Prototype

Eleven

The screaming man was really beginning to get on Valentine’s nerves.

It wasn’t that the sound of pain bothered him; rather, the simple fact was that it was distracting. There were times, it seemed, when all the world conspired to keep a man from ten minutes of peace just to go through his mail.

Valentine scowled at Teddy. “Would you listen to this pussy? Where’d you stick this guy, anyway?”

“Just the ear is all.” Teddy was nothing if not obedient and loyal, assets that made it worth putting up with the mysterious way in which he always smelled fresh from a breakfast heavy on bacon. “Listen, Patrick? We’ll have everything wrapped up in time to get to the Bruins game tonight, won’t we?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, center ice, if you’re lucky, you’ll catch a puck in the teeth.”

Valentine took the stack of two days’ worth of mail brought from home — ignored during this round of deal making gone horribly sour — and slapped it back onto the driver’s seat through the open window of his car. He stepped away from the door and stretched; autumn in the Massachusetts countryside, there was really no place he would rather be. The pulse and throb of Boston was left behind — he could breathe up here, could take refuge among the trees and listen to the icy wind in the last of their leaves. In the city, wind was just that: wind. Up here it was a voice that all predators heeded, and all prey feared, for on it was borne the scent of hunger.

Valentine motioned Teddy to follow and they began to walk up the gentle slope of the drive, toward the barn. It was more than merely old, with low foundation walls of stone, and the upper wooden remainder had not seen a paintbrush in his lifetime. The barn sat in the center of his property in Essex County; the nearest neighbors were a mile distant, and if they were outdoors, it would only be chance if the shimmer of a cry of misery floated to them on the wind. They would wonder if wind was all the sound was, and go back to work.

“‘A criminal is frequently not equal to his deed: he makes it smaller and slanders it.’ Nietzsche said that.” Valentine nodded and drew his longcoat tighter against the wind as husks of dead leaves crunched underfoot. He pointed toward the mouth of the barn as it resounded with a fresh warble of pain. “One more exhibition of living proof.”

They entered the barn, shut the side door after them.

They walked past a small cluster of pens into the main clearing, dirt-floored beneath peaks and rafters where birds built nests and paid no heed to what transpired below. A scent of age clung to the air. No more horses, nor cows, nor other animals of the herd, just the smell of time.

The other three men were already inside. Two of them nodded at Valentine while standing a little straighter, and one of those still held a hammer. The third remained where he was, kneeling on the floor with hands wired behind his back, and his left ear nailed to one of the heavier posts.

“Hello, Shay,” Valentine said. “Don’t get up.”

He was answered with a little yelp, and could see one eye widen, roving in search of his voice. Valentine stepped around him, knelt to bring them face-to-face. A few smears of blood trailed down Shay Cavanaugh’s cheek.

“We can work this out, can’t we? Can’t we?” Begging already, and Cavanaugh’s unruly black hair, crow’s hair, looked electric in his pain.

Valentine grabbed a sweaty fistful and gave the entire head a fierce shaking, side-to-side — no no no — and the man screeched with every tug of ear against nail.

“It’s gone a little far for that, Shay. Put yourself in my place. And when’s the last time you let a hostage cut a bargain with you?” Valentine shook his head at the glisten of tears in the man’s blue eyes; here was a sorry sight. “Listen to you, you’re a disgrace to your cause. Forgotten Long Kesh, have you? Doesn’t the memory of Bobby Sands do anything for you anymore? If somebody’s going to try to rip me off, I’d just as soon it be a Muslim. Give me somebody from Abu Nidal’s group. Spend all day pounding nails into one of those sons of bitches, and the only thing you’ll hear is him cursing your entire family.”

He shook his head again, and stepped away to take a coffee can from one of his men. A paintbrush with a two-inch width jutted against its rim, and Valentine stirred lazily on his way back, sniffed the heady fumes.

Shay Cavanaugh, the transatlantic point man for a breakaway cell from the Provisional IRA, had genuinely surprised him. A month ago Valentine had met with him in the back of a Chelsea pub to arrange the sale and dockside delivery of, among other sundry ordnance, several Heckler & Koch .308 assault rifles, a dozen drum-fed laser-sighted American 180s, several Ruger Mini-14s, and three cases of Semtex plastic explosive. The financing had been solid, had come from a few of the Manhattan Westies and some remnants of the old Emerald Society that Valentine knew were sympathetic to the rogue elements splitting from the traditional army. So what went wrong? Maybe Cavanaugh and his fellow travelers thought they could get away with both the weapons and the cash.

Last night, at the transfer drop in a warehouse along the docks of Gloucester harbor, Cavanaugh’s people had turned greedy, treacherous, then bloodthirsty. Four of Valentine’s freelancers were dead of head wounds. Others had been outside, a precautionary measure, and, for once, required.

The first time anyone had ever tried to blatantly rip him off and it had to be a countryman. They had gotten it all back, but then there was that small matter of disrespect.

Valentine squatted before the kneeling Cavanaugh and swirled the coffee can, wafted kerosene fumes to the man’s nostrils like a chef teasing someone with the scent of his most savory meal.

How old was Shay, anyway? Thirty, thirty-five, around there. Valentine knew that, ten or fifteen years ago, he himself might have done just the same. Might even have tested his luck and skill for no better reason than to see if he could have gotten away with it, not really caring one way or another in the end. Though he would have had a better excuse than Shay Cavanaugh.

He listened to the last shreds of dignity come stammering from the man’s bruised mouth, all please and don’t and failed persuasion. For a moment, a fresh seizure clouded thoughts and gripped muscles and made him itch to inflict punishments more savage still, and Valentine simply could not think straight.

Down with you, he told it, down with you, I’m better than that…

He breathed deeply, and the kerosene made his head swim.

And so Valentine began to paint.

He slathered kerosene along the heavy post, from the ground up to Cavanaugh’s perforated ear. It would be cold, surely, having sat in this barn all through an early November night; cold and stinging on the perforated ear. More and more he added, letting it soak into the wood while tears flowed just as freely.

“I’ve got a question for you, Shay…”

Valentine flicked the brush clean, returned it to a waiting hand.

“You tried to rip me off. You killed four people who worked for me…”

From the can he poured a thin trail from the base of the post to a larger puddle five feet away, out of reach of a wildly swinging hand.

“But I’m not going to ask you why. Nothing you could say about that would much interest me…”

Tossing the empty can aside.

“No, what I really want to know is: How steady is your hand?”

From Teddy he accepted a heavy pair of cutters and stepped behind Cavanaugh to snip through the wire binding his wrists; gave them back as Cavanaugh pulled his hands around and began to massage the raw chafing burns glistening with blood blisters.

Valentine tossed a single-edged razor blade onto the dirt and waited until Cavanaugh picked it up, staring at it with a mute and terrible comprehension. There was always that silence, the silence that transcended circumstance. The silence of knowing — “If you’re steady, you can cut around the nail head and save most of your ear" — followed by the worst cries of all.

Kneeling again, taking no pleasure in this, just as he felt no remorse, Valentine lowered a lighter to his end of the kerosene’s liquid fuse. “Outside, a few minutes ago, I quoted Nietzsche, but here’s one for your benefit: ‘Whoever rejoices on the very stake triumphs not over pain, but at the absence of pain that he had expected.’ So rejoice, Shay. I could’ve made it a lot worse for you.”

And he set flame to the trail.

Valentine had already walked out the door, was halfway to the car on this crisp and sunny November afternoon, before he heard the sound of gunshots finishing the job. These would attract no more attention than a faint, faraway cry. They were sporting men. They loved and appreciated fine weaponry. They shot targets and test-fired guns here all the time.

“So how much you got riding on the Bruins tonight?” he asked Teddy a few minutes later.

“Double or nothing on what I was down last week.” He hunched his big sloping shoulders.

Valentine conked him on the side of the skull. “Happy just to call it even, after all that? Ought to have your head examined.”

They rolled away with Teddy behind the wheel of his car for the drive back down to Boston, and Valentine resumed shuffling through his stack of mail. People went to an awful lot of trouble to send an awful lot of nothing. Except for one, which he tore into as soon as he noticed the return address.

He hurriedly read the hand-scribbled cover letter, devoured the attached pages. Scanned photocopies of information that had been sent by fax. Lovingly crushed them like roses to his chest as he stared out the window at a passing countryside that seemed very far removed.

“They found another,” he said, in reverence, in awe, in gratitude. “Clay Palmer, his name. Hmm. If I have to, I’ll play this one as carefully as a prize marlin.”

“And land him by when?” Teddy asked.

“Valentine’s Day, when else? This time it’ll work out. I can feel it. I’ll have my legacy.”

Patrick Valentine leaned back against the seat, and the look that settled over his face — those wary eyes, those contoured cheekbones and jawline that seemed to sweep around to either side of his streamlined skull — was a look very close to serenity.

Twelve

They left Tempe at the end of the week, the first weekend in November, Adrienne’s car packed modestly considering her plans for an indefinite stay, ample room up front for herself and Clay. He had passed Friday night at her house without incident, so they could get started all the earlier, before dawn.

Northeast into the sunrise, the road soon blazed with desert fire, while at its other end beckoned mountains that would outlast them and their every hope and dream and granule of dust in death — gods of rock, the face of nature’s indifference.

“As long as you can avoid it,” Clay said, “could you not take the interstate? I hate the interstate.”

“I’ll try,” she said. An atlas lay curled and wedged in the gap between their seats. Eight hundred miles. She had sworn to herself that she would do her best to avoid any conversation that resembled session work. In the car, it could be too much confined to too small an area, too pressurized.

Still, this seemed benign enough.

“What’s wrong with the interstate?”

“I didn’t touch an interstate after I left Denver.” He stared ahead toward the corona of the rising sun. “I came on secondary roads. They’re more interesting. Something about them seems true. If you keep off the interstates, you tend to see the people who travel for its own sake.”

Gently, slowly, Clay was squeezing a rubber ball, therapy for muscles long unused. In the hospital he had seemed to relax after she’d told him that no one would challenge his discharge. She had been able to talk him into waiting a couple of days so he could leave with hands unburdened.

Just to see his hands at all seemed foreign, as if he should have remained in those twin casts forever. Both hands and lower arms had that unnaturally pale, pasty quality that skin sometimes takes on beneath a cast. His hands themselves, now emerged like chrysalids, shone with the angry red of new scars from the compound fractures.

Hands were so very vital, so telling of a person and the life led. And here now were Clay’s, new to her, some facet of him once concealed, now revealed. She could glance at them — squeezing the ball, thumbing through the atlas, at rest — and wonder things she’d not considered before: They had known brutality, but had they ever known tenderness? He claimed to dislike being touched, but did he use them to caress, or stroke, or bring pleasure to someone else? Were they ever held, fondled, kissed? Such simple acts, but those who were denied them must be terribly lonely.

So much ground they had yet to cover.

“You never told me you were a lesbian,” he said, miles later.

Adrienne had been waiting for that, in one form or another. “I never saw it as being relevant.” She did not bother correcting him: You’re half-right, at least, just caught me on that side of the pendulum’s arc. If it served to discourage any transference of misdirected sexuality, all the better. “That’s not suddenly going to be a problem, is it?”

“No. It was just a surprise. You know the way we fill in the blanks for people we don’t know much about, and imagine things.” He tired of squeezing the ball and took to tossing it, catching it, one-handed, over and over. “I noticed you never wore a ring, but I pictured you… I don’t know… trading off sleepovers with some businessman, somebody like that. Not another doctor. I don’t think you could stand another doctor.”

Patients. Sometimes they could pick up the damnedest things.

“But it was good to be surprised,” he went on, still tossing, catching. “Things like that remind me not to take anything for granted. Is this bugging you?” Holding up the ball, suddenly.

“A little.”

Clay went back to squeezing. “It’s easy to see why you were attracted to Sarah. It’s like big parts of each of you are things the other isn’t.”

She weighed this a moment. Last night Clay had spent little time in actual conversation with them, quiet and withdrawn mostly, spending at least an hour sitting in the gathering darkness on the patio, alone, watching night seize the backyard. Still, it would have taken little observation, she supposed, to decide who was the extrovert and who the introvert, who made sure the bills were paid on time and who planned the parties.

They might have been friends, Clay and Sarah, under other circumstances, or at least as close to friends as he thought he could be. Adrienne knew it, just knew they shared elements of a common core, had at one point watched them briefly converse and resonate like both prongs of a tuning fork. He had already spent a couple of minutes enchanted by the rainstick, then set it aside while wandering over to a bookcase filled predominantly with Sarah’s titles, mostly anthropology texts and compendiums of multicultural mythic beliefs and the like. He scanned the spines, finally removing one from her small collection of art books.

“Salvador Dali, you like him?” he asked.

“Oh, are you kidding?” Sarah said. “He’s only about my favorite twentieth-century artist. Adrienne and I were in Florida last year, and for two days I was inconsolable until we got over to St. Petersburg to the Dali Museum.”

Watching from the kitchen, Adrienne caught the brief and uneasy hesitation with which Clay opened the book, flipped through pages. Close as Sarah was, it could never have escaped her.

“What, you don’t like him?” she asked, looking that way she sometimes did, as if she’d be crushed if the answer was no.

“That’s not it.” Replacing the book, bruised brow furrowing beneath its bandage. “He hits too close to the bone sometimes. I… there are nights I have dreams like this. A lot, really. Some of those pieces, they’re like home movies.”

Sarah looked enthralled, respectful. “Some people take drugs to see that clearly and make those leaps of connection, and don’t even get close.”

Clay nodded, then looked at Adrienne in the kitchen doorway. “And some people prescribe drugs to make it stop.”

Sarah looked at Adrienne, too, and burst into laughter, clapping a companionable hand against Clay’s upper arm — he didn’t flinch, Adrienne noticed — Sarah’s unexpected and sincere delight even bringing a smile from him. The two of them, just standing there sharing what felt even worse than a private joke. Am I reading this right? she’d thought. They just met and they’re ganging up on me? Turning away, finally, momentarily petulant and grumbling something about Dali being the Liberace of modern art.

Or was it just an irrational twinge of jealousy, made even more confusing by her not knowing which of the pair of them had caused it?

Regardless, it had passed.

Behind the wheel, sun now higher and yellow, lifted from the fiery red desert bath of its rising, Adrienne gripped harder and tuned in the highway. In retrospect, how pointless that small flare of anger now seemed. Despite the virulence of the yearnings that had driven him south to begin with, Clay had instinctively been right about one thing:

The road could heal.

It rolled on, grinding morning and afternoon and evening into dust that was taken by the wind. The land northeast was no less barren than the desert, just barren in a different way, brown hillsides dotted with pines. They climbed from the low Arizona altitudes into the higher reaches of mountain country, and the temperature must have slid more than thirty degrees. Denver often had its first snowfall by this time of year.

But the freeways and streets were clear and dry when they reached them that night. Clay directed her through the urban maze and the atlas was forgotten. Many more miles and her nerves would have whined like the highway beneath her tires. Earlier she had accepted his offer to share the driving; without his help she doubted they could have made it in one day’s haul. She had taken care to consult the maps as to when they traded, to make sure he wouldn’t be driving in cities. As long as he was on the open road, the danger seemed minimal that a stranger’s carelessness would shove him into blind rage and mechanized retribution.

The neighborhood to which he directed her seemed, so far as she could discern with her directional sense dulled by hours of monotony, close to the heart of the city. Houses built tall, decades ago, three stories to accommodate all the offspring of families vast and prodigious, when big families were the norm in a younger city and a younger nation. They would be lonelier dwellings now, interiors gutted and rearranged and walled off into isolated compartments for one or two, who might never even know the names of those living beneath the same roof. The walls would no longer recognize the sound of laughter from sprawling holiday gatherings, and the music that followed family feasts would only be an echo lodged in some aged rafter.

Adrienne parked at the curb, idling, headlights shining upon a tree just before the car, one of a blockful whose stark branches scraped at the neighborhood’s sky, defiant and gnarled like the fists of gods who had been forgotten to death.

“What next?” whispered Clay.

“You go in, you take a hot shower, and you sleep in your own bed for a change.”

“Right.” He looked unconvinced, turned in his seat and facing her but half of him thrown into shadow. “That’s not what I mean.”

“I know.”

It’ll be all right, she wanted to soothe him. Something about him in this moment made her want to push aside all formality of the therapist-patient relationship — or was it now researcher-subject? — and reassure him as a friend.

“We keep going,” she finally said.

“You’re in my world now.” He spoke as if regretting the fact. “I’m not in yours. It could make a difference.”

“I’ll try to find a neutral corner.”

A thin smile touched the half of his mouth she could see, and while he said nothing she could almost hear him anyway, what he must have been thinking: There is no such thing as neutrality. We just fool ourselves into thinking some regions are immune to our influence.

“You’re going to need some time to settle back in and readjust to being home. And I don’t want to push you. But we need to decide on a day for me to call you and see when we should start our sessions again.”

“Just give me the rest of the weekend, that’s all I should need. Try me Monday afternoon.” He laughed mockingly. “I guess I still have a phone.”

“I can find my way back if you don’t.”

He nodded. “There’s… someone… she’s used to this kind of shit out of me. She probably came by and brought in my mail. If I’m lucky maybe she opened the bills.”

It was the first real indication of a woman in his life. In therapy he had been evasive around the issue, more comfortable discussing past relationships than those of the present.

“What’s her name?”

“Erin.”

“I think I should hear more about Erin sometime soon.”

“Why stop there? You’ll probably meet her before long.” He grabbed the rubber ball, bounced it once off the windshield and caught it. “My hands ache.” Pocketing the ball in his jacket. “I’m going now.”

After watching him recede up the walk, between a gauntlet of shabby hedges, to let himself into the house, Adrienne sat for a couple of minutes, until a light winked on in a third-floor window. She caught sight of his silhouette framed beneath a peaked eave, leaning there as he stared out into the night and the city, from his cage or his refuge, whatever home had now become.

Only when she saw a curtain glide before the window did she drive away.

Adrienne backtracked, having noted on the drive to Clay’s, the hotels along the way. Saturday night, alone in a strange city, at the tail end of 800 miles, she was not about to be finicky.

She checked in with one bag of essentials to get her through the night, leaving the car in the hotel’s parking garage, where she hoped it would be less likely to be broken into. Her gold card was deposit enough for an indefinite few days until she could arrange for something more permanent. She would be routing the bill to Arizona Associated Labs for reimbursement anyway.

Exactly what her hospital was getting out of the arrangement had not been made clear, but the lab must have made a persuasive offer to Ferris Mendenhall and his overseeing administrator. The hospital was essentially loaning her out as a freelance consultant, with AAL picking up her salary and supplying a staff psychologist to pick up the slack left by her absence. As well, AAL had agreed to cover her housing expenses, and then, so long as they were happy with her results, there was the possibility of a bonus once she had completed her evaluations and observations of Clay in his regular environment. Not surprisingly, treatment was the lowest priority on their agenda, something for her discretion.

The question of where this sudden influx of money was coming from, precisely, Adrienne had not heard asked, but she was assuming that AAL would be cannibalizing it from other projects that had already been funded. Diversion of funds was an everyday occurrence in many scientific communities. Where budget lines were loosely defined, there was a lot of flexibility in how they were used, or abused.

The ultimate irony: She had gotten her grant after all, with the blessings of Ward Five.

She was settled into the hotel room by midnight, filling the tub for a steaming bath to soak away road sweat, road nerves, the late-night blues of being too far away from the one she loved. Never would a bed seem any bigger and more desolate than tonight. The TV played softly, a sad companion.

While the faucet gushed water, she phoned and Sarah answered. Here I am, here’s my number, I miss you already, and even though I don’t want to bring it up, I’m sorry if I acted like a bitch last night because I felt you and Clay were conspiring to judge me for what I do.

“When are you going to start hunting down someplace real to live, then?” Sarah asked.

“As early as possible.” Adrienne peeled away her socks, threw them toward her small suitcase, and curled her legs beneath her on the bed. She had planned on checking into the availability of condominiums for rent, with everything furnished.

“You know,” said Sarah, “I got to thinking today, with the kind of schedule I’ve been keeping lately, I could join you, you know. I mean, that is, if you’d want me underfoot all the time — ”

Want her? Want her?

“ — bailing me out of jail every other night, maybe, am I talking myself out of this?”

Adrienne clutched the phone with both hands and shut her eyes and smiled, as if prayers she didn’t even know she’d prayed had been answered. “How soon can you make it?”

Thirteen

Home again, such as it was — coming back, he felt as if he were an intruder. At any moment, someone might lunge from around a corner and shoot him. Pacing the floor, everything here unsettled, charged with menace until it recognized him and left him alone. His apartment was like a forgetful guard dog whose trust he had to win all over again.

It’s just me, it’s just me, it’s just me —

Too long away, he would have to burn his renewed essence into the place before it became his once more.

Two rooms and a bath on the top floor, these were his quarters. Beneath a low roof, the place had a mild claustrophobic feeling; two feet from the ceiling, the walls angled inward, closing off space that was rightfully his. It needed airing, all of it, from the stale funk of the bedroom to the refrigerator and its miasma of things gone bad.

On a small dining table that demarked the kitchenette from the rest of the living room, Clay found a small accumulation of mail. He received little anyway, never any letters because he had no one to write to; junk, mostly — his name was worth more to strangers, so long as they thought they might get something out of him. A few past-due rent notices that must have been taped to his door had been brought in. From the phone and power companies nothing but empty envelopes, along with a hastily scribbled note: I took care of these so you wouldn’t get shut off and you owe me. You’re on your own for the rent, I can’t cover everything. WHERE ARE YOU, YOU SHIT?

No name, but Erin’s handwriting. How many times had she been up here? Walking through each room, the place vulnerable during an absence more prolonged than he could ever have anticipated. She couldn’t help but leave things behind, smells and hairs and shed skin cells, little markings of territorial encroachment. Should he piss on the walls now, in reclamation? There was no reason to feel this way but he did; then again, how comforting to realize she cared that much.

If it was a problem, why had he given her a key in the first place? Here, check on me if I turn up silent, maybe I’ll be in this chair with a bullet in my head — was that it? No, it wasn’t. There had been times when suicide was tempting, but mostly he’d felt he would sooner kill the rest of the world.

Although according to Adrienne, that would probably turn out to be just another means of suicide, slower perhaps, just waiting, hoping, for that inevitable faster gun to come along and end it for him. He must need Adrienne — he was beginning to think like her, hearing the way she would say things in pointing out what should be obvious to him but never was.

And he wondered if he wasn’t cooperating with this continued examination into the clockwork of his being to find out not what he was made of, but rather how she handled it. Both of them had been pushed nose-to-nose with the unknown, although at least he knew what it was like to live with himself for twenty-five years. If his more outré elements, less understood than simply sensed, turned out to be due to a chromosomal glitch, then that might explain a lot. Although to him this glitch wasn’t science, it was survival. And not necessarily his own.

Just teach me how to stop before I kill someone…

There was nothing to unpack, nothing to eat, nothing to do, so Clay left the television playing to nonstop news of the world beyond, crawled into sheets that needed washing two months ago, and decided to sleep until the last eight hundred miles were leached from his system.

He was aware of her in the doorway before he really awoke and saw her. Footsteps on creaking floors and a voice lingering in the bedroom doorway; the grind of a tiny motor like a metal whisper.

“And this is an asshole, you can tell by the way he just lies there. They’re everywhere, but this one’s a bigger asshole than most, and it’s not often you find them this defenseless.”

She came in just as he was focusing, skirting the bed in a shuffling half circle, legs and arms and a body and a video camera leering in.

Sudden flash: strapped into bed — no, wait, he could move — and they had sent in clones of people from his personal life to invade even his sleep chamber, to record every moment; perhaps he slept differently than normal people. No observable behavior was too minute to tweeze away from his life, to dissect and examine through a lens.

No — Erin. Only Erin.

She halted her impromptu documentary and lowered the camera to her side, looking at him as if not trusting that he was really there. Beneath a slouch hat, bottle-blond again — when he’d left, her hair had been its normal brown — and the thinner kind of thin she got when not eating much. Hollow-cheeked, with a full-lipped mouth whose corners tended to turn down, and blue eyes that naturally seemed to ache from some recent wound.

“So where’ve you been?”

“A psychiatric ward.”

She stared, lips and tongue frozen on the edge of sly retort, and it looked as if the camera was about ready to swing up and resume documentation. Then her shoulders sagged. “You’re not kidding, are you? They really did it to you this time. They really did it, didn’t they?” Erin spun in a slow circle, shaking her head, then sat on the edge of the bed. “Here?”

Clay shook his head, thick inside, webbed with sludge. “Arizona. Tempe.”

Normal people would have asked what he was doing there, would have taken every answer as a clue to pry another question out of their disbelief, backtracking one step at a time. Erin would not. Something about her took it as a matter of course that it was perfectly natural that he should end up in Arizona, while his car remained at the curb for the entire trip. It made for a welcome kind of shorthand.

“What happened to your forehead?” She pointed at the bandage, the yellowing bruise creeping beyond its edges, the ghost of a fading black eye. “Did you get that in a fight?”

“With myself.” A soft huff. “I had a nightmare, and… you know how I can get.” Erin found it hard to sleep with him unless he was so saturated with chemicals that he did not dream; almost anyone would. “I had a cast on when it happened.”

“A cast.” She looked him over more closely, lingering across his knuckles, the backs of his pale hands. The ugly fresh scars that slashed and curled their way over the healed bones. “I guess that explains the Frankenstein look.”

So he decided, why not, fill her in on the more important details. Nothing surprised her anymore, if it ever had, and she did not judge. He told her about the initial journey, the fight; told her about Ward Five and Adrienne. He left the more recent developments alone, and Erin never interrupted. She videotaped, though, sitting opposite him at the end of the bed with her camera steadied on both knees, and he was used to this by now. Sometimes it was her way of listening.

“They tell you anything this time that you didn’t already know?” she asked, just a voice behind a camera, not expecting him to say yes — it was apparent in every word. Oh, just business as usual for Clay, they just kept him a little longer for a change.

“Yeah,” and he looked into the camera eye, Erin hidden, patient, trying to find the perfect frame in which to fit him, an angle to capture his essence in all its contradictions, or take what was there and banish it, leaving him neither brute nor human. He exhaled, long and heavy, stale morning breath — or was it afternoon by now? “I’ll tell you later.”

She lowered the camera, mildly disappointed, mildly chiding, mildly amused. “You’re boring.”

“I’m tired.”

Erin reversed ends and stretched out on the bed alongside him, thin rack of bones and curves and layers of clothing still chilled from outside. He looked to the window, saw that it was trying to rain, spatters striking glass in hushed counterpoint to the constant murmur of CNN in the living room. Bare branches swatted helpless and angry in gusts of wind. The sky was gray as iron, cold looking, and if it could care about anything at all it would surely be hostile.

“How’s everybody else?” he asked.

“The same, I guess. I think you scared Graham. You’ve never been gone this long, have you? I didn’t think so. After a while he just wouldn’t talk at all about you being gone. Uncle Twitch was trying to take bets on when you’d show up again.”

“Did anybody take him up on it?”

“Just Nina. But that doesn’t really count, keeping it between the two of them like that. So, no takers.”

“Not even you?”

She rolled her head over, now face-to-face, glaring with no-nonsense eyes. “I was already out sixty-odd bucks for your bills, what do I need to lose more for?”

“You’ll get it back.”

She glared a little fiercer, yet seemed to have softened somehow, lightly touching her forehead to his; the swelling beneath the bandage throbbed. “You could thank me, at least.”

Erin was right. He knew he was lax when it came to certain words, certain phrases. It wasn’t that he did not know gratitude; it was just that it could leave you so indebted.

“Thank you,” he tried anyway, and found it did not kill him.

It was enough. Erin expected little, planned for no future, took everything as it came along — a supremely pragmatic outlook in dealing with him. He was fully aware that most women, assuming they could have tolerated him any length of time at all, would now be ready to choke him, and would not necessarily be out of line.

It was neither love nor commitment here, on any conventional scale; more a drawing together, as members of some small pack who watched each other’s backs, and took care of cauterizing the wounds whenever the need arose. False conceits such as monogamy and exclusivity were of little use. Erin fucked him and she fucked Graham, both on a regular basis, and of the two, it was Graham’s heart that seemed to bleed at times over that to which he could never lay sole claim.

But no one had ever accused Graham of being too pragmatic; no one had ever accused Erin of not being so. Fucking was also a part of her job description, or at least pretending to. Her face and body were treated well by cameras, and there were a few connected photographers in the area that she knew. She posed with other models for layouts in some of the harder skin magazines on the stands, and the even rawer material available by mail only, or racks in the hard-core shops. She had said she didn’t even consider the other models to be sex partners, just other bodies, other props; while there was excitation and insertion high and low, not often was there actual climax, and even less so for her than for the male models.

All in all, to Clay it served as no threat. Once or twice, at least, it was probably a good thing to have a relationship in which you knew you were just one more inserter on the assembly line.

She lay with him through the afternoon, warm company with whom to weather out the worsening assault of chilly rain at the window, and the continuous barrage of news from television in the next room. Daylight waxed and daylight waned, just that, just light; never a sun. She wanted to call the others, Graham and Twitch and Nina, let them know he had returned in one piece, but he said no, not today — what if they wanted to come over already? He had disappeared almost two months ago. The news would keep until tomorrow.

He showered when the road-worn feel of his skin drove him out of bed, for a time huddling on the slick and stained porcelain as water beat down upon his fetal body. A hot rain, but he shivered as if it were the cold deluge beyond the windows. Strange moments indeed: home again, setting his own schedule; in control of his life once more, if he didn’t count the lithium. Although that was taking much for granted, and assuming he’d been in control to begin with. Maybe he never had been, and free will was the cruelest of illusions; every step he’d taken and decision that had seemed arbitrary might have been as predictable, to anyone who knew those inscriptions of nucleic acid, as C following B following A. A savvy fortune-teller of the genetic age might be able to divide his cranial lobes and tell all from simple inspection: Kick a man in the teeth even after he has been justly conquered? There, in that whorl of brain tissue. Carve a scar on his own arm? There, there, in that fissure…

For you are not like others

not like others

not like others

He left the bathroom, wrapped in a towel, his damp hair combed back, slick and contoured to his head. Erin was standing at a window off the kitchenette, watching sluggish traffic on the street, when he came up behind her.

“Stitches, too,” she said upon turning to see what the bandage had been covering earlier, fingering the knotty black line over his eye. Starting to laugh, then, supple mouth breaking into a smile beautiful in its sadness. “You look like they gave you a lobotomy.”

“It might be the only way to fix things,” he said, half-joking, and despite the serious half he realized he was almost happy like this. The two of them standing here, it could be mistaken for something normal… rainy Sunday afternoon, what do we do now? Someone peering in from the other side of the glass might even get the impression they were in love.

“They found something genuinely wrong with me,” he began, keeping his earlier promise, and he told her. It came surprisingly easy; it sounded like such a joke. Sum it all up in a few brief sentences, and what did it make him, if not a punch line to some evolutionary jest? Somewhere even now Darwin might be laughing.

Eye-to-eye, she did not blink as she held his bare shoulders, biting her lip. Better she ache there than within, right?

“You’re so alone,” she whispered, “you are so alone. Always have to do things your own fucking way, don’t you?”

Clay did not know what to say to that, had no arguments, no evidence to the contrary. So he just watched her shake her head and roll her tongue inside her cheek until she sagged, resting her brow against his collarbone. One wandering hand debated where to alight, trailing from his arm to waist to leg, finally fumbling beneath the towel and cupping his genitals. He grew against her, and shut his eyes as soon as he felt a tiny trace of moisture against his chest. If she had shed a tear for him, it was nothing he wanted to know about, nothing he could afford to know about.

Erin took the lead in making the way to his bedroom, lay him down on the bed while whipping her own clothing aside: oversize black T-shirt, tight black leggings, black Doc Martens boots, flung into a pile like an exoskeleton. Her every rib was clearly defined, her shoulders as bony as a waif’s, although for someone so skinny she was uncommonly large-breasted.

She straddled him and leaned forward along the length of his body, kissed his lips, but with his tongue seeking to probe deeper she pulled away — up, then, to his brow, where she settled her mouth over the stitches. The knot was still exquisitely tender and as sensitive as an erogenous zone. He could feel the tip of her tongue play across the needlework, then a faint teasing pressure from her teeth; strange game of trust, this — he did not wholly feel secure that she wouldn’t bite down hard.

In the back of his mind he longed for a condom, but she would not want one. She played that game of roulette in her professional life; her personal was but an extension. It wasn’t even so much that he worried about diseases as it was the risk of failure of her birth control pills. What a horrible thing that would be. She could abort, but their child might truly be its father’s, consumed by fierce survival instincts; it might fight the scraping and the suction, turn her womb into a battleground. He had always been averse to the idea of bringing a child into the world, even more so now that he knew he was wrong on a molecular level. A second generation might be more hideous still, like every parent’s curse become prophecy fulfilled: Just wait until you have a child of your own someday: then you’ll see.

He gambled again; parted her and entered unguarded, the fear a dark and shining facet of the thrill.

Erin shuddered upright, then bore down upon him with a face he had never seen in her still-life faux sensuality. She looked wounded, angry, capable of consuming him; then she doubled in on herself. She stretched back, back, reaching to the foot of the bed with long thin arms and bringing the video camera to her eye. Red light winking on; she flexed her hips, seeking a rhythm at last, and the frame would have a steady rolling flow.

Selfishly, he missed her hands on him, their rough urgency, and her eyes were gone, replaced by glass and plastic and metal, so he shut his own, and concentrated on trying to feel what he could, whatever he could. It really was better this way.

Fourteen

Early Monday morning, Adrienne began setting appointments to see condominiums for an indefinite rental. Her criteria were few but inflexible: The place would have to be fully furnished; it would ideally be within a mile or two of Clay’s apartment, to facilitate contact; and it would need, if not a room, at least a corner or wall that she could rearrange to her liking into some semblance of a professional domain. Better for both her and Clay if they had a territory to help ease them away from the Tempe office to which they’d been accustomed.

She kept her first appointment later that same morning, with another for late afternoon, a third for Tuesday. After lunch, she whittled away a couple of hours going over notes and the Helverson’s case studies.

Anything to put off taking the actual plunge? Maybe she was stalling. Once she picked up that phone and resumed contact with Clay, the pressure to perform would begin from all sides, with no one to fall back on. Her isolation had become a tangible essence, she was bathed in it. Even Sarah’s eventual arrival — whenever that occurred — would be more tonic than cure.

She placed the call, imagining that Clay would not answer, that the number he’d given was a decoy and the apartment not even his; he would have given them all the slip as he straggled off to some other desert of scorched revelations. She would return south in failure and disgrace.

And when he picked up on the other end, she felt quite the irrationalist.

“How are you feeling?” she asked. “This isn’t too early to call, after all, is it?”

“No, no. I’m fine. I’ve slept a lot, but I think I’m coming out of that today.”

“How is it to be back home? Any feelings of dislocation?”

“A few,” he said, a reluctant admittance. “Even though I didn’t much care for it, I got used to a routine in that place and it’s not in effect anymore. I keep expecting people to come in to look at me, and they don’t.”

“It’s normal, trust me. Clay, Friday morning you woke up on Ward Five, the same as you had every morning for a month and a half. This is only Monday. If you still feel this way in a week, let me know. But I doubt you will.”

“I don’t miss them,” he said. “And it’s good to get back to an irregular meal schedule.”

Adrienne had him grab a pen and paper and take down the hotel phone and her room number, told him she should be there until the end of the week, give or take a day. She didn’t think they should wait for her relocation to resume sessions. Had he given any thought to a schedule he might like? Sundays and Wednesdays were good enough before, nothing wrong with them now, he said.

“Then I’ll expect to see you day after tomorrow,” she said.

“Listen, if you’re interested… three or four people I know, they wanted to welcome me back tonight, at this place we go. If you want to come…”

Her immediate impulse was to decline. He was a patient; it was not a good idea to socialize with patients. Then she amended: He was far more than that, as her duties had for the first time been extended beyond therapy into field observation.

You’re in my world now, he had told her. I’m not in yours.

“What kind of place are you talking about?”

Clay seemed to consider this for several moments, perplexed or at a loss, then asked, almost cheerfully, “Have you ever read Dante’s Inferno?”

The Foundry, it was called. She had said she would try to make it by ten, after the others would have been there an hour or so, but decided it wasn’t so bad to be fashionably late, however unwittingly.

She fought the urge to take a cab — better she learn to get around without a hired crutch. Circling the blocks in an area north of downtown to which Clay had directed her, where the buildings looked grained with decay, where storefronts and their roof lines defiantly stood despite advancing age, as if proud of fatigue and scars. Doorways and windows frequently wore faces of nailed plywood, never blank, bristling with bent-cornered flyers and thousands of staples, layers upon layers of each.

She parked, finally — perhaps the place she was looking for was invisible from a car — trying to walk these streets as if she belonged here, knew them by heart. At last she came upon a sigil: The Foundry, in black spray paint on raw brick, nearly invisible in the night, on the flank of a building just inside the mouth of an alley. An arrow pointed back. Not a place you would stumble upon by accident.

Descending to a doorway below street level, she paid the four-dollar cover to a boy with blond dreadlocks, greenish in a spill of light from within. Without checking her driver’s license — how depressing, her youth must really be gone forever — he sealed a cheap vinyl bracelet around her wrist and she was on her way. The music was already rumbling out at her, louder with every step along a concrete corridor that felt thick underfoot, sticky, like an old theater’s floor.

It took her into a low, cavernous asylum of a place — bedlam’s basement — where heavy-gauge pipes ran riot along walls and the ceiling. Here and there some fetish dangled; mutilated baby dolls were popular, charred with a blowtorch or skewered by spikes or garroted with frayed wires, shining sightless eyes, invariably blue, wide with naiveté. A pair of projection screens unspooled a continual flood of imagery — one a horror film, the other what appeared to be a narrative-free video collage of everything from medical procedures to wartime-atrocity footage to factory machines disgorging glowing rivers of molten iron — but no soundtracks could be heard above the music. Much pandemonium on the dance floor, as heavy bass tones shuddered into bones and a caustic treble grinding rended equilibriums in a corrosive symphony of deconstruction.

Seating was confined along the walls, discarded cathedral pews and tables and chairs imprisoned in alcoves behind chain link fencing. It was in one of these that she found them, Clay her one and only clue. He stood when he saw her, laughed at the look on her face.

“Toto,” he said, “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.”

“I’m more used to coffeehouses at home.” An idiot confession. A college town, surely Tempe had someplace like this, but she had no idea where to find it.

Three others sat at the table, eyes neither welcoming nor rejecting her, more curious than anything. They would surely know what she was, if not every detail as to why she was here. She guessed that she was older than most by eight or ten years, maybe more in the case of the thin blonde to Clay’s left, but it did nothing to alleviate the sense of intimidation. The world often aged people by pain rather than by years, and if their families had been anything like Clay’s, she could well have walked in upon a conclave of ancients with deceptively young faces.

She sat, and Clay made cursory introductions. The thin blonde to his left was Erin. At the end of the table was Graham, another stick figure lost inside a T-shirt — didn’t these people eat? — who met her eyes briefly, then averted as he took a draw from a cigarette pluming with some rank herbal smell.

“Clay’s mentioned your paintings,” Adrienne said. “I’d like to see your work sometime.”

Graham nodded, and with one bony, large-knuckled hand waved out toward the dance floor, the ceiling.

“The dolls?” she guessed.

He nodded again. “They aren’t supposed to be anything, I was just bored one night.”

“But the material just happened to be sitting around,” this from the chunky young woman across the table, with thick, red, wavy hair, an obvious dye job, gathered to one side in a kind of gypsy scarf. Clay introduced her as Nina.

“Look close now, she’ll probably look completely different next week,” he added as a caveat.

“Piss off,” Nina told him, not unkindly.

“I’m just letting her know you keep a frequent metamorphosis schedule, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it.” Turning to Adrienne, “Uncle Twitch works in the sound booth, maybe he’ll be out later.” Clay pointed across the dance floor, where brutal silhouettes collided under blue-purple lighting. A small structure appeared to cower in the far corner, behind another barricade of chain link fence, beneath lights and speakers.

“Would you tell me if you did think there was something wrong with it?” Nina asked.

“Yes,” Clay said without hesitation.

She leaned forward to seize Adrienne’s complete attention, as if it were suddenly very important to explain herself. She seemed to crave intimacy and there was no way intimacy could be achieved with the volume of the music, with the exaggerated gestures required to compete.

“I just don’t think anyone should limit herself to only one incarnation, that’s all,” she said, nail-bitten hands flailing in tight circles. “What if I like myself even better another way? How can I know unless I try it?”

“I understand.” Adrienne tried to nod with reassurance. Poor thing, she knows what I am and she’s afraid I’m going to pick her apart right here at this table. “I live with someone who’s the same way about a lot of things. She has trouble making up her mind if it means excluding some other option.”

Nina began to nod right along with her, wide pleasant face radiant with proxy kinship to a nameless stranger — yes, that’s it, exactly.

“A few weeks ago she asked if it was her fault that everything looked so interesting. It stumped me.”

“And by living with her, you mean…”

“We sleep in the same bed, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“That’s cool,” said Nina. “I tried sleeping with other women but it just didn’t work for me. Hetero and hopeless, I guess.”

Graham, his face high-cheekboned and oddly aristocratic, blew a dour gust of smoke. “I’m sure you can find a support group somewhere.”

“Piss off,” she told him.

Graham pushed black, tumbledown bangs from his eyes, flashed a look of impish mockery at Clay, then back to Nina. “I’m just letting her know you’re a neurotic flake, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it.”

Nina drew back in indignation. “Graham, I hate to tell you this, but you’re an asshole tonight.”

Erin propped her chin on a fist, looking down at the table, and said, “A lot of that going around lately.”

Nina had recovered quickly, leaning toward Graham with forces marshaled. “Some people think change is healthy. Some people" — a glance toward the sound booth — “find change sexually arousing. Every few weeks or so, Twitch gets to ravage a new woman and we don’t have to worry about disease entering the picture.”

Erin looked up, interest renewed. “This is a good time to ask something I’ve always wondered. What if Twitch likes ravaging one of the earlier women better?”

“Well you can just piss off too,” said Nina, and now she really was beginning to get agitated.

“What, what did I say?” Erin cried. “It’s a valid question.”

“Well, it doesn’t deserve an answer.”

Graham nudged Erin’s shoulder. “It’s already happened,” he declared, very sure of himself, and did not give Nina a chance to respond. “Which one was it, let me guess: the dominatrix? Or was it the post-Woodstock earth-mother with the Birkenstocks?” A shrewd smile, a carnivore’s smile. “Which one moaned louder?”

“Graham — ”

“And does he ever breathe a sigh of relief when one’s gone?”

Nina drew back in her chair, seeming to shield herself behind the scattering of empty bottles, bleeding from unseen slices. Eyes that moments ago had shone brightly were now dismal and frantic, without grounding. She looked to Clay but got nothing. To Adrienne it was like watching someone being poked with a stick, seeking support from an older brother, and finding only a turned back.

Save for Clay, she did not know these people, but could she sit there and let this happen? Say nothing? Would they even listen to her? She had stiffened in her chair, and before she could say a word, it was as if Clay knew precisely when to nudge her arm.

“Come on,” he said, “let’s go introduce you to Twitch.”

Staring, torn, I’m needed here —

More insistent: “Come on,” voice low and compelling even through the ratcheting music. She followed him out of the cage into greater light, denser sound, a disorienting assault. She pulled in closer to Clay, her mouth at his ear.

“You could have stopped that, couldn’t you?”

“Probably,” he shouted back.

“But you didn’t.”

“It’ll stop anyway.”

Why, you cold prick — it crossed her mind before she was able to filter it out. Objectivity had died without a whimper. What a plunge this was, ripped from the four safe walls that comprised her zone of efficiency in Tempe, set down where she wasn’t even sure which rules had flipped. The dynamics of exchange were completely different here.

I am a fraud and I’m totally unqualified to be doing this. The sudden need for Sarah swept over her. Sarah would lead by example. Sarah would thrive here, would have immersed herself upon arrival. Sarah would take to them naturally because that’s what Sarah did, and in that moment the only thing that terrified her more than Sarah deciding she should stay home after all, was if she came, and the rest of them, Clay especially, decided they had no use for Adrienne at all.

Clay in the lead, they weaved through the throng of long hair and shaved heads, leather and flannel, T-shirts and dark wraiths, all of them like members of allied tribes who had come together for noisy ritual, drawn by a summons they may not even have comprehended. They were in here, they were not out there, and it was enough.

He first led her to the bar, where she got a gin, and he some red-orange concoction in a plastic glass. A smart drink, he told her: quantum punch.

“Much alcohol at all, it just kills me,” he said. “They say this has amino acids, it helps your brain.” Taking a drink, then shrugging. “Probably just bullshit.”

They circled the floor again, a slow path. On one screen, actors in latex demon makeup menaced a young woman with curved tools of butchery; on the other, a mad-eyed rhesus monkey secured by metal clamps shrieked without sound during the advanced stages of vivisection. She turned her eyes away, the symmetry obscene.

Clay halted at one point, tried to explain that Graham really didn’t intend to be cruel to Nina; it just came out sometimes when he had been drinking. His own theory: Graham secretly envied her apparently effortless flexibility. He had his paintings and an occasional sculpture, but these were all he dared try, while Nina was essentially fearless. She constantly attempted to define her own niche, without much success at anything, but at least she tried it all. Painting had been an early experimental passion, but Graham had laughed off her vision and execution as immature, so into the closet it all went. Last year she had tried writing subversive children’s literature, not disliking children but resenting them for their innocence, and had penned such twists on convention as The Little Engine That Died and Little Red Riding Crop, in which Red seduced the wolf and found him to be a closet submissive; but no one had cared to publish them. A few months ago she’d tried her hand at designing greeting cards for people who hated holidays, hoping to market the idea of a series of Sylvia Plath Christmas cards, but had been denied the rights to reprint excerpts from the selected poems.

Meanwhile, Graham had his paintings, and did not even feel comfortable straying from the corroded iron realms he had forged for himself.

Of course not, thought Adrienne, he’s painting his own prison, a hasty judgment considering she had only heard the works described and had barely even spoken to him; but instinct was often more correct than she gave it credit for.

“Nina,” said Clay, “she’ll probably outlast us all.”

They worked their way around to the sound booth, and Clay rapped at a plastic window overlooking the dance floor, showed his face, then they moved around to a door that looked flimsy enough to withstand one kick, no more. After a moment it was unlocked, and they squeezed into the booth, at most four feet by eight. The volume dropped immediately; you could converse in here without throat strain.

A tall figure was hunched forward, feverishly loading music, a mad Frankenstein busying himself with digital technology. Even alone he would appear too cramped in the booth, the sort of guy whose elbows and knees seemed to have their own renegade senses of direction. A short sandy ponytail hung limp at the nape of his neck, and he wore a beard but no moustache. To Adrienne he looked like a young Amish man gone irrevocably astray.

“Charmed,” he said flatly when introduced, and shook with a hand already burdened by a cassette. He missed not a beat and prattled on, ignoring Clay for the moment and talking only to her. “Look at these, would you?”

He forced upon her the cases from two compact discs and one tape, releases by artists she had never heard of: Godflesh, God’s Girlfriend, the God Machine. Adrienne gave them back with a vacant smile, much like her own mother’s when she had been handed some cryptic crayon drawing: Oh yes, isn’t that nice.

“I come up with these thematic blocks, and nobody out there ever catches onto them.” Uncle Twitch looked disconsolate. “No one recognizes subtext anymore. I work among philistines.”

Adrienne glanced at the two windows, long and narrow and overlooking the concrete dance floor like gunports in a fortress. Beneath them were makeshift shelves for the CD players, a tape deck, a turntable, a mixer, the amplifier. She looked for someplace safe to rest her glass but there was none.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Maybe there’s no incentive to tell you.”

Twitch looked at her, open-mouthed and perfectly still, then nodded sharply. He reached up to seize a microphone and lever it down before his face. Flipped a switch and his voice cut in over the music like that of an angry prophet: “The first one of you ungrateful cocksuckers who can tell me what the last three tracks had in common gets a free rectal exam!” He jammed the microphone back into place and crossed his arms. “There.”

“Subtle,” said Clay.

Cheers and jeers from the dance floor; from some unseen quarter most of a cup of draft beer came showering across one window, and Twitch cackled loudly. “That got ’em! Sometimes you just need to know you’re not being taken for granted.”

He settled, finally looked at Clay. Warmly, she noticed, a small smile creeping onto the corners of a mouth that looked given to smiling frequently, almost against its will.

“I’m glad you’re back,” he told Clay, lightly, though not without concern. For a moment Twitch looked as if he intended to hug him, then consciously forced it away, as if even an arm tossed about Clay’s shoulders for a few seconds would be too much, either feared or unwanted. Worse, it appeared mutually understood.

Here they lingered, the booth calm and cool, a hurricane’s eye in fragile isolation from the chaos just yards away. While Clay and Twitch conversed, she remained at one window, a staring face washed black and blue and purple, the colors of fresh bruises. She could watch with more removal than she could ever have summoned at one of the tables; out there a patron, in here an interloper who watched dancers that did not so much dance as spasm, less from celebration than the vaguest kind of rage. The music was well chosen here, the sound of a world grinding its children into grease to lubricate its machines. Here the defiant could stave off that fate awhile longer; or maybe they mocked it, or simply rehearsed the moment when they too would be fed struggling into the maw, like their parents before them. Or perhaps they worshiped it instead, without even realizing; gods took many forms, and the new ones were no less thirsty for blood than the forgotten ancient deities; they just waited until it was spilled in newer ways.

Clay decided to leave the booth long enough to return to the bar, and she decided against following, risking the impression she was dogging his every step.

“He told us,” said Twitch, soon.

“Excuse me?”

“About being a freak.”

Adrienne turned from the window. “That’s not the terminology I like to use.”

“I think he prefers it.”

“And I don’t.”

Twitch nodded with appeasement — not worth arguing about. At once she found something endearing in his clumsy way of trying to steer out of this.

“He can be so honest about himself, in the strangest ways,” Twitch mused, hands moving restlessly over knobs and switches and sliders, as if they found comfort there. “Is it… is it dangerous for him?”

Adrienne sagged, hands in her pockets. “I can’t answer that. I wouldn’t if I could.”

“He thinks it is. Isn’t that all that matters?”

No, but that was most of it, so much so that there was no need to refute. Clay was back soon, spent a few more minutes in the booth before deciding to return to the table. She came along this time, eyes drawn to the reality screen in spite of herself, where a man sat placid and shaven-headed, eyes catatonic, while doctors probed into his opened skull; one cheek ticked as if jerked by a puppeteer.

At their table they found that Erin had left for the dance floor, while Nina sat holding a morosely stupefied Graham as he sagged against her side. His expression looked like something that someone had crumpled up and cast away. He might have been crying recently, or not; most certainly he was drunk beyond repair. And Nina, eyes full of pity, as if she was not sure what else she could feel… she held him, and kissed his forehead, and brushed the hair from his eyes when it fell there. Whatever she whispered into his ear was lost to the greater din.

Clay nudged Adrienne’s foot to get her attention.

“Told you, you’re not in Kansas anymore,” he said, and drew out a chair and sat heavily upon it, to wait… until, she supposed, the night ended.

Fifteen

Quincy Market was one of Boston’s main melting pots, and that was why Patrick Valentine loved it so. It was more than just the food, although that was incentive enough. Here, all the cuisines of the world converged, small counter stands packed along a gray stone hall that looked more suited to housing a wing of government. You could walk from end to end, side to side, slowly, taking time to breathe, to savor, and conduct a global tour via aromas alone.

Or you could sit and watch the passing humanity, and the world would come to you. He knew of no place else where he could see such diversity among those with whom he had to share the planet, and it always did him good to keep in touch this way, keep him mindful of why he was what he was.

Sometimes he indulged fervid old fantasies, imagining the break in the humdrum that he could bring to the herds who came to feed with firm belief that the day would be a day like all others. How many could he kill in, say, five minutes of forever? He was a man who knew weaponry, who had made it his business, and his hands seemed made to hold it. His fingers and palms fit machine-tooled steel as the hands of passionate men fit their lovers. With the compression of one index finger he could awaken them all from their walking comas, and bring home to them the truth of the world, and worlds beyond: All things tend toward entropy.

But not today; not ever. How he had managed to quell such impulses as a younger man remained elusive, but mystery augmented relief; surely some greater process had been at work to stay his trigger finger. Ignorant of his heritage then, and now wiser by extremes, he had a greater purpose, the best kind: one he had created for himself.

A Thursday afternoon; alone, then not. The man who joined Valentine at his table brought with him the scent of a shivering city and breath that smelled of cherry throat lozenges.

“Are you eating today?” Valentine asked him.

The man coughed into his fist and shook his head, eyes red and watery as he tried to smooth his graying, gale-blown hair. He owned, by many accounts, one of the finest minds in a city filled with exceptional minds, but publicly downplayed it well enough. Stanley Wyzkall may have been the director of applied research in MacNealy Biotech’s genetics division, but it was possible that rumors were true: His wife was in charge of his wardrobe.

“Something to drink, then?” Valentine asked, and Wyzkall told him a hot coffee would be nice. He left to patronize a Greek vendor, souvlaki for himself and coffee for them both. When he returned he found a fat manila envelope waiting on his side of the table, and it was just like Christmas, six weeks early.

“Hello, hello,” he said to the envelope, snatching it up. Papers spilled into his hand but gold dust could have been no more welcome. Medical profiles, psychological evaluations, MMPI results, subject’s history… enough to keep him engrossed for hours.

“Quite the unique extended family you’ve grouped about yourself.” Wyzkall honked his nose into a napkin before bringing the coffee to his lips, two-handed.

“And he actually consented to continued observation,” said Valentine, still scanning pages. He then crushed them to his chest in the closest thing to glee he could feel. “Maybe there is a God.”

“Mmm. Possibly. But defined by a keen sense of the absurd, wouldn’t you say?”

“I wouldn’t call it perfection.” Valentine stuffed the papers back into the envelope, too much of a temptation — his lunch would grow cold.

“The attending psychologist — Rand is her name — has been in Denver since last weekend. She returned him there herself. She’s agreed to file weekly progress reports with Arizona Associated Labs. Of course I’ll have access to these. And this, mmm, this brings up the matter… the matter of — ” He began to clear his throat harshly, at last popping another cherry lozenge and looking so reluctant that Valentine was tempted to just let him squirm.

“The matter of a weekly retainer?” he prompted.

Wyzkall appeared greatly relieved.

“How much?”

“Twenty-five hundred per week seems reasonable.”

“Two thousand is the limit at which I’m prepared to keep from being unreasonable.” He hunched forward, bringing his face closer to Wyzkall’s, every sweeping curve of his skull glistening with intent. And his eyes, cunning eyes, flat eyes that spoke of pain for the sake of expediency, that simmered with the knowledge of families who should be protected from assassins unknown. There was no need to say another word.

Because you trust me and I trust you, ethically and legally and in our future goals we have each other by the balls, but you always keep that little flame of fear of me alive. Because you know what I am inside and there’s always the remote chance I may explode in your face. You have dealt with a devil and he pays you well, but the devil can always, always, slip his leash.

“Two thousand will be sufficient.”

Valentine settled back into his seat. He bluffed well but would never hurt Wyzkall. You did not hurt the goose that laid the golden eggs; although if you could scare it into shitting out a little extra gold now and then, so much the better.

“Drink your coffee, Stanley,” he said, “and we’ll decide the best way to launder in the new cash flow.”

Theirs was a business relationship based on the two primary commodities in the modern world: money and information. Over the past four years, Valentine had paid $20,000 apiece for his own copy of the file on each identified Helverson’s syndrome subject. He had an insatiable need to know the limits of the mutation that had marked his own chromosomes; the private sector lab for which Stanley Wyzkall served as research director had an equal need for monetary reserves.

MacNealy Biotech, in addition to its indigenous research projects, was one of numerous labs the world over involved in the Human Genome Project, the inner-space equivalent of landing the first man on the moon. Discussed in think tanks and on scientific symposia for years, and finally decided to be technologically feasible, the Project was launched in the fall of 1990 with the fifteen-year goal of mapping every strand of human DNA. Each of the three billion nucleotide base pairs, charted. Each chromosome identified, its function labeled.

The resource needs were staggering. Entire supercomputer data banks would have to be constructed to contain the sequenced information. New technologies needed refining to speed up the process of deciphering the protein codes. Human effort was estimated at upwards of 30,000 man-years of labor. And the financial requirements would be almost endless.

Patrick Valentine felt that, in some small way, he was doing his part. Stanley Wyzkall wanted none of the covertly allocated funds for himself, instead insisting they be directed, through foundations that existed only on paper, into MacNealy Biotech.

It all worked out well, and shaped direction in a life that had for its first forty years seemed to him to be absolutely without meaning.

Chicago-born, Chicago-bred, Patrick Valentine had grown up, if not the toughest boy in his surrounding neighborhoods, at least the fiercest. His furies knew no logic, they were just there, so much a part of him that childhood acquaintances who committed no mayhem seemed another species entirely. Life was something to be consumed, not savored, then shit out as quickly as possible. Years of turmoil and restless energy and a formless anger had brought him nothing but welts across the back from a distraught father who continually threatened disavowal, and a succession of run-ins with the law.

What a strange, strange lad. What a disappointment. He was educated, but not civilized. He looked in the mirror and saw only the dimmest capacity for greatness, buried in the roughest ore.

Great men must first become great masters of themselves, and connections eventually formed in his mind. The blue uniform that had heretofore meant only trouble gradually took on an air, not of mystique, but of practicality. Here was a channel for his violent exuberance. Here was a job he could love.

The Chicago Police Department was a most unexpected choice to those who knew him.

He applied. He was accepted. He was amazed.

The feel of the baton, the comforting weight of the service revolver… these became extensions of himself. They were the distillations of potent rage given a vessel to contain it. That he represented law and order was incidental. Far better was that he had been given both a license to inflict controlled miseries upon those whose word could never stand up to his own, and a support system that backed him up when there were doubts. Valentine knew no fatigue when it came to subduing the guilty with bruising ferocity. He was respected by some, reviled by many, and feared by all, but the opinions of others had always been of low priority.

Six years it lasted, this urban bounty of bleeding heads and broken bones, cowering lowlifes and intimidated lovers. Six years before termination for repeated use of excessive force; you really had to be a monster to get the pink slip from this outfit. He tried to take the turn of events philosophically — only so many complaints could be lodged before the scales tilted inevitably against him. He’d had a fine run.

As well, he had long since taken measures to ensure a bonus to his income, a supplement with the potential to far surpass any paycheck the city of Chicago would ever cut him.

He had found the streets and weedy lots and decayed tenements to be a blue-steel cornucopia. Guns were everywhere, yet it seemed there was no end to the demand — a fine paradox. No gun made it to the evidence room if it could be avoided. Even those that did were occasionally misplaced. Shakedowns of suspects led to confiscations, as easy as picking apples from a tree.

It was a good racket. Investment was nil; the proceeds, 100 percent clear profit. His day job was such that he was in frequent touch with those who made the best customers, and some of them led him to connections greater still. By the time Valentine was fired from the police department, he was already masterminding break-ins at National Guard armories and manufacturer warehouses to truck away heavyweight hauls. Within another three years, he was plugged into an underground pipeline capable of supplying demolitions ordnance, rockets, mines, mortars, nearly everything that dealt a lethal blow short of nuclear.

Eternal demand, infinite supply. He had stumbled upon the one business that remained untouched by the whims of fickle economies. So long as one took precautions to avoid federal scrutiny, it was a seller’s market. The groups all but lined up and took numbers: slothful insurrectionists and supremacist militants, international terrorists, private mercenary armies out to create third-world bloodbaths, and, after he had relocated operations to Boston, the IRA.

He took no sides, took only the rewards, but even the money paled beside the hypnotic thrill of tuning in news footage of some trouble spot in the nation or halfway around the world and knowing he might have contributed. Here, the flaming wreckage around a car packed with a quarter ton of plastique; there, the stilled body of some leader cut down by an assassination squad. I am there, he would think. He would stare with sated hunger at blood sprays on walls, at churning smoke, at fragments of devastated buildings. Where others saw misery, he saw poetry. Where they mourned senselessness, he recognized the fractal chaos of inevitability.

All things tend toward entropy.

His prayer: Let them burn and let them bleed, but most of all, let them go their way.

Had he believed in the divine at all, Valentine could surely have seen himself as its instrument; but he did not. He was but a man of his world and his times — to an extent a self-made man, but augmented, he came to understand, by deviant biology.

A decade ago, while in his mid-thirties, he had survived another facet of the world’s patterned chaos. A malignant tumor had taken root in his scrotum and claimed both testicles before being excised. In the years to follow, while cancer stayed a vanquished foe, the obsessions it had inspired remained. Patrick Valentine could not get enough medical magazines written for the serious layman. Disease was fascinating. Disease was systemic failure that broke down the status quo.

Four years ago he had come across an article on misbegotten chromosomes and their exploitation in the sentencing hearing subsequent to a murder conviction in Texas. The name of Mark Alan Nance sparked dim recollection — a robbery and shooting spree, three days of outlawry in and around Houston. He’d had his fifteen minutes of infamy, then been forgotten by all but those involved.

Don’t sentence my client to death, the defense attorney was arguing, because he could be genetically predisposed to commit the crimes for which he’s been found guilty. Several months before his rampage, Mark Alan Nance and his wife had been genetically tested to determine why they had conceived a child with severe birth defects, a child that had eventually died. While the abnormalities had been traced to the maternal bloodline, Mark Alan Nance had exhibited an unrelated deformity never suspected, not even known of until two years prior.

It was the first time Valentine had ever heard of Helverson’s syndrome.

The article cited comparisons between the defense attorney’s wrangling and trials conducted in the late sixties in which reduced sentences were requested for convicted murderers who had double-Y genotypes. Nance’s attorney must have done his homework well. Many of the arguments were the same as those of twenty years before. Unhappy case studies of the scant handful of known Helverson’s subjects were introduced as evidence.

But in the end, the Texas courts were unforgiving. Death row for Mark Alan Nance.

The arguments in mercy’s favor and the portrayal of Nance’s miserable life — social malcontent, uncontrolled rages, emotional cripple — rang enough common chords that Valentine began to feel a strange kinship with the convict, loser though the man may be. Above all, though, he had been riveted by the single jailhouse photo accompanying the article.

He looks exactly like I did at his age.

The article had mentioned a certain physical similarity among Helverson’s progeny.

It was enough to drive Valentine to a private investigator, paying him well to compile data on the top researchers at MacNealy Biotech, the site of Helverson’s original discovery and the primary data bank for its subsequent research. Most looked far too clean to even consider approaching with the kind of offer he was planning. Among them, surely at least one would possess less than bedrock ethical foundations… but which to choose? One wrong selection and he might never get another.

One of the scientists, however, had a skeleton in an old closet. Stanley Wyzkall had been fined several years before for tax evasion. God bless greed.

Valentine flew to Boston, where he arranged to meet with a perplexed Dr. Wyzkall, and paved his proposal with an endowment of $50,000. Ample rewards for information, for progress and understanding — what could be more noble? Discretion would be assured as well as demanded, particularly for Valentine’s own genetic karyotype…

Which confirmed his every suspicion about himself.

Ironic. He had become the oldest identified Helverson’s syndrome carrier — the first of a kind, possibly — and remained entirely off-record. Only after their deal was clinched did he stress to Wyzkall just how deep was his need for continued privacy.

“We’ll get along beautifully as long as we stick to the simple guidelines I suggested,” Valentine told him one day over lunch. “We’ll both profit immeasurably.” Then from a pocket he removed five pictures and dealt them across the table like a poker hand: Wyzkall himself, then wife, daughter, daughter, son. “But if you ever expose me? Stanley? I’ll leave every single hair on your head untouched, but I’ll center these other four heads in the crosshairs of a scope on a rifle so powerful there won’t even be teeth left.”

Valentine slid Wyzkall’s own photo over to him, gathered the rest, and returned them to the pocket — patting them — over his heart. The man was speechless, but he had not paled. Admirable.

“Have you read Nietzsche?” Valentine then asked.

“No,” Wyzkall murmured.

“He wrote, ‘The great epochs of our life come when we gain the courage to rechristen our evil as what is best in us.’” With a frank and humorless smile, “Have courage, Stanley. And enjoy my money as much as I’m going to enjoy learning.”

Dealing with the devil was the way Stanley Wyzkall chose to regard it, but Valentine took no offense.

And within two months, the devil decided to move his home and entire operation to the Boston area.

He drove back across the river and was home in Charlestown before the afternoon traffic thickened to its worst.

Valentine settled into his Cape Cod, secured it, checked every room and closet, made sure each room’s pistol was where he normally kept it. Once he could breathe again, he eased into the armchair in the living room and did not leave it until he had gone through Clay Palmer’s file from beginning to end. He read slowly, carefully, each word not so much comprehended as digested.

Another one to hope for, another in which to invest his dreams of a surrogate guardian. This one, Clay Palmer, would have the attentions of a therapist in these days of self-discovery, but what did doctors really understand? They sought the concrete and quantifiable because as long as they could measure something, it was the easiest way to chart progress. To underlying meanings they gave as little thought as they could get away with.

Clay Palmer would in many respects be the last to know what was important. Left to doctors, he would be told only as much as they thought prudent to let him know, as if it were a privilege and not his right.

Unacceptable.

Late in the night, Valentine repackaged Clay’s file and took it into his bedroom, pulled back the rug in the center of the floor. Very solid floors in this house, teak, like the decks of old sailing ships. It made a solid anchor for the floor safe concealed beneath the rug and a removable panel.

He opened the safe and stowed the file, along with the dozen others he’d purchased. There they would spend the night until he awoke the next morning, refreshed, and could retrieve them for some selected photocopying.

When he would find time to make it to the post office was anyone’s guess.

Sixteen

Adrienne only had to spend one night alone in the condo. A month’s lease signed, renewable, she had moved in on Friday, and it seemed wrong, all wrong. The task had taken barely an hour. It looked like a home, but that was all. She spent the rest of Friday roaming rooms that had been furnished by someone else, a stranger, and trying to make herself comfortable on furniture that she had not bought. This was like wearing someone else’s old jeans and trying to convince herself they fit just as well. She stood at windows overlooking the neighborhood — hedges and lawns and trees — and they looked lifeless. Three years in the desert and she had forgotten the desolate grip of early winter.

Come on, this too shall pass. This is where I live now.

Sarah arrived mid-afternoon on Saturday, having spread the journey over two days. Adrienne was outside to meet her almost as soon as she had stepped from the car, hugged her tightly and they kissed, and Adrienne wanted nothing more than to spend a few hours getting reacquainting with Sarah’s wonderfully distracting body. It was under there somewhere, beneath all those clothes.

“I think somebody missed me,” she said.

Adrienne squeezed her hand. “Don’t let it go to your head.”

And the crisp air smelled sweeter, felt for the first time invigorating rather than forbidding, while the sun strained more persistently behind its prison of clouds. The day had gone from vinegar to wine.

“Do you want the grand tour first,” said Adrienne, “or are you itching to lug boxes already?”

“Show me, show me.” Sarah fell in step beside her, toward the enclosed stairway to the second floor. “I dressed for the state, do I look like I belong here?”

Sarah tramped up the stairs in jeans and soft leather moccasin boots, a heavy knit sweater, and a down vest. She looked as if she’d just stepped from an ad for a ski lodge.

“Everybody’s a chameleon,” Adrienne told her.

After seeing the condo, Sarah granted approval, adding only that as long as someone else was picking up the tab, why not have gone for someplace with a hot tub as well?

They put off unloading the car until it seemed indecent. Sarah could never travel as lightly as Adrienne; always something she might want, might miss, might long to hold to remind her of another place or time. She packed keepsakes the way alcoholics packed bottles, always in reserve if needed.

Flashbacks came while carrying boxes from the car, a pleasant déjà vu of two years ago when the commitment had finally been made between them, the house in Tempe chosen, Adrienne acknowledging, This is no passing fling, I love her, this is serious. Friends had shown up that weekend to pitch in, those whom she had gotten to know and love through Sarah. Lesbian couples, mostly, who seemed to form their own extended family, and around whom Adrienne had at first been terribly insecure. Worrying, Will they even accept me? I’m a half-breed. They had, and it really came through that day. Everyone had toted crates and boxes and furniture, had made seats for themselves amid the half-finished jumble. Passing pizza and beer, they traded tales of old moves, horror stories of demolished possessions and runaway trucks and wrecked appliances and fires, those ruinous events that seem to grow more fondly hilarious the longer ago they happened. Adrienne found out that day why it is always wise to withhold the beer until the job is completed. It was the first day since leaving San Francisco that she had genuinely felt this new town to be her home, that her soul had taken root and found a sense of community.

Alone this time, just the two of them to share the burdens, though they were few, and she found herself missing the gathering of a tribe.

When they had everything in, Sarah ran for the door one last time. “Back in ten minutes, I swear,” then she dashed off. Adrienne heard the car gunning back onto the street.

She began unpacking, sorting by destination: bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, unknown. One box she opened was labeled, in slapdash marker, Thesis Books. Had Sarah at last decided on a subject she would stick with? Adrienne was on her knees, browsing titles, when Sarah rushed through the doorway with flushed cheeks.

“I couldn’t resist.” She held up a bottle of wine. “I spotted a package store a few blocks away on Colfax. You want glasses or are you feeling hardcore today?”

“From the bottle’s good,” Adrienne murmured, still sorting among the books. This was odd. Given the half dozen or so topics Sarah had been flirting with, none of these books seemed to apply.

“Oh,” Sarah said. “You found them.”

“I gather you finally committed to something… but what are these?” Adrienne then dug out Erich Fromm’s The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, Carl Jung’s The Undiscovered Self. “There are some of mine in here.”

Sarah had the bottle uncorked and headed out of the kitchen, taking the first pull. “You don’t mind, do you?”

“Of course not,” accepting the bottle to make the christening of the temporary new home official. She handed it back and went randomly diving for more. “Apocalypse Culture… The Theory and Practice of Apathy… Tried as Adults… Generation X, even? What did you finally decide on?”

Sarah sank down to the floor, opposite Adrienne, over the box. “You won’t get mad, will you?”

“No…” Saying it automatically, hating that prefacing question; she always had. It was like waving a red flag: You’re going to hate this.

Why were you having an affair, Neal?

Well, you won’t get mad, will you?

“The idea started taking shape a week ago,” Sarah began, “right after you left with Clay. And then when we talked on Tuesday after you’d spent the night before with his friends, that only firmed it up more.”

Adrienne sat motionless, not liking the way this was heading. Clay, the friends he wouldn’t even refer to as friends… this was too close.

“Don’t look at me that way.” Sarah leaned forward, elbows propped on the spines of books. “I want to do my thesis on the social climate and milieu that Clay and the others come out of. That kind of doomsday subculture and malaise that are woven through the post-boomer generation. All those people who missed out on the banquet, and mostly got stuck with the leftovers and the bills. The ones who don’t have any hope or faith left, to the extent that they don’t even see the point of trying.”

Adrienne shook her head. “You’re doing it again.” Hoping to argue on the side of generalities rather than specifics. “Another idea rears it head, and you just can’t get enough of it. Do you know how many times I’ve listened to this same kind of pitch?”

“What, are you keeping score?”

“Six times, Sarah.”

“So I’ve finally committed myself to one. You knew it had to happen eventually. This is what I want to do. This is the one.”

“And I’ve heard that line, too.” She snatched the bottle away and belted down a swallow, flipped the silky blond hair up off her neck; it suddenly felt too hot. “And I suppose if you stumble across some lost tribe up in the Rockies, then that’ll be the one, the one, the big one.”

“Objection!” Sarah cut in. “Ludicrous example.” And Adrienne nodded, Oh, all right, so it is, I speak in principle but have it your way.

Sarah took the bottle from her and set it aside so she could hold her by both hands. “I told you I wanted to do something I could get really passionate about. And I think this matters very much. Besides,” she said, squeezing Adrienne’s hands, “my adviser liked it.”

She felt some of the starch flow from her shoulders. Well. Well. This did shed a light of validation on things, didn’t it?

“Cultural anthropology?” she said softly. “Fishbine thought this idea fit?”

Sarah nodded. “He’s actually pretty progressive.” She let go of Adrienne’s hands and implored with her own as she rocked up onto her haunches. “I think the next time the world yields up another lost tribe, that’ll be it. There won’t be any more. We’ve found them all and most of the time they’ve become a little more like us, and they’re never any better for it. And you know? That’s what intrigues me most, why we’re the ones so screwed up.

“There’s nothing I could do with a more primitive culture that wouldn’t be redundant. So why not look at my own the way it is right now? The whole field of anthropology, it’s been at a kind of pivotal point for the past several years. It’s still asking the same questions, but we have to ask them in a whole new context. So in a way, the whole field becomes fresh all over again.”

“Because the world’s changed so much,” Adrienne said.

“That’s right. It’s taking a new look at family structures, gender and race relations. Migration. Warfare. Law and order. All of those things are giving us fits right now and it’s because we mostly ignored them, except in the most superficial ways.” Sarah ran both hands back through her hair and it became a savage mane. “I just want to be part of that. It excites me.”

“I know,” said Adrienne. “I understand that. But…” And why such a prickly reception to this? She knew perfectly well that Sarah had not come up here to intellectually seduce Clay from her, but to be just as perfectly irrational, that was exactly how it felt. And she almost had to laugh. Fighting over a man? That was the last thing she’d ever expected to happen.

“But what?” asked Sarah.

Oh, out with it. “It feels like a tremendous conflict of interest brewing here. Almost to the point of it being unethical.”

“I thought about that. But you’re not in a clinical setting anymore. As soon as you brought him into your home — my home, too — and agreed to take him to his, you entered a new area. I’m not one of them, but some people would call that unethical. But it’s a weird case, so…” Sarah shook her head. “You’re taking a good long look at Clay in his natural environment to see how it relates to him. I just want to take a look at his natural environment to see how it relates to everyone.”

And this was it, wasn’t it? Adrienne looked at her bluntly. “You’re in my territory now.”

“That’s what really bothers you, isn’t it?”

Adrienne sat still for a moment, then nodded.

Sarah cocked one corner of her mouth, like a disgruntled teenager. “You have a problem with sharing sometimes.”

It should have stung. Another time it might have, but not now. Because it felt justified? “It’s an occupational hazard.”

Sarah took the wine bottle, rolled it between flattened palms for contemplative moments. “Answer me one thing: What do you think I’m going to do to Clay, or anyone else?”

“Do?” Adrienne blinked. “I’m not sure I follow — ”

“Yes you do. What effect do you think I’m going to have on the reason you’re here?”

Adrienne tried to answer, found she could not. This had cut the legs from beneath her. With Clay’s friends — or whatever they were to him — she wasn’t even sure she should remain in contact. They had met and she had learned what they were like and perhaps that should be enough, although to be honest, a couple of them, Nina and Twitch, she had rather liked.

She pictured Sarah with them, all of them, plus any other peripheral folks who drifted along. Anthropologically speaking, fieldwork involved living with a group for a time and assimilating a part of them. She wasn’t so sure she liked the tone of what Sarah would be taking in.

Based on what she had seen the other night, they were bitter and spiteful, they had no direction in their lives, and when they weren’t staring morosely at the world at large, they were picking at one another. Well, sometimes you had to make a conscious effort to see the light of day, and it really was worth the effort; tell yourself, Get on with it, that the world didn’t end for you unless you let it happen. Adrienne knew that, as a professional, she wasn’t supposed to react to others judgmentally, but sometimes you still just felt like slapping someone.

And this was the emotional environment that Sarah would be assimilating? Adrienne could see nothing constructive coming of this —

And she realized how ridiculous that sounded. As if she were turning into her own mother, anybody’s mother, circa the teen years: I don’t like those friends of yours, they’re a bad influence.

So what did that leave her with, simple jealousy?

“We take the same kind of oath, you know,” Sarah told her. “You’re not an M.D. but that doesn’t matter. Do no harm.’ That applies to you, too. From my end, it’s ‘Never endanger the informant.’ And we wouldn’t be working at cross-purposes. I might even be of help to you. I come at things from a different perspective. So I might see something that you miss.”

Adrienne nodded. I’m the only one here who came to make an impact. She didn’t…

She came to be impacted.

“I’ll leave this up to you,” Sarah said. “If you say no, I’ll live with that.”

Adrienne straightened, sharply. “Don’t do this to me. I don’t make your decisions for you and I’m not starting with this one.”

Sarah took a long, slow drink of the wine. Reached over to retrieve her down vest from where she had dropped it on the floor, held it on her lap. Was it as manipulative a gesture as it felt? So subtle, so damnably subtle. In the moment Adrienne felt lost, helpless, imagining how Sarah must have been with her father ten, fifteen years ago. Twisting him around her finger as teenage girls are wont to do. She might have gotten anything.

“What are we going to do, Adrienne?” she asked.

“Stay,” was all that finally rose to her lips, as she pulled the vest from Sarah’s lap, hands, intentions. “Stay.”

Seventeen

Keeping his appointments with Adrienne, Clay began to see, was a matter of faith, faith that something good would come of them. It had become more binding here than during his tenure on Ward Five, when he had nothing else to do. Now he actually had to extend an effort.

He liked the condo better than the hotel. The hotel hadn’t worked for him at all, if only for a single session, but what a bust that session had been. Sitting in chairs by the window, the round table dragged aside so that it would be no barrier between them, but that hadn’t helped. He’d sat there for most of the time as if a cork were in his brain, and had left with a headache as bad as the pain after he’d smashed his forehead with the cast.

He found he could relax at Adrienne’s condo, maybe a quarter of the living room given to a desk and a pair of chairs and a love seat. If he did not let his eyes stray too far he could sustain the illusion it was an actual office. She had obviously gone to some trouble for him.

What he had not counted on, though, was seeing her lover up here. Sarah. An unexpected delight, that. She had to know what he was and what was wrong with him — doctors weren’t supposed to talk but he never believed they didn’t — yet not once could he catch her looking at him as if he belonged in a sideshow. She headed out the door after a couple minutes and he almost told them there was no need, but stopped. Adrienne did not seem that loose about it all; had to maintain protocol, if nothing else.

They had exchanged the couch for a love seat, but the routine was familiar by now: his back to the wall, following where thought and memory and psychic wreckage led. There were times he regarded his head as a jar, Adrienne’s occasional questions and prompts just more swipes of a kitchen knife to make sure he was scraped out as clean as possible.

Will there ever be an end to this? he wondered, and of course there would be, but when would they have enough? He had to admit he felt better since having someone to unload on, to talk with and not just be talked at, but this remission would surely last no longer than the treatment itself. Still, the thought of turning it into a lifetime habit would be enough to make him opt for Erin’s joke. You look like they gave you a lobotomy, she had laughed when seeing the stitches across his brow. Assuming he lived to fifty, he could not picture himself in this same pose, week after week. Go ahead, he would have to tell them at some point, while tapping his frontal lobe. Drill here, make it messy.

There would come an end. Adrienne would someday return home. Maybe she would be the one to decide enough was enough. Or maybe those footing the bills would seal the purse and leave her with no choice. And then? Adrift again and perhaps no better than before, the inside of his head spread thin for everyone’s benefit but his own. Perhaps someone, somewhere, waiting for the pressures to again mount within him, watching from afar for his greatest explosion, so they might nod and concur, Yes, we all feared it would happen someday but we could not hold him. Let us learn from this tragic mistake.

So maybe it really was best to try while he had the chance.

I am what my birth made me but isn’t there some way to rise above it? There should be. There must be.

“Let me ask you something,” he said, far into the session. “Do you think people are inherently good or bad?”

Adrienne shifted to one side in her chair. “Always asking the easy questions, aren’t you?”

He shrugged: Sorry, just being myself. She now knew better than to try ducking these questions, or turning them around back onto him; he had conditioned her well; he could be relentless in pursuing where she stood on matters.

Clay watched as she formulated her answer — the soft tilts of her head, the interplay between hand and ear. Away from the hospital she was no longer wearing her hair pinned back. Good for her; it made her look so much less prim. She now looked like a Nordic athlete.

“No, I don’t,” she said. “I believe there’s a capacity in everyone to fulfill a certain potential. But whether or not they reach it, and how it emerges — say, whether it’s constructive or destructive — depends largely on the experiences they’ve had, and there you get into so many cultural and environmental factors that it’s impossible to even list them all. But then, in most people those experiences are an ongoing process, so I certainly don’t believe they’re locked in.”

“So life experience, this overrides biology.”

“In my book it usually can.”

“So you think I can save myself.” He knew what was coming —

“What do you think?”

Nailed it. “I believe you think so.”

“You know what I meant.”

Clay nodded: Yeah, just sparring with you. “You’re probably right. I suppose I do believe in the power of the individual. But we’re not left alone, we don’t live in vacuums. I’ve tried and it doesn’t work. Other people always want in, even if they have to force themselves in. So that negates the power of the individual. I think it’s mostly in a collective sense that we’re failures. Like a chain being only as strong as its weakest link. The same thing applies to a society. It’s no better, no stronger, than its lowest offenders.”

“That discounts a lot of good that people do for others,” said Adrienne, and he thought she was probably picturing Mother Teresa right now. She would.

“That doesn’t discount it, that just puts it in a context of being hopeless, more or less. It’s individuals that do good, but individuals die. It’s societies that chew everything up, and they keep right on going until there’s nothing left.” He took a deep breath. “I think the world’s been shaking itself down for a long time, trying to bottom out toward a lowest common denominator…

“But that’s just one weak link’s opinion. Got any coffee?”

And they went on for another forty minutes or so, until Clay at last decided he was talked out for one afternoon, then realized they had been at this for more than an hour and a half.

On the way to the door he asked if she and Sarah had plans for the following night, confident they would not. Who else would they know here, who else had they had time to know? Adrienne asked why before she answered.

“Thought you might like to head over to Graham’s awhile,” he said. “You told him you’d like to see his work. Sarah would like it, probably.”

“I’ll ask her.”

“She’ll say yes,” Clay said, so sure of himself that he didn’t look at her when detouring into the kitchen to grab a notepad by the phone and write directions.

He did not even attempt to show his paintings — that was the thing Clay never understood about Graham. Content to let them be seen only by close acquaintances, and the occasional stranger who had heard of them and wore him down through persistence, Graham consigned them to the walls of his basement apartment and studio. They hung alone, bleak portals made even more so by the absence of frames, somehow more naked and raw that way, and so far as Clay knew, none of them had a name.

“I don’t see why you shouldn’t,” Clay had once said about Graham’s reticence to exhibit. “People go for H.R. Giger, they should go for yours.”

Graham had shaken his head, so appalled at the idea that he had to light a cigarette to put himself right again. “It’s not a question of acceptance. Galleries expect you to stand around that first night and make putrid small talk to people who’d cross the street to avoid you any other time. No, I don’t think so.”

“Like that would stop you from walking out if you felt like it,” Clay had said, knowing this was just one more excuse. Graham had so many they should be numbered. “Anyway, I’ve figured out what the plan is. You’re going to wait until you die early and they’ll find everything and you’ll become this cult celebrity.”

Graham’s face had lifted with a Mona Lisa smile, aloof and knowing; here’s to life and untimely death and skyrocketing market values. “It would be a hilarious inside joke, wouldn’t it?”

Clay had agreed. It was only the young and talented who became gods after their deaths. The mediocre were even more completely forgotten, and the old went on to just rewards. Only the young seeded debates of speculation, what might have been.

At the time he had been jealous, thinking, I’ll die and there won’t be a thing left behind, not one lasting bit of graffiti I scrawled on this world to say I passed through. Now he knew he’d been wrong. At least geneticists would know his name. He wondered if they would store his brain in a jar, or keep even more of him around, like the skeleton of Truganini, last of the extinct Tasmanians, displayed for the generations to follow. Better living through the study of mutants could be their motto.

And thus he was in a contemplative mood arriving at Graham’s on Monday night. Erin, pale blond hair ethereal against her baggy black sweater, was already there to film his arrival, or maybe she had been there all day — he’d not talked with her since she’d spent Friday night with him. Nina came alone; Twitch was at work. Sarah and Adrienne were last, Sarah bringing a few bottles of wine.

They all seemed to get along. One would never know that Sarah was walking in on a roomful of strangers. With Graham she got into a discussion of Dali and Francis Bacon; with Nina she discovered they were both fans of the writing of Charles Bukowski. Even Erin dropped her guard and warmed up rather quickly, and elicited no judgment when she sprang her frequent test, telling how she earned part of her income. Erin shared industry secrets, told Sarah what Clay had already known for some time: splattered semen in still-life cum-shots was hardly ever real, but a mixture of unflavored gelatin for viscosity and dishwashing liquid for pearlescence, and was squirted from a small turkey baster.

“I never thought it quite looked real,” Sarah said.

Adrienne glanced askance at her. “How would you know?”

“I grew up with three brothers, don’t forget. Puberty wasn’t always dry.”

“That might’ve been enough to turn me to women,” Erin said.

Graham made a small grunt. “But think of all the fascinating career highlights you would’ve missed out on.”

She turned back to him, almost coy, as coy as Erin could be when actually herself. “Don’t be jealous, when they’re in my mouth I’m still thinking of you.”

“Where are they when you’re thinking of Clay?”

Erin frosted, just a bit, a fine ice-eyed edge of pique. “Wherever it feels good,” she said, and left it at that.

Clay added nothing, content to stay out of it, thinking only, This can’t last, this triangle. Someone was eventually bound to get seriously hurt, and he doubted he would be the one, no matter what transpired.

Soon, Adrienne talked Graham into giving them a tour of his paintings, and he consented. Walking them through the haphazard placement, in black jeans and T-shirt, an apple picker’s cap atop his limp curls, and an open bottle of wine planted against one hip, he reminded Clay of some lost Parisian, out of place and out of time, and especially out of faith in himself. The canvases came with frequent disclaimers: I should have painted over that one; I was drunk most of that month.

“Compliment him enough,” Clay told Adrienne, “and maybe he’ll give you one. Anything to replace that washed-out impressionist crap in your office.”

He skipped out on most of the tour; had seen them all many times. The grimy metal structures rendered in oils and acrylics; the furnaces, the bridges to nowhere, the girders turned to pretzels by holocausts unknown. But then he realized that, off in one gloomy corner, Graham had begun discussing a painting he had not yet seen. On his way over, he heard Graham say it had been done the whole time Clay had been gone. Bastard, hadn’t even told him about this one.

He admired it beside Adrienne and Sarah, seeing it as they must. The difference in scope was obvious at a glance. While the earlier works had but one subject, with this, the eye hardly knew where to begin. Graham had to have poured nearly every spare moment into this over the weeks Clay had been AWOL, and even then it was… it was…

Astounding, was what it was.

“It reminds me of Bosch,” Sarah said.

Graham, pleased, nodded. “There’s nothing new left to be done in painting. If it’s not just pure form and no content, then it’s all self-referential in one way or another. So I figured why not be blatant about the reference.”

He went on to explain how he’d taken the right wing from Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Delights — the portion depicting Hell as a dark, phantasmagoric landscape teeming with countless figures either suffering or meting out judgment — and reconfigured it for the postindustrial age. The painting crawled with the malevolence of machines; some were alone, others linked by networks of pipe and cable. They ground small, fragile humans into ruined clots beneath their treads, in their hydraulics, between their gears. Where Bosch’s silhouetted city raged in flames across the top, here decrepit factories gasped their last in the red glow of smoldering coal pits. Where Bosch’s Hell teemed with demons in the form of grotesque hybrid animals, Graham saw traitorous humans, themselves become half-machine.

“What about the triptych concept?” Sarah asked. “Bosch depicted the Earth and Paradise, too. Are you planning on…?”

“I thought about it. But I just couldn’t come up with any comparable vision I thought was pleasant enough to bother with.” Graham shrugged this way and that, watched his foot as he twisted the tip of his shoe against the bare concrete floor. “In Bosch’s day, you know, they still believed in Paradise.”

Clay left the three of them talking, wandered back into the living area. Erin was rolling joints on the kitchen counter, and maybe he would partake soon. Wishing already he could join in with the wine, be like everyone else, but not really up to the violent nausea and thunderous headache sure to come. Thank you, chromosome twelve, thank you so much for everything. Sometimes oblivion could be so inviting.

“Hey you.” Nina, coming up from behind, fresh from the bathroom in a diaphanous swirl of gypsy cloth and wavy red hair. “You’re awfully quiet tonight.”

“Sorry,” he said, “I never realized.”

Plump-cheeked and smiling brightly, she slipped back around behind him, clamped onto his shoulders with hands soft and warm, squeezed twice in an offer of amateur massage before he flexed out of her grip and took a step just beyond reach.

“I forgot,” she mumbled with apology, creamy brow furrowed.

He nodded but didn’t believe her. She was just testing to see if anything had changed while he’d been away, been cured, if anything in him had inched closer to her view of the way normal people behaved. He was sorry to disappoint. He had just never liked being touched, unless something more animal was sure to come of it. Sex, or fighting — probably both qualified, and weren’t even so different. Both involved tearing into someone else. Touching for its own sake was like making a promise that would eventually have to be broken.

“Graham’s being sweet tonight, have you noticed?” she said.

“Maybe he remembered to take his Prozac.”

“Clay!” she bawled, half-laughing, half-chastising. He did like to make her laugh, on the rare occasions he actually managed. Nina was the sort who looked as if she needed to laugh more, even deserved to. Laughter was kind to her, erasing the damage and hurt accrued just by being alive.

Sometimes he had to wonder why she and Uncle Twitch hung out with the rest of them. They were too optimistic, too kind. They would be cannibalized someday.

“Why shouldn’t he be sweet?” said Clay. “He has admirers and he didn’t have to do anything to get them over here. He gets to maintain his front.”

“Well,” Nina shifted her rounded shoulders, a tacit agreement, “you know how he can be. I worry about him sometimes. While you were gone? A couple weeks went by that nobody saw him, not even Erin. I thought maybe he went out on your trail.”

“Erin didn’t mention that.” He shrugged. “He was probably just locked in here working the entire time. Have you seen that new painting?”

“It’s not good for him to be that alone, he’s not like you. Graham thinks he doesn’t need other people, but he does.” Nina’s eyes were wide and she nodded, an innocent sage.

“Mostly to try to salvage his own ego.”

“That’s still needing them.”

He smiled at her, could not help it. Saint Nina. He wondered how she discussed him behind his back, what kind things she would find to say that, if he heard them, would make him blush or gag, knowing them to be revisionist varnish. When I die, he would get around to telling her someday, you write the obituary.

Clay got up, had to move. Drifted about the maze of the basement apartment, the half walls and squared brick pillars that came down to anchor the house above, and made Graham’s home seem smaller than it really was, more complex. In one far corner was a door to a big storage room. When Clay passed it he noticed a faint odor lingering about the corner. He put his nose to the door crack and sniffed — stronger, an old after-scent like brimstone, fires recently burned in the hearts of iron forges.

He opened the door and the scent rolled out of the black. Nothing inside that he could see but a mere shape, massive and still, like a boulder carved raggedly square by ancient Mayan hands, then shrouded in pale drop cloths —

And then a hand, this one flesh and blood, splayed on the door to push it out of his grasp, to close it.

“No,” Graham said. “I meant to get a padlock for that door.”

“What’s in there?”

“No, no. No. Don’t ask me about it.” Graham twisted in place, looking painfully at the floor for a moment, leaving his hand on the door. “It’s not ready yet.”

“A sculpture?” But surely not, Graham had never before worked on anything approaching such a scale, nothing he could not set upon a tabletop with ease. Although clearly he had taken some leap with that new painting, upgrading his obsessions into grander dimensions.

“I told you not to ask me.” Something burned in Graham’s eyes, those dark eyes alight and saying, I’m in control, I know what I’m doing, that look approaching pure transcendence just before someone tries to fly out a window.

“Sorry,” Clay said, and it was Graham again, the Graham he had always known. Always? As much always as you could fit into four years.

“You feel like going out?” Graham asked. “Sarah wants to go to The Foundry. Sounds good to me, I’m sick of this place.”

Clay said sure, The Foundry, anytime, knowing he had lost his one and only chance for a sneak preview. Graham would have a lock on the door by the time he was here again. Graham kept promises. He was funny that way.

Eighteen

Why was the question Adrienne kept coming back to about Clay and the other dozen. What spotty knowledge she had of genetics had been picked up just since Clay’s karyotype had been run, but it simply did not seem feasible that Helverson’s syndrome could have remained undetected until six years ago, not when karyotypes had been run since 1956. Were it that rare, it seemed statistically unlikely that thirteen subjects would then be found in just six years, had this mutation been in the gene pool for centuries.

But suppose it were a more recent mutation, spontaneously arising within the last generation or two?

Such dramatically swift changes were not impossible. The higher incidence of hypertension among black Americans was now thought to trace back to the days of slavery, when the bodies of Africans in oceanic transit — chained below deck for weeks in sweltering holds and denied adequate water — quickly learned to retain vital salts rather than sweat them out. A swiftly adapted biological survival mechanism that, ironically, was now impairing lives rather than sustaining them.

But again, Helverson’s: Why? What possible function could it serve? She could not, in good conscience, consider it an illness.

While a gross mutation, it was not a debilitating condition on par with Down’s and Wolf-Hirschborn syndromes. There was no developmental abnormality as with any of several misprints affecting the sex chromosomes. So far as she could discern, Helverson’s syndrome manifested itself — aside from benign facial-structure similarities, and such frequently reported quirks as resistance to sedatives and alcohol intolerance — in emotional and psychological affect. But detrimentally so: Its carriers seemed ill-equipped to contend with standard human stresses and interactions. If there was a common thread running through the dozen case studies, and now Clay’s life, this was it.

Experience can override biology, she had assured him, but here the data challenged that precept. Among the thirteen, there was not a single exception to what looked to be a depressing rule.

All along she had wanted to believe that, as in countless other behavioral disturbances, genetics may have played a factor in predisposing someone to certain tendencies, but whether or not these were manifested was due to upbringing and environmental conditions. An authoritarian father, an abusive mother, a loveless home… one or more trigger mechanisms. A room packed with gunpowder may sit calmly for a lifetime, as long as it’s never introduced to a spark.

While she could not know everything about the first dozen, their backgrounds seemed to transcend even those broad criteria. One of the Americans, a twenty-seven-year-old named Timothy Van der Leun, whose home was listed as Indianapolis, was the son of a Lutheran minister whose family had cooperated fully in research, and had been found to be quite loving and healthy. Yet Van der Leun’s life had been plagued by much the same turmoil as the rest.

While thirteen made a tiny research population by most lab standards, it was nevertheless difficult not to make sweeping conclusions based on available evidence. That extra chromosome did something to them. It heightened aggression and curtailed more tender emotions. It turned them into outsiders, adrift in societies for which they had more contempt than love.

What a find it would be if one were located whose life had taken a placid course. It would belie everything she was thinking while trying so hard not to. It would bury the notion that the stigma surrounding Helverson’s was pure biological determinism. It would prove they were not prisoners of a rogue chromosome.

For that matter, what a find it would be if one were located who was female. More statistical unease.

If she allowed her intuitive right brain to leapfrog ahead of its logical left counterpart, it would almost appear as if something were deliberately guiding this. Some bored god shuffling molecular parts in a new configuration — there, let’s see how this works.

She was big on theory, conjecture. Dutifully, she logged her evaluations of Clay in her notebook computer. She composed weekly reports and uploaded them to the mainframe at Arizona Associated Labs. She sought weekly feedback from Ferris Mendenhall, a link to the structure of Ward Five, almost distrusting his opinion that she was handling the case as well as could be expected from anyone.

She told them all how Clay professed to be more at ease with the world since having a trusted therapist to talk with, and they all found that of interest. She was just waiting for them to tell her to cut him off, therapeutically speaking; see if he reverted.

At his next Wednesday session, following Sarah’s introduction to the others at Graham’s, he was in fine form, low-key, and she gently worked her way around to a discussion of the possibility of a spontaneous mutation that had some as yet unexplainable reason behind it. Thinking this may be a good way, after another session or two, to reveal the existence of the others. Perhaps he would be strong enough now to handle the fact of them, their lives. Their sad lives.

She found his response to today encouraging, Clay as intrigued as if this were an evolutionary mystery to be solved, and he a smoking gun.

Her only real fear was ethical: In getting Clay to consider the possibility of some process at work here, rather than a random fluke, was she overstepping her bounds of authority? Dabbling in lines of thought for which she was unqualified?

No, that’s the problem with science, there are too many delineations, she told herself in rebuttal. Too many specialists who can’t let themselves see beyond their specialty. Too many experts dividing the material body from immaterial consciousness.

Western medicine was only recently beginning to admit what Eastern physicians had known for thousands of years: All things are one, connected, interdependent.

And most times she thought she would rather be boldly wrong than so narrowly timid she dared never stick her neck out.

The only drawback: You could never know how wrong you might be.

He came over Thursday afternoon, unexpected, unannounced, and, once she got a good look into his eyes, unbalanced. Clay stormed past her with a sheaf of papers clutched in one fist, trembling as he bristled from the core.

“Don’t lie to me,” he said, voice a raw crack of air. “I’ll smell it from you this time.”

She could feel it instantly, that same cold squeeze of her heart she’d known that day in her office when Clay had experienced a minor breakthrough, trembling with furies she did not wholly trust him to contain. He had become that Clay all over again, Clay at the breaking point, an atavism with the smell of the city wafting from his clothes.

Adrienne was acutely aware of the door at her back, how alone she was, Sarah off with Nina, doing Nina things, the two of them new friends, Nina probably asking for lessons, Teach me how to be a lesbian.

She shut the door, could not run now. She had expected this to be a smooth process? Setbacks were inevitable.

“Tell me what’s wrong,” she said.

“You held back from me. You held back information from me!”

Frowning, Adrienne stepped forward, inner alarms giving way to curiosity.

“Tell me if these places strike you as having anything in common.” He could not stand still, pacing with the frightening deliberate monotony of a lion in a cage, back and forth between the sofa and the open bar that bordered the kitchen. “Los Angeles, Texas — death row no less — Indianapolis.”

Her breath lodged in her throat.

“Seattle, let’s see, that’s it for this country, umm, oh yeah, Canada’s got one.”

One question huge, echoing: How had this happened?

“Two for Japan, the little fuckers probably build cars that blow up on impact" — wheeling on her then, screaming into her face — “Have you figured out yet what I’m talking about?"

Everything she had accomplished with him, the distances she had brought him in two months — Adrienne could sense them slipping away. Any danger from Clay was forgotten as soon as she recognized the hurt stamped upon every feature of his face. The ache, the sense of betrayal. The loathing. This must be the feeling of pulling someone to the brink of safety from a flood, and just as they rise cold and shivering from the murky depths, seeing them disappear once more, traceless in an eye blink, no second chances.

How? How?

Sarah? Could Sarah have copied some of this information and given it to him? Would she have? Surely not.

“All right, Clay, listen to me.” She strove for reasoned calm that she did not possess. “I understand that you must feel — ”

“No! No, you don’t! I used to think you might, but you don’t understand or you wouldn’t have let me find out this way!” One arm trembled in the air, then he snatched up a cereal box from the bar — Sarah’s breakfast — and hurled it across the kitchen. It struck the corner of the range hood, bursting like a boil, cereal showering across the stovetop and counter and floor. “There’s twelve more and they’re just like I am, they’re all this way!”

She made herself take one more step in his direction. “Clay, show me what you’re holding.”

He threw them at her, most of the pages staying together in a sheaf that struck her full in the face. She started backward, more in surprise than anything; an unaccountable shame, like a slap in the face. When she rubbed a tingling spot at the outer corner of one eye her finger came back with a spot of blood, seeping from a tiny paper cut. It was an awakening — he might really do her harm.

“Calm down, Clay,” speaking firmly, with neither anger nor trembling. “I do realize you’re upset about this… ” On and on, empathetic, soothing. She stooped to gather the stray pages, scanned them quickly, found them to be photocopies of the introductory overviews from each of the prior twelve case studies.

Adrienne looked up and saw him glaring, at last rooted to one spot. Not knowing if it was good or bad.

“Where did these come from?”

“I got them in the mail.”

“And there was nothing else with them?”

He jabbed a finger toward the papers. “You haven’t gotten to it yet.”

She shuffled until she found it. The note posed only more questions; a skimpy cover letter, a single sentence typed near the top of a sheet of plain white paper: In case they haven’t already told you, you’re not alone in the world. There was no signature.

She was at a complete loss to explain this, the sort of thing that might be laughed off as a cruel joke were the information not available to such an exclusive few, all of whom should know better than to tamper with someone with such a vulnerable — and volatile — state of mind.

“Did you bring the envelope this came in?”

“No.” His laboring breath seemed very loud to her; even his lungs sounded stressed. “No return address, if that’s what you’re wondering. The mailing label was typed. It was postmarked from Boston.”

The city in which Helverson’s had been discovered. The name of the lab escaped her at the moment, though she could not believe anyone there would perform such a grossly negligent stunt. People got hurt this way, someone learning too much, too soon.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.

“I know you’re feeling betrayed,” she said. Trying to imagine such an all-inclusive betrayal: his family, the world, nature itself. And now me. “You may not believe me, but I hope you do. I was about ready to tell you, after another session or two. It wasn’t a question of keeping this a secret from you, Clay. Never that. I was waiting until I felt the time was right — that you’d been stable enough, for long enough, that you could handle the news.” Better than you’re handling it now.

“Good idea!” he screamed. “Great fucking idea, wait and let somebody else do it, everybody knows except me, everybody but the mutant!”

For two months she had watched him wage his battles, those intensely private wars with himself, with his impulses, with fears and memories and truths. She had seen him emerge with victories, draw stalemates, and while he had at times been bested, always, always, she had believed he would in the end win out. Part of it was faith in Clay, the rest faith in her own dedication.

There could be no greater heartbreak, then, than to realize she may have been deluded. He might actually lose, helpless to save himself, she powerless to prevent it.

Clay grabbed one of the round-topped stools sitting at the bar, upended it so that he held it by the ends of two legs.

“They just decide they want to push my buttons" — he brought the stool crashing down against the bar — “see if that fucks me over too" — the stool’s heavy wooden framework cracked apart, and he battered it down again, again — “this is just another experiment" — shrapnel and splinters rained, and the cushioned seat flew in a wobbly arc to slam against the far kitchen wall — “so you go back and tell them it worked! Adrienne!”

As the stool had broken apart, he’d been left with a little less in hand for the next downswing. She had moved neither to stop him nor to flee, for if old theories were correct, property destruction was a safety valve to keep him from committing assault. The bar now scarred, his surrogate Adrienne, perhaps. Or a stand-in for everyone he remembered poking and prodding his body and mind. He will not strike me, he will not strike me, he will not strike me.

He finally stopped, pieces of the stool scattered over ten-foot radius. Clay flung the last flimsy shards to the floor, then turned on her, breath heavy upon her face, furnace-hot and feral, the breath of a lion.

“Give me that,” he said through clenched teeth, and tore the papers from her nerveless fingers.

To the door.

From outside herself, she watched Clay’s stride and her own after him, mentally fumbling in her inimitable way with the proper things to say, out of textbooks and lectures and experience. All had fled; just as well. They would serve her no better than muteness.

“Stay out of my head,” he told her, and didn’t look back.

She wished for so many things after that afternoon: at first, that Clay would cool down and return a more reasonable man, to resume where their sessions had left off. Later, as the days wore on, she simply wished that he would accept her phone calls.

Sometimes he would answer, and Adrienne took heart that at least he was not sitting home listening to it ring. Once he heard her voice, though, nothing could save the connection. His hang-ups were worrisome things by their very method. No receiver slammed back down in rage, as she might have expected. Instead, she could feel its pause midway between his ear and the cradle, as if he lingered deliberately, and each time she would think, This might be the one, just before he hung up once more, softly, scarcely a click. It was torture; he would know that.

She made irate phone calls to Ferris Mendenhall and Arizona Associated Labs, unsatisfying conversations that got her nowhere. No, no one had okayed a mailing of case overviews to Clay Palmer. They would check into it. Hang in there, be patient, see if he comes around, and if he doesn’t, monitor him via his peer group if possible. A few times she came close to phoning MacNealy Biotech but quelled the urge. Hurling hazy accusations could only make a bigger fool of her than she already felt.

She checked with the others, with Erin and Graham, with Nina and Twitch. Twitch? She felt somehow unentitled to call him that, but didn’t know his real name; perhaps none of them did. And all any of them could tell her was that Clay was making himself scarce from them, as well. Give him time, maybe he would come around; he always had before.

Don’t you care any more than that? she felt like crying into the phone. He told me you were at least there for one another, you covered each other’s backs and cauterized each other’s wounds.

Then it occurred to her: Maybe they were doing exactly that. Maybe their apathetic voices were a shield erected around him, to keep her away.

She made several trips to his apartment, knocking on a door that he never answered. Sometimes silence from within, at times the chatter of televised news, no guarantee he was there but she knew he was, the evidence as indisputable as it was invisible. She could feel his formless and confused hostility radiating through the door: I hate you because I don’t know what else to do.

Denver lay in the grip of deep autumn, winter on its way, but she felt frozen out already, every leafless tree a stark monument to a withdrawal so cold it burned.

Sarah held her through the lengthening nights, and often throughout each day, telling Adrienne, “You weren’t wrong, you did nothing wrong, you got undermined by somebody you could never even have accounted for. Some jerk who wouldn’t even sign his name.”

Until one night, late, very late, the two of them in bed and setting aside books they both were too distracted to concentrate on, Sarah stroked her hair and Adrienne shut her eyes and curled against Sarah’s side. It was safe here, in this warm nook.

“You know,” Sarah said, “that I’d never want to usurp your authority with Clay. But… why don’t I give it a shot?”

Adrienne lay very still, for a time content to listen to the wind moaning around the eaves, the frozen mountain wind. Finally she accepted the inevitable and nodded.

“Okay,” she said, feeling not so much that she was giving up on Clay, as that she was giving him away.

In practical terms there was no such thing as neutral ground, not when he lived in this city and she did not. The whole of Denver was Clay’s turf; she was just passing through. People were territorial that way, without even realizing. It would be a mistake to pretend otherwise, just because asphalt yielded no crops.

Sarah tracked him down to a part of town she supposed all cities had, where train tracks snarled together like stitches across a wounded earth, and blackened trestles stood weary from the generations; where vacant lots grew choked with weeds that were brown even in the bloom of spring; where low brick buildings sat rotted and scabrous from disuse. Relics, their windows in shards and once-proud faces scabbed and corroded, they were corpses awaiting the blessing of burial.

Sarah parked her car on an old gravel lot that the earth was slowly reclaiming, hunted a minute and found the rip in the chain link fence, right where it was supposed to be. She turned sideways to squeeze through, huddling in her down vest as she moved along a walkway of crumbling concrete, in the shadow of a smokestack.

She found the door that had been jimmied aeons ago, slipped into the abandoned factory. Dim hallways radiated a chill that must have taken years to seep into its walls. Along one, she found a pale rectangle, the ghostly afterimage of some long-removed time clock.

Clay was in the factory’s cavernous center, as stilled as the chamber of a dead heart. From somewhere, an office perhaps, he had salvaged the metal framework of a surviving chair, sat surrounded by pits and the huge industrial bones that had once anchored vast machines before they’d been ripped out, sold or scrapped. The silence roared, and beneath it she could almost hear a dim echo of clattering gears.

“Hey. I know you,” she said, her voice nearly swallowed, a prayer floating in a cathedral.

“Sarah.” Clay sounded surprised, a little curious. Calm, though. Calm was good. She had hoped he would not feel invaded.

“You haven’t, like, drawn a line I have to keep outside of, anything like that, have you?”

“No,” almost a laugh, and he waved her over.

“Graham told me you come here sometimes.” She found a spot on the concrete floor that didn’t look too filthy, sat cross-legged. “He drew me a map.”

“Better keep it, it may be worth something someday.”

“Forgot to get it signed. Stupid, huh?”

His eyebrows nudged upward but he said nothing, as if too polite to agree. She sat looking at him for a few moments. Liked his face, always had. It was nothing unique, as she understood; at least twelve other guys out there had it, too. She had even peeked at the pictures just to see for herself how eerie something like that really was, faces from a hive identity, linked by a strange and darkly wondrous mystery of conception. Still, he made the face his own. Everyone wore their hurts and hungers a little differently.

“What did this place used to be?” She looked up, around. Weak sunlight filtered in from half a dozen skylights and windows.

“I don’t know. It was here before I got here, to Denver. I just like to come. It’s easier to think here, some reason. Quiet.” He shrugged. “I never cared about knowing what they did here before. I don’t care what they built. It’s just what it is now. When you don’t know, it feels like it’s always been that way.”

Sarah grinned. “Why ruin it, then?”

“Exactly. Look.” He pointed, swept an arm from wall to distant wall. They were mottled in shades of gray, washed from ceiling down with accumulated water stains. Mineral traces and contaminants had left abstract patterns. “It looks like cave paintings from the Paleolithic era or something.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah!” Scanning, embellishing with a tiny push of imagination. She pointed with a mittened hand. “There’s a mastodon… and a wild stag.”

“And there are the hunters.”

“We need a fire,” she told him. “And bones. And raw meat.”

“Bones,” he said, and sighed. Pointed toward the far corner, where shadows clung thickest. “There used to be some over there. Probably not human, but I don’t know what. Graffiti too, I think some idiot cult used to come here for sacrifices.”

It brought her plunging back, the late twentieth century — oh, that. Sad. Some of the magic fled already. Clay had a point about keeping willfully ignorant of the past.

“Did Adrienne send you after me?” he finally asked.

“It was my idea. But I told her first.”

“She wants me back twice a week plus social calls, I guess.”

“She’d like that. She thinks it’s important. And for whatever my opinion’s worth, I think so, too.”

She watched the creases deepen across his forehead — this Clay Palmer, the one who stared at water stains on factory walls and saw cave paintings, who looked at them with such yearning he might really want to breathe the air of some primeval dusk and, by the light of fires, scratch pigments into rock. She tried to balance this Clay against the one who had demolished a bar stool in front of the woman she loved.

“Helverson’s syndrome,” he said. “What do you think caused it?”

Sarah laughed, hopeless, stuck her hands to either side of her head and rubbed furiously. “I don’t know. This is not my area of expertise.”

He smiled down from his chair, swathed inside a faded old army field jacket. “So who’s here to know?” Losing his smile; she had noticed they were few and never lasted long. “I mean, we show up just within the last thirty-five years or so, it looks like, all around the world. Got more in common than probably most blood brothers have. I’m not saying it has any meaning… but there’s got to be a cause of it.”

Probably so. And all the more elusive for the fact that no one could ever know what it was, but could only guess. She tried to hold onto thoughts, conjectures, found them slippery as eels. But her own thoughts she could sort in time. Of greater interest, and importance, was what Clay made of it all.

“Last week Adrienne and I had a session the day before I got those reports. We were talking about the extra chromosome and how maybe it was a spontaneous mutation in some evolutionary way, for some reason. I figured that made as much or more sense as anything. After I got those reports… and after I’d been to your place… I went out and got some books on genetics. I’ve done a lot of reading on the subject the past week. A lot. Did you know that human beings have put about three and a half million new chemicals into the environment, things that don’t exist in nature?”

That many? She wished she’d heard him wrong. “No.”

Clay nodded. “Most of it’s benign, inert, but still, you’ve got hundreds of thousands of potential mutagens. You know, wrong person gets too close, wrong time, that’s it: You’ve got a misprinted gene. Maybe more. And the thing is, once mistakes go into the gene pool, you can’t dredge them back out. They’ll always be there, repeating through the generations.”

Lifeguards at the gene pool, she thought, some strange word association, that’s what we need.

“But that’s not what I wanted to tell you about. Ever hear of the peppered moths in Manchester, England?”

She told him she never had, and he flashed an almost wicked smile: Oh, you’ll love this.

“For who knows how long, there’s been this big population of the peppered moth around Manchester. Up through the middle of the nineteenth century, ninety-nine percent of them were the same color, this pale gray shade, helped them blend with the tree bark so birds couldn’t spot them very easily, come in and pick them off, eat them. The other one percent was gray-black. They think it was a mutant strain. But over the next fifty years, the percentages reversed, because during that time England’s industrial revolution really got cranking, and around Manchester there were all these factory smokestacks covering the countryside with soot and crap. The trees and everything got darker, and the pale moths, they stood out like blinking lights, just about. The birds didn’t ever have to skip a meal. But the moths adapted. The mutation took over to darken the species’ color so they’d survive. There’s even a name for it: industrial melanism. By the time the naturalists figured out what was going on, they realized it was happening everywhere industry was going up. And it wasn’t just moths.”

Silence; reflection. She was still envisioning moths and smokestacks and the confusion of marauding birds when Clay drew back in his chair, something like embarrassment crossing his face.

“Listen to me,” he muttered. “I never used to talk this much. I guess that’s one difference Adrienne made in me.”

She saw her opportunity. Whether clumsy or not, Sarah knew she had better seize it. “You know, you could go back and work on a few more.”

He was shaking his head even before she was finished. “I got into those sessions so I could find out about myself, what was wrong, if there was any hope I could change. Even after they found the extra chromosome I thought there was still hope, that maybe it didn’t really make any difference. But I think, deep down, I knew better all along. And nothing against Adrienne, but I learned more from those reports than we ever could’ve gotten out of psychotherapy.”

Sarah rose to her knees, feeling the grit and grime pressing through, and it was as if her own career’s self-esteem were riding on this. Please, please, see that it’s for your own good.

“Can you ever know too much?” she said. “What would it hurt to learn more?”

“There’s no need for more. I know what I need to know now. I found out what I wanted to know all along.” He bent forward, scarred hands twisting at the frayed collar of the field jacket. The look of resignation on his face could have broken the resolve of a priest. “The moths,” he said. “The moths were what their world forced them to become. They were a product of their time and place, because that’s what they needed to be to survive. I’m not any different, not really. I’m just one of those first fucked-up moths.”

Don’t say that about yourself, don’t condemn yourself to that. It crossed her mind but she was losing her inner voice, her sense of how to plead her case. The worst person to argue with was the one who made more horrible sense than you knew you could. Much as she wanted to believe otherwise, optimism could rarely win against bitter experience.

“Thirteen moths, with the same face,” he said, and laughed, a sad and hopeless echo in the chill, from steel and concrete, over the distant drip of pooling water. “I got another envelope from Boston today. Pictures this time. Twelve pictures.”

Nineteen

The next day was Thanksgiving, bringing a fine snow that fell for hours in a lazy windless drift. The invitation came from Nina the night before. They usually convened for the major holidays, she told Sarah, because with families elsewhere or estranged or both, they were all the family any of them had.

“Do you want to go?” Sarah asked Adrienne.

“You do, don’t you?”

“Well… I guess,” trying not to sound too eager, and it hit Adrienne just right, and she began to laugh at such poorly feigned nonchalance, the first real laugh she’d turned loose in a week. Sarah smiled broadly, the inadvertent savior.

“Sure, why not,” Adrienne said. “I can’t think of anything more depressing than sitting around here and trying to pretend it’s just another day.”

“That’s the Pilgrim spirit.”

Nina and Twitch lived in a third-floor walk-up on the fringes of Capitol Hill, above a twenty-four-hour copy shop. They gathered at half past noon, and Sarah quickly sized up that tradition played little role in their celebration, if it could be called that at all — pretty much as she had anticipated. They gave no thanks, offering no prayers because, she surmised, none had much faith that prayers were heard. The menu was piecemeal, each contributing some culinary specialty or two: Uncle Twitch’s chili of flaming torments, Nina’s baked Jamaican salt-fish and a vegetable stir-fry, couscous and baklava for dessert from Erin. Graham not only brought a Greek salad, but furnished the centerpiece as well, a papier-mâché turkey nailed to a cutting board and opened as if dissected, body cavity stuffed with Monopoly money.

“He makes a different one every year,” explained Erin as she circled it with her video camera.

“I’m glad to see he’s back in form,” said Twitch. “Last year was a disappointment. An Indian drowning in a pumpkin pie, what the hell was that all about?” He waved his arms in spastic confusion.

Graham stood smoking by the window, staring down three floors to a deserted street. “How many times do I have to explain this to you, Twitch? It wasn’t pumpkin, it was shit. Who ever heard of putting corn in pumpkin pie?”

“Shit, my ass,” said Twitch. “It came out of a can with a label, said Libby’s, right on it.”

“That’s why I put the corn in, idiot, so you could tell the difference.” Graham fumed with smoke and friendly disgust. “Give you a simple historical metaphor and it’s like you’re still lost in a forest.”

Erin turned her camera on Uncle Twitch, telling Sarah and Adrienne, “He’s just still pissed ’cause he cut a piece and tried to eat it.”

Twitch frowned, grumbling. “Well, the least he could’ve done was baked the thing.”

“That’s when we took a vote,” said Nina, touching Adrienne on the wrist. “No more organic centerpieces.”

Conspicuous by his absence was Clay, and at least this group was traditional in one respect: They spent much time talking of the one who had failed to make it to the table this year. No one knew what he was doing with his day, and Sarah noticed that the longer they dwelt on him, the less Erin ate, picking at her food, rearranging it with a fork.

“When he called he told me you saw him yesterday,” Nina said to Sarah. “How was he?”

“He seemed okay, we must’ve talked forty or fifty minutes.” She slipped a hand beneath the table to Adrienne’s leg, and their eyes met. Thinking, Please don’t hold it against me that he opened up to me this time, and I’m not even the authority here, but she did ask. Saying it all in a glance. Questioning, too: How far can I go here?

“It’s all right,” Adrienne said, mostly sincere, but wasn’t it pierced with a sliver of resentment? How could that be helped? “Go ahead.”

Sarah squeezed her knee. Maybe Adrienne would see it was fortuitous that Clay had shared with her instead, at this point: Constrained by no oath of confidentiality, Sarah could freely tell these others who had known him for years, people who might help him because he was part of their daily lives.

“On the one hand, it was good to see him stronger than he must’ve been feeling recently,” she said. “But then again there was something painful to watch about it. There was this… I don’t know… nihilistic acceptance, I guess, of his condition. Like most of him had just given up to the worst he could believe about it.”

“So what’s wrong with nihilistic acceptance?” Graham asked. “If you ask me, that sounds like the most honest way to deal with it.”

Nina threw her fork down upon her plate. “Because it means he’s writing himself off for good, Graham! That’s what’s wrong with it!”

He arched his eyebrows in a half smirk. “The truth hurts, doesn’t it?”

Uncle Twitch paused while dishing out his third helping of couscous. “I looked into nihilism once,” he mused, “but there was nothing to it.”

Nina paid no attention, leaning over her end of the table. “I really can’t believe you sometimes, Graham. I should know better by now, but it always manages to surprise me, just how insensitive you can be. Are you really that nasty inside, or is just some act you think gives you credibility as an artist?”

He clasped his hands in mock admiration. “Very good, most impressive, very insightful. Especially for a junior college dropout.” Graham turned to Adrienne. “You’re the professional, how did she score?”

Sarah watched Adrienne draw a thin breath. “Not that I’m diagnosing, you understand, but actually,” speaking with cool surgical precision, “she may have a point.”

Graham had not expected this, clearly, and Sarah watched the minute narrowing of one eye. Aching with him in some small touch of empathy, even though he had invited it on himself. Yes, I know what it’s like to hope for an ally who refuses the job. Ask me and I’ll tell you about a big brother who denies he has a sister just because she likes women.

Graham chose to ignore it, like a wounded animal that might grow only more vicious. “It has nothing to do with being twisted or insensitive, it’s being honest enough to admit that if you know you have nothing better to look forward to, why not at least embrace that much? We’re each alone enough as it is, and for sure we die that way. Is it that threatening to you to admit it?”

Adrienne rested her chin on clenched fingers. “And Buddha said, ‘I am awake.’”

“You’re not alone, Graham,” said Erin. “You do have me.”

“Half-alone, then.”

Nina was looking at Uncle Twitch, throwing her hands in the air. “Why do I invite him? Why do I keep inviting him? He’s like a solar eclipse!”

Twitch frowned. “Well, would you rather talk about your mom’s hysterectomy?”

Nina turned back toward Graham. “Not everybody shares your conviction that nothing out there in the universe loves us.”

He began to laugh. “I didn’t notice you bowing your head when we sat around the table.”

“It doesn’t mean I don’t believe in something.” And Nina began to slip down into her chair, her ideological footing clearly less sure here. Sarah thinking, No, don’t back off now, you were doing so well. Nina bit her lip. “I mean… I’m not all that comfortable calling it God, like that, but… something’s there.”

“Oh, there’s a God, all right,” said Erin, staring glumly at her plate. She speared a lettuce leaf. “The bad news is, She’s got PMS.”

It continued like that throughout the rest of the meal, then dessert. Discussion that often grew heated, but never quite savage enough to draw blood, and Sarah wondered if it were not, simply enough, their way. That if in their world, their lives, given their backgrounds, this was the manner in which they assured one another they mattered and that the ultimate expression of dislike came not in barbed words, but indifference. Prickly though it may have been at times, she saw something cohesive about their little unit.

Graham grew increasingly quiet, smoking by the window and staring through the veil of snow to the street, watching the occasional car that slowed. Twitch went clicking up and down the television channels, despairing of football, and above it they could barely hear Erin, vomiting in the bathroom. Adrienne asked if she did that often, and Twitch shrugged, saying, “Well, it is a holiday.”

They soon fought, Erin and Graham — over what, Sarah could not tell, but she wondered if it might not have something to do with Clay. Probably it would have been better had he been here. Somehow it could be so much less threatening to compete with flesh and blood, than a phantom present only in conversation.

Sarah’s eyes met Graham’s once, as Erin grabbed her video camera and cradled it as tenderly as a child, as she threatened to leave, and before he could turn away, Sarah noticed the shimmer of tears in his eyes. Soon they retired to the privacy of Twitch and Nina’s bedroom, and she heard one low sob as someone cried, not sure who it was, and then for a long while could hear nothing at all. She supposed that was good, hoping it meant they were just quiet lovers, more vocal in their depression than in their ardor.

The four of them left to carry on with Thanksgiving drank wine, Uncle Twitch proving to have an unexpected gift for spices and flame, as he first mulled it with cloves and cardamom seeds and cinnamon sticks. They sat about the living room and ignored the TV, pleasantly lethargic now that the worst of the psychodrama appeared to have been played out.

Nina moved across the room to sit on the couch as Sarah took the floor, so Nina could weave her hair into a curtain of long thin braids. Nina’s fingers were soft, warm, deft, the gentle tug and pull soothing. She could sleep like this, some echo of childhood surrender into the total security of two hands. Hoping only that Adrienne would not take it wrong; it was not that kind of surrender. She would store this tactile arousal until they got home, could get a fire lit — a fire would be divine — and she would make love with Adrienne for hours. Flushed and firm, their bodies would glow, and they would be flawless. Firelight smoothed over every blemish. Perhaps it was this magic luster, above even heat and light, that made fire such an object of primordial veneration.

Eyes too heavy to open, she groped to find Adrienne’s hand, held it while the sun died beyond the windows and the snow whispered cold promises.

“I wish he’d been here today,” said Uncle Twitch, with a reflectiveness born of wine. “He should’ve been here.”

Adrienne stirred. “Clay?”

“Who else.”

And she smiled, a wistful little smile that Sarah saw upon opening her eyes.

“I’ve been sitting here turning it over and over, what bothers me about everyone being so willing to concede defeat, Clay most of all, over that goddamned chromosome. You know what it is? It’s the superstition.” Adrienne drew knees toward chin, wrapped both arms around them. “We’ve haven’t really gotten over spilled salt and broken mirrors, just replaced them with stranger things we can’t explain. So we’re afraid of them. As long as the technology holds up, we’ll always have that shadow just on the other side of understanding.”

“And poor Clay had to find a big one inside himself,” Nina said.

“He’ll deal with it,” said Twitch. “I don’t think we give him enough credit sometimes.” He held arms open wide as Nina, finished with Sarah’s hair, sank into his lap, and they held each other. “He deals with some of the most god-awful stuff but always comes out of it. I think we need him more than he needs us. I look at him sometimes, and think, well, if he can get through, I guess I can too.”

Nina nodded into his chest. “Graham needs him most.”

Sarah roused from her dreamy languor. “So the rest of you find him inspiring?”

“He’s still alive, isn’t he?”

Twitch nodded. “He reduces a lot of his life to fundamentals and doesn’t miss the frills. I envy the hell out of him for that.” His eyes seemed to pinch as he nuzzled distractedly into Nina’s hair, something eating at him: all the things he wanted for Nina and himself, perhaps, wanted and might never admit; all the things he wanted to give her and could never afford. “For a long time I had this romantic notion about poverty. For everything out there I looked at and knew I didn’t want any part of, it seemed that trying to live the impoverished artist’s life was the most honest thing I could do. That’s okay when you’re twenty-two, you can get away with it then. But thirty-one…?” Clinging to Nina. “It was just one more hollow icon, wasn’t it?”

Nina was stroking his beard, his ponytail. “You’ll find what you want to do, you’ll find it.” Trying to smile. She could be so brave, if only she had a cause. “We’ll find what we’re good at.”

Sarah hated herself for her first thought. No, no, you probably won’t, but I don’t think it’s your fault, it’s just that no one bothered teaching you how to recognize it when you see it.

They stayed for another hour, then went down to the street and scraped the snow from the car. Sarah stood in the chill, face tilted to the sky, until a nugget of sadness felt cleansed. And in the car Adrienne kissed her, told her she liked the braids, and said that all in all, this Thanksgiving had the edge over the last one she had been forced to spend with in-laws; so think about that.

Twenty

He would never have admitted it to anyone, but sometimes Valentine wondered if he wasn’t a better man for having lost his testicles. Really. Looking back before the cancer, he wondered how much time he had spent just trying to protect them, relieve them, meet their incessant demands. They could be worse than even the worst children he could imagine, because those little monsters you could at least ship away for a weekend, or even walk out on the rest of their lives. With gonads, you had no options.

Naturally, he had mourned their loss. Years of anguish and grieving it had taken, but eventually he had realized it was like being liberated from, well, a ball and chain.

It had bestowed upon his mind a clarity of vision he had never known outside of dreams. He could track a line of thought and wring from it all he hungered for. Without that distracting flood of hormones, ideas came to him like smiles from the gods.

Like this game. This new game. This indulgence. The old fantasy had continued to burn strong enough to force him to seek a compromise, making of it a variation on a very old theme, but even this middle ground had unique thrills all its own.

One gun, a Colt Python .357 revolver. One bullet, hollow point. Which chamber in the cylinder? He would leave it to chaos to sort out those one-in-six odds.

When the moment was right.

He met Teddy where Boston met the Bay, along the wharves and the plaza before the New England Aquarium. Teddy the family man — stand downwind of him when he belched and you could catch a whiff of yesterday’s meals. A numbing Atlantic wind swept in off the water, encountered the city’s first rank of buildings, and whipped itself into confusion. It roared, nature’s scream at mankind’s impudence.

“Think you could’ve picked someplace windier?” Teddy cried above the gale. It made a wreck of the careful sculpting he did to conceal early pattern baldness. “I hear at MIT, they got this wind tunnel, check aerodynamics, that kind of shit.”

“Let’s go in, let’s look at the fish,” Valentine said.

They crossed the plaza, leaning into the wind, while out in the harbor it chopped the water into low whitecaps. Farther out, a pair of freighters chugged and rolled against a horizon gray as iron.

Friday afternoon and the aquarium was doing slow business. The day after Thanksgiving, most of the human herd had holiday shopping on their minds. Couldn’t wait to spend their money, feed the machine, instead of learning about these creatures that owned the other seventy percent of the world.

They strolled past exhibit tanks, stocked with fish from the North Atlantic to the South Pacific, glassed-in replicas of their home seas. Floating along with rippling gills, or nosing the glass to peer out at the fragmentary world on the other side, sometimes those fish looked wiser than most people he had met.

“Look at that one,” said Teddy, pointing. “Looks like Bob Hope, doesn’t he?”

Present company included, Valentine feared. But Teddy was a good employee, and there was business to do, the sort of business it was never wise to discuss over telephones.

“What’s the status on the Alabama shipment?” he asked.

“Lydell says he’ll have the last of the M16s converted by tonight. I got a van and driver lined up to run them down from his place to the Chelsea drop until the launchers get here.” Teddy maneuvered back and forth before a tank of lionfish and checked his reflection; couldn’t quit worrying about that hair. “Sunday at the latest on those. Breckton says he made the payoff and got the armory keys last night.”

They took their time along a coral reef and went over the logistics of moving the shipment south. Frequently, the real money to be made from selling arms wasn’t so much in the merchandise itself, but in its transportation. For smaller shipments such as this, he liked small vans, because they attracted little attention on the highway; but the big problem with vans was that, once loaded with all that ordnance, they rode down low on their shocks. State troopers noticed that sort of thing, so the suspensions had to be rebuilt ahead of time.

It was a panic shipment all the way: white supremacists in the thick of Alabama, sure their world was close to caving in. They had committed nearly all of their war chest to a shipment of M16s to be converted to full automatic fire, and M79 grenade launchers with crates of both smokers and explosive rounds. Valentine had already been able to lay hands on the cream of their order: four Gustav 84-mm recoilless rifles, originally designed to penetrate a Soviet main battle tank at up to 400 meters, and enough to inflict grievous fuckage on any armored vehicle that any federal agency might roll onto their compound.

They expected this as a matter of due course. Everybody had an Armageddon hard-wired to some damn timetable — these backwoods lads because they’d been unable to control one of their own.

The incident had made national news three weeks ago, each network trumpeting it as Exhibit A of national disgrace and more proof positive of a barbarous age. Valentine remembered it well, having savored every telecast. A bigot named Hardy Sutton had, late one night, drunkenly run his car off the road and into a swiftly flowing creek. Drowning amid the beer cans would have been imminent, had a passing motorist driving home from the late shift not stopped to dive in and pull him to dry ground.

Afterward, Sutton had apparently been unable to live with himself, knowing his rescuer had been black. Co-workers reported behavior of a man in rapid deterioration. Within the week, Sutton had taken a small submachine pistol and not only killed his savior, but also wiped out the rest of the man’s family before reserving the final trigger pull for his own head. A trace on the weapon pointed a finger back to members of an Aryan resistance faction.

Some people simply could not withstand a challenge to their preconceptions, for which Valentine was eternally appreciative. It led to a more interesting world. And people spent billions to give muscle to their hatreds.

Once he and Teddy had the details worked out, Teddy decided to skip out on the rest of the aquarium, and Valentine continued alone. His topcoat hung well-fitted to his frame, and he walked slowly, back straight, every step smooth and deliberate. Hands in his coat pockets, the right one caressing the Python revolver.

On one of the aquarium’s many levels was an exhibit known as “The Edge of the Sea" — rocks and shallow water, like a small tidal pool. They kept it stocked with durable, crusty little creatures, while an employee stood by encouraging curious visitors to pick them up, examine, learn. Kids loved it.

Here Valentine lingered, standing a couple of feet behind a father and two grade-schoolers, a boy and a girl. It smelled like a long custody weekend — Dad’s got the kids, got to make every moment count or they would hate him one day. With the kids’ attention distracted, Dad had that look of sad, weary panic: Am I doing the right thing, are they having fun?

Inside his roomy pocket, Valentine maneuvered the revolver, trained it on Dad’s back. Thumbed back the hammer, heard a click too soft for anyone else’s ears, like a whispered secret.

One bullet, the cylinder spun more than an hour ago, waiting like a stilled roulette wheel the dealer had yet to check.

Blond-haired boy, braces already, holding up a horseshoe crab and wiggling it in his sister’s face. She only laughed.

Valentine’s hand, slick on the grip — if this moment could only last forever. The anticipation, the perfect and delicious element of random chance, a stranger selected on a moment’s whim, with a one-in-six chance of a magnum bullet tearing his spine in two. He might even live to appreciate the irony.

Finger, tightening on the trigger…

Mass murder, the old fantasy, would never do. With this substitute, the prelude was all. Valentine had decided he would allow himself one day per month, one spin of the cylinder, one random target who would never realize what the smiling, well-dressed stranger had in his pocket. And when everything was perfect, one pull of the trigger. Such strict discipline. Like letting the demons out of their boxes, but making sure all they had was a day pass.

He squeezed the trigger —

— and heard the click as the hammer fell on an empty chamber.

He shut his eyes and took a deep breath, his skin tingling, heart soaring, bowels loose and free of knots.

Fine. This took care of November. He would not be greedy.

Valentine continued on his way, up to the top level, then descended the ramp that spiraled down around the 180,000-gallon ocean tank in the center of the aquarium. He and the sharks just inches from each other.

Who would it be next month, he wondered, and what was he doing at this very instant? Or she? Neither of them even knowing the other existed, Valentine sure only that their paths would cross the day after Christmas. Perhaps next time he would even look his choice in the face while playing the game. And perhaps not.

Knowing only that no one could ever say he did not have the balls to pull the trigger.

Before he went home late that afternoon, Valentine dropped by to see Ellie. Ellie would surely be home. She rarely went out during daylight, stating with indifference that she didn’t like the sun, but he suspected it was more phobic than she let on. He had been around her two or three times when she was drugged, something she’d picked up on the streets, and once she had whimpered for an hour about skin tumors.

He kept her in fine style, a business-district penthouse that was even nicer than his Charlestown home, or would be if she took enough trouble to keep it up. Certainly more than Ellie was used to, or had any right to expect, but he supposed the place was just as much for himself as her. From nineteen floors up, the streets and everything in them were just things to frown down at, turn your back on. For the right price, anyone could feel like royalty.

Ellie let him in, and he said little for the longest time, content to sit with her on opposite sides of the living room and watch some game show on TV. He sank back into the plush depth of a sectional sofa, kicked his feet up on a coffee table whose top was a thick slab of gray and black marble. He could still remember when the surface held a reflection, now so smudged and dusty the shine was a memory. Two bags of taco chips were going stale on it at the moment.

“When’s the last time you washed your hair?” he finally had to ask.

Ellie shot him a look and shrugged. “When was the last full moon?”

So she was in one of those moods. With some effort she might be a little shy of beautiful. Instead, she settled for striking, which didn’t necessarily connote the same thing. Her skin was a creamy alabaster; her hair electric with a deep violet rinse, hitting her at the shoulder blades, on the sides razored to stubble in a sidewall over each ear. He supposed some guys would find that a turn-on, a kind of urban pagan allure. He supposed, too, that it was probably a generational thing, and he was simply too old to appreciate it.

Barely twenty-two and she’d lucked into what surely was a prime arrangement for someone like her. Found a sugar daddy who didn’t care what she did with her time, expected no favors for himself, demanded only that she practice safe extracurricular sex if she practiced it at all. He’d become a fanatic on the subject; didn’t want to have to be procuring any abortions. That could louse up all kinds of plans and timetables.

He had come to believe that, if he’d had a daughter, this was the way he would feel about her.

Valentine had no children, at least none that he’d ever been told of, from the era that had ended more than a decade ago, when he had been shackled by the same drives as any man. His cradle of seed had then metastasized into something foul, and so the idea of children was now academic, at least in a biological sense.

But fate, destiny, evolution — these could give a man children no less his own than those from his loins.

From a shirt pocket he slid out a picture and flipped it into Ellie’s lap. Looking at it with downcast eyes, she let nearly a minute tick by before touching it, turning it right-side up.

“Which is this one?” she asked. “They all look alike to me.”

“Daniel Ironwood. He’s the one in Seattle.” Valentine watched her go over the picture with mild appraisal, milder interest. “He’s nice-looking enough. Do you like him?”

Ellie shrugged. “He’s all right. He’s coming here?”

“In a few weeks. Right after Christmas. I talked to him a couple of days ago, and that’s when he thought he could get away.”

She dropped the picture to the floor beside her chair, aimed the remote to boost the television volume. “In 1628 this British physician published his treatise, ‘On the Movement of the Heart and Blood in Animals’…"

“Who is William Harvey,” she said, and looked down at the picture again. “You know, Patrick, who I think I could really go for is Mark Alan Nance. There’s a look in his eyes I get off on.”

“It’s called waiting to die,” he told her. “There’s a lot I can do, but arranging a conjugal visit to death row in Texas isn’t one of them.”

“What is The Mikado,” she said to the TV. Then, to him, “If you can do so much, why don’t you get me on this show? I bet I could clean up.”

“I’m guessing that doesn’t refer to your hair.”

“Har har.” Ellie rolled her eyes. “Who were the Cathars.”

He listened to her volley back and forth with the television, decided against opening his mouth when he knew an answer, because, frankly, she looked to be edging him out by a two-to-one margin. This was embarrassing. Better she be left in the dark as to how much he knew, or didn’t.

Ellie stretched, arms fisted high, legs out stiff before her, stocking feet wiggling. Then she curled back into the chair. “Now that geek from Indianapolis, now there was a disappointment. You let that happen to me again, Patrick, and I don’t care how good I have it here, I’m not doing it any more.”

He told her sure, sure, he understood. Well, it had been an unqualified fiasco, and he’d tried to tell himself that Timothy Van der Leun must have had more problems beyond Helverson’s syndrome. Some irritating vein of guilt morality beaten into him since birth, maybe. He was, after all, a preacher’s son; lots of damage potential there.

“What about the new guy, that Clay guy?” she asked.

“What about him?”

“Are you going to bring him here?”

“What’s the rush? I just found out about him the first part of this month. I’m not going to push it before it’s time, if that’s what you’re driving at. Backfired on me once, with that one from L.A. I’ll take an extra two or three months if that’s what it takes to keep it from happening again.”

That was the problem with the young: their impatience, their need to get things done posthaste, forget the groundwork. It wasn’t their fault, though. He recognized signs of their conditioning by a world trapped in hyperacceleration. Children reached puberty a full three years earlier today than they did at the time of the American Revolution. He envisioned a massive social vise, squeezing tighter and tighter these malleable young bodies and minds. Such resilience, though. They found their ways to cope, to survive; to thrive, even. And for the very lucky few, biology had found it for them.

What a prophet Nietzsche had proven to be, a century before his time. If only the man had lived to see his concept of the übermensch, the superman destined to rise above the human herd, take form as a biological edict.

If only the man were here now, to seek out as one might seek a guru, for wisdom. Their strained and wretched lives, these first growing pains of a genetic monarchy taking its first wobbly steps toward the throne, might be given succor, balm, and meaning.

He liked to think so, anyway.

“Well, that was an easy eighteen grand I could’ve made,” said Ellie, and she clicked off the television with a snap and flourish of the remote. Smiling at him as she dropped the remote atop the picture on the floor, a vicious little smile that made his skin crawl, made him want to batter it from her face.

Ellie slithered from the chair down to the floor, advancing toward the sectional on all fours, swaying side to side like a predator in torn black tights, white skin luminous through the rips. A panther, stalking slowly and willfully, eyes cruel in their curiosity; violet hair hanging before her face; she blew a lock of it off her cheek with a sharp and feral gust.

“Why not you, Patrick?” saying it soft, saying it low, as she palmed both hands over his knees. “What’s your secret, why so chaste around me? Nobody ever got a madonna vibe off me.” Sliding her hands higher along his thighs.

He caught her wrists and held them; thin little twigs, he could have broken each. And twenty years ago, might have broken her wrists and flipped her over; he’d have torn her clothing free and made her regret she had ever thought of seducing him. Shown her what seduction had brought — the beast that, once awakened, could not be put back in its cage.

But twenty years could change a lot, cancer even more. The same name but hardly the same man, the Patrick Valentines of then and now connected primarily by strands of DNA.

“I like whores,” he said. “You’re not a whore.”

They did have their merits. Anonymity, and the assurance that you never had to look the same one in the eye again if you’d rather not. And you could pay them to never, ever mention that they noticed your deformity. Actresses in the end, they could lay a hand on you and pretend you were whole. Their faces would never betray the shocks that would cause a normal woman to snatch her hand back as if defiled by a malignant void. Whores were just dandy that way.

And Ellie laughed.

“Then what do you call me?” she asked, drawing back, not one visible wound from the rejection; just a game she played. So little real power she possessed, but that she did, she was certainly aware of. “I mean, you’re paying all the bills here, it makes me something.”

She was right. Although he had yet to decide upon the term.

Twenty-One

These were the most unlikely of missives, and would take serious contemplation to assimilate into his worldview.

Had he believed in any thinking power greater than himself, this could have been a guardian angel come to his aid.

Had he believed in prayer, this might have been an answer.

But Clay believed in neither — so what other than a fluke could it be? He had a Boston postmark and nothing else, an entire city in which to plant his imaginings… who it must be, and why, and how this relayer had come by the information that Adrienne and her backers thought too sensitive to let him in on.

He had at first suspected it to be more of their chicanery: We’ll poke him this way, see how he responds. But it had continued as if according to a deliberate agenda, heedless of his reaction, by someone who might not even have a means of gauging it. Tantalizing rations of information, one envelope per week with something new. First the general overviews, then the pictures. This week, case studies of the five North American Helverson’s subjects known before he had been tagged as number six. Keep this up, before long he would be as informed as Adrienne. Maybe more so.

Maybe that was the plan.

He could face the east, as if toward Mecca, and come close to sensing some distant kindred heart, beating in a stranger’s chest. Who are you and how do you know my name, how do you know my aberration?

And just what does it matter to you?

Whoever it was, this person had touched his life from across the country, and while no name had yet been shared, in a sense he felt a little less alone, and far less dependent on psychotherapy. He had been snipped free from the bureaucratic umbilical cord of a think tank in a desert city into which he had wandered by chance. He didn’t need them anymore.

He had this.

And Clay realized why he could not believe in angels: They were obsolete. What was their job but to bring information, to herald announcements? Now they had been bettered. The messengers of the information age had fiber-optic wings; their chariots, jets filled with sacks of airmail; their trumpet knell from the sky, now the programming of satellites in orbit. The angels had fallen, clipped and shorn.

And if it would have been nice to believe in the comfort of their radiant presence, the welcome rustle of their wings, rather than in the cold hard hum of technology, at least the latter was dependable. It required no more than the touch of a button, and was there whether he believed in it or not.

Go ahead, he directed toward the east, more than a thought, not quite a whisper. You started this, now finish it. You know what I am, and whoever you are, you probably don’t know why I’m this way any better than I do… but can you at least tell me if I can be anything more…?

Or if this is all there is, all there ever will be. All there ever can be.

Save me.

While the anger at a world he had not asked to join — not in this mutant body, at least — often seemed too much, more and more it seemed as if it simply were not enough.

She came into the apartment the way she had come into his life a few years back — quietly, hesitantly, even sadly, and Clay supposed his first thought was but an echo of an earlier one, maybe even the very first thing he had thought about her: She looks broken.

Footsteps soft and small across the floor — she was walking as if even her legs had been snapped and were not to be trusted. No video camera with her for a change, both arms busy hugging across her front. Erin shed her coat, then sank onto the couch beside him and they were bathed in the news anchor’s chatter from the TV. She remained so still he had to check to make sure she was breathing.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

Her hair straggled like yellowed weeds from beneath her hat. “What do I smell like?”

Clay frowned, almost laughed. Finally bent close enough to put his nose to her, where Erin’s slim neck curved into shoulder.

“Soap,” he said. “Shampoo.”

Oh, she seemed to mouth, full lips pale, pressing together. When she looked at him, her face could have been no more naked had she been skinned alive.

“Is that all?”

He tried again and got nothing, nothing more than the city through which she had come, the city and the cold. She smelled of December, but didn’t they all?

“I think so,” he said. “Is there something I missed?”

No answer, just Erin, Erin on a winter’s evening as a chill gripped the attic apartment the way it always did when dusk turned black. Thin veins of frost rimed the windows, and she went to one such web, as if drawn, hypnotized. She looked at the frost as a jumper looks at a ledge; it became her entire world. She scraped a fingertip along the pane, a white crescent of ice thickening beneath her nail.

“Sometimes,” she said without turning, “sometimes I think every man should have a gay experience. Taking… taking the passive role. Just once, as long as he remembers it. Remembers what it’s like to have his body invaded.”

Sinking by the window then, down on her haunches and her head lowered into arms that were already pretzeled about her body; she turned halfway and tumbled back against the wall but barely made a noise, as if she weren’t really there. Posed for too many pictures, maybe, each one slicing away a few more layers of cells — a specimen donor for voyeurs’ fantasies.

When she raised her face, Erin’s eyes were red and her mouth was stretched wide. “What’s wrong with me?” she screamed. “I can’t even cry anymore! I tried for an hour and the tears wouldn’t come and I want them to, I want my tears back!”

He remained on the couch where she had left him, staring from across the living room. This would be how deer feel in headlights, snared by some approaching sensory overload, petrified and about to die for it.

He should go to her — Clay knew it as surely as he knew the scars on the back of his hand. He should touch her if she wanted to be touched, hold her if she wanted to be held, kiss her if she wanted to be kissed. It should be automatic. He shouldn’t even have to think about this, because where did thinking get him? Got him to realizing just how many broken parts he must really have inside, and maybe he’d shattered them all himself over the years, in one fit of rage after another, until nothing was left.

Slit me open, he thought, and would I even feel it then…?

Feel enough to connect them? Or would Erin find nothing more inside than a coagulated mass of scar tissue, so thick it defeated even the knife?

“What happened?”

“Tell me the truth.” She sounded so desperate to hear it. If she could hold onto words, her clenched fists would burst them like watery boils. “Just tell me the truth. Am I ugly? Do you think I’m ugly?”

Shaking his head: “No.” How could she even wonder? Never had he known her to exhibit the slightest insecurity about her looks, even when they were her stock-in-trade. Shedding her clothes came as easily as others found removing their shoes. He had always assumed if there were any doubts, she had locked them deep within, and built walls around the locks, and posted guards to protect the walls. He had thought her impregnable.

As secured as Troy.

“Liar!” she cried, as she curled onto her side on the floor, beneath the window. “Don’t let me down now, you shit. If there was one thing I could respect most about you, it was that you were always brutally honest. Don’t you even know how rare that is, how much it’s meant to me?”

Turning his hands up, shaking his head. “You’re not ugly, I never found you ugly.” But why couldn’t he go the extra mile? Why did his throat constrict around the rest, why couldn’t he tell her she was beautiful?

For so long he had felt aged, even ancient at times, as worn and cracked as old leather. Yet he felt too young now, as ineffectual as a child, three feet off the floor and watching as towering parents battled it out with fists and whipcrack words meant to hurt where fists could never reach. Don’t fight, don’t fight, the only thing a child can say; he was no more qualified now to intercede in misery than he must have been twenty years ago.

Don’t hurt, Erin. Don’t hurt.

She drew a breath between clenched teeth, smoothed a phantom tear away from the corner of her eye. “I remember, I was eight, I think. There was some stupid citywide kids’ beauty contest I heard about at school, all these other girls were entering and I thought I wanted to, too. You can laugh if you want, the idea of me being interested in something like that.”

Clay shook his head. He had never considered Erin as a child. Never thought of her as tiny, impressionable, innocent.

“You’re not laughing.” She sniffed, did it for him. “I asked my mother about it and she told me to ask my father. I asked him and he told me no, he wasn’t about to waste thirty-five dollars on the entry fee, not when I could never win.”

He watched her tremble for a moment, face half-hidden by a spill of hair, the visible half more than he wanted to see. A small sympathetic spasm rippled through his center and he dug fingernails into knees to stop it.

“Why do they do those things to us, Clay? Why do they do things like that?”

“There’s…” he said, trying to find words. “There’s some other way?”

He tried to move, succeeded only in sliding off the couch onto the floor, on the same level as she but a room and chasms away. He thought to try to reach — it was a small room — but his arm would still fall short. He was sinking, drowning in the same chilly air he had breathed all day, would breathe all night, would breathe all his life.

“I did another layout today,” she said, “and they wanted me to look ugly. Scared and ugly. They posed me with five guys this afternoon, all of them at once, and they were, they were… they were…” Erin went through some kind of contortion, as if she were retching without sound, with nothing emerging; dry heaving her soul. “I could smell them sweating under the lights, and they were… they were in me, everyplace, and holding me down, I couldn’t even breathe anymore, and every time the photographer would yell for me to look more scared or more ugly, they’d… they’d all just laugh. And do me harder, all of them, in this weird rhythm they got into, like they were some kind of group machine or something.” Voice breaking into a sobbing wail, “This morning I got up thinking I was going to like it, that I’d have fun with it! But it was like they didn’t even need me! I’d always, I’d always, I’d always tell myself these other people, they weren’t sex partners, but… but this is the first time anybody’s ever made me feel that way, like I was nothing to them. Why did it have to be different this time?”

Clay had no answer, not even the beginnings of one. Thinking, But Adrienne would, then dismissing it immediately.

“Why do I feel all the wrong things, the things I don’t want to feel and not the things I do?” Erin pushed the hair from her face and slowly sat up, back against the wall, arms wrapped around her knees to turn her into a tight little ball.

He watched her raise her eyes to him, plaintive eyes, eyes of a beggar seeking scraps at a back door: whatever you can spare. I should go to her —

A sound, then, like the breaking of a violin string in the middle of a pitifully beautiful solo: her voice: “Why won’t you hold me, Clay?”

Hold her? Hold her? He could not even answer her.

“Sometimes I just want you to… to…” Shaking her head in defeat.

“Why didn’t you go to Graham’s tonight instead?”

Erin snapped her head up as if she had been slapped, fresh hurt washing down her face. And while her nose could run, still she shed no tears. “Graham? I couldn’t tell this to Graham. I’d tell him about this afternoon and it’d be like digging his heart out with a fork. If I did that to him I’d hate myself even more.”

He almost smiled at that. Erin, as wretched as she felt, still managing to brush the dust off something close to altruism. Perhaps she deserved better than either him or Graham, only no one knew it, least of all her.

“Please hold me!” she cried. “Please!” And how expectantly she waited, suddenly poised and tense, just waiting for something other than herself around which she could throw her arms. Her empty arms.

The body, the mind — how strange when the former freezes up, and the latter seems at its peak. Had he really been this way since birth, his priorities hopelessly awry? He had never been afraid to hurt. Hurt was so dependable it seemed natural, the only thing anyone could count on. It was pleasure that seemed suspect. Maybe because, once it diminished, as it inevitably had to, the hurt seemed even more powerful, twice as real as before.

When they grew tired of looking at each other in their stalemate, neither making the first move, Erin got up and slowly shrugged on her coat and, without a word, left him slumped in the spot that had claimed him for its own…

Thereby proving him right.

He still might have been wrong, might have touched her and found that to be close was not such a prickly thorn after all. But better to err on the side of caution.

He tried to drink but even the taste was venom. Three shots of vodka and he was clinging to the kitchen sink while the lining of his stomach nearly turned inside out. He was recalcitrant when it came to feeling? This he could feel just fine, every contracting fiber of gut muscle.

Clay tried calling her later, but never a human pickup, just Erin’s answering machine. He almost left a message on the fifth attempt, but again slammed the receiver back down when he tried to speak and found he had no words to suit him. The failure got less shameful as he went along.

Maybe she was there, curled beneath a blanket in the dark, counting each abortive call. Or maybe she was at Graham’s.

He smashed the bottle of vodka but it did not help; followed suit with three plates, then sat among the shards and carved on himself with one, watched the blood ooze down his arm; hung his head and found he had a few tears in reserve even if Erin had none. This much breaking of glass — used to be, he could count on his downstairs neighbors to bang on their ceiling, call out for him to knock off the noise, but no more. He wondered if they were now afraid of him.

He knew what the problem was. Knew exactly what the fucking problem was. They’d had him on lithium since late September, and why he was still taking it he didn’t know. More than two weeks since he’d relieved Adrienne of her duties and still he was popping the pills like daily communion. He supposed he had faith in them to some degree: Lithium is my shepherd, I shall not kill.

No more, though. It was dulling him inside, suffocating his one chance at anything like love and grace in the world. They prescribed it because they wanted him alone; he would be easier to study that way.

When he flushed them away, he thought the act should at least make him feel better than it actually did.

Facing himself in the mirror, he saw the smudgy dark circles beneath his eyes, the thin scar over the left. Remembering when he had stood here and taken the twelve stitches out himself. No doctor would get near his eyes with scissors if he could help it.

Maybe he needed a job, something to fill his days. Certainly the need would be upon him eventually. He had squirreled away five thousand in savings from his stint as a garbage man. Fine for now, but it wouldn’t last through spring. A job, something mindless, like the rest of them, Nina and Twitch and Graham, working below their abilities but above their interest. A job…?

No, it would never be enough.

I have to get out of here, he thought. Breathe other air and purge the lithium from his system, maybe he could return in a few days and be better for Erin; be real. If those assholes in Tempe hadn’t wanted his wallet, maybe he could have achieved an epiphany months ago; burned himself blind in the Arizona desert and vomited out every bitter root he had been fed since birth. Dragged himself home half-alive, but at least that half would have been worth the effort it took just to live.

He would try, try again, and if he could have furthered the cause by praying to anything he believed might answer, he would have done that, too.

He could pray toward the east, toward his guardian messenger.

But no — that was just one more vessel in which to misplace faith that would probably turn out to disappoint. They all did, in the end.

North this trip, a direction only a fool would take this time of year, but fools could be mad and could even be holy, and the paths of holy madmen led somewhere.

He would find one such path — he had to.

Unburdened by his car, on foot as seemed proper, Clay wore layers of clothes and carried only what fit in the pockets of his heavy field jacket. He trekked across the city for an hour and blocked out its roar with his Walkman tape player and earphones. The night was cold against his face but at least it was dry, and finally he caught a bus, boarding it in a swirling cloud of diesel stink and riding with fellow passengers who lived in their tiny islands of air and met no one’s eyes. He rode as far north as he could, then got off and trudged several blocks to the highway.

Three in the morning and he caught a lift with an eighteen-wheeler. Anyone hitching in December must need the ride. Might be crazy, but not dangerous crazy, or so the driver told Clay.

Rolling through the night, the ribbon of highway far below, with a billion cold pinprick stars overhead. He had burned before, so maybe this trip he should freeze. He would turn west eventually, climb as far into the mountains as he could, feel them rise majestic and savage beneath his feet, and the sooner, the better. It had become an urgent need to stand dwarfed by trees that grew as plentiful as grass, and between earth and stars, bare himself to a roaring winter wind that would try to strip him naked and turn him blue. Perhaps he could survive only minutes, seconds even — but the seconds would be his. His tonic. His truth.

If it left him nothing but his name, turned the rest of him into a blank scoured clean by wind and ice and snow, perhaps that might be best. He could try building again.

Around four, the driver veered into the rest stop before the Fort Collins turnoff to catch a nap before continuing, so Clay went striding across the lot with half a moon in the west, half a beacon, as all around him the big rigs grumbled like restless sleepers, snorting and farting into the sky. Diesel fumes burned his nose and he trudged into the silent rest stop, locked himself in a stall, and, sitting on the toilet, managed to sleep until an hour past dawn.

Clay hoofed west into Fort Collins. The sun was up and baked the night’s chill out of the earth. Beneath his clothes he finally broke sweat. Fort Collins was a college town, he had been here before but couldn’t recall why; thought it was a lot like Boulder, only less self-conscious about what it was and was not.

An oasis on the edge of the mountains — here he spent the rest of the morning, on into the afternoon. Found a sandwich shop where he passed two hours pouring down coffee and silencing the dull hollow in his belly, reading the local free weeklies just so he looked as if he had something to do. Liking the feel of it all — the vagabond life really did suit him at times. He could watch the students who were wrapping up their semester and see the sleepless tension in their eyes, and felt like the freest man in town. Plenty of knowledge to go around, but did they really know how to think? A lot did not, he suspected, else they wouldn’t be here, so ready to sacrifice themselves just to be content with such meager crumbs of lives once they were finished. No one to hire them and nothing to do.

Late afternoon, he ducked off a side street into a music store, We Sell New And Used, little hole-in-the-wall shop that smelled of dusty album jackets and earlier incense, with walls half-papered over with do-it-yourself announcements. Clay prowled the shelves of cassettes, missing Erin in a way he had not thought possible. Whatever it was they had, last night he might have wrecked it without saying a word, because he’d not said a word, not any words that really mattered.

Don’t hurt, Erin. And don’t hate me because I don’t know how to keep you from it.

He found what he was looking for, a few tapes by Gene Loves Jezebel. All the same to him, he didn’t really know their music, but Erin loved them; knew titles, lyrics, everything; they were a perennial favorite and that was good enough. He could play this through his Walkman and let it work whatever magic it might; make it easier for him to feel the space at his side was a little less empty.

He selected one of the tapes by merit of artwork alone, took it to the counter and slid it to the guy on duty. Gave the short plastic carousel of promotional tapes a spin while waiting for the kid to ring him up.

The kid paused with his finger over the cash register, tape in hand. Loose hair to his shoulders, flannel over a concert T-shirt that one more washing would destroy. His narrowing eyes smacked of disapproval.

“Are you still listening to them?” he asked.

“Yeah,” said Clay. “Are you still selling them for minimum wage?”

The kid smirked and did not answer, took his money, and Clay realized it was the hardest thing he’d done in weeks, giving his cash to this guy. The in-store music seemed to boost in volume, shrieking needles of sound. Clay wondered if the kid noticed the trembling of his hand when he took his change.

The kid did not bothering sacking the tape, just stood tall and superior and flipped it across the counter.

“Enjoy,” he said. “Dick.”

Clay slipped it into a roomy pocket, stood looking down at his shoes for a moment. They had carried him far in one night, but it was never far enough. Never. He looked up.

He put on his gloves.

“Problem?” the kid asked, with grossly exaggerated concern.

“Uh huh,” he said, and punched the brat as hard as he could, felt the nose squash like a plum. Watched him buckle facedown onto the counter, then could not stop himself from grabbing the carousel of promo tapes and lifting it high. He clubbed him once, on the back of the head. Clubbed him again.

It might have been only one more time.

It might have been forty.

Twenty-Two

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

“Probably for you,” Adrienne murmured.

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

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

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

Then: “Adrienne?”

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

“I’m glad you called,” she said.

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

“Sure.” Automatic. “Where are you?”

“I think I might have killed someone.”

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

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

I think I might have killed someone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Maybe he’d have problems no matter where he was.”

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

“But you really don’t want to.”

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

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

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

“Have you thought of hypnotherapy for him?” Sarah said.

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

“He’s big on finding out what that chromosome triplet means, you know,” Sarah said.

“Trisome.”

“Hmm?”

“It’s called a trisome.”

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

“Well, don’t we all.”

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

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

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

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

“Remember Kendra Madigan?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Naturally, Sarah had been enthralled.

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

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

“Oh, forget it.” Sarah drew together with a frown. “We’ve had this argument before.”

“It’s not an argument, it’s a discussion.”

“Whatever it is, I’m not budging.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adrienne slid into the booth across from him.

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

“That’s all right,” Clay said, “you can stay.”

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

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

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

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

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

“I just kept hitting him,” he whispered. “I don’t know why.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Was,” he repeated. “Did you hear yourself?”

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

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

“Am I your doctor?”

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

“Yes,” he surrendered.

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

“Am I going to jail?”

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

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

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

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

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

Clay looked only perplexed.

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

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

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

“I can’t help you with that.”

Nodding, Clay sighed. “It’s a loveless world, you know.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To which she could think of only one rebuttal.

“A tumor can’t change its nature, Clay. A human being can.”

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

“A separate peace.”

Twenty-Three

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

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

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

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

Clay conformed to no pattern.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They were gearing up to survive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And why.

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

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

Adrienne stared.

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

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

Adrienne blinked. “Did you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You couldn’t have waited until I didn’t?”

“You had your work, and… and I had mine.”

Work. She’d really said that.

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

“This was work to you.”

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

“Your thesis.”

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

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

“I like it,” she whispered. “I just wish I’d been there.”

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

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

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

Adrienne tracked a finger through the sweat between Sarah’s breasts. “It sounds like a rite of passage.”

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

Adrienne frowned. “Don’t confine me like that, all right?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Make her own.

Twenty-Four

Word spread fast: Graham announced that not only did he plan on unveiling a new piece — his largest and most complex yet, he promised — but tonight would be a first. Tonight he would actually confer a name on something.

Adrienne and Sarah both thought it significant. All those paintings and not a one of them named… like illegitimate children he might have been ashamed of and would rather have forgotten. Perhaps he was entering a new phase. Like Picasso and his blue period, maybe Graham was leaving his bastard-offspring period behind. Although they might as well offer Vegas odds on what lay ahead. Nina thought it had something to do with whatever he was keeping locked in that storage room, and was being so secretive about.

Graham said he didn’t want to do it until everyone could be there, which included Uncle Twitch, so that meant they would have to wait until he got off work. From there it was a short hop to the suggestion that they all pass the night at The Foundry.

Did she really want to be here? Adrienne had yet to decide, every decision borderline these days, it seemed, not necessarily to be trusted. Ulterior motives might be veined beneath their surfaces.

The Foundry was the same, always the same, claustrophobic and smoky and dank, thudding with enough force to twitter the stomach, and packed with Sarah’s tribes of discontent and disillusion. The wall screens dished up one silent, ghastly image after another; at the moment, one was flashing excerpts from what appeared to be an old precautionary film on industrial accidents. The camera zoomed blandly in on the hand of an ashen-faced blue-collar worker being treated at a first-aid station. One finger was flayed to the bone, as if it had been ground down in a pencil sharpener.

“I put in a special request for this tape tonight,” Graham was saying. “Twitch told them it was my birthday.”

“How many birthdays does that make this year?” Nina asked.

“Five. They never remember.”

“They would if they gave free drinks on your birthday,” said Erin.

Sarah leaned forward, elbows on the table, too far away for anything less than a shout. “Any significance to this particular tape?”

He slid back in his chair and watched, eyes either reverent or half-drunk, it was difficult to decide. How did he view this? More carnage, a twisted leg broken in at least three places, the bends agonizing to contemplate. The screen was the mirror of the soul? Maybe that was the key to Graham’s fascination.

“It makes me think,” he said. “I always wonder what the accidents sounded like. You know how bone conducts sound? I always wonder what sound these poor dumb fuckers heard that nobody else around them could hear.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what they heard the next day,” Erin said.

“What’s that?”

“Weeping insurance agents.”

Most of them laughed, a good mean chuckle at the expense of State Farm and Prudential, which suddenly struck Adrienne as a telling moment. They liked tragedy and misery because of the purely random element inherent in them. Suffering was a great equalizer, respecting no money or status. If they could never aspire to the success they saw flaunted around them, what perverse comfort it must be to see that success was no insulation from life’s cruelties.

This they’d understood long before she had.

Adrienne found her eyes returning over and over to Nina, who had undergone another of her metamorphoses. Gone were the red dye and scarves and flamboyant gypsy skirts. Her thick hair hung straighter now, black, and she wore a flowing sari draped about her chunky body. A tiny, jeweled bead glittered at the side of one pierced nostril. She looked like the world’s palest Hindu.

“How does she manage to pull this off?” Adrienne asked Sarah, discreetly, once Nina had gone to the bar. “She should look ridiculous but she doesn’t.”

Sarah beamed. “It’s the weirdest thing, isn’t it? Don’t you think it must be that deep down she adopts something of whatever it is she takes on? She never seems to be playing a role.”

“A serial multiple personality.”

Sarah frowned, cocking her head. “That’s a bit severe —”

“I’m joking.”

When Nina returned with drinks, she toasted to celebrate resuming her creative endeavors with mutant children’s literature.

“I know what I was doing wrong with the first ones,” she said. “I really was writing for kids and trying to be as honest with them as I could be, and that’s why it never went anywhere.”

“Better the little brats learn the awful truth now, huh?” Graham perked up with a cockeyed laugh. “That’ll teach you the value of honesty.”

“Right, right!” Nina squeezed his arm, delighted. “See, he gets it! So what I decided I should do is write satirical children’s lit for adults who know better now.”

“I like this,” said Clay, laughing. It was the closest thing to enjoyment she had seen in him for too long. “You’ve already started one, haven’t you. I can tell.”

Nina’s head bobbed with excitement. “It’s a sadomasochistic fantasy on the high seas. The Slave Ship Lollipop.”

Even Adrienne laughed at the idea; and Sarah, well, forget it: Sarah was howling.

“You can publish a whole line,” Adrienne told her, inspired, or maybe it was the gin, “and call the series Crib Death.”

Definitely the gin, but maybe she had needed that for a while. Two parts gin to one part anxiety, then stir. Things did feel better now, looser, and it didn’t even seem so sad to think that Nina’s latest scheme was surely doomed to failure, like the rest. How undaunted she seemed, something noble in the way she flung herself headlong into new identities, new projects, without a trace of bitterness over the past. If only she could hang onto that. Seeing Clay more comfortable than he had been since Fort Collins made her wonder if being around Nina was actually therapeutic for him.

He sat on Erin’s right, Graham to Erin’s left, she between the two of them like a mediator. Clay had told Adrienne there hadn’t been anything much between him and Erin since that pathetic Friday night, neither one mentioning it since, skirting the matter like a secret shame. He had confessed maybe it was better that way, maybe she would gravitate toward Graham and they both would be happier for it. And himself?

What’s a little more solitude to an emotional hermit? he had said. She’d told him to can the self-pity and take a risk.

She was starting to feel the slightest bit unsteady in her chair when Erin leaned over to touch her arm, a moment Erin looked as if she had been waiting for. She scooted across a seat Adrienne realized was now empty, Clay and Graham having disappeared. Erin waved toward the dance floor, where things had turned très savage.

“Whenever Twitch plays anything by Skrew,” she said, “they can’t resist.” Watching for a moment, the two of them out there, underfed and only partially visible, colliding repeatedly with each other while the stale air was rent with shreds of growling thunder. “It’s like those nature films they shoot up in the Rockies, with the bighorn sheep butting heads.”

“Over you?” Adrienne asked.

Her smile was a shy flicker. “It’d be flattering to think so. But they probably would anyway.” Erin tried to laugh and it came out very wrong. “I wanted to ask you something.”

Adrienne nodded, blinking to clear her eyes. This sounds serious and I have no business hearing serious right now —

Erin checked beyond their huddle to make sure it would go no further; Sarah and Nina were in their own little animated world.

“If,” she said, “if I can convince him to do it, do you think you might, like… talk to Graham? You know… privately? Like you do with Clay?”

“I suppose I could spend a little time with him,” she heard herself saying. “But it would be better if I helped him get with someone who could be more impartial. With that triangle between you and him and Clay, I don’t know, Erin.” Wait, why was she even asking this now? Adrienne leaned in and hoped her eyes would not betray her fallen sobriety. “Is something going on that might have an impact on Clay, that I should know about?”

Erin’s forehead creased as she folded her arms, stick arms over an enviable chest, shaking her head. “No, it’s just Graham, I’m really starting to worry, he’s getting more like Clay in one respect, he’s holding things in more than he ever used to, and I’m afraid for him. Last week…” A steadying breath. “Last week he asked me to marry him and I said no, I wasn’t ready to marry anybody. Can you imagine? I can’t even get the hang of monogamy.”

Adrienne shut her eyes a moment. The pounding from the speakers felt as if it were thickening her brain with scar tissue. “How did Graham react?”

“He spent maybe twenty minutes talking about hanging himself. I don’t know how to deal with this. He finally quit and said he was just kidding, but…” She could not finish.

I don’t know how to deal with it either, Adrienne almost told her, but said she would have a word with Graham, as long as she could make it appear that she and Erin were not conspiring against him — but really, they should discuss this later.

“And that little room, where he’s been sculpting whatever the hell it is,” Erin went on, “even I don’t know what’s going on in there. It’s been like an obsession for him the past week or more. He’s burning something in there, you wouldn’t believe the smell.”

Adrienne supposed that this was when what had started out as a promising evening really began its dive. Such a precarious balance this group walked. Ten minutes could make a difference that almost defied belief. Their whole lives were one bipolar mood disorder.

When Clay and Graham came wobbling back from the dance floor, she saw that Clay was bleeding from a cut on his forehead and Graham looked glumly sheepish, kept rubbing his elbow. She thought of Lady Macbeth, rubbing, rubbing, out, damned spot.

Another hour, two, and Sarah tried to get Adrienne to dance when the motion was less frenzied, but by now the last things she trusted were her feet and her balance. Only perception seemed unimpaired. If anything, it had amplified, the grim subterranean world of The Foundry roaring around her, inside her.

Then someone staged a whipping, a special treat for the night — Nina had mentioned this happened occasionally, but Adrienne had yet to see it, had only once noticed two pairs of handcuffs dangling from one of the chain link partitions.

Garter-belted young woman; scarred male plaything stripped to the waist and cuffed in place, barebacked; the crowd made room as the coil of black leather rose and fell, stretched and recoiled; some cheering and others watching, glazed and mesmerized, the crack of the lash just audible over the hushed sensual throb of whatever music Twitch had cued —

And the worst of it was, this was taking place not fifteen feet away, and to her coagulated reasoning it really had begun to seem normal, perfectly normal behavior for a Wednesday night.

Why else would she have gone streaming away from the table with the others for a closer look?

Beside her, Sarah watched without blinking, and soon lifted one hand before her mouth, two fingers at her lips as she idly pushed her tongue tip back and forth through the cleft between them, as distractedly content as a toddler sucking its thumb.

I’ll lose her someday, Adrienne thought, I won’t be enough, and it didn’t even seem as sad as it should; just another given.

“You want to be over there doing it too, don’t you?”

“I might have to someday.” Sarah nodding, an automaton. “I might have to know. How it feels. From either side. I might.”

She broke from her trance, dropped her hand with a grin as if only now realizing what she had been doing. She reached out to bury that hand in Adrienne’s hair and kissed her deeply as Adrienne left her eyes open, peripherally aware of the flicker of the lash. Sarah tasted of some exotic liqueur, sweet and spicy-bitter, or maybe it only seemed exotic because it was Sarah. It felt as one of those moments of great revelation, understanding why she sometimes wanted to die so happy, and why, at rare other times, she wanted only to run.

“Who loves me?” Sarah breathed into her mouth, with heavy-lidded eyes.

“Everyone,” said Adrienne. “Everyone does.”

Graham’s door at 3:00 A.M., and there were too many of them to stumble through at once. That was the way it felt to her, all of them like parts of the same body, divided by severed nerves. The usual suspects, now that Uncle Twitch was free, plus a couple of others who had tagged along. Young, the both of them: a slim, breastless girl who looked no older than sixteen; her boyfriend, who obviously idolized Graham and clutched to his chest one of the charred-and-spiked baby dolls he had ripped from The Foundry’s ceiling, periodically asking to have it autographed. He’d said he had been here late one night last year, with friends, though Graham did not remember.

“I’m, I’m an artist too,” the boy confessed at one point. It appeared to have taken great effort.

Graham nodded. “How nice for you.” He rolled his head about to loosen his neck, and stroked the girl on her bare shoulder; she seemed to shrink a half step away. “Well if you’re an artist, you really have to learn to share things, foster a sense of community. You knew that already, didn’t you?”

The boy stood looking younger and younger, newly mute as he watched Graham knead the girl’s shoulder. She had not made another move to retreat, but her eyes were sick and confused, back and forth. Her arms folded into a fragile shelter.

Adrienne watched from a chair, slumped in and holding tight. It seemed the most solid ground she could find. First impulse was to say something, knock it off, Graham, but she reconsidered: Why should it be her responsibility? If they lived this way it was by choice.

“Don’t,” the boy mumbled, finding his voice, pleading to the floor, “don’t do that, please don’t, don’t.”

Erin came in from the bathroom and quickly sized things up, stomped over to yank Graham by one arm, what the hell do you think you’re doing, and he stumbled away with a groaning laugh that held no mirth, nor even cruelty, only emptiness.

“Just my luck,” he said, “my first protégé and he’s a Quaker or something. I wonder what he does for talent.”

I want to go home, Adrienne thought, this was all to see some painting or sculpture and I bet it never even happens now. Too far gone, she dared not drive, and dared not issue Sarah an ultimatum for fear of the choice she would hear.

After hours, midway between midnight and dawn, this chilly basement apartment felt like a speakeasy. It had ceased to be fun a long time ago but they were still trying. Clay channel surfing at the TV, Nina at the stereo, Twitch raiding the refrigerator and bellowing for beer that wasn’t there.

Then Sarah laid one hand on Graham’s shoulder, one on Erin’s, to quell whatever vicious discussion they were having in a corner. After a moment he grew calm, seemed to take it as a restoration of purpose. Sarah walked away but Adrienne kept watching — nothing like the perspective of distance. She was as omniscient as a voyeur. Graham reached out, as timidly as if he had been beaten, to hold Erin. Over her shoulder his face seemed to sag and flow like a melting candle.

You’ll always have my heart, Adrienne thought he said as they broke. That’s the problem.

“Well, shit,” he then said, loud enough to be heard by all, “let’s get this done.”

Graham called them together and led them over to the least-used corner of the basement, around a door that was secured by a stout padlock. His eyes grew distant as he fished a key from beneath his shirt, on a chain around his neck.

“Shazam,” he murmured, and opened the door.

Twitch’s bobbing head was in Adrienne’s way, but even if it weren’t, she doubted she could discern what was in there… just some staggeringly solid shape beyond the door. The smell was freed, dense and acrid, an accumulated stink of scorched metal.

Graham was first in, and flipped on the overhead light.

The word monolithic floated to mind, but she quickly decided it wasn’t right. It implied aloofness, the timeless indifference of something that measures centuries the way mortals measure seconds.

This? This thing? It was unnatural and grotesque and malevolent.

It reached nearly to the ceiling, and three-quarters of the distance from wall to wall, a jagged conglomerate of more small machines than could be counted, more than could even be identified at first glance, or second. One abutted another that flowed into the next, like jumbled refuse that had only partially survived a holocaust’s meltdown; a slag heap left in the declining wake of progress and ambition.

Graham held the door open and they crowded in, slowly, as if the thing would bite. No one saying a word. No one dared.

With a closer look, she could make out individual components: electric motors; power tools of all kinds, table saws and circular saws and jigsaws, drills and lathes and sanders; chainsaw belts had been secured between motor-driven pulleys. All had been joined into a hulking Frankenstein’s monster by welded stitches, the metal having been allowed to melt and flow, then cool like metallic tumors.

Even the room had become a part of the creation, the concrete walls and ceiling having been drenched with soot over time. It was all black and gray in here, a world in monochrome.

Once they had taken it in, Adrienne felt the logical next thought ripple through all of them, everyone glancing left and right into neighbors’ eyes, realizing something had been going terribly wrong and no one had guessed its magnitude.

Graham could not have intended this to be a sculpture, not in any reasonable sense… because it could never leave the room.

“I didn’t mean for it to get so big,” he said, “but it just kept growing.”

“Graham?” Erin’s voice, tiny, as if she were calling a stranger, or had heard someone say he was maimed.

“Some of it even works, still, that’s what took longest to get right,” he said, and yes, she really had seen cables and conduit snaking about within, like arteries.

He stepped over to the back wall, stooped. Plugged it in.

The air in the dense room seemed to surge for a surreal moment as motors hummed to tortured life, then began to shriek all at once. The grinding roar was instantly painful, and only Graham did not clap his hands over his ears. Adrienne swore that she saw the structure thrum like a tuning fork, as all those moving parts churned up a breeze that carried a congealed stink of old fires. Saw blades spinning and belts whirring, metal teeth a blur. It made no sense. It was the cold, hard embodiment of illogic. It hung together and functioned when it should have ripped itself into shrapnel.

They fled the room in a spontaneous exodus, and Graham must have let it run another fifteen seconds before pulling the plug. He shuffled out of the blackened room as the cacophony wound down and broke apart into a dozen component voices, high dying whines. When it grew quiet enough, they could hear an upstairs neighbor pounding on the floor, his muffled shout.

“Graham, man…?” said Twitch, gangly limbs in awkward poise, as if flight might be imminent. “This is… this is…”

“In seventeenth-century terminology, it’s an infernal machine. And it exists for its own sake.” He stood before the doorway and took a little bow, or a sick parody. To Clay: “Now you know what I’ve been doing with all the scraps you brought me from the dump.”

They had scattered around the apartment, each seeming to have chosen his or her turf and rooted there, old friends and young strangers alike. Adrienne knew she was faring no better. Head thumping and ears ringing, she thought, He shocked them. I didn’t think it was even possible, but he shocked them.

“What’s its name?” Nina asked. “You said it was going to have a name.”

Graham nodded. “I didn’t even realize it had one until three days ago. But that’s when I knew.” How frail he looked, how malnourished, his cheekbones sharper, with unruly dark curls hanging to his eyes, those eyes the only thing about him that seemed suddenly, madly, vibrant. “It’s called The Dream of Kevorkian.”

No one moved, no one spoke.

“I don’t get it,” said Twitch.

“The suicide doctor,” Adrienne said, or thought she made the attempt, and her legs went wobbly.

It couldn’t be happening, could not, Graham giving them all a resigned look, saying nothing but the look conveying enough, Well, that’s everything, and he retreated into the charred room and the door slammed and it sounded as if another padlock was being fitted into place, this time from the inside.

Jack Kevorkian, the suicide doctor, inventor of the suicide machine — did he dream of contraptions more violent than his own, machines even more brutal than that of Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin?

Nothing was happening in fluid motion anymore, just snapshots of hyperclarity: Nina the first to reach the door, then Sarah, then the rest, fists pounding or twisting at the knob, but all they could do was rattle it in its frame. They called out and Adrienne heard her own voice join the clamor, not even sure what she was saying, only that it was a desperate plea.

When the infernal machine resumed its metallic hurricane roar, Erin screamed. A long, agonized scream —

As harrowing as the moment of anticipation.

As futile as the hope that Graham was only joking.

As piercing as the wet marrow shriek of a bone saw.

Twenty-Five

He had never been one for obligatory rituals, but Clay now thought perhaps he recognized their necessity.

Denver saw no funeral for Graham Layne Detweiler, his recoverable remains sent to Pennsylvania, back to a home he had not acknowledged for years. What happened there, none of them knew. Denver saw no funeral, but should have.

Some sense of closure was needed, any kind of scab over the open wound that his suicide had been. Its shock had staying power, lingering throughout the days — Graham, alive one moment and gone the next, more than gone, gone in a way that seemed to rend his existence into fibers and mist.

Clay supposed they could have stolen into his apartment and conducted their own ceremony in Graham’s charnel room. The Dream of Kevorkian remained intact, probably stymieing everyone from the police to the landlord, and no doubt they could have retrieved some fragment of Graham from the machinery. All those cracks and crevices? There was no way all of him could have been recovered for shipment. Some scrap could surely be their prize to tweeze free and bury.

But Clay decided that it was a ghoulish idea, would be more upsetting than comforting to everyone, and kept it to himself.

Besides, they had done one thing, no memorial by any means, but at least one final act to preserve whatever legacy Graham had left behind.

Twitch had been the first to state the obvious, that Graham would have hated the idea of his paintings being gathered with the rest of his belongings and carried east, to be stacked in some airless storage facility because, while his parents would detest them too much to display them, they could not bring themselves to destroy them. Knowing Graham, it would probably not be the where so much as the who.

They took it upon themselves to recover the paintings, Twitch and Clay, with Nina serving as lookout. With a crowbar they ripped away the padlock used to secure the place, then used Erin’s door key. It was four in the morning and they drove away having liberated thirty-two canvases.

These were divided up at Twitch and Nina’s two days later, like a grim auction, all these metallurgy dreams uneasy reminders, particularly his final painting, the Boschian landscape with its myriad body-chewing machines. Terrible prophecy, that; no one spoke up as wanting it until Nina suggested giving it to Sarah, for Graham had been pleased by her love of it on first viewing, her immediate understanding. He really had been, Nina insisted, even if no one had noticed but her.

Clay made sure that Adrienne was not left out, in the end selecting for her a two-by-three-foot acrylic of a twisted iron bridge that seemed to hover over a raging river the colors of rust and slate, a bridge with no access and no exit, going nowhere. He gave it to her while Sunday-afternoon snow brushed the windows of Twitch and Nina’s home, and even before his hands had left the canvas he saw tears slip from Adrienne’s eyes. They stared openly at each other, neither pretending the other did not know.

Crying, Adrienne? As unexpected as it was, even more so was that she made no effort to hide it or dam it back. Real tears, real grief, she was fully human after all, more human to him for that than even for her obvious love of Sarah. It was like looking into the wet red eyes of a person he had only thought he’d met, the moment somehow more devastatingly honest than any moment in all their sessions.

Adrienne. Crying.

It was nothing to stare at but stare he did, as the paintings continued to find keepers and curators, peering out of the corner of his eye. Adrienne. Crying. Sarah’s arms around her and the two of them leaning into each other. Take one away and the other would fall, but together they balanced just fine.

I want what they have, he thought. Other people managed, so why couldn’t he? It was the grand failure of his life, being born, being born so different there wasn’t even a name for it until six years ago. He looked at the paintings he had claimed so far, closed doors and piles of slag and scrap, and he thought, There it is, my life, it’s all right there, he painted it and probably never knew it was me. Because it was him, too.

Adrienne. Crying. Being held.

He met Erin’s eyes, almost went to where she sat on the couch but his legs would not move, his arms would not reach, and maybe Graham had had the right idea after all: If the fucking things don’t work right, then cut them off.

Erin had him over to her tiny apartment that night, her invitation almost shy, so unlike the Erin he thought he had known, the Erin he preferred to know. There was so much to say and none of it seemed to come out right, from the very start, so they gave up and tried to go to bed. No camera, just the two of them face-to-face, eye-to-eye, a pair of candles burning on her dresser while outside the snow had gone icy enough to peck at the window. It should have been romantic but seemed instead a desperate, last-ditch attempt at pretending to be that which they were not. She trembled as she kissed him, and when he tried to enter her she was dry, completely dry, as if the rest of her body had sucked up all the moisture and held it for ransom. He rolled off her, his erection dying, and soon Erin burst into more tears than he had ever seen from her.

Tears — she had found them at last.

“What… what’d I do wrong?” he asked.

She shook her head against the pillow, continuing to dampen it, and he got up, mentally answering for her: You lived, that’s what. And went off to sleep on the couch, where he could do no more harm.

He supposed he would have made more of an effort to shatter those walls, any walls, no matter how alien such tender advances would have felt, had he known he would never see her again. Never dreaming she would resort to what she did, never considering the possibility that Erin would pack up what she could and leave the rest, then do the unthinkable: drive away, return to South Dakota, and move back in with her parents. It seemed the ultimate defeat, a living death; the final degradation in a life filled with them — she had the pictures to prove it.

No phone call, no advance warning. He knew it only when Nina came over Wednesday afternoon to tell him, and give him a videotape that Erin had entrusted to her on the way out of town two hours earlier.

“Did you watch it?” he asked.

“She told me not to.” Nina stood in the doorway, the only remaining vestige of her New Dehli persona the jeweled bead at her nostril. Jeans and parka and limp hair, just not Nina anymore.

“But did you watch it?”

“I tried to,” she confessed, “but I couldn’t, I had to turn it off, it hurt too much. But if you want I’ll watch it with you.”

Clay shook his head, held up a flat hand as if to ward her off, then shut the door. Probably it would have been all right, but this was Nina, and if anyone was the mother of the bunch, she had served that purpose. She would want to comfort him, and while she loved Twitch, things happened. Consolation got out of hand, became something else, never planned for, then never to be talked about because it meant that a new door had been opened and could fly open again.

So he watched alone, as he was surely meant to.

The camera was trained on a chair in her living room, rigid and unmoving, a tripod’s point of view. Empty chair, the brittle tick of a clock out of frame, its metronomic advance little slices out of the time they’d had left together while only one of them had been aware of it.

A blur of motion as Erin’s skinny bottom receded from an abrupt close-up and she walked to the chair. Facing the camera, saying nothing, a sticklike index finger winding absently around a single hair, tugging it free, letting it fall to the floor. She did it again, her movements slow, even, soothing.

Her eyes roved into their own focus, found the lens. They could always find the lens. She could always pull herself together for that.

“I’m sorry, Clay, I, I can’t say goodbye to your face because if you asked one wrong question… I wouldn’t know how to answer. I don’t do answers much anymore. If I ever did.”

She went on, occasionally halting and staring off, at times slumping lower into the chair, less and less of her visible in the frame until she would become conscious of it, and straighten. Nothing seemed prepared, just Erin, alone with the ticking of that hostile clock, sometimes speaking, sometimes pondering what to say, sometimes trying to hang on to what she had just said. None of it pleasant to listen to: She needed more, there had to be more than this, and while she might have been able to admit to loving him someday, it could never happen with him as remote as an Arctic plateau.

“I do awful things sometimes,” she told the camera, “and I need someone to tell me it doesn’t matter what I’ve done. Even if it does, I need to hear that it doesn’t.”

It didn’t go on much longer, for she had already begun to dissolve, big eyes gone hollow and moist, blinking back the goodbye tears as she buried her head for a moment, then raised it, pleading for something beyond words, palms uplifted, shaking.

“I don’t even feel like a human being anymore,” she said, then crumbled entirely.

Only after it was over did Clay remember sliding to the floor and sagging on his knees before the television, mouth working soundlessly as he watched her wrench herself free of the chair and advance toward the lens. Static frame once more showing nothing alive, just that mechanical ticking, ticking. He clung to the television to preserve the moment, eyes on the empty chair, knowing Erin was somewhere in the room, just out of sight; he could hear rustling movement and a sob caught in her throat. If he could just stop her from ending the recording, there might still be hope. The camera still rolled and contact was held. She might return to her chair and this time, why, this time she might even smile —

But then it all vanished, her chair, her clock, her entire life, zapping into white static as sudden as a nuclear blast.

Which might have been preferable, really.

In a holocaust, no one dies alone.

He spent some time screaming after that, wordless sounds that came erupting from the poisoned wellspring within. He imagined that men in wars screamed this way as they lay broken and dying in fields of mud and smoke and land mines, screaming for help or for their mothers, but never truly believing either would come.

No one else in the building banged on their walls, or shouted for him to stop.

He missed that, too.

Throat like a raw scrape, Clay stared at one of the paintings that had become his inheritances.

Iron rungs on an iron wall, centered between rows of rivets resembling cold hard nipples: a ladder. Turn it upside down, right side up, it worked either way, an Escher-like ambivalence. The ladder led from one door to another, virtual twins, opening into the glowing hellfires of blast furnaces.

No Escape, the artist might have named this one, if only he had extended the effort. Were Graham not dead already, Clay might just kill him and be done with it. It would be a favor to all of them who had suffered under his tyranny, his blackmail by melancholy.

Why couldn’t you hang on? You fucking coward, why couldn’t you just hang on? I should be missing you but now all I can do is hate you because look what you did, look what you cost me.

This was the downside of suicide he’d never considered. Graham had not just killed himself, but all of them. What had they been if not a family? Not the healthiest, nor free of abuse and neglect, but they were better together than they could ever have been alone. And now? Their numbers had been sheared, checks and balances destroyed. All that was left was one couple and a spare.

Plus, for the time being, a pair of inquisitive types who’d found them to be specimens worthy of study.

If he believed in portents, he might have wondered if this past week wasn’t precisely that: You have been here long enough, lived your life in its latest rut and dug it as deep as you dare.

A specimen worthy of study — what more was there now? What else was left but well-intentioned friends who could barely take care of themselves, and the will to know why his heart could never be what he wished?

He concluded that he had three families: the family into which he had been born, and left by choice; the family of his heart, which he’d accepted out of mutual need and had just watched die; and the peculiar family of those he’d never met, but whose similarities ran so deep they were biological mandates.

Dim as the future appeared, there could be only one choice. The road was opening bit by bit, week by week. Someone in Boston was seeing to that.

Was it merely coincidence, then, with Graham dead a week and Erin gone a day, with the holiest of the year’s holidays just two days away, that the mail brought his greatest surprise yet? Or was some other infernal machine grinding him toward an ultimate destination?

Standing in his living room, while in the window the sun blazed diamond-brilliant off melting snow, he opened the day’s mail. A Christmas card from Sarah — it made him smile even though he didn’t believe. And a large envelope with a Boston postmark, whose weekly arrival he had come to count on.

He shuffled through the papers long enough to see that they were research overviews, nothing specific as to case studies; dry reading ahead. Tales of chaos and mayhem were always more captivating. My brothers, he had once thought. My crazy brothers.

Clay saved the brief, handwritten cover letter for last, as always. He would scrutinize the cramped scrawl and try to picture the stranger who had penned it.

Still no name, but when Clay saw that a phone number had been provided, he realized that his hands had begun to tremble.

Joy to the world, indeed.

Twenty-Six

It was the one dependable aspect of working with the mentally ill, being able to find your boss in his office on Christmas Eve. They were still psychotic on holidays, and reality still as fluid. Adrienne found the weird stability in that comforting; something to believe in, count on.

“I’m wondering if you might be able to explain something to me that perhaps I should know about,” Adrienne said.

She sat with both feet on the floor at her desk, hair tousled and in her eyes. Sarah had gone shopping and this phone was the only way she was sure Tempe still existed, or ever had.

“And that would be… what?” asked Ferris Mendenhall.

“Do you have any knowledge of something called the Cassandra Study?”

“No. I can’t say that it sounds at all familiar. This is a study of what?”

“I assume it has something to do with Helverson’s syndrome, but beyond that I haven’t a clue.”

“Where’d you come across the term?”

“I didn’t. Clay did. It was mentioned in the latest mailing from whoever it is in Boston that… well, you know. Whoever.”

“Mmm hmm.” Mendenhall sounded irritable. He had said little on the subject of this rogue informant, but she could tell that the longer such a presence was felt, the more he loathed it. It was an element out of control, beyond his sphere of influence. It was, therefore, a small and hateful nugget of chaos. “In what context was this study mentioned?”

She did not need the paper before her to recollect it, so scant was the mention, but still it would have been preferable. Clay, though, had refused to leave the report behind when bringing it along this morning. At least he was sharing information again, which she counted as a major triumph. Possibly a miracle.

“It was in an overview on general conclusions drawn from the latest case studies on Helverson’s subjects,” she said. “The most up-to-date entries. Including Clay’s. But there was this passing reference to something called the Cassandra Study. It said that the study’s first significant data wouldn’t be available for another three to four years. There was no definition. As if it’d be generally understood by the intended readership.”

Mendenhall sighed; here we are on Christmas Eve and I do not need this. “You know, Adrienne, someone is getting a lot of satisfaction out of what’s basically cloak-and-dagger bullshit.”

“I agree.”

Whoever it was wanted Clay to know about this study, wanted him to learn for himself rather than having it spoon-fed via the mail. Its importance would be magnified a hundredfold if someone had to go digging for it. There was nothing at all incidental about this, the dropping of a single hint in all those pages.

“And Clay Palmer’s given you no indication of having been told anything about whoever’s been sending him information, is that what I’m to understand?”

“Either he doesn’t know or he’s keeping it from me. I tend to believe he doesn’t know. Whoever it is maintains power by remaining anonymous. But it’s not coming from a prankster’s mindset. Whoever it is obviously feels a strong need to protect him- or herself. And won’t drop the mask until feeling assured of Clay’s dependence. So he’ll continue to protect that anonymity.”

Mendenhall told her that he would get on the phone with someone at Arizona Associated Labs, see if they could shed any light on this study. Told her she had done the proper thing in phoning him instead of routing a call directly to AAL. He knew how to bureaucratically finesse his way around far better than she.

She thought he was about to say goodbye when he said, “You sound tired, Adrienne. You sound exhausted.” His voice in her ear like a nagging conscience that hadn’t quite gotten it right.

“No I don’t, I sound drained. That’s what you hear. There’s a difference.”

“Hmmm.” She could almost hear him frowning into the phone, closed-mouthed, his droopy moustache twitching. “Is there anything you need to talk about, unload?”

She nearly laughed, straightening at her desk with her hair tossed back from her forehead, swishing along her shoulders, her head rolling limply back. Was there anything she needed to unload?

I have broken enough regulations to probably get me barred from practice. A week ago I stood present while a young man nearly liquefied himself and I did nothing to prevent it. I have watched as almost every inner support of my sole patient got torn from beneath him, and for some reason he still trusts that I have his best interests at heart. And I believe that I am ready to accept whatever comes from him next because I feel as if I’ve been hit and hit and hit again until I just can’t be surprised anymore…

So precisely where would you like to begin?

“It’s just been an intense emotional week for everyone around here, Ferris,” she said. “And I’m not going to be home for the holidays. I’ll get over it.”

“I’ll call back when I have anything for you. And if it’s not later today, then, um… merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas,” she said. Automatic, a parrot’s reply, and she hung up.

She found herself staring across the room to the painting that Clay had given her. Graham’s bridge to nowhere, an iron island in the sky for seekers marooned. She could almost hear the turbulent river below; had he meant it to be life itself, amniotic waters become raging eddies of confusion? Of course he had — she could see it so clearly now. Graham could view life in no other way. None of them could, try as they might. They all clung valiantly to a precipice, attempting to climb, but the waters rose as inexorable as a tide to sweep them away, one after another.

She could see it in the way Clay had come to her following Graham’s suicide. He had needed their session the way recovering addicts crave methadone. He’d come to her this morning and wrenched his way through news of Erin’s departure, and his eyes, she imagined, looked like those of schizophrenics in the glory days of electroshock therapy. A blinding light and a lockjaw taste of metal, a whiff of burnt ozone in the forebrain, then a blank slate with hazy recollections of something wrong, somewhere, with someone. Clay had no fight left, it seemed, merely the capacity for acceptance. He was beaten and she had allowed it to happen.

Ferris Mendenhall called back after more than three hours, in the middle of the afternoon. Across the city, across the miles separating them, Adrienne imagined millions of people succumbing to the sloppy temptations of office parties. Would that she had no more worries than making a guileless fool out of herself. But no, no harmless sin for us, we guardians of the mind.

“I found out what the Cassandra Study is,” Mendenhall said with slow contemplation. “When you were doing your cramming on genetics, and the double-Y… well, do I need to fill you in on the study that was run out of the Boston Hospital for Women between 1968 and 1975?”

“No,” she whispered. “Oh Ferris. They’re not doing it again, are they?”

“Yes and no.”

Boston again. What was it with that city? The study to which he referred had been the project of a Harvard child psychologist and a pediatrician. They had karyotyped newborn boys in the maternity ward of the Boston Hospital for Women; those found to have an XYY genotype had been marked for systematic tracking, for years. Each boy’s behavioral development was to be recorded by home visits, schoolteacher questionnaires, periodic psychological tests; no abnormality would remain undetected. They proposed what was termed anticipatory guidance: counseling to help families cope with whatever problematic behavior might arise.

Their project — and all similar studies — ended after seven years, largely from public outcry over shoddy ethics. Apparently the researchers had never considered the harm done to children by the application of stigmatizing labels, or the potential harm of overreacting to the typical aggression displayed by nearly all little boys. Apparently they had never considered the likelihood of self-fulfilling prophecy.

Yet someone was doing this again, with Helverson’s subjects?

Yes and no.

“It was initiated two years ago,” Mendenhall said. “Standard screenings of newborns in forty-seven hospitals in twenty-five cities across the country. All they’re supposed to do is track the Helverson’s babies. There’s to be no contact, no counseling, no intervention… just statistical analysis of what happens to them down the road. It all goes into a central database at MacNealy Biotech in Boston. The parents aren’t even informed when a baby’s found to have the extra chromosome.”

“So they’ve already located more, then?”

“Oh yes,” he said, a fatalistic grumble of a laugh.

Her stomach tightened. “How many?”

“After two years, as of last week… six hundred and eighty-three. With a sixteen percent birth increase from year one to year two. Now, that may only be a statistical blip. A big blip, but…”

Adrienne sat, just sat. Holding the phone and listening to its soft electronic silence swallow her whole. Fill her empty hollows. Six hundred and eighty-three. And counting. In two years.

And these were just the known births. Someone who loved to crunch numbers would have compared that birth rate with national averages, maybe that of all industrialized nations, even globally. They would have estimates, how many were really out there. Unfound and unnamed, on no rosters. But out there.

The ones already studied? The adults? The Clay Palmers, the Mark Alan Nances, the Timothy Van der Leuns? They seemed like such rarities because they had been discovered by accident; oh, but what an informed and directed effort could pinpoint.

And in that gulf between the first adults who had been found to carry their rogue chromosome, and these infants, how many resided? How many teenagers, how many grade-schoolers had found themselves maladapted to a world not made for them? How long before they began to make that world over, in their own image?

Six hundred and eighty-three, and birth rates on the rise.

They were filling cribs, and soon enough would fill streets. Perhaps that turbulent makeover had already begun.

“Adrienne? You still with me?”

“Yeah.” Always functioning.

“I’m afraid I have some bad news for you. Although it’s nothing you weren’t expecting eventually.” Mendenhall cleared his throat. “AAL informed me this afternoon that they’ll be cutting your funding at the end of the year. Which gives you another week to wrap things up with Clay Palmer.”

“Wrap things up?” she said. “The kind of issues we’re dealing with can’t just be wrapped up.” Her volume was rising. “It’s the height of callousness to pretend otherwise.”

“You knew this was coming, Adrienne.” Mendenhall’s voice had gone flatter, sterner. “Therapy never led the priority list. You knew that when you agreed to this.”

She drew a strong breath through her nose, let it out the same way, right into the mouthpiece. “Thank you for giving me the news, Ferris. You’re a good administrator… and that’s about it.”

She hung up, and wouldn’t it have felt better to rip the phone from its wall plug, hurl it across the room? Of course it would. Clay would have done so.

She left her desk and drifted along in subconscious circles, slow and lazy, mildly dazed. After a few moments of staring out over the deck, Adrienne shoved open the sliding door and stepped across the redwood and the snow.

It was still coming down out here, clinging to her sweater and melting cold upon her skin, while the pines looked choked with it. She walked to one side of the deck, where the peculiarities of wind had sculpted days’ worth of snow into a low, rounded drift. She sank into it as she might into a sagging throne.

Her legs and behind soon began to feel the creeping chill; maybe would go numb before long. She could stay here until Sarah came home and forced her in, brushed away the caked snow and asked what she was trying to do, catch pneumonia and ruin Christmas?

God rest ye merry lesbians, let nothing you dismay.

Adrienne tilted her head back upon the icy pillow and looked straight into the milky gray depths of the sky. No color, no warmth, no fury, nothing up there at all. Just snowflakes coming down to brush her cheeks, soft as angels’ tears.

Six hundred and eighty-three.

And did the heavens think to grieve?

Twenty-Seven

Patrick Valentine picked him up at Logan Airport two days after Christmas. A Monday — he was hoping to avoid the crush of too many holiday travelers, but by the looks of the crowded gates and terminal, a lot of people were stretching out a long weekend. Lots of shopping bags in hand, clutched as proudly and carefully as if they contained gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Oh, it was touching.

He had yesterday, among their kind, played the game once more, the game devised a month ago. The Colt Python in the pocket; one bullet, one spin, one disciplined squeeze of the trigger. He had come to think of the game as snake-in-the-grass. Yesterday’s flood of gift refunds and exchanges supplied a bounty of backs from which to choose. It had taken two hours of department store roaming before finding the one that screamed to be taken.

Another click. In the end, another reprieve.

Another month of sweet anticipation.

Next time he would ruin someone’s Super Bowl, maybe.

As the late-afternoon flight from Seattle began to disgorge its passengers through the gate, Valentine scanned faces. Fifty or more he discarded until experiencing a frisson that went deeper than mere recognition. A face familiar because it was his own, twenty years younger and half-concealed behind heavy round shades of metal and amber glass, almost like blast lenses for a nuclear test site: Daniel Ironwood.

Valentine took several steps forward while other passengers split around him, like a swift stream encountering a rock, and he barred Daniel Ironwood’s path. Face-to-face, they stared.

Strangers who liked to people-watch in airports would think them relatives. Naturally, the resemblance was there, if no warmth upon first meeting. Those same curious sleek faces and contoured skulls. They could be father and son, and anyone who stared, impolite or compelled by the sight of such fine-boned peculiarity, might believe them estranged. Years gone by since they last embraced, perhaps, while the younger grew to manhood on an opposite coast, turning into more of his jaded elder than he would ever have dreamt possible.

How deceiving looks could be.

Daniel dug into a coat pocket for a crumpled pack of Salems, popped one into the corner of his mouth, and lit up. “Fucking airline regs, that must be the longest I’ve been without a smoke since I was twelve.”

“Let’s get your luggage,” said Valentine, and led the way.

“Is she with you? She didn’t come with you? What’s her name — Ellie?”

Valentine glanced back over his shoulder, saw Daniel quicken his pace to keep up. “No, Ellie’s not with me.” Laughing then, “What’s the matter, turbulence up there give you a hard-on?”

Daniel said nothing, might have glared with embarrassment or offense, but the dark glasses contained it well. No doubt he found them a survival tool, never betraying a thought if he could help it. Blank faces go unnoticed, unchallenged. Blank is a little bit like dead, and in dead there is a certain strength, for dead means nothing left to lose. Daniel would know this, had done his time as a juvenile offender; teen-age burglaries and robberies, a rape.

“This is weird, I don’t mind telling you,” he said. “This feels really really weird.”

“I don’t care how it feels, as long as it doesn’t cause you any problems.” And Valentine remembered the one from Indianapolis, that colossal disappointment back in late summer; the shame and impotence that seemed to have even embarrassed Ellie, who had until then seemed shockproof.

“And how’s it make you feel? Doesn’t it leave you feeling just a little like a pimp?”

Valentine laughed, clapped a hand down on Daniel’s shoulder, drew them closer as they walked until he could feel the young man’s body stiffen against him, resistant. Lean, hard… the same body he’d once had until growing into a thicker muscularity with stubborn traces of fat around the middle. The cancer rooted in his groin had changed him in all ways — metabolically, intellectually, even his inner essence.

And with this son given him by destiny, he wanted to lean in until Daniel squirmed, his rough stubbled cheek scraping Daniel’s smoother one as the kid smelled the coffee on Valentine’s breath. He would slap his cupped hand down over Daniel’s crotch and squeeze just to the point of pain. Protect these, he would say. Because in that sac lives a hope that I lost a long time ago.

Would a pimp do that?

“Pimps make money,” he told Daniel instead. “You’re costing me. Remember that and maybe you’ll eventually figure out how I really feel.”

“Right,” Daniel said. He shrugged off Valentine’s hand. “You don’t plan on… you know… watching us go at it, or anything like that. Do you?”

And that really tore it, such an insinuation beyond the pale of reason. Valentine clenched his jaw and dragged him by the arm halfway across the terminal’s walkway, thumped him against the wall by a row of telephone carrels before Daniel really knew what was happening. They drew passing glances, but Valentine could not have been more oblivious. Face-to-face, then, nose-to-nose. Heavy sunglasses or not, Daniel Ironwood could not hide his sudden trembling with fear. Yeah, taste it now, and learn not to be a little brat, and maybe it’ll spare us a worse clash down the road.

“Is that why you think I flew you here?” Valentine whispered into the tightly impassive face. “I’m not a voyeur, I’m not a pervert. I didn’t bring you here for my pleasure — I can’t feel it in the first place. I brought you here to do a job, first, and maybe learn something. Now, are you going to keep that in mind?”

Nothing.

“Or are we going to have to go through frequent reminders?”

“I’ll remember,” said Daniel, and when they stepped away from the wall, Valentine noticed that he kept a half step behind; the farther they walked, the more he appreciated the ambiguity in that. Back there, Daniel Ironwood could either be playing the subservient or plotting to club him across the back of the head.

A fine specimen, Daniel Ironwood.

Maybe there was hope for the future after all.

He took Daniel to Charlestown so he could shower and clean up, dump off his luggage, anchor his life for the next couple of weeks. They grabbed a quick dinner at a pub a few blocks from the house, and by then evening was chilling into a hard, crisp night. It was time. Introductions were in order.

They drove back across the Charles and up to the penthouse where he kept Ellie, and it generally went well. No mad burst of passion and fireworks, no instantaneous surge of lust. But he preferred a low-key beginning, had hoped for it, because if their hormones locked into immediate and earnest sync, what would prevent them from really pairing off, deciding his money did not matter, and striking off on their own?

Like ungrateful children.

So there they sat, in the living room, television and stereo playing in jarring discord. Ellie nervously flipped through channels for the first thirty minutes, then seemed to calm herself. Valentine had taken a sniff of her on arrival, of that razored violet hair, and it appeared that she’d washed it today. Good girl. Daniel was at first no calmer than Ellie, sat behind the big marble table as if it were a fortress, chain-smoking himself into a fuming cloud.

No mention was made of the real reason for their coming together, but its undercurrents charged the air all the same. Valentine watched with viper’s eyes, watched their body language toward each other, made note of their eye contact — fleeting at first, then held longer. They spoke of doctors, psychiatrists; an unusual turning point, but… whatever works.

“The last doctor they made me see, he told me why I turned out so screwed up,” said Daniel, deadpan behind his glasses. “He said I’d been molesting my inner child.”

Ellie frowned for a few moments, unsure whether or not to take him seriously, finally laughing when she saw him break his veil and grin crookedly toward the floor.

“Are you ever going to take those damned glasses off?” she asked. “Patrick, make him take those things off.”

Daniel took care of it himself, drawing them slowly away from his face, as if performing an amputation.

“Okay,” Ellie said, “okay. I just wanted to be sure you had eyes. You didn’t really seem quite human.”

Daniel shrugged. “The jury’s still out.”

Shaking her head, Ellie narrowed her eyes, smiled the aloof and vicious smile that came to her in odd moments, moments that to Valentine felt to stretch much longer, somehow, for in them she seemed older than he, and far more mysterious than he had ever suspected.

“The jury can be bought,” Ellie said, pointing at Valentine. Pointing at his heart. “Just ask him.”

He wasn’t used to the phone ringing before he woke in the morning. When it came to associates he generally initiated the calls, and wrong numbers were rare.

Valentine dragged the receiver to his ear and croaked out a simple “What.”

“I have a number but I don’t know a name,” came a voice, the voice of a stranger, “so I don’t know if you’re the one I need to talk to or not.”

“About what?”

From the other end came a slow breath. If he didn’t like the answer, this conversation was terminated. Feds — he wouldn’t put it past them to bug his phone, call him up when they knew he’d be groggy. Call it entrapment.

“Chromosome twelve.”

Valentine sat up, scooting back against the headboard while scrubbing the sleep from his face. This was long-distance; he could hear the miles of humming lines between. Could it be…?

“How did you get this number?”

“You mailed it to Denver. Does that narrow it down?”

Valentine broke into a broad smile, a morning rarity, as the heavy burden of sleep began to flush from his system in a surge of excitement. This would be how Magellan had felt upon sailing past the known boundaries demarked by the maps of his day.

“Clay Palmer,” he said with genuine pleasure. “It’s good to speak to you, finally.”

“Are you going to tell me your name?” Clay asked.

“It’s still too early for that. You understand. I have to protect myself. Nothing personal.”

“I’m coming your way,” said Clay Palmer, with all the inborn inevitability that Valentine knew had made them what they were, had made them cogs in a greater machine that would one day finally get around to meshing. “I’m coming because all I have left is to see if what I have ahead of me is even worth trying to get to, and I don’t know if you can tell me, but I don’t know anyone else who could even try. So maybe you’ll tell me who you are when you know I’m calling from a local phone.”

Sitting in bed, his first impulse was to say no, bad timing. He had a new houseguest, after all, and eugenics on the mind. But reconsideration was swift, as soon as he remembered an evolutionary given that did not escape the human species:

Sperm production was boosted higher in competing males.

“I’ll look forward to it,” he said, and let it be all the invitation that Clay Palmer was likely to need.