Prototype

by Brian Hodge

  Adrienne pulled herself out of it a little at a time — a vague feeling of uncleanness, the clash of values in how she could never have left a murder victim behind, a secret buried by a city's refuse — and likely Clay never knew she was trying so hard not to judge. She spoke again of predatory ethics versus the conscience he obviously had somewhere within, if not always accessible. Spoke of the way people could latch onto symbols of their guilt over events entirely unrelated. He was no killer. Was he?

  Not yet.

  "When you told me about my chromosomes," he said, mouth curling down, "that about did me in. But I asked, didn't I?"

  Adrienne noticed that he was actually trembling. Another peek into vulnerabilities only rarely glimpsed. It reminded her of pets owned when she was younger, taking them to a kennel or the vet; thrust into circumstances beyond their understanding, their warm furry bodies seeming smaller as they huddled, gripped by fear's seizure. Her heart would break, always.

  Clay, trembling.

  "But I remembered a few weeks ago I said I'd keep talking to you because it could be one more step toward understanding myself. That's why I'm here now. I might not always like what I find out, or even take it very well … but all I want to do is stay in this for the duration."

  *

  The quest for self-knowledge was a noble endeavor, as she saw it, but it didn’t exist in a vacuum. Clay could look within, and she could show him where, could help dry the tears when what he saw there seemed too ugly or hopeless to bear.

  But it had gone beyond that now: Clay one of the rarest genetic commodities in existence, one of less than a dozen living known Helverson's syndrome lab rats on the globe. What had been a routinely simple, balanced doctor-patient dyad was opened up to accommodate new strangers with degrees, with hypotheses, with agendas of own, and a never-ending catalog of questions.

  Who comprises his biological family?

  Has he any brothers, sisters?

  Any children that he has fathered?

  Any somatic deviations noted — physiological, biochemical, neurological, and so forth?

  Any pronounced differences in his healing faculties?

  What behavioral patterns are exhibited when he is confronted with a controlled battery of stress-inducing stimuli?

  May we have additional tissue samples?

  More, and more, and more.

  Specialists all, geneticists with concentrations in development and population and other fields, along with their affiliate researchers in mutation's other ramifications, they made the cross-town pilgrimage from Arizona Associated Labs to see the new prize. Paying heed to the protocol of hospital hierarchy, they were warmly received by Dr. Ferris Mendenhall, who conferred with Adrienne, who in turn approached Clay, partly on their behalf, partly for his own: "They want to learn more about you — they'll be able to find out more than I or anyone else on this hospital staff can."

  "It doesn't mean they'll be replacing you, does it?" seemed to be his main concern.

  She shook her head. "No. You'll just have busier days here, is all."

  Clay shrugged. "That doesn't sound entirely bad, you know."

  Adrienne smiled, forcing it, this time touching him on one cast and the thin fingertips protruding from its end. They felt cold before he drew them away. Cold as her silly sense of loss, forced to share, forced to work and play well with others whose interest in Clay was based on his status as an oddity — and really, shouldn't she be beyond this sort of petty resentment?

  That doesn't sound entirely bad…?

  I do hope you can still say that by the time they decide they're through with you…

  If they ever do.

  *

  Bad? No, not at first, nothing that distressed him, pained him, certainly nothing that bored him. It was all new. The body, oh, they were big on that, poking, prodding, charting, loading him into machines that ground electronically around him and bombarded him with radiation, magnetic fields, whatever could be used to peer inside without the aid of a scalpel. Not that they were far away from that particular violation either.

  Blood and hair samples, tissue scrapings, urine specimens — here you go, have one on me. Humans make such wonderful resources, for they are always renewable.

  He laid his brain open to them — these doctors who had no need for names, they were just the tall one, the stubby one, the one with clammy hands, the one with the mole on her cheek. With every day that passed, Dr. Adrienne Rand accrued new dimensions of reality by comparison. These others, they were inquisitive to the point of farce, comical in their seriousness, surreal in their relentless clinical precision. They were Nazis.

  But if even one could train a penlight on some previously shadowed corner inside him, to illuminate a malignant growth he could squash like a vermin, it might all be worth it.

  He free-associated, looked at Rorschach blots, composed extemporaneous stories to accompany flash cards. They measured his intelligence with a battery of tests, qualified his personality traits with the MMPI, inquired of his sex life and his dreams.

  They described situations for him and asked how he would react. You are confronted by a mugger on the street. What do you do?

  I'd try to tear the asshole's head off. How do you think I ended up here, genius?

  You are alone after work in an office and realize your boss has left his filing cabinet unlocked. Somewhere in one drawer, you know that there is a file containing employee evaluations. What do you do?

  I'd make copies of all of them and sell them to whoever wanted a look at their own or anybody else's.

  You are told by someone you love and have lived with for two years that she is leaving you. How do you react?

  Can we … can we stop for today?

  What do you do?

  What do you do?

  What do you do?

  It was better than working, he supposed: regular hours but no one whose approval he was trying to maintain. Just be himself and they were satisfied. Although it wasn't as if he was drawing a paycheck, was it? And here he was, exerting as much effort as any of them. They would go back to their labs flushed with success, having peeled back another layer … but only because he had agreed to show it to them. That should be worth something, shouldn't it? For with every day that passed, it felt less and less as if he were going to get much benefit out of this at all. They were happy to see him only because of what he was, not who, and his problems were only buzzwords in their terminology.

  This was no arrangement of mutual beneficiaries.

  And then the gene meddlers led him down the primrose path of the past, to shove it into his face. He was the son of his mother and father, all right — but still with his own secrets yet to be explained.

  They had arranged for his parents to be screened back home in Minneapolis, the both of them eager to yield up their tired blood for the sake of a son neither seen nor heard from for four years. There had been no sign of Helverson's syndrome in either of them. Naturally. Their DNA had been free of taint, the both of them pure and unadulterated specimens. Proud veteran and loving home-maker, these two were suburbia, they were America at its finest. Fascist and alcoholic, they were every self-perpetuating shame concealed and denied behind a picket fence and a gingham curtain.

  Of course they had checked out fine — they had no need of chromosomes gone awry. They were ruined in so many other ways.

  Did they tell you about the dead ones? Clay considered asking. The weaker ones, my brothers and sisters that died in the crib, or never drew a single breath outside the womb at all? They let you in on that family legacy?

  Not asking, fearing the answer. Imagining ghouls in lab smocks dispersed in a cemetery, seeking the powdery old bones of babies dead for twenty years. Here's a shovel — we'll expect the karyotype by tomorrow afternoon.

  And then the inevitable. Here was a scenario better than any fabricated stress test:

  You have spent the last four years of your existence trying to amputate yourself from a spaw
ning ground of hypocrisy and ineffectuality and meaninglessness. You have tried to tell yourself that you have no love left for them, that they forfeited it long ago in ways they could never possibly imagine. You know they tried to kill you one screaming nerve at a time. You were the abortion that lived. And now they want to see you, your parents want to see you. What do you do?

  What do you do?

  What do you do?

  I tell you to go to hell. And then…

  I cry.

  *

  Clinicians, even in his dreams —

  meat-metal god-puppets in caverns of iron, deep, deep, where boilers thump and steam-jets hiss scalding clouds that condense to drip from tiny screaming mouths, and gray-cheeked faces of slag pile fetuses heaped halfway to ceiling

  in lab coats of rust they welcome him, Clay, star patient, welcome to the convulsion factory: you are meat, you are nerve endings, and you are ours

  the examination table a vast slab, corrosive with its crusted layers, black on red on gray, runneled with fluid runoff troughs, and here they spread him, arms and legs akimbo, Dr. Mengele, I presume? and in he leans with trigger finger spastic, Clay pinned by rivet-gun crucifixion, wrist, wrist, ankle, foot, the peg nails burning molten red to sear flesh to bone to charred marrow

  girders like steel bone, clanking down from ceiling and up from floor to hold him in place, organic straps tightening across his forehead/throat/ribs/hips/knees, becoming one with the slab in symbiotic bondage —

  and he feels the pulsing shudder of gears, turn, turn, grind, ratcheting the slab to lengths never hinted at by its cold hard solidity

  clank

  clank

  screams drowned out by piercing bone-saw whine in his ears as they hack at him with tools growing from their limbs like phallic pistons, we will penetrate you in 100 trillion orifices

  a stranger is just an enemy you haven't assessed yet

  pierced a thousand times over with razored syringes whose plungers slide back to draw blood flowing like rust-water clots

  what do you do? what do you do? what do you do?

  tearing one hand free to leave half his palm behind, bleeding and welded to the slab, throbbing hand a brute weapon now, to lash at tormentors with sallow alloy skins

  even as fragile bones crack under strain

  even as the slab rends him into component parts and his last sensation is a collision between machine and heavy clubbed hand

  and blood sprinkling in his eyes with a caustic burning like acid baths and bitter autumn rains —

  *

  A nurse found him collapsed in the hallway some twenty feet from the door of his room, bleeding and barely conscious. The gash on his forehead took twelve stitches.

  I've got to get out of here — this while they were sewing him up, and it felt like the clearest thought he'd had in days.

  Ten

  Never beloved, sometimes despised, in antiquity a sacrificial lamb: the bearer of bad news was this, and more.

  "Night before last, at approximately 3:30 A.M., Clay Palmer suffered a particularly vivid nightmare related to his recent experiences here and nearly gave himself a concussion with one of his casts, while thrashing in his sleep. He was treated in the emergency room and received twelve stitches above the left eye, which is now swollen almost completely shut."

  Adrienne paused for a sip of water and glanced beyond her briefing notes, to take in the faces around her in the conference room. Unhappy, for the most part, dour beneath the unflattering fluorescent wash. Ferris Mendenhall and one of his superiors from hospital administration, plus a small contingent from Associated Labs — Ryker and three others. The finer particulars of their association had been settled upon without her being there, but she had to assume that Clay had, this past week and a half, become something of a hospital asset, bringing in income rather than draining it as a problem case whose insurance was in contention.

  Mutation makes for strange bedfellows.

  Three hours of sleep, a chilly shower, and a large espresso gulped in the car while fighting the morning rush hour, and here she was: out of her element and treading water in bureaucratic seas. Onward.

  "Early yesterday afternoon Clay expressed his intention to discontinue cooperation with all further research into his genetic condition. And for the first time since his arrival, he requested to be discharged. He said that if there's any attempt made to keep him here, the first chance he gets at a telephone, he'll put in a call to the ACLU and will refuse to eat. I spoke with him at length yesterday, and briefly this morning before this meeting, and his position hasn't changed."

  Murmurs, discontent: the ungrateful prick.

  "Correct me if I'm wrong," said one of the geneticists, "but I've been working with him under the assumption that he's in Ward Five under voluntary commitment."

  "That's correct," Mendenhall answered.

  "Then is there a possibility of involuntary commitment?"

  She bit her tongue, deferring to Mendenhall. Tried to show no expression as she doodled on her notes a stick caricature of the man, tall and balding, with a mad eager grin, dashing feet, and an upraised butterfly net. There — take that.

  "That would be ill-advised, in my opinion. But then, that's just based on twice-weekly reports, and not personal evaluation." Mendenhall turned to Adrienne. "You've spent more time with him than anyone at this table. What's your opinion?"

  "If it came to a sanity hearing, Clay would walk. And I'd be the star witness in his favor." Shaking her head. "He just wants to go home."

  "You wouldn't say he presents a danger to himself or anyone else, then." Dr. Ryker this time, slender and compact and possessed of extremely direct eye contact. He no doubt made a fine supervisor, she reasoned, because he could make any subordinate squirm.

  "His impulse control has been reasonably stable," she said.

  "Stable." Ryker raised an eyebrow. "Night before last he nearly staved in his own forehead."

  "I doubt there's a person in this room who hasn't thrashed at some point during a nightmare. If they'd had casts on both hands, the exact same thing might’ve happened."

  "Nearly two weeks ago he smashed a window and mutilated his stomach." Ryker pressed a slim advantage as if it were a stiletto. "And a week before that, you yourself implied to Dr. Mendenhall that Clay Palmer was a menace who desperately needed attention because his violent outbursts were worsening."

  "I wasn't pleading for his confinement. I was requesting a chance to continue treating him because he seemed to be responding well to it" — and because he fascinated the hell out of me? — "and he wanted to continue. If he no longer does … there's no rationale for forcing it on him." She drew a breath and raised a finger to silence an interruption, let her summarize. "Clay is emotionally disturbed, somewhat self-destructive, and he's prone to violence when provoked. But he is not irrational or out of touch with reality or any less able to function in the world than any of millions of people on the streets right now. Can I say he won't commit an act that'll jeopardize his entire future? No, I'm sorry, I can't. Neither can I guarantee that about you or anyone else. But the law doesn't recognize the risk of future offenses as grounds for imprisonment."

  "The right judge might see it differently. This is hardly a typical case."

  A woman from the lab spoke up, a research psychologist who had been administering a trunkful of tests. "So let's assume that a judge does. Does it make Clay any more cooperative?"

  "Possibly, if what he's doing is throwing a tantrum. Even the most unruly child gets tired of kicking and holding his breath, sooner or later."

  But this is not a child you're discussing! She quelled an impulse to shout this into Ryker's face. Bowed out with little to contribute as they debated and weighed options among themselves. To listen was an education in itself, a crash course in everything that was wrong with the state of modern science, the fundamental evidence being that the last consideration on their minds was that they were here because of the sufferings of
a human being.

  That they could do their jobs was not in doubt. But they would live and work in a peculiar vacuum of their own creation. Science was no longer the innocent, leisurely pursuit of well-bred Victorian gentlemen and aristocrats. Its two fundamental consumers were now private industry and the military, under whose influence science was no longer about discovery and understanding for their own sake, but for the perpetuation of power and profit. Bettering the human condition was, more often than not, incidental.

  So, was most of this crew naturally insensitive to Clay's pain, or were they simply victims of systemic failure?

  She would give them the benefit of the doubt. They were all beholden to the checkbooks that fed them, with too desperate an interest in maintaining that support to be objective. Among them was no such thing as a generalist, and with their focus trained on the narrow parameters of practical application, little wonder they had trouble seeing a broader spectrum beyond the lab walls. Little wonder they overlooked human dimensions, even when confronted with a deviation that cut to the core of humanity.

  Compared to them, her interest in Clay felt more pure than it had in weeks. She'd worried about that, wondering at times if she weren't just one more carrion eater who simply wore a kinder face as she too picked away, at the expense of his feelings. Watching the growing volume of tapes made of their sessions, her thickening file of notes, wondering, What does it all mean, what does he mean … and where am I really going with this?

  And when Ferris Mendenhall gazed long and pensively at a note slid to him by Ryker, then nodded, and politely asked if she would mind stepping from the room for a few minutes, Adrienne had no idea why.

  *

  She paced out in the hall, restless, the espresso humming through her bloodstream. Take up smoking while waiting? Why not. Adrienne understood the appeal, some mindless function to assign her hands and mouth.