Prototype. Part 24

Freezing wind behind him, the smelly heat of the house before him, Clay stood on the porch and took off his gloves. Turned his hands down to show the red slashes across their backs; skinned his hair away from his forehead to reveal the most recent one above his eye. His badges, all; his scarlet letters of admission.

"I have more," he said, "but I'm not taking off my clothes for you."

But Timothy Van der Leun was already nodding, "Okay, you're real," turning away, shuffling back inside the house and leaving the door open for him to follow.

Clay shut it behind him; waited for his eyes to adjust to the dim halls, dim rooms. It reeked of heat throughout, a thermostat allowed to go mad, but the air was worse, thick with the scent of things burned, then allowed to spoil. If he were offered food here, he would never accept.

"Which are you?" Timothy's voice, from the shadows, and this time Clay knew the meaning.

"Denver."

Timothy tilted his gaze, quizzical, a thin head on a bony stalk above the flapping sails of his s.h.i.+rt. "A new one."

Clay realized what they were standing in must have been the living room, surrounded by overflowing junk-pile boxes and brittle old wrappings from convenience foods. They littered the floor like tiny shrouds, and when Timothy moved over to a chair they crackled underfoot. Down he sank, his arms wrapped protectively around his middle.

"When did they finger you?"

"This past fall." Clay found another chair but beneath him it seemed to fit wrong, as if for skewed bones, or perhaps his own had begun to warp into other shapes, other forms. Anything might happen beneath this roof, far from the face of the sun. "It was an accident."

"We were all by accident," Timothy said. One hand dropped to the floor beside his chair, crabbed around, came up with a bottle. He put it to his mouth and took a ferociously long pull from it, then offered to share.

Clay looked at the bottleneck, the squared gla.s.s ... dripping, dripping, amber blood that flies might die from if they lapped it up. He shook his head. "I can't."

Timothy nodded. "I heard that was a problem with some of us," then the whiskey spilled down the front of his palpitating throat as he poured it again. "It never was with me."

Clay watched him drink, silently, as the house hung as still around them as a rotting carca.s.s, save for the televised murmur from another room, probably the bedroom. He found himself drawn again and again to that other face, so like his own, yet not. He had thought for days that this meeting might be like walking in upon a brother he had lost from birth, that the both of them would know enough not to speak, that what they shared beneath the skin would fill the silences.

But it was not like that at all - more the tearing of a membrane between himself and what might have been, or worse, might yet be. Not brothers at all, they went deeper: fibers unraveled from the same umbilical cord that might have strangled lesser babies. They could look at each other, and the small differences - black hair or blond, clean or encrusted - were made insignificant. Anything that varied in their lives they need neither ask nor tell about, for they had lived in all the same skins.

"Where," said Clay, "did you learn about the others? Who told you?"

Timothy opened his mouth, then shut it while he prodded the question for veiled implication. "Where are you going now, where are you going?" He curled in on himself. "If you're from Denver - you're not going to Boston, are you?"

"I don't have anyplace else left to go."

"It's where we all go last, I think," and Timothy trembled, as if another thought might be torn free, then surged from the chair. Stray papers fluttered to join a hundred others on the floor. "I can't sit here, come back here with me, okay, come back here," leading down a narrow hall where tilted old pictures leered from the walls. "Seeing you here, it's just ... it's just..." Repeating it over and over, a mantra.

Clay followed into what had been a kitchen, maybe not even all that long ago, but it had since been taken over by piles of newspapers and magazines spilling from cartons whose corners had ruptured. Unseen mice scurried under the cartons; their droppings speckled the counter. Timothy sat at the table, silhouetted against a window covered by a cataract of brittle, brownish paper.

And the smell was worse back here, in Timothy's wake, that sweet black stink of burnt dinners left to spoil in a room of nicotine light.

Timothy swept an arm across half the table, cleared it to the floor so that Clay might have a place to rest his elbows when he sat. Apologizing when Clay was seated, "I'm sorry it's such a mess around here, I'm on disability, I should pay someone..."

"You've been to Boston? Who is it that's there? I really need to know before I get there, but he won't tell me his name."

"Not even on a name basis with him yet, huh?" Timothy drank, then went sc.r.a.ping through an a.s.sortment of electrical components scattered over his half of the table. Wires like snipped arteries, pieces of broken circuit boards. From a tangle of cords he brought out a soldering iron and turned it on, watched it begin to heat. Clay sat mesmerized as a single fleck of some dead fire burned off its tip, sent a wispy coil of smoke toward the ceiling.

"His name is Patrick Valentine. I was there in the summer. I think it was last summer." When Timothy scratched at his forehead, his fingers came away flaked with dead skin. "You really didn't know his name?"

Clay shook his head. No, I didn't.

"Then what are you doing going there so soon? Don't you think you should know a man's name before you let him put you to stud like some horse?" When he raised his eyes from the table and noted the incomprehension in Clay's, Timothy's head sagged toward one shoulder, then he slapped Clay, once, with a stinking hand. It might once have been a strong blow. "You really are a virgin, then, aren't you? You really don't know about that girl he's got up there, that he found somehow, you don't know about her?"

Clay shook his head no, still no, and perhaps he should leave this table. Timothy Van der Leun began rocking back and forth as the soldering iron radiated a s.h.i.+mmer from its smooth beveled tip.

"I really wanted to do it," he whispered, looking somewhere off to Clay's right. "I did, I wanted to, and he wanted me to do it, and so did she -" Twisting like a junkie starting to sweat, wretched memories leavening the fix. "My father used to think he was a real holy man until he realized they couldn't cure me. They used to feel sorry for him, I think, but he never ... he never told them the way he used to whip me for those dreams I'd have, or where, the way he'd come in to check the sheets every morning."

Clay felt a struggle in his own hands; wanting to reach out, grip Timothy by the shoulders and shake him until he got back on track. What girl, who are you talking about? Going so far as to raise one hand, but no further. There was something diseased about this man, exuding from every pore. He was as untouchable as a shadow.

"I really wanted to," he said again, though from the deadness at the core of his eyes, desire had burned out long ago. "But I just couldn't get past being there in her bed, looking at her face."

Clay watched him tap the soldering iron against the tabletop the way normal people tapped pencils. More scars for the imitation wood, little furrows smoldering with the acrid reek of burnt plastic. Thinking, Two years between us, just two years - is this what my next two are going to be like? Because if they are, then maybe Graham saved a place for me.

How terribly sad it must be for people who meet brothers, sisters, about whom they have known nothing all their lives, only to find their siblings to be worse shambles than they themselves are. The conclusion would be inescapable: We're congenital losers.

"I wanted to," this time like a vow, "but her face, it was right there ... it would've been like humping my own sister, and I just couldn't ... do anything."

And Timothy went on, dissolving slowly in his chair, oily tears mingling with sweat that broke freely across his face. Clay sweating too, the house closing around them, warm as an oven. If they died here, the house would bake them into leathered mummies before they were found, brethren of a hideous dynasty.

my own sister This was an even greater revelation than the name of Patrick Valentine.

Then she's mine, too.

He was about to leave when Timothy smiled hopefully, with jittering thin lips, and pointed across the table, saying, "Give me that jar of Vaseline." Clay slid it over, wiped the film on his pants before it could absorb into his fingers.

Timothy Van der Leun rolled up one sleeve like a junkie ready to plunge the needle, an eager light gleaming in his eyes. All the way up to the bicep, the forearm bared - Clay's face went slack when he saw the sores, the scabs, the thickened blisters. They covered the inner arm like an oozing crust.

"I don't usually start this until night," Timothy told him, "but since you're here..."

He dipped the tip of the soldering iron into the Vaseline - "So it doesn't stick as bad," he said - and as it began to bubble on the tip, he found a clear spot on his arm. Held it there until it began to smoke. The sizzle wasn't as bad as Clay thought it would be. The mice were louder, in their way. But the burnt pork smell was in his nose before he could do anything.

"I know how we went wrong - just look at the way we start out growing from the sperm and the egg," said Timothy. "One cell, two cells, four, eight..." The soldering iron dipped back to the Vaseline. "That's the way we grow. This thing in our cells, I can fix it the same way, I know that now."

Back to his arm, contact, with a soft incinerating hiss and a curl of smoke.

"A few cells at a time," he said, as if he had never known such rationed bliss. "A few cells at a time."

Clay did not leave until Timothy resumed where, the night before, he had left off on his chest.

Thirty.

Listening for his return was ostensibly a pa.s.sive task, but it seemed she was getting little else done. Adrienne sat at the motel room's table while the cursor of the laptop computer blinked hypnotically - final evaluations of Clay, they might yet be of use.

She paced to the window a fourth time and found the parking lot still barren of her car.

"Gee Mom, do you think Clay stayed late after the prom?" asked Sarah from across the room. She was sprawled facedown on the bed, bare feet kicked up over her bottom as she pored through one of her thesis books.

It came so easy to her, waiting did. Life. Everything. Had Sarah ever failed at a single endeavor? Probably she had - she was not, after all, inhuman - but she never once gave the impression that failure was within her range of possibilities. She lived and breathed and ate and slept and made love as if the world would fall naturally into place around her. To lesser mortals she could be intimidating that way.

"He'll be back when he's ready," she said. "You'll know."

Adrienne crossed the room, sank onto the bed beside her, let Sarah play with her hair because she knew Adrienne liked that, the way it unknotted her body, her mind, her soul.

"I wasn't ready for all this," Adrienne said, a confession. "When I agreed to leave Tempe, I didn't think of the way I'd be letting them take all my other patients away from me." Both of Sarah's hands went slowly swirling across Adrienne's scalp. "Clay's been all I've had left in the world to validate me. He's been it. I should have known better than to put myself in that situation."

A position dangerous to them both. Perhaps, subconsciously, it had been too much like a s.h.i.+ft into private practice, where there was no profit incentive in a cure, only the continual hope of one.

"I don't validate you?"

"Sure you do. But he validates a part of me you'd never be able to. A part I wouldn't want you to."

Sarah pushed the book aside and slowly lay across her, like a widow flung over the broken body of a mate claimed by war. "If someone told you that in a session, you'd tell her she was compartmentalizing her life, and relying too much on people who might let her down."

"So I'm notoriously blind to my own faults."

"Just so long as you know."

Sarah held to her, and she to Sarah, asymmetric but fitting together nevertheless. Sarah's cheek was pressed along her thigh, hip near her head. Adrienne nuzzled harder against Sarah's hip, breathing deeply to drag the musky scent of her within. A smell could take you anywhere, to any time. Sarah was the one real thing she had on this trip that reminded her of home; even the rainstick had been left in Denver. Holding Sarah so, breathing her in, she could touch Tempe better than if she'd brought a jar of dirt from the desert. We'll be there again, soon, in our own home, in our own bed ... and I will be wiser.

They stayed this way until she heard her car pull up outside, heard the slam of its door. Footsteps, aimless and undecided, then a quick knock. Halfway to answering, Adrienne heard the clunk of the neighboring door through the thin walls. When she opened her own, Clay was not there - only her keyring, lying on the threshold.

She picked them up, held them in the open doorway while a frozen wind flooded past.

Sarah watched from the bed, eyes big and incisive, now her largest feature with her hair still hanging in its curtain of braids. "I know what your first impulse is. But give him some time alone. He needs that respect." A smile. "And close the door. My feet are freezing."

"Put some socks on for a change."

She gave Clay a half hour, then another fifteen minutes just to test herself. And when at last she knocked and he let her in, she saw that he looked more pale than he had late this morning, when borrowing her keys. He sat diminished, as if his bones had shrunk, rocking himself in place with tiny, controlled movements. His staring eyes possessed the frightful wisdom of one who has seen something terrible; with some people, you could just tell. She found his room preternaturally still, none of the vitality here that she felt next door. Without Sarah's presence, how cheerless and arid this place really seemed.

"You found him at home," she said.

He would not look at her, sitting on the edge of the bed, his army field jacket crushed beneath him. "Yeah."

"And he wasn't quite what you'd hoped for?"

"I don't know what I was hoping for. But I don't think I could have hoped for ... for this."

She had never been clear on why he had sought out Timothy Van der Leun, what he had hoped to accomplish; all along Clay had been reticent to discuss it. A Boston destination she could understand, but in Van der Leun's case, there had been no tantalizing prior contact. She supposed, simply enough, that it was crucial for Clay to at last come face-to-face with another like himself.

Even if that other self proved hopelessly lost.

"He's destroying himself," Clay said. "Destroying himself and thinking it'll cure him. But maybe ... maybe he's right, in a way."

He said he'd rather go for a walk than sit, so she retrieved her coat and met him outside. They headed for the sidewalk along the street, downtown Indianapolis rising in the distance. A few yards away, heavy traffic ground through old slush as clouds of exhaust fogged past them. Here they strolled, upon the urban moors. New Year's Eve - she had almost forgotten - and was there not a hint of frivolity in the petroleum air?

A block had gone by before he told her what Timothy Van der Leun had been doing to himself. She thought of Clay's own bent toward self-mutilation. Likely this now struck him as an inherited tendency, a mad pa.s.sion buried deep in the genes to which they all might be p.r.o.ne, as vulnerable as the members of some doomed family in the most grotesque Southern Gothic imaginable.

"I don't imagine seeing him that way left you feeling any too rea.s.sured," she said.

"Oh, I don't know. Maybe it's the kind of thing I expected all along, and didn't realize it." A crooked smile, thrown up in hurried self-defense. "He had his agenda and he was sticking to it. Same self-immolation agenda as mine, isn't it? Only he's going at it a little more directly."

d.a.m.n his cynical hide, anyway. It was her last official day on the job and even if it took until midnight she vowed to get beneath it.

"Agenda," she said, and began to quicken her stride. Her legs were nearly as long as his - let him work to keep up. "So where does this agenda come from?"

"Remember chromosome twelve? I'd say we're looking like a stronger case for biological determinism all the time. If that's the way it is, then I'm prepared to accept that."

"Maybe, but you don't want to have to, do you? You may never admit it to yourself, but you're looking for a way to avoid that conclusion, and you're desperate to find it." When he said nothing she forged ahead. "You don't share the same fate as Timothy Van der Leun unless you allow it. I still maintain you're in control." A deep breath, let's try something. "n.o.body knows just yet, but for the sake of argument, let's say that all of chromosome twelve is involved, all three copies. You've done some homework. How many chromosomes do you have left?"

"Twenty-two pairs."

"Forty-four chromosomes to three. Even if you're given over to biological determinism, you still have to account for a lot of genetic encoding in those other forty-four that doesn't have a thing to do, directly or indirectly, with chromosome twelve. It should speak as loud, if not louder. So let it have its say."

Clay grunted, staring at the sidewalk as they glided along. "Are you forgetting what my father and mother were like? I think I'd rather take chromosome twelve."

She rolled her eyes. He was good. Oh, he was good. "But maybe a lot of what was dominant in their genes turned out to be recessive in yours. And vice versa."

"And maybe not."

"But maybe so. A congenital soldier and a pa.s.sive alcoholic? Neither one sounds very much like you."

He nodded, working his tongue inside his cheek; backed into a corner at last and he knew it. "Well, we could debate this all day and never really be sure of anything, other than that Helverson's syndrome isn't a good thing to have," he finally said. "Just a few cracked eggs in the genetic omelet. They'll have us figured out eventually."

"To a degree. Probably never completely."

"They're reading those DNA codes right this minute, you know. They'll have their map. They'll know us inside and out."

The Human Genome Project - such lofty goals propelled it, but it made her nervous as well. In full-bloom, the power of genetic knowledge would eclipse even that of nuclear fusion, yet thus far no one was even regulating it. Historically, great power was often wielded by clumsy hands at best; at worst, savage ones. For their owners understood only the mechanics of what they manipulated, never the grand underlying mysteries.

"And suppose they do have that map someday," she said. "You can look at a map of the Grand Canyon, but you can never get any true sense of what it's like until you stand at its rim. You can look at the full orchestral score of Beethoven's Fifth, laid out right in front of you, every note ... but it's only the bare frame. You can't hear the music in it."

"And what do you think might happen," Clay said, "if you took a page or two from that score, and repeated it at random? It'd wreck the whole symmetry, wouldn't it?"

"It could. But depending on the skill of the musicians, they might just make it work."

He weighed this, kicked idly at a chunk of ice to send it skittering ahead of them along the sidewalk. "Well ... Beethoven'd probably still be p.i.s.sed."

It felt as if they had arrived at a friendly stalemate. She the proponent of self-determination, he the unwilling proselyte still waiting to be convinced. It was an existential dilemma, all right, and she began to wonder if her victory might not come about only in his living of it. That realization on Clay's part could lie years ahead, and she might never hear of it.

Clay frowned, a little bitter, a little bemused. "You know what the genetics labs are finding, now that they're starting to really get into the DNA codes? I read this not long ago."