Prototype. Part 15

"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 a.s.sociated 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 unent.i.tled 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 s.h.i.+eld 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 pa.s.sing 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 st.i.tches 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 anch.o.r.ed vast machines before they'd been ripped out, sold or sc.r.a.pped. 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 ident.i.ty, 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 acc.u.mulated 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, embellis.h.i.+ng 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 a.s.sociation, 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 c.r.a.p. 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 embarra.s.sment 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 f.u.c.ked-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 antic.i.p.ated. 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-mache 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 h.e.l.l 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 s.h.i.+t. Who ever heard of putting corn in pumpkin pie?"

"s.h.i.+t, my a.s.s," 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 p.i.s.sed '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 dis.h.i.+ng 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.