by Brian Hodge
Or was it just an irrational twinge of jealousy, made even more confusing by her not knowing which of the pair of them had caused it?
Regardless, it had passed.
Behind the wheel, sun now higher and yellow, lifted from the fiery red desert bath of its rising, Adrienne gripped harder and tuned in the highway. In retrospect, how pointless that small flare of anger now seemed. Despite the virulence of the yearnings that had driven him south to begin with, Clay had instinctively been right about one thing:
The road could heal.
It rolled on, grinding morning and afternoon and evening into dust that was taken by the wind. The land northeast was no less barren than the desert, just barren in a different way, brown hillsides dotted with pines. They climbed from the low Arizona altitudes into the higher reaches of mountain country, and the temperature must have slid more than thirty degrees. Denver often had its first snowfall by this time of year.
But the freeways and streets were clear and dry when they reached them that night. Clay directed her through the urban maze and the atlas was forgotten. Many more miles and her nerves would have whined like the highway beneath her tires. Earlier she had accepted his offer to share the driving; without his help she doubted they could have made it in one day's haul. She had taken care to consult the maps as to when they traded, to make sure he wouldn't be driving in cities. As long as he was on the open road, the danger seemed minimal that a stranger’s carelessness would shove him into blind rage and mechanized retribution.
The neighborhood to which he directed her seemed, so far as she could discern with her directional sense dulled by hours of monotony, close to the heart of the city. Houses built tall, decades ago, three stories to accommodate all the offspring of families vast and prodigious, when big families were the norm in a younger city and a younger nation. They would be lonelier dwellings now, interiors gutted and rearranged and walled off into isolated compartments for one or two, who might never even know the names of those living beneath the same roof. The walls would no longer recognize the sound of laughter from sprawling holiday gatherings, and the music that followed family feasts would only be an echo lodged in some aged rafter.
Adrienne parked at the curb, idling, headlights shining upon a tree just before the car, one of a blockful whose stark branches scraped at the neighborhood's sky, defiant and gnarled like the fists of gods who had been forgotten to death.
"What next?" whispered Clay.
"You go in, you take a hot shower, and you sleep in your own bed for a change."
"Right." He looked unconvinced, turned in his seat and facing her but half of him thrown into shadow. "That's not what I mean."
"I know."
It'll be all right, she wanted to soothe him. Something about him in this moment made her want to push aside all formality of the therapist-patient relationship — or was it now researcher-subject? — and reassure him as a friend.
"We keep going," she finally said.
"You're in my world now." He spoke as if regretting the fact. "I'm not in yours. It could make a difference."
"I'll try to find a neutral corner."
A thin smile touched the half of his mouth she could see, and while he said nothing she could almost hear him anyway, what he must have been thinking: There is no such thing as neutrality. We just fool ourselves into thinking some regions are immune to our influence.
"You're going to need some time to settle back in and readjust to being home. And I don't want to push you. But we need to decide on a day for me to call you and see when we should start our sessions again."
"Just give me the rest of the weekend, that's all I should need. Try me Monday afternoon." He laughed mockingly. "I guess I still have a phone."
"I can find my way back if you don't."
He nodded. "There's … someone … she's used to this kind of shit out of me. She probably came by and brought in my mail. If I'm lucky maybe she opened the bills."
It was the first real indication of a woman in his life. In therapy he had been evasive around the issue, more comfortable discussing past relationships than those of the present.
"What's her name?"
"Erin."
"I think I should hear more about Erin sometime soon."
"Why stop there? You'll probably meet her before long." He grabbed the rubber ball, bounced it once off the windshield and caught it. "My hands ache." Pocketing the ball in his jacket. "I'm going now."
After watching him recede up the walk, between a gauntlet of shabby hedges, to let himself into the house, Adrienne sat for a couple of minutes, until a light winked on in a third-floor window. She caught sight of his silhouette framed beneath a peaked eave, leaning there as he stared out into the night and the city, from his cage or his refuge, whatever home had now become.
Only when she saw a curtain glide before the window did she drive away.
*
Adrienne backtracked, having noted on the drive to Clay's, the hotels along the way. Saturday night, alone in a strange city, at the tail end of 800 miles, she was not about to be finicky.
She checked in with one bag of essentials to get her through the night, leaving the car in the hotel's parking garage, where she hoped it would be less likely to be broken into. Her gold card was deposit enough for an indefinite few days until she could arrange for something more permanent. She would be routing the bill to Arizona Associated Labs for reimbursement anyway.
Exactly what her hospital was getting out of the arrangement had not been made clear, but the lab must have made a persuasive offer to Ferris Mendenhall and his overseeing administrator. The hospital was essentially loaning her out as a freelance consultant, with AAL picking up her salary and supplying a staff psychologist to pick up the slack left by her absence. As well, AAL had agreed to cover her housing expenses, and then, so long as they were happy with her results, there was the possibility of a bonus once she had completed her evaluations and observations of Clay in his regular environment. Not surprisingly, treatment was the lowest priority on their agenda, something for her discretion.
The question of where this sudden influx of money was coming from, precisely, Adrienne had not heard asked, but she was assuming that AAL would be cannibalizing it from other projects that had already been funded. Diversion of funds was an everyday occurrence in many scientific communities. Where budget lines were loosely defined, there was a lot of flexibility in how they were used, or abused.
The ultimate irony: She had gotten her grant after all, with the blessings of Ward Five.
She was settled into the hotel room by midnight, filling the tub for a steaming bath to soak away road sweat, road nerves, the late-night blues of being too far away from the one she loved. Never would a bed seem any bigger and more desolate than tonight. The TV played softly, a sad companion.
While the faucet gushed water, she phoned and Sarah answered. Here I am, here's my number, I miss you already, and even though I don't want to bring it up, I'm sorry if I acted like a bitch last night because I felt you and Clay were conspiring to judge me for what I do.
"When are you going to start hunting down someplace real to live, then?" Sarah asked.
"As early as possible." Adrienne peeled away her socks, threw them toward her small suitcase, and curled her legs beneath her on the bed. She had planned on checking into the availability of condominiums for rent, with everything furnished.
"You know," said Sarah, "I got to thinking today, with the kind of schedule I've been keeping lately, I could join you, you know. I mean, that is, if you'd want me underfoot all the time — "
Want her? Want her?
" — bailing me out of jail every other night, maybe, am I talking myself out of this?"
Adrienne clutched the phone with both hands and shut her eyes and smiled, as if prayers she didn't even know she'd prayed had been answered. "How soon can you make it?"
Thirteen
Home again, such as it was — coming back, he felt as if he were a
n intruder. At any moment, someone might lunge from around a corner and shoot him. Pacing the floor, everything here unsettled, charged with menace until it recognized him and left him alone. His apartment was like a forgetful guard dog whose trust he had to win all over again.
It's just me, it's just me, it's just me —
Too long away, he would have to burn his renewed essence into the place before it became his once more.
Two rooms and a bath on the top floor, these were his quarters. Beneath a low roof, the place had a mild claustrophobic feeling; two feet from the ceiling, the walls angled inward, closing off space that was rightfully his. It needed airing, all of it, from the stale funk of the bedroom to the refrigerator and its miasma of things gone bad.
On a small dining table that demarked the kitchenette from the rest of the living room, Clay found a small accumulation of mail. He received little anyway, never any letters because he had no one to write to; junk, mostly — his name was worth more to strangers, so long as they thought they might get something out of him. A few past-due rent notices that must have been taped to his door had been brought in. From the phone and power companies nothing but empty envelopes, along with a hastily scribbled note: I took care of these so you wouldn't get shut off and you owe me. You're on your own for the rent, I can't cover everything. WHERE ARE YOU, YOU SHIT?
No name, but Erin's handwriting. How many times had she been up here? Walking through each room, the place vulnerable during an absence more prolonged than he could ever have anticipated. She couldn't help but leave things behind, smells and hairs and shed skin cells, little markings of territorial encroachment. Should he piss on the walls now, in reclamation? There was no reason to feel this way but he did; then again, how comforting to realize she cared that much.
If it was a problem, why had he given her a key in the first place? Here, check on me if I turn up silent, maybe I'll be in this chair with a bullet in my head — was that it? No, it wasn't. There had been times when suicide was tempting, but mostly he'd felt he would sooner kill the rest of the world.
Although according to Adrienne, that would probably turn out to be just another means of suicide, slower perhaps, just waiting, hoping, for that inevitable faster gun to come along and end it for him. He must need Adrienne — he was beginning to think like her, hearing the way she would say things in pointing out what should be obvious to him but never was.
And he wondered if he wasn't cooperating with this continued examination into the clockwork of his being to find out not what he was made of, but rather how she handled it. Both of them had been pushed nose-to-nose with the unknown, although at least he knew what it was like to live with himself for twenty-five years. If his more outré elements, less understood than simply sensed, turned out to be due to a chromosomal glitch, then that might explain a lot. Although to him this glitch wasn't science, it was survival. And not necessarily his own.
Just teach me how to stop before I kill someone…
There was nothing to unpack, nothing to eat, nothing to do, so Clay left the television playing to nonstop news of the world beyond, crawled into sheets that needed washing two months ago, and decided to sleep until the last eight hundred miles were leached from his system.
*
He was aware of her in the doorway before he really awoke and saw her. Footsteps on creaking floors and a voice lingering in the bedroom doorway; the grind of a tiny motor like a metal whisper.
"And this is an asshole, you can tell by the way he just lies there. They're everywhere, but this one's a bigger asshole than most, and it's not often you find them this defenseless."
She came in just as he was focusing, skirting the bed in a shuffling half circle, legs and arms and a body and a video camera leering in.
Sudden flash: strapped into bed — no, wait, he could move — and they had sent in clones of people from his personal life to invade even his sleep chamber, to record every moment; perhaps he slept differently than normal people. No observable behavior was too minute to tweeze away from his life, to dissect and examine through a lens.
No — Erin. Only Erin.
She halted her impromptu documentary and lowered the camera to her side, looking at him as if not trusting that he was really there. Beneath a slouch hat, bottle-blond again — when he'd left, her hair had been its normal brown — and the thinner kind of thin she got when not eating much. Hollow-cheeked, with a full-lipped mouth whose corners tended to turn down, and blue eyes that naturally seemed to ache from some recent wound.
"So where've you been?"
"A psychiatric ward."
She stared, lips and tongue frozen on the edge of sly retort, and it looked as if the camera was about ready to swing up and resume documentation. Then her shoulders sagged. "You're not kidding, are you? They really did it to you this time. They really did it, didn't they?" Erin spun in a slow circle, shaking her head, then sat on the edge of the bed. "Here?"
Clay shook his head, thick inside, webbed with sludge. "Arizona. Tempe."
Normal people would have asked what he was doing there, would have taken every answer as a clue to pry another question out of their disbelief, backtracking one step at a time. Erin would not. Something about her took it as a matter of course that it was perfectly natural that he should end up in Arizona, while his car remained at the curb for the entire trip. It made for a welcome kind of shorthand.
"What happened to your forehead?" She pointed at the bandage, the yellowing bruise creeping beyond its edges, the ghost of a fading black eye. "Did you get that in a fight?"
"With myself." A soft huff. "I had a nightmare, and … you know how I can get." Erin found it hard to sleep with him unless he was so saturated with chemicals that he did not dream; almost anyone would. "I had a cast on when it happened."
"A cast." She looked him over more closely, lingering across his knuckles, the backs of his pale hands. The ugly fresh scars that slashed and curled their way over the healed bones. "I guess that explains the Frankenstein look."
So he decided, why not, fill her in on the more important details. Nothing surprised her anymore, if it ever had, and she did not judge. He told her about the initial journey, the fight; told her about Ward Five and Adrienne. He left the more recent developments alone, and Erin never interrupted. She videotaped, though, sitting opposite him at the end of the bed with her camera steadied on both knees, and he was used to this by now. Sometimes it was her way of listening.
"They tell you anything this time that you didn't already know?" she asked, just a voice behind a camera, not expecting him to say yes — it was apparent in every word. Oh, just business as usual for Clay, they just kept him a little longer for a change.
"Yeah," and he looked into the camera eye, Erin hidden, patient, trying to find the perfect frame in which to fit him, an angle to capture his essence in all its contradictions, or take what was there and banish it, leaving him neither brute nor human. He exhaled, long and heavy, stale morning breath — or was it afternoon by now? "I'll tell you later."
She lowered the camera, mildly disappointed, mildly chiding, mildly amused. "You're boring."
"I'm tired."
Erin reversed ends and stretched out on the bed alongside him, thin rack of bones and curves and layers of clothing still chilled from outside. He looked to the window, saw that it was trying to rain, spatters striking glass in hushed counterpoint to the constant murmur of CNN in the living room. Bare branches swatted helpless and angry in gusts of wind. The sky was gray as iron, cold looking, and if it could care about anything at all it would surely be hostile.
"How's everybody else?" he asked.
"The same, I guess. I think you scared Graham. You've never been gone this long, have you? I didn't think so. After a while he just wouldn't talk at all about you being gone. Uncle Twitch was trying to take bets on when you'd show up again."
"Did anybody take him up on it?"
"Just Nina. But that doesn't really count, keeping it between the two
of them like that. So, no takers."
"Not even you?"
She rolled her head over, now face-to-face, glaring with no-nonsense eyes. "I was already out sixty-odd bucks for your bills, what do I need to lose more for?"
"You'll get it back."
She glared a little fiercer, yet seemed to have softened somehow, lightly touching her forehead to his; the swelling beneath the bandage throbbed. "You could thank me, at least."
Erin was right. He knew he was lax when it came to certain words, certain phrases. It wasn't that he did not know gratitude; it was just that it could leave you so indebted.
"Thank you," he tried anyway, and found it did not kill him.
It was enough. Erin expected little, planned for no future, took everything as it came along — a supremely pragmatic outlook in dealing with him. He was fully aware that most women, assuming they could have tolerated him any length of time at all, would now be ready to choke him, and would not necessarily be out of line.
It was neither love nor commitment here, on any conventional scale; more a drawing together, as members of some small pack who watched each other's backs, and took care of cauterizing the wounds whenever the need arose. False conceits such as monogamy and exclusivity were of little use. Erin fucked him and she fucked Graham, both on a regular basis, and of the two, it was Graham's heart that seemed to bleed at times over that to which he could never lay sole claim.
But no one had ever accused Graham of being too pragmatic; no one had ever accused Erin of not being so. Fucking was also a part of her job description, or at least pretending to. Her face and body were treated well by cameras, and there were a few connected photographers in the area that she knew. She posed with other models for layouts in some of the harder skin magazines on the stands, and the even rawer material available by mail only, or racks in the hard-core shops. She had said she didn't even consider the other models to be sex partners, just other bodies, other props; while there was excitation and insertion high and low, not often was there actual climax, and even less so for her than for the male models.
