Prototype. Part 10

"Why stop there? You'll probably meet her before long." He grabbed the rubber ball, bounced it once off the winds.h.i.+eld 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. Sat.u.r.day 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 a.s.sociated Labs for reimburs.e.m.e.nt 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 a.s.suming 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 b.i.t.c.h 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 s.p.a.ce 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 acc.u.mulation 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 s.h.i.+T?

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 antic.i.p.ated. She couldn't help but leave things behind, smells and hairs and shed skin cells, little markings of territorial encroachment. Should he p.i.s.s 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 outre 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 was.h.i.+ng 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 a.s.shole, you can tell by the way he just lies there. They're everywhere, but this one's a bigger a.s.shole 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 doc.u.mentary 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 doc.u.mentation. 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 gla.s.s 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 grat.i.tude; 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, a.s.suming 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 f.u.c.ked him and she f.u.c.ked 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. f.u.c.king 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 s.e.x 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 relations.h.i.+p in which you knew you were just one more inserter on the a.s.sembly line.

She lay with him through the afternoon, warm company with whom to weather out the worsening a.s.sault 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 s.h.i.+vered 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 a.s.suming 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.

"St.i.tches, 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 gla.s.s 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 f.u.c.king 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-s.h.i.+rt, 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 st.i.tches. 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 sc.r.a.ping 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 gla.s.s 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.