Prototype

Thirty-Seven

He had lost sight of the past, wondering if for every year he spent distancing himself from civilization, those memories had not become more and more like some vestigial organ that had withered to a nub, to someday drop away entirely. The primitives, he had heard it said, possessed no true sense of time, past and future only the broadest of conceits, sacrificed to a raw and overwhelming now.

Was he, in part, proving the theorists right, bridging that gap by becoming a living atavism? Would that no one ever got the opportunity to find out. He had tried their route; he’d been there before.

As for the route he had chosen, its first steps he scarcely remembered; they seemed as unimportant as his name, his lineage. Once even dirt roads have been forsaken in favor of desert vistas and high crags, one can wander for years without need of the past. It made no one any less human.

He could no longer recall how he had found himself here, but some nights, when on the verge of sleep with rocks at his back and the fire at his front, he stirred with the idea that something must have been terribly painful long ago, when he was young, with fewer scars, and that it was better left in a world given up for dead. Memories were sly things, not to be trusted, for their faces could change so over time. Treacherous change he did not need. Better he immerse himself in something stable and endless, a place that time could never defile, because what was time but a sense of order imposed by human hands?

A desert was such a place.

To the Gobi he had come, drawn by its call, its immensity, by everything it promised not to be. It offered neither truth nor lies, it simply was, and that was all he asked for. That, and the fulfillment of some tale he knew he had heard, with reason to believe, but far enough ago that its teller had been lost to him.

Once upon a time he had heard of the almas, and their story lay lodged within him so deeply it might have been a memory planted for the sole purpose of sending him to an elder world in which hours had no meaning. A world in which lives progressed by days and nights, by the passing of the seasons and the cycles of the moon. He needed no more clock than these.

Deserts he crossed and mountains he climbed, nourished by the land and that with which it teemed. Old clothes tore and rotted and fell away to be replaced by hardier skins, while his head and face sprouted with hair thicker than any he had known before. It must have been years that he wandered, that he climbed, and his feet grew tough and his hands callused, and his voice grew vast with the song of primeval solitude. He was earth and wind and sky and water. He was beast and dream.

And the almas waited.

He loved them long before he saw them, knowing that whatever they were, when he found them it would not matter. Be they hermits of folklore, or the descendants of feral children, or some dead-end evolutionary branch, prototypes of humanity with all their potential intact, who lived now as forgotten anachronisms. They were as wrong for the world he had abandoned as he was himself — he remembered that much, too, not quite recalling the problem, only sure of one thing: I am not like others, not like others.

He roamed the slopes and plateaus, and sometimes he would find the remains of their fires — more than once still warm, he was but hours behind them — and the bones of their kills, picked clean. In the shelter of caves he would find evidence of their lingering, earthen pigments used to pay homage to a mighty bisonlike creature that would surely die a very hard death. In all his years up here he had seen no such animal, and it was a long time before he realized: They passed it down. They remember what used to be, as a people, if not as individuals. This is how they keep it alive because if they let it die, a part of them dies too.

He wished that where he’d come from they had known things like that.

So he followed, but the almas were as elusive as they were nomadic, as shy as their legends said. There were times when he began to wonder if he were becoming somehow incorporated into their folklore. And why not, they must have found him a creature of sufficient mystery: a solitary being with a strangely shaped head but clothing not unlike their own, who walked in fog and left lonely tracks in the snow. Perhaps they thought him a spirit, or a god. Or a demon.

He knew only that they seemed to grow to trust him, allowing him to get closer and closer over the years before turning and melting into the hillsides. Half a mile became a quarter, became an eighth, until as little as fifty yards might separate them, and the almas would stand immobile, stocky and powerful atop a hill, silhouetted against a sky of blue, or gray, or sunset red. They would stare at one another through mists and rains and burning suns, but the almas would always vanish before he could walk in on their camp.

Still, he took their small tokens as encouragement to keep trying, objects they could not have left behind by accident in their haste to flee. A soft-furred pelt, a flint knife, a clutch of wild flowers lashed by rawhide to a bone. Such gifts he came to cherish, whether they were left in simple trade, or in appeasement driven by awe.

So he followed, and dreamt of the day when they would no longer run from him, and he began to imagine fathering a child, the idea no longer repellent, as it had seemed long ago. What might such a child be like? Perhaps, backward as the almas were, that which was best in them might cancel out what was worst in him, and so the child — or children — could grow to be something new, better than either of them, a more worthy survivor.

If only they would let him get closer, close enough to touch.

They had to; this could not be all there was.

And, too, if only that damned blazing star would quit searing from the sky to blind him at the most inopportune moments —

“Pupillary response… none.”

The results were always the same, year after year — shine a penlight into his eyes and it might as well have been shone down a mineshaft. Pupils fixed, pursuant to damage to the frontal lobe, she’d been told more than once; patient catatonic. He had, for the greater part of a decade, not uttered a single word, nor focused his eyes on anything in his field of vision, nor reacted to one sound around him. It was as if Clay Palmer had simply gone away.

Each summer Adrienne flew northeast to visit her parents in their retirement on Prince Edward Island. From there it was a simple matter to drop down to Logan Airport in Boston, then rent a car and drive out to Worcester to visit with Clay in the state hospital that had been the longest-lived home of his adult life.

Never had he given any indication of being aware of her, but she visited anyway, hoping against experience that in the year since her last visit he might have shown some meager improvement. Always a disappointment, though, and Adrienne supposed by the time she was forty she had given up hope, had accepted, and, all things considered, was grateful that Clay had grown no worse.

He had, ironically, managed to keep his youth over the years, his skin still smooth as a twenty-five-year-old’s because he never used it and it never saw the sun. His impassive countenance became a living museum exhibit of Helverson’s syndrome, worst-case scenario, the streamlined bones no longer going anywhere. And as fine lines circumscribed her mouth, crossed her forehead, circled her eyes, she began to resent his stasis. Age, damn you! — a fool’s command, and she thought of spending hours folding his face with wrinkles in hope that at least a few might take root. It wasn’t fair; he was thwarting her in body as well as mind.

Although it wasn’t as if he looked perfect, now, was it? She thought it terrible the way they kept his hair trimmed so short in this place, for easy maintenance, when they should have let it fall unruly over his brow. It would at least conceal that broadly scarred concavity across his forehead.

In a dayroom alive with the shufflings and mutterings of his ward mates — a chamber that took her back to her duties on Ward Five — she would spend a full afternoon with Clay, sitting with him at a table and for a time trying to penetrate his never-ending stare. Where did you go? she would think, sometimes even feeling a tweak of jealousy because his surrender to it was so complete. It denied her everything.

She would then take to conversation that was entirely one-sided, wondering if anything was getting through. Giving him updates on her life because she didn’t know what else to talk about — she should reminisce about all the fun times they’d had? — and she would reveal herself in a peculiar role-reversal she had never anticipated. Clay sat like the perfect therapist, never a word, a pale iconic presence whose silence only prompted her to go on, find something else, there must be more.

He heard of changes in locale. Tempe had understandably gone sour, Sarah everywhere she looked and many places she didn’t, and so she had tried Albuquerque but hadn’t fit; perhaps her need for the desert was no more. For now it was San Diego and holding. Probably she had come to her oceanic phase, in love with saltwater and the security of the tides.

He heard of lovers present and past, of Karen and Sally and Adam; of the brief marriage to Geoff, which ended in amicable defeat. She thought to try celibacy for a time but had fallen off that wagon in four months. He heard of Val and Franz and Melanie, and others, and after a time she began to think, I see him once a year and I’m still probably boring him, because it always sounds the same. Only the names have been changed to protect the wounded.

And she remembered when she could love, easily, eagerly, and wondered what was wrong, why none of them ever seemed right, why they would invariably drift apart. It should be easy to find someone, the advantage was hers — after all, she had the whole of both sexes to choose from.

She confessed this to Clay, but if he knew what the problem was he wasn’t saying.

She would sit and hold his hand sometimes, taking it as her pathetic triumph that he no longer pulled away. Wherever he had gone, she could never follow, and so she took to making up inner lives just so she might pretend she knew: He had found a family, or a lover he could never drive away, or a womb in which he curled, bathed in all the potential that might yet be fulfilled.

Life is a short dream, the ancient Romans had said, and so once a year she would stay through late afternoon, and kiss him on the cheek, and wish him godspeed on his.

While she went back out and tried to make sense of her own.

In the ninth year of his stay Adrienne left as she always did — a little sad, a little relieved, a little fearful over the thought of how her life might change, or mightn’t, in the year to come before her next visit. Annual rituals were harsh that way, always forcing your head around to face the future. She took the elevator down to ground level, sharing it with several others to whom she paid no mind. Its doors slid open and all of them went about their lives.

Adrienne was halfway to the door when she realized that one of them seemed to be trailing her. Surely not, though. It must be coincidence.

“It’s good of you to come every year, way you do,” the man said as they stepped through the doors of the hospital and began to descend terraced steps toward the parking lots. “It’s a fine thing you don’t forget him.”

She stopped on the concrete walkway and turned. The speaker was an elderly man, once tall but now mostly withered, with a stern face gone slack, his hair white and cropped in an old man’s crew cut. He wore his old blue suit with a touchingly natty pride, and smelled of too much sweet cologne, and she had never seen him before in her life.

“Do I know you?”

“I’m…” He looked down, seemed almost embarrassed. “I’m Clayton’s father. Randolph Palmer.”

He seemed reluctant to shake hands, no point to such a formal gesture, for which she was glad. She might not even have been able to move her arm, when it came right down to it.

Clay’s father. He must have been, what, in his early seventies now? About that. He looked it, possibly more. She found a scar on him that she’d not noticed at first, a thick ridge nesting low in the wattles on his neck. He caught her staring, mentioned getting a Purple Heart for that one, and didn’t appear interested in pursuing it further.

“I been trying to catch you, this makes the fourth year,” he said. “The boy doesn’t have any visitors but for you and me. They told me about you a few years back, and I said to myself, ‘Well, I’ve just got to meet her, if only the once.’ It’s a fine thing you remember Clay.”

Adrienne got herself moving again, down the stairs and across the lot. He followed along as escort, mindful of the traffic because he seemed to realize how distracted she was.

It was like the appearance of an apparition, a visit from the ghost of Jacob Marley or Hamlet’s father. Never had she pictured him, not consciously, even during the heaviest of her sessions with Clay. But deep in her heart she supposed she had painted the portrait of an ogre, a cruel and gigantic man who devoured his only son until he was nothing but scraps and bones, then berated him because there was nothing left to take. Randolph Palmer could never have lived up to such a fearsome image, now less than ever, and she wished he had never shown her his face at all, for now she was tempted to feel sorry for him.

“Did you travel all this way just for this?” she asked.

“Wasn’t anything. I don’t live but a few miles from here. It’s not a bad drive at all, come summer.”

“I thought you lived in Minneapolis.”

Randolph Palmer shrugged, scuffing along in well-worn shoes, newly polished. “I moved here seven years back, to be close to him now even if I wasn’t for the years before he… well, hell, before he got this way. I suppose I could’ve moved him someplace back to home, you know, but… just seemed right I should leave him be and I should be the one haul up stakes.”

“What about his mother?”

“Oh, she died about the same time. Her liver got too big on her.” He shook his head. “You can’t have that.”

There’s a lot you can’t have, she thought, but people do it anyway, to themselves and to each other. So often they never learned in time. Or never learned at all, going to their graves with befuddled faces.

She led them to her rental car and stood at the door, digging in her purse for her keys as Randolph Palmer stretched, turned on run-down heels, and tipped his face to the lowering sun while gazing back toward the hospital.

“The boy always was a handful, or most of the time,” and then his head lowered, sinking into the scarred wattles. He rubbed his chin with his fist, huffed with a gruff little laugh. “One time, he was four years old, must’ve been, he had this favorite toy. A stuffed lamb is what it was, dirty white thing, half the fuzz worn gone. He dragged it everywhere. Stupid damn toy for a boy, is what I thought. I burned the thing. Burned it and held his hand over the flame so he wouldn’t want to touch one again.” He shut his eyes, and for a moment she thought he might cry until he cleared his throat and put himself out of danger. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

Keys in hand, she tried to stand tall, taller than she felt while unlocking the car door and hoping to ignore the remorse in the man’s voice. It was too late for remorse in this case. For once she wanted to be unreservedly bitter and childish and cruel. Let her have this one bitter thing in her life, and she would keep trying to make the rest, if not sweet, at least palatable.

“I have a flight at Logan to catch,” she said, but froze when she saw Randolph Palmer looking at her as she had always imagined Catholics would look at the Virgin Mary while praying to her.

“I wanted to ask you something,” he said. “They came and told me even before he got like this that he had things wrong with him, things he was born with inside that didn’t come from his mother or me, neither one. I know you knew him then, before. These people here, they didn’t, none of them. I want you to tell me if you can… would he have ended up the way he was no matter what? I know sometimes I probably didn’t raise him the way I should’ve, but… that wouldn’t’ve made any difference, would it?”

She tossed her purse in through the door, cocked an elbow onto the roof as she leaned there and met Randolph Palmer’s eyes. He was a needy old man, come to seek absolution in what was most likely his final chance. How many years had he wrung his knotty hands and wondered if only he had done things differently? She should have been kinder than she felt, but if the temptation was there, so too was the thought of that small hand over a burning toy lamb, and it burned so much brighter.

“We’ll never know, will we?” she said. “I still live with that.”

“What about me?” He was close to pleading. She could see behind his eyes to all the fears that pooled there, how little time he had left to make his peace with a ruined son and how little progress he had made.

“You made your bed,” she told him. “Now die in it.”

She left him standing on the lot, alone and small at the end of a lengthening shadow at the close of a dismal day, and for another year she drove away hoping that Clay was where he wanted to be, at last, if only in his mind. And she thought, too, of all those babies born with the identical defect. Six hundred and eighty-three, the last she had heard, but that had been nine years ago. They would be in grade school now, and for them she prayed for patient teachers and persistent friends and, most of all, parents who had not confused love with something else, something tyrannical.

She thought of the last thing she had said to Randolph Palmer, then echoed his sentiments exactly.

I shouldn’t have done that.

But she did not turn around.

The damage was already done.