, but this time it wasn’t working.

“What was it about the experience that made you feel you had to leave home for a while?”

He stared down, as if answers were to be found on the floor. “I’d been looking at him for a minute or two, trying to figure out how long he’d been there. Overnight, I was guessing. And then I had to stop and think: Well hell, where was I last night? For a few seconds, I didn’t know. No memory, nothing. I came out of it after a minute, and I knew I hadn’t done it. But that didn’t make me feel relieved, not really, because I started thinking, Well, if it wasn’t me, maybe it could have been, and could I really do that to someone, if I went out of my head? It was like getting slapped in the face, and hearing somebody tell me, ‘You’ve got a lot bigger problem than you ever thought.’”

Adrienne pulled herself out of it a little at a time — a vague feeling of uncleanness, the clash of values in how she could never have left a murder victim behind, a secret buried by a city’s refuse — and likely Clay never knew she was trying so hard not to judge. She spoke again of predatory ethics versus the conscience he obviously had somewhere within, if not always accessible. Spoke of the way people could latch onto symbols of their guilt over events entirely unrelated. He was no killer. Was he?

Not yet.

“When you told me about my chromosomes,” he said, mouth curling down, “that about did me in. But I asked, didn’t I?”

Adrienne noticed that he was actually trembling. Another peek into vulnerabilities only rarely glimpsed. It reminded her of pets owned when she was younger, taking them to a kennel or the vet; thrust into circumstances beyond their understanding, their warm furry bodies seeming smaller as they huddled, gripped by fear’s seizure. Her heart would break, always.

Clay, trembling.

“But I remembered a few weeks ago I said I’d keep talking to you because it could be one more step toward understanding myself. That’s why I’m here now. I might not always like what I find out, or even take it very well… but all I want to do is stay in this for the duration.”

The quest for self-knowledge was a noble endeavor, as she saw it, but it didn’t exist in a vacuum. Clay could look within, and she could show him where, could help dry the tears when what he saw there seemed too ugly or hopeless to bear.

But it had gone beyond that now: Clay one of the rarest genetic commodities in existence, one of less than a dozen living known Helverson’s syndrome lab rats on the globe. What had been a routinely simple, balanced doctor-patient dyad was opened up to accommodate new strangers with degrees, with hypotheses, with agendas of own, and a never-ending catalog of questions.

Who comprises his biological family?

Has he any brothers, sisters?

Any children that he has fathered?

Any somatic deviations noted — physiological, biochemical, neurological, and so forth?

Any pronounced differences in his healing faculties?

What behavioral patterns are exhibited when he is confronted with a controlled battery of stress-inducing stimuli?

May we have additional tissue samples?

More, and more, and more.

Specialists all, geneticists with concentrations in development and population and other fields, along with their affiliate researchers in mutation’s other ramifications, they made the cross-town pilgrimage from Arizona Associated Labs to see the new prize. Paying heed to the protocol of hospital hierarchy, they were warmly received by Dr. Ferris Mendenhall, who conferred with Adrienne, who in turn approached Clay, partly on their behalf, partly for his own: “They want to learn more about you — they’ll be able to find out more than I or anyone else on this hospital staff can.”

“It doesn’t mean they’ll be replacing you, does it?” seemed to be his main concern.

She shook her head. “No. You’ll just have busier days here, is all.”

Clay shrugged. “That doesn’t sound entirely bad, you know.”

Adrienne smiled, forcing it, this time touching him on one cast and the thin fingertips protruding from its end. They felt cold before he drew them away. Cold as her silly sense of loss, forced to share, forced to work and play well with others whose interest in Clay was based on his status as an oddity — and really, shouldn’t she be beyond this sort of petty resentment?

That doesn’t sound entirely bad…?

I do hope you can still say that by the time they decide they’re through with you…

If they ever do.

Bad? No, not at first, nothing that distressed him, pained him, certainly nothing that bored him. It was all new. The body, oh, they were big on that, poking, prodding, charting, loading him into machines that ground electronically around him and bombarded him with radiation, magnetic fields, whatever could be used to peer inside without the aid of a scalpel. Not that they were far away from that particular violation either.

Blood and hair samples, tissue scrapings, urine specimens — here you go, have one on me. Humans make such wonderful resources, for they are always renewable.

He laid his brain open to them — these doctors who had no need for names, they were just the tall one, the stubby one, the one with clammy hands, the one with the mole on her cheek. With every day that passed, Dr. Adrienne Rand accrued new dimensions of reality by comparison. These others, they were inquisitive to the point of farce, comical in their seriousness, surreal in their relentless clinical precision. They were Nazis.

But if even one could train a penlight on some previously shadowed corner inside him, to illuminate a malignant growth he could squash like a vermin, it might all be worth it.

He free-associated, looked at Rorschach blots, composed extemporaneous stories to accompany flash cards. They measured his intelligence with a battery of tests, qualified his personality traits with the MMPI, inquired of his sex life and his dreams.

They described situations for him and asked how he would react. You are confronted by a mugger on the street. What do you do?

I’d try to tear the asshole’s head off. How do you think I ended up here, genius?

You are alone after work in an office and realize your boss has left his filing cabinet unlocked. Somewhere in one drawer, you know that there is a file containing employee evaluations. What do you do?

I’d make copies of all of them and sell them to whoever wanted a look at their own or anybody else’s.

You are told by someone you love and have lived with for two years that she is leaving you. How do you react?

Can we… can we stop for today?

What do you do?

What do you do?

What do you do?

It was better than working, he supposed: regular hours but no one whose approval he was trying to maintain. Just be himself and they were satisfied. Although it wasn’t as if he was drawing a paycheck, was it? And here he was, exerting as much effort as any of them. They would go back to their labs flushed with success, having peeled back another layer… but only because he had agreed to show it to them. That should be worth something, shouldn’t it? For with every day that passed, it felt less and less as if he were going to get much benefit out of this at all. They were happy to see him only because of what he was, not who, and his problems were only buzzwords in their terminology.

This was no arrangement of mutual beneficiaries.

And then the gene meddlers led him down the primrose path of the past, to shove it into his face. He was the son of his mother and father, all right — but still with his own secrets yet to be explained.

They had arranged for his parents to be screened back home in Minneapolis, the both of them eager to yield up their tired blood for the sake of a son neither seen nor heard from for four years. There had been no sign of Helverson’s syndrome in either of them. Naturally. Their DNA had been free of taint, the both of them pure and unadulterated specimens. Proud veteran and loving home-maker, these two were suburbia, they were America at its finest. Fascist and alcoholic, they were every self-perpetuating shame concealed and denied behind a picket fence and a gingham curtain.

Of course they had checked out fine — they had no need of chromosomes gone awry. They were ruined in so many other ways.

Did they tell you about the dead ones? Clay considered asking. The weaker ones, my brothers and sisters that died in the crib, or never drew a single breath outside the womb at all? They let you in on that family legacy?

Not asking, fearing the answer. Imagining ghouls in lab smocks dispersed in a cemetery, seeking the powdery old bones of babies dead for twenty years. Here’s a shovel — we’ll expect the karyotype by tomorrow afternoon.

And then the inevitable. Here was a scenario better than any fabricated stress test:

You have spent the last four years of your existence trying to amputate yourself from a spawning ground of hypocrisy and ineffectuality and meaninglessness. You have tried to tell yourself that you have no love left for them, that they forfeited it long ago in ways they could never possibly imagine. You know they tried to kill you one screaming nerve at a time. You were the abortion that lived. And now they want to see you, your parents want to see you. What do you do?

What do you do?

What do you do?

I tell you to go to hell. And then…

I cry.

Clinicians, even in his dreams —

meat-metal god-puppets in caverns of iron, deep, deep, where boilers thump and steam-jets hiss scalding clouds that condense to drip from tiny screaming mouths, and gray-cheeked faces of slag pile fetuses heaped halfway to ceiling

in lab coats of rust they welcome him, Clay, star patient, welcome to the convulsion factory: you are meat, you are nerve endings, and you are ours

the examination table a vast slab, corrosive with its crusted layers, black on red on gray, runneled with fluid runoff troughs, and here they spread him, arms and legs akimbo, Dr. Mengele, I presume? and in he leans with trigger finger spastic, Clay pinned by rivet-gun crucifixion, wrist, wrist, ankle, foot, the peg nails burning molten red to sear flesh to bone to charred marrow

girders like steel bone, clanking down from ceiling and up from floor to hold him in place, organic straps tightening across his forehead/throat/ribs/hips/knees, becoming one with the slab in symbiotic bondage —

and he feels the pulsing shudder of gears, turn, turn, grind, ratcheting the slab to lengths never hinted at by its cold hard solidity

clank

clank

screams drowned out by piercing bone-saw whine in his ears as they hack at him with tools growing from their limbs like phallic pistons, we will penetrate you in 100 trillion orifices

a stranger is just an enemy you haven’t assessed yet

pierced a thousand times over with razored syringes whose plungers slide back to draw blood flowing like rust-water clots

what do you do? what do you do? what do you do?

tearing one hand free to leave half his palm behind, bleeding and welded to the slab, throbbing hand a brute weapon now, to lash at tormentors with sallow alloy skins

even as fragile bones crack under strain

even as the slab rends him into component parts and his last sensation is a collision between machine and heavy clubbed hand

and blood sprinkling in his eyes with a caustic burning like acid baths and bitter autumn rains —

A nurse found him collapsed in the hallway some twenty feet from the door of his room, bleeding and barely conscious. The gash on his forehead took twelve stitches.

I’ve got to get out of here — this while they were sewing him up, and it felt like the clearest thought he’d had in days.

Ten

Never beloved, sometimes despised, in antiquity a sacrificial lamb: the bearer of bad news was this, and more.

“Night before last, at approximately 3:30 A.M., Clay Palmer suffered a particularly vivid nightmare related to his recent experiences here and nearly gave himself a concussion with one of his casts, while thrashing in his sleep. He was treated in the emergency room and received twelve stitches above the left eye, which is now swollen almost completely shut.”

Adrienne paused for a sip of water and glanced beyond her briefing notes, to take in the faces around her in the conference room. Unhappy, for the most part, dour beneath the unflattering fluorescent wash. Ferris Mendenhall and one of his superiors from hospital administration, plus a small contingent from Associated Labs — Ryker and three others. The finer particulars of their association had been settled upon without her being there, but she had to assume that Clay had, this past week and a half, become something of a hospital asset, bringing in income rather than draining it as a problem case whose insurance was in contention.

Mutation makes for strange bedfellows.

Three hours of sleep, a chilly shower, and a large espresso gulped in the car while fighting the morning rush hour, and here she was: out of her element and treading water in bureaucratic seas. Onward.

“Early yesterday afternoon Clay expressed his intention to discontinue cooperation with all further research into his genetic condition. And for the first time since his arrival, he requested to be discharged. He said that if there’s any attempt made to keep him here, the first chance he gets at a telephone, he’ll put in a call to the ACLU and will refuse to eat. I spoke with him at length yesterday, and briefly this morning before this meeting, and his position hasn’t changed.”

Murmurs, discontent: the ungrateful prick.

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” said one of the geneticists, “but I’ve been working with him under the assumption that he’s in Ward Five under voluntary commitment.”

“That’s correct,” Mendenhall answered.

“Then is there a possibility of involuntary commitment?”

She bit her tongue, deferring to Mendenhall. Tried to show no expression as she doodled on her notes a stick caricature of the man, tall and balding, with a mad eager grin, dashing feet, and an upraised butterfly net. There — take that.

“That would be ill-advised, in my opinion. But then, that’s just based on twice-weekly reports, and not personal evaluation.” Mendenhall turned to Adrienne. “You’ve spent more time with him than anyone at this table. What’s your opinion?”

“If it came to a sanity hearing, Clay would walk. And I’d be the star witness in his favor.” Shaking her head. “He just wants to go home.”

“You wouldn’t say he presents a danger to himself or anyone else, then.” Dr. Ryker this time, slender and compact and possessed of extremely direct eye contact. He no doubt made a fine supervisor, she reasoned, because he could make any subordinate squirm.

“His impulse control has been reasonably stable,” she said.

“Stable.” Ryker raised an eyebrow. “Night before last he nearly staved in his own forehead.”

“I doubt there’s a person in this room who hasn’t thrashed at some point during a nightmare. If they’d had casts on both hands, the exact same thing might’ve happened.”

“Nearly two weeks ago he smashed a window and mutilated his stomach.” Ryker pressed a slim advantage as if it were a stiletto. “And a week before that, you yourself implied to Dr. Mendenhall that Clay Palmer was a menace who desperately needed attention because his violent outbursts were worsening.”

“I wasn’t pleading for his confinement. I was requesting a chance to continue treating him because he seemed to be responding well to it" — and because he fascinated the hell out of me? — “and he wanted to continue. If he no longer does… there’s no rationale for forcing it on him.” She drew a breath and raised a finger to silence an interruption, let her summarize. “Clay is emotionally disturbed, somewhat self-destructive, and he’s prone to violence when provoked. But he is not irrational or out of touch with reality or any less able to function in the world than any of millions of people on the streets right now. Can I say he won’t commit an act that’ll jeopardize his entire future? No, I’m sorry, I can’t. Neither can I guarantee that about you or anyone else. But the law doesn’t recognize the risk of future offenses as grounds for imprisonment.”

“The right judge might see it differently. This is hardly a typical case.”

A woman from the lab spoke up, a research psychologist who had been administering a trunkful of tests. “So let’s assume that a judge does. Does it make Clay any more cooperative?”

“Possibly, if what he’s doing is throwing a tantrum. Even the most unruly child gets tired of kicking and holding his breath, sooner or later.”

But this is not a child you’re discussing! She quelled an impulse to shout this into Ryker’s face. Bowed out with little to contribute as they debated and weighed options among themselves. To listen was an education in itself, a crash course in everything that was wrong with the state of modern science, the fundamental evidence being that the last consideration on their minds was that they were here because of the sufferings of a human being.

That they could do their jobs was not in doubt. But they would live and work in a peculiar vacuum of their own creation. Science was no longer the innocent, leisurely pursuit of well-bred Victorian gentlemen and aristocrats. Its two fundamental consumers were now private industry and the military, under whose influence science was no longer about discovery and understanding for their own sake, but for the perpetuation of power and profit. Bettering the human condition was, more often than not, incidental.

So, was most of this crew naturally insensitive to Clay’s pain, or were they simply victims of systemic failure?

She would give them the benefit of the doubt. They were all beholden to the checkbooks that fed them, with too desperate an interest in maintaining that support to be objective. Among them was no such thing as a generalist, and with their focus trained on the narrow parameters of practical application, little wonder they had trouble seeing a broader spectrum beyond the lab walls. Little wonder they overlooked human dimensions, even when confronted with a deviation that cut to the core of humanity.

Compared to them, her interest in Clay felt more pure than it had in weeks. She’d worried about that, wondering at times if she weren’t just one more carrion eater who simply wore a kinder face as she too picked away, at the expense of his feelings. Watching the growing volume of tapes made of their sessions, her thickening file of notes, wondering, What does it all mean, what does he mean… and where am I really going with this?

And when Ferris Mendenhall gazed long and pensively at a note slid to him by Ryker, then nodded, and politely asked if she would mind stepping from the room for a few minutes, Adrienne had no idea why.

She paced out in the hall, restless, the espresso humming through her bloodstream. Take up smoking while waiting? Why not. Adrienne understood the appeal, some mindless function to assign her hands and mouth.

Catching her reflection in a window overlooking a parking lot five floors below, and homes beyond, she scrutinized. Had she erred somewhere? Not professional enough in demeanor? Did they intend to bulldoze her right out of having any say at all regarding Clay Palmer? She was every bit as educated and degreed as most of them in there — barring an exception or two — so why did she get the feeling they looked down on her?

Because they fed from a richer trough, that’s why. They did not get bogged down in the small, middling lives of individuals whose existence never touched the world they knew of, and who died struggling against pain, alone, anonymously.

When they called her back in, she resumed her place at the table and steadied herself to hear almost anything.

Except what they actually said.

“Would you be prepared,” said Mendenhall, with drooping moustache and burnished forehead, more resembling a cattle baron than the administrator of a psychiatric ward, “to accept a temporary leave of absence to go to Denver?”

“Excuse me…?”

“This would be assuming Clay Palmer agrees to continuing his therapy with you, of course. But he appears to place a great deal of trust in you — a trust that he doesn’t grant indiscriminately.”

Ryker leaned forward, elbows on the conference table; she caught a clashing whiff of deodorant soap and cologne. “It puts you in an invaluable position to help gain more understanding of what Helverson’s syndrome is. And help him at the same time.”

She blinked. Blinked again. I wanted to know where I was going with this…?

I just got the chance to find out.