Prototype (12 page)

His room felt cold for no good reason, or was she the only one who noticed? It was Monday afternoon, hell of a way to start the week — you seem to be coming along nicely in our sessions, and by the way, did you know you're a freak of nature?

"I thought it was something I could work on, try to beat," he said, "but it's
me
…"

"Clay, please listen, there's no reason to believe that. It's too early to conclude
what
effect this might have on you, or even if it has one at all."

"It's me, it's
me
," and his voice curled into a low chant of loathing,
"it's me,"
weighted forearms beginning to clash against each other, the casts striking as hammer and anvil, each blow harder than the last. Eyes wide, an acute madness brought on by knowledge — he had looked into deformity and found himself staring back. Black hair in tangles that fell into his eyes, he burned upon a pyre of his own fears, and she had no way to assuage them.

"It's me and it's in every fucking cell in my
body
!" Clay screamed.

He was off the bed before she realized what he was doing, lurching across the room to the far wall, throwing himself whole-bodied into a murderous swing at the chain link over the window. The cast — his right — rebounded with an atonal twang of metal, and he battered away at it again as she went for the door, holding it open, nodding into the hall while in they came, the enforcers of the asylum she'd had waiting just in case. He was code blue all over again, and succeeded in impacting the chain link with enough force to drive it into the window behind. Glass shattered, but if he wanted shards he was out of luck, nothing had fallen inside, so he sagged down the wall while turning on himself. Reddened fingertips hooked just beyond the ends of the casts, ragged nails in need of trimming. Clay seemed to regard his body as something hideous beyond tolerance, head straining on neck as if to distance itself from torso. With those heavy, clawed hands he ripped at the T-shirt under his robe, shredded through to the skin beneath.

He tore.

He tore.

The orderlies were on him before he knew they had entered the room. Arms seized, he was dragged away from the wall, sobbing. His last recourse at venting the corrosive rage was to snap, and try to bite.

Convulsing and nailed to the floor by other hands, enforced cruciform pose and raw bleeding stomach and raked chest and old ribbed scars from older hatreds turned inward, he met her eyes just once…

Then followed the needle all the way to his arm.

As many times as it took.

*

It was the curse of the evening shift: One could never get off at midnight and have enough time to drown workday sorrows in a long night of binge drinking. She'd be lucky to get in three rounds before last call.

Home, then, home and a bottle. Nobody could run her out of home before she was good and ready.

Adrienne turned on the stereo before pouring the first drink, volume low because Sarah was already asleep upstairs. Music had its charms, a companion that never judged failures. She could listen to the enchantment of Celtic song and believe in the magic of beautiful dark-haired women with the throats of angels.

She found the note in the kitchen, taped to the freezer door, where she wouldn't miss it. Sarah's expansive, loopy hand:

I invented a new drink tonight: the peanut butter daiquiri. It sticks to the roof of your liver.

Are you smiling?

I love you and I think you're working too hard.

Adrienne peeled it away from the door — smiling, yes — and brushed it with her fingertips, some new kind of Braille, seeking love, any connection. Such mementos she kept in a small box upstairs, always meaning to get around to sorting them and giving them a proper scrapbook home, but never finding the time.

Her drink of choice tonight was gin over ice with a squeeze of lime. She carried it to the sofa and sank into both.

And what of Clay, this late hour? Calmed out of his senses, strapped into his bed in case he was feigning stupor, or woke up cranky. Three and a half weeks of lithium might as well have been breath mints, for all the good it had done him. Given enough of a trigger, he could have exploded at any time.

Still…

He had not.

So which had been the greater force within him: self-control, or medication? Her every assumption about him was now in a tenuous new light. Oh, she could talk, all right, could spin textbook reassurances in accordance with proper methodology: no reason to believe his genetic condition had anything to do with behavioral affect, cognitive defect, emotional maladaptation, nothing to indicate any connection at all…

And it would have been miraculous if this had reassured him. She wasn’t even fooling herself. This was simply beyond all understanding.

Adrienne got a second drink and returned to the sofa with the rainstick kept propped in one corner. It had been made in the shadow of the Andes, a meter of thin Normata cactus. While dead and drying, its spines had been pressed into the hollow body, which some peasant artisan had then filled with pebbles and fragments of bone, before sealing the end.

She upended it slowly, like an hourglass, and listened to the cascade of pebbles and bone over delicate spines, a rippling sound like a sweet July shower. Sarah had bought this for her for their first month's anniversary, after Adrienne's passing remark that she missed the rains of San Francisco.

Prayers for rain; the Diaguitas of Chile used rainsticks to serenade their gods. In more superstitious moments, she fancied she could do likewise: serenade elder gods of the mind, summoning the spirits of Jung and Fromm; prayers for a deluge of insight.

"Paper didn't say anything about rain."

Sarah slouched in the doorway to the hall, frowzy-headed and squinting against the light. She wore rumpled socks and a T-shirt that fell to mid-thigh, promoting some den called Club Cannibal, on the Ivory Coast. She braved the light and came on in.

"I woke you, I'm sorry."

Sarah, waving it off, half-asleep and squinty, shuffled around the sofa to lean over and wrap her arms around Adrienne's shoulders. Their heads knocked lightly together, black hair on blond. She felt the tender press of lips to her neck.

"You look whipped," Sarah murmured.

Adrienne fought it, finally shut her eyes and nodded. "I'm sitting here second-guessing myself. It takes some effort."

Sarah kissed her again and came around to join her. Adrienne set aside the rainstick, listened to its final trickling.

"Are you ready to talk to me?"

Here again was that breach of ethics, that forbidden sharing of privileged information. She had often compared her profession with religious vocations and their inevitable crises: priests who doubted, nuns who lusted, vice versa. Encouraged to seek guidance only from others in the same fold, they would get such a narrow perspective in return, wouldn't they? Such myopia had never made sense to her. Sometimes you needed a confessor from beyond your own circle, if only to remember there was another world out there, with other ways of thinking.

So she told: Clay and the test, the results and his reaction. Feeling no better, but less alone, and less alone can be a lot.

"You had an obligation to tell him," Sarah said. "There's no way around that."

"I
know
that" — Adrienne was gesturing more emphatically than she realized — "but it's the timing, I thought he was strong enough to deal with it, I really did. I completely misjudged it, the chance he'd revert back to an earlier state where he'd try mutilating himself."

"But look at the kind of news it was. Do you think there's a
good
time to hit somebody with something like that?"

Point well made. Perhaps the true measure of her progress with Clay would be how well he acclimatized himself to the test results over the next several days — not his immediate devastation.

"And consider this: You'd have to tell him eventually. If you told him it came back normal and then admitted you'd been lying, no matter how well-intentioned the reason, how do you think he'd feel then?"

"Betrayed. Maybe manipulated."

"You're damn right he would. I would."

You would, wouldn't you? And you'd be furious about it, too.
A part of Sarah was like Clay, on some rudimentary level. Odd how it had never occurred to Adrienne before. Impulsive, a bit untamed, now and again given to fanciful rumination, Clay was like Sarah would be with all the restraints chipped away, leaving only a core of desperation, confused hungers, and panic-stricken rage.

"So isn't all you can do, really," Sarah said, "is help him come to terms with that news?"

"It doesn't seem enough."

"Sure it is. People can deal with some ungodly stressful situations, as long as they know what they are. It's when they don't know what they're up against that they start to break down." Sarah scooted close enough to drop both hands onto Adrienne's thigh. "That's why there's myth, to help people deal with those unknowns that are just too threatening to leave unknown."

"But Sarah, that's the problem here: an entire huge unknown area just opened up and swallowed us both. I had to tell him because his condition
might
be significant to his problems … and because it's going to attract a lot of attention to him that I don't think he's going to want at all."

"And that's what you're most afraid of. You know that, don't you?"

Adrienne frowned at her.
What?

"Losing control. Having him taken away from you."

Objections rose:
He's my patient; I just want what's best for him.
But of course it was true: She felt she was most qualified to make those judgments. Was this why doctors could squabble so over patients as if they were territories instead of people? With flags of conquest and discovery speared into their bodies? To surrender to someone else’s authority, then, was weakness and retreat.

"That doesn't make me selfish, does it?" Adrienne said.

"We're all selfish, it's what motivates us."

As if to prove it, Sarah braced her hands on Adrienne's knees and leaned forward to kiss her, hungry greedy mouth at her own and bright eyes continuing to stare as she held the kiss. Wide mouth breaking into a broad smile then, wanton, just before she drew Adrienne's lower lip in and bit. Neither hard nor soft, bordering on that delicious threshold of tender pain.

Hands next, meeting before each went to the other body, to shoulders, and to breasts with straining nipples, and to bellies flexing with quickened breath, and to groins; so much moist heat. From her own, from Sarah's, Sarah so easy to get to, naked beneath the T-shirt but for panties. Sarah straddled her lap, then rose on knees, pulling Adrienne's head roughly to her, and Adrienne drew back, opened her eyes to see the shirt, its tribal mask design staring at her. Whereas it had been funny before, now she found something ominous about it. The mask, the unchanging face created to hide the real one, the countenance that could not be reasoned with.

"Take that off," she whispered fiercely, and Sarah peeled it, cast it free, not even suspecting. It struck the rainstick, sent it falling to the rug for one last sprinkle of pebbles and bone.

She'd have been happy to let it happen there on the sofa, or to slip to the floor and spread each other wide upon the rug, but Sarah's plans were otherwise. This was to be no quickie. Adrienne let Sarah pull her up, to her feet, up to the bedroom and down on her back again, where the last of the clothing came off.

They embraced, they rolled; teeth bit and lips soothed, and tongues traced wet trails from mouths to breasts to navels to cunts and back again. Their hands were slippery, drenched with one another's dew. Adrienne bent her back across the bed, slid her hands along Sarah's risen inner thighs and lowered her head, peeling Sarah open with fingers and tongue. Tasting her damp and hot, teasing her with pointed flicking tongue tip, tickling her with soft blond hair, at last plunging her mouth into the wet fire.

And when Sarah came, it was hard, loud, powerful hips flexing and thighs clamping onto Adrienne's head. Then Sarah went scrambling for the night table where they kept their toys. Adrienne heard the scrape of the drawer, all aching mouth and wet face, gasping for breath as she saw Sarah coming for her — not empty-handed. No choice in the matter, just Sarah sculpting her onto knees and elbows, leaning across her back and wrapping one arm down and around her middle, with the other working the phallus into her. Roughly, but not without love, and Adrienne was about to strangle on her own cries. It was like being violated, willingly, and if she said to stop, Sarah would, but Sarah's power came from knowing it would never happen.