Prototype

by Brian Hodge

  Adrienne reached over the couch and took down a Navajo blanket from the wall clips that held it in place. Off with the light, and she curled herself on the couch. Reached behind her head to unbind the straight blond hair she kept pulled back while on duty, and let it fall to just above her shoulders.

  Beneath the blanket, she held her gaze across the office to the painting, pale luminescence in the office gloom. Let it sink in, be the last thing she saw before sleep, and perhaps she would dream of snow. The virgin autumn of late September was still plenty warm here, but winter was on its way, and still she would miss the winters of the north. Desert winters were never satisfying, in the schema of the birth-growth-death-rebirth cycle of the seasons.

  She slept, and dreamed instead of ice, and factories where straggling drones stoked desperate, feeble fires until the last embers died, and then the drones fell, until they too lay frozen.

  *

  Buzzing, persistent and harsh enough to pierce sleep: her phone. Adrienne pushed aside the blanket and took several reeling steps to her desk and answered, barely coherent.

  "Doctor Rand?"

  "Mm. Yes." Blinking, widening her eyes, alternately; focus had to be somewhere.

  "This is Beth Weatherford, down on five. You wanted to be notified as soon as your John Doe from last night came around?"

  "Right, right, right…" Adrienne cleared her throat; could not yet make sense of her clock. "What time is it?"

  "It's about seven-fifteen."

  "What kind of emotional state is he in this morning?"

  "Well, he's … quite calm, really. He's very lucid and aware."

  Interesting. Adrienne thanked her, said she'd be down in a few minutes, asked to have an orderly make sure there was a chair in the room. Even before the phone was cradled she was reaching for the small curved combs she used to hold her hair back. She kicked into her shoes, and while she never much liked the white coat, better that than it being so obvious she had slept in her clothes.

  Down on five, Adrienne smiled briefly at the nurse who had buzzed her from the duty station, clicked a brisk walk down the hall. While some found Ward Five a nightmare zone, rarely did it bother her. It took a special breed to work here, amid the crises and breathing cautionary tales of lives in implosion. The schedule of the outside world and the pulse of circadian rhythms meant nothing here. Rooms might rebound with despairing moans and nonsensical conversations at any hour of the day.

  Room 532. She knocked, entered. Wished, for a moment, that she'd thought to hunt for the breath spray somewhere in her desk drawer. Her mouth tasted stale.

  Room 532, and its sole occupant … she found them both eerily calm, as if they belonged on another floor entirely. Certainly, the man's behavior and countenance were polar opposites of what they had been last night.

  "Another new face," he said.

  She smiled, hoped it came across as disarming. "That's odd. It looked like the same old thing to me this morning."

  A bit lame, as wit went, but at least he didn't roll his eyes. Adrienne contended that, just as the first crucial five years of a child's life could set the tone for the remainder, the first several minutes of exchange between patient and therapist could determine everything to follow. Even minor missteps could blaze trails along terribly wrong paths.

  She pulled the chair over from the wall, near the bed. Best to get to the same eye-level as soon as possible. Nobody liked dealing with someone towering over him the entire time. A tape recorder might be intimidating this soon, as well, and anyway, she didn't plan on covering ground any more complicated than what could be served later by memory and quick jottings in the notebook she slipped from her pocket.

  "How are you feeling this morning?"

  He shrugged with a tilt of his head and a constricted twitch of his shoulder. Beneath the restraints criss-crossing the bed, it was about all the body language he could manage.

  "My name's Adrienne Rand," she said. "I'm a psychologist on staff here. I was on duty last night when you were brought in."

  He nodded, almost matter-of-factly, gave a small sigh. Rolled his head away for a moment, to stare with flat eyes toward the window. Beyond the chain-link window guard and spots on the glass, there was nothing to see, nothing but brightening sky.

  Lying there, calm, he looked smaller than he had when first brought in last night. Certainly too small to have inflicted the kind of damage he had on three assailants, and then require two police officers to subdue him. Average height and build, skinny hipped; she wondered how well he'd been eating lately. Black hair of moderate length, wildly unkempt now, with days' worth of beard stubble. His head and bruised, sunburned face were characterized by a curiously sleek appearance, with both contoured cheekbones and jawline that swept around to either side of his skull. It seemed a face engineered to lean into the wind, to cut resistance, to slice ahead. Adrienne found a strange beauty in it. As faces went, this one was fascinating. Last night's figurative assessment as she watched him sleep still held: His could be the seductive face of an angel or a devil. A single stroke by the artist — or a vandal — could tilt it in favor of one or the other.

  "Do you know where you are?"

  "If it's Friday, then this must be Tempe. Or didn't you have geography in mind?" His voice was low and even. Not inviting, but neither was it hostile. He tilted his head toward the meshed windows. "If those are any indication, I'd say I'm in a psycho ward. How'm I doing so far?"

  Day, city, and facility. She nodded. "Three for three." She took a deep breath, tried to minimize the swell in her chest on the inhale. The spotlight was definitely on; without being too obvious about it, this man was sizing her up … her every move, every word. And if he'd had a way of picking through her every thought, no doubt he would be exercising that option, too.

  "How much do you remember about last night, about why you were brought here? Do you have any recollection at all?"

  Hooded gray eyes, lids drifting shut. For a moment they clenched as fiercely and tightly as fists. "I didn't finally kill someone, did I?"

  Finally? He remembers something, definitely. "No, you didn't kill anyone."

  He relaxed. "Well that's good news."

  "How much do you remember about last night?"

  "I remember losing my temper, but I'd say I was provoked. And I still never got to eat my tacos." He laughed, weakly. "Once the police got me here, hauled me out of the car … gets kind of fuzzy. I don't remember you." Suddenly those watchful gray eyes flashed upon the door. "Have I been charged with anything?"

  "Not yet, not that I've heard."

  "Think I will?"

  "I couldn't say one way or the other, I'm sorry. Given the degree to which you … defended … yourself last night, I'm sure the police will at least be interested in some follow-up before any decision is made."

  He rolled his head to face the window again. There, for the first time: what seemed to be a glimpse of genuine emotion, an ache in something far deeper than the shattered hands encased in heavy casts.

  "As I said," she went on, "I was there when you were brought in last night. Both your hands had sustained compound fractures. It was necessary to give you Thorazine to prevent you from hurting yourself any more, or someone else."

  "Did you shoot me with it?"

  "No."

  "You just watched." A flat statement, almost an accusation, then he smiled directly toward her with something like twisted pride. "It took a lot, didn't it?"

  Adrienne hesitated, then agreed. "We thought you might have pocketed the first dosage. There was no discernable effect, really."

  "It just takes a lot. I don't know why."

  Definitely something to look into, once she had access to his case history, more background. He certainly didn't speak as if he were any stranger to the receiving end of crisis intervention.

  "When you were brought in, you had no identification with you. So as far as who you are, I'm afraid I'm going to have to start from scratch. Could you tell me your na
me?"

  "Clay Palmer." His mouth ticked. "Of the Gehenna Palmers."

  She frowned. "Gehenna?"

  "That's a mythical name for hell. It's a joke."

  "And where is your home, Clay?"

  "Home…" He looked at the ceiling, as if attempting to define the term. "I always thought of my home as my shell of skin. That way I'm never lost. But that's not what you mean. Is it?"

  "This time I did have geography in mind … but we can get around to that later, too."

  "I'll bet." He eyed her with a flicker of wicked mirth; he'd just baited her and he knew it. Whether he'd done it deliberately or not was the only thing that wasn't clear. "I'm from Denver."

  After she got his address, he reeled forth a social security number and his birth date without any prompting. She'd have to double check later, but for now, would take his word for it that he was twenty-five years old.

  "You did considerable damage to yourself last night, Clay. I wonder if you could tell me what was going through your mind at the time?"

  "You mean what I was feeling?" Laughter, harsh and incredulous. "I'd say I was feeling extremely pissed off. Adrienne."

  "Lots of people feel pissed off. Some of them even act on it. Very few of them go so far as to break their own hands."

  He gazed down along his body, the casts engulfing his lower arms. "My hands, yeah, I miss them this morning. At the time, they were just … means to an end."

  "What end was that?"

  He sighed, looked very stricken and exhausted all at once. "I don't know … conquest?"

  She took a quick breath and decided to steer this thing back to case history. "Had you ever been attacked like that before? That you remember?"

  He let a small, ironic smile twist one corner of his mouth. "Like that, three-on-one … no … I don't — no, definitely not."

  She had wondered last night, immediately upon learning the particulars of his case. Because his fight hadn't ended when all three assailants were on the ground, had it? In some convolution of his brain, he had seen reason to fight the police and emergency room personnel, too. Every reaching hand belonged to an enemy.

  Not uncommon, though. When trauma had wrenched a life to its foundations, some people simply withdrew from all but the most overt stimuli. They could not differentiate foe from ally. She recalled the case of the jogger gang-raped and beaten in Central Park. Even having been clubbed unconscious, the woman had flailed about and fought the trauma-center team while on the table.

  But therein lay the difference: Clay Palmer had successfully fought his assailants and still gone past the brink of shutdown.

  What had happened to him in the past, to generate such fear, such virulent rage? What lay buried like a bomb in that mind?

  "Clay, is there anybody you'd like us to notify, that you're here, that you're safe?"

  "Nobody. Adrienne."

  Mental note: He was baiting her again, that name thing. The last two times she had called him by name, he'd turned around and done likewise, though in deliberately obvious fashion. Not quite sarcasm, not quite as afterthought … more like he was letting her know he wasn't going to be swayed by attempts to buddy up through co-opting his first name. She couldn't blame him, actually. Often as not, she associated the tactic with creepy salesmen she didn't want to deal with at all, much less buy from.

  "Any family or friends in Denver, or locally…?"

  "I said nobody."

  Adrienne nodded. "If you change your mind, I'll be happy to take care of it for you. And convey any message you might like to pass along."

  "Even if it's obscene?"

  She maintained a level gaze, even returned his earlier wry smile. "I'll let discretion play the better part of judgment."

  "Just checking. Probing the bounds of your honor." For a moment his gaze roved about the room, this cheerless and spartan chamber, and through his eyes she sought the human being behind them. When he wasn't looking at her, wasn't playing the role of guardian at the gate of his privacy, he seemed to drift upon small painful currents within. If only she could see him free and unencumbered, observe how he moved, how he sat. How he might enter a room and commandeer it for his own, or find its most sheltered corner and make it his harbor. The body told much … but his was silenced. And in its restriction, it was as if his eyes were compensating by what they communicated, like sharpened hearing to the newly blind.

  But this she knew: He would not be the type who found it easy to ask for help. Which didn't mean he was not without other questions: "How old are you?"

  Adrienne saw no harm in answering. "I'm thirty-four."

  "Baby boomer, huh?"

  She couldn't help but smile. "Just barely. In that bulging demographic chart that looks like a pig in a python, I'm pretty much at the pig's curly little tail." And on that cusp, Adrienne supposed, she did not truly belong to the body proper. Cut off the pig's tail, and it may squeal, but it will never miss the thing. She was a vestigial appendage, with no generation to call her own. She lived in the temporal gulf between those who came before and those who followed.

  "The boomers," he said. "Our civilization's last big gasp of self-indulgence. At least I know my place."

  "And where's that?"

  "I'm with the people on the side, holding the shovels." Clay Palmer cleared his throat. "Are we through?"

  "Yes. I think that's enough for now." Adrienne stood, put away her notebook. "About all we've done this morning is introduce ourselves. We've talked a bit about last night … but there's a lot that led up to last night that we never touched on. I think we should, and … I hope you feel the same. And I hope you'll want to continue talking with me later this weekend."

  "Maybe," he said. "But no touching. I don't really like being touched. No touch therapy."

  "All right." Adrienne nodded. Interesting: could indicate a past history of abuse, emotional withdrawal. "I think we can work around that."

  He raised his hips and torso, pushing up off his shoulders until his body surged against the restraints. The twin casts lay along his sides, chunky anchors of white plaster. "Can you do something about getting these straps off me?"

  She would first have to get an authorization from Ferris Mendenhall, the psychiatrist who oversaw all Ward Five treatment, but her own recommendation would be that Clay no longer needed to be restrained, for his own protection or anyone else's.

  Still, not to forget: He had broken his own hands and used the ends of snapped bones to lacerate three faces. What damage might he be capable of inflicting with those casts, if he set his mind to it?

  It was nearing eight o'clock, and Mendenhall should be in by now. It was his call.

  "I'll look into it immediately," she said.

  Sometimes it was a relief to defer responsibility.

  Two

  Adrienne was back in her own driveway by nine o'clock that morning, sitting behind the wheel for several moments after killing the engine. On the dry wind rode the creeping burn of the day. An all-nighter — sleep in her office notwithstanding — and still she found something decadent about dragging wearily in at this hour. Only the motivations had changed over time. Fifteen years ago it would have been the inevitable final surrender after a binge. Now, just more overtime devoted to a classic type-A personality's drive to alleviate the sufferings of humanity. By fifty, her lock on sainthood should be clinched.

  She left the car, started for the front door.

  Adrienne called it home, but after two years it still took some adjustment. Two floors of stucco topped with red-tile roofing, on a lot whose lawn was suitably sparse, as per desert climes, and at least one palm tree visible from nearly every window. Each time she came rolling down the street she expected to see a burro tied up out front.

  Adrienne's own tastes ran more toward colonial and Victorian, but upon first setting foot inside when they'd looked at it, Sarah had loved it, and felt instantaneously at home here in that impulsive, predestined way she had about her sometimes. Adrienne figured,
in her heart, that her own love would grow.

  Still waiting. By now, she was probably up to at least an amiable affection for the place.

  Sarah was in the front room when Adrienne came through the door, looked up from her book and brightened immediately. Uncurled from her cross-legged perch in the cushioned rattan chair that hung in one corner.

  "Hiya," she said, and met Adrienne halfway to kiss hello, good morning, whatever they had skipped the night before. "Guess who missed you last night."

  "You got my message, didn't you?"

  "Yes, I got your message. I was just feeling needy." Sarah gripped her by the shoulders and steered her gently toward the sofa. "C'mon. Sit, sit, sit, sit."

  Adrienne shut her eyes and smiled and let fatigue overwhelm her, began to feel tired all over again. Let Sarah take charge — some indulgent pampering now and then was good for body and soul. Sarah stayed behind her, reaching across the back of the sofa and down to the shoulders that felt cramped and unnatural after sleeping on the office couch, and maybe from all that residual tension from her first encounter with Clay Palmer. With this one she wanted very much to tread wisely.

  "Let it out, let it out," Sarah said, then nipped her on the ear. "Can you come out and play tomorrow? I think it's in your own best interests, you're looking too serious this week."

  "Tomorrow being, what … Saturday?"

  "Gasp — she's in touch with modern timekeeping after all."

  Adrienne made a show of inner debate, but a day out on her day off sounded like a tonic she would be wise to self-prescribe. "Since it's you, and since you asked," she said. "What do you have in mind?"