Prototype

little soldier to be marched around and around within the house on peculiar drills? Three hours is forever when you’re five. Left, right, left, right, and don’t you dare cry, you little pussy, if you cry I’ll smack you and your mother, and you’ll watch. He learned to toe the line, and by the time he was old enough to understand the omnipresent television show called Vietnam, and listen to his father’s armchair Pentagon rhetoric about everything that was being mishandled there, young Clay’s big fear in life was that it would all end before he was old enough to ship over.

Doesn’t every father hold his kid’s hand over the gas-stove burner, an exercise in discipline?

Doesn’t everybody have a mother whose eyes deaden with every increase in breast droop and hip expansion, and to whom vodka is a wretched god that gives and takes away? A mother who, too often, cries herself to sleep on a sagging couch and clutches her child to her heart and, with reeking breath, murmurs promises of tomorrow? We’ll go away, for the rest of our lives, but remember, you can’t tell Daddy, it’s our own special secret.

Doesn’t everybody have brothers and sisters who failed to survive? He was first, the eldest, therefore the strongest. His survival seemed perfectly natural at the time, as one crib death and then three miscarriages claimed all others who might be called siblings. He recollected his small, solitary celebrations with root beer and a hidden cache of firecrackers, because he had outlived yet another.

How insular, this world of childhood, when anything might be perceived as the norm.

“How old were you when your sister died?” Adrienne asked, a Wednesday afternoon in her office. He actually looked forward to the sessions more and more. They were the two hours per week when he felt farthest from his itching bones.

“I was five,” he said. “It’s one of my first real memories. I can’t say for sure, but something about that day had a real Sunday-afternoon feel to it. I think we’d been to church… and I remember a roast smell, all through the house. Beef roast, that was always Sunday food. Special. Family day, you know. All God’s children love a good roast.”

He looked at Adrienne in her chair, legs crossed at the knee, where her interlocked fingers rested. All she did was nod, but he knew her nods by now, could differentiate among them. Yes, she was saying, go on, tell me more. Feed me.

“I remember my mother, her voice at first, coming out of the nursery and down the hall. High, very high, and loud. Like she was trying to talk, but something was clipping frequencies from her voice, so it was just this… this sound… this creepy sound. Crying, but uglier, just… nonsensical. Like the sound of chaos, if chaos could grieve. I’d never heard anything like that before. It scared the hell out of me. I just stayed put on the dining room floor — I was playing with a toy truck — but even though I was scared, what I really wanted to do was run down the hall and see why she was making that noise. Because whatever it was, if I saw it and I didn’t scream, I knew I’d see something I’d never seen before. I didn’t know what… maybe like a god suddenly showed up in there or something. It was Sunday, remember.”

“Was this the first time your parents were forced to explain death to you?”

Clay nodded. Memories were like dominoes, one tripping another tripping another, until all lay flat and inert. “My father sat me down on the back stoop with him that evening. The sun was going down. One of the neighbors was grilling steaks, must have been. That smell of meat again.” He shook his head. “The backyard seemed bigger at twilight. It always scared me then, I thought it was changing on me. I couldn’t trust it, it wasn’t the same place I’d play during the day. I, umm… I guess I must have asked where they’d taken Amy. It was the only time I can remember seeing him cry. Actual tears on that leathery, pitted face — it seemed so wrong. He told me God sent some people to take Amy away, because He needed more angels.” Clay laughed. “I think that was the extent of my father’s theological understanding. And if he thought he was giving me comfort, he couldn’t have been more wrong. I sat there wondering, if it was that easy, what was to stop them from coming for me the next time?

“‘At ease,’ he told me. He actually said that, ‘At ease.’ And then he nodded and told me, just this once, it was okay to cry if I wanted to. I sat there and tried, but nothing happened, so I told him I’d save it for later. He put his arm around me and said he was proud of me for that.”

“For staying strong, you mean.”

“Not so much strong, as in control. Control, that was a very big issue for my father.” He supposed it still was. He had neither seen nor spoken to nor corresponded with either parent since leaving Minnesota four years ago. His father would be sixty-four now; there was no reason to believe him dead. Men like that never died before living a full lifespan and more, inflicting their share of misery on the world. “Maybe that’s what shook him up most about my sister’s death. And my mother’s round of miscarriages after that. It must have been her drinking that did those. She was probably so toxic inside, nothing could live for very long. He used to hit her but she wouldn’t stop. Everything was way the hell out of his control. Maybe that’s what first taught me that something could be out of his control. It was… liberating. So I became the miscarriage that lived.”

It was his fourth session with Adrienne when that came out, and shouldn’t he be feeling at least some relief from such confessions? One would think so. These rancid old memories, he’d not called them up for longer than he could remember. They were episodes in the life of a Clay Palmer he no longer recognized, a family that wasn’t truly his. The most he felt during it all was some minor uneasiness now and then, never any real pain.

Quite the contrary: There could be fun in this, as if he were a boy, with a boy’s usual fascination with morbidity, and he had found a bloated roadside carcass to prod and turn over, and whose distended cavities he might examine to see what squirmed inside.

There was no real pain linked with telling Adrienne of the child he had been, the slings and arrows withstood. Doesn’t everybody know small boys, late to grow, last to be chosen, first to be punched and spat upon when childhood begins its rites of stratification? Some boys simply grow up magnets for fists and spittle, some subtle thing indefinably strange about them. Such tormented boys radiate their otherness from every pore and cell, a phenomenon everyone recognizes but none can qualify. It might as well be debated why the sun rises in the east.

Yet why such variance in their adult selves, when all have been much the same victims? Some grow stunted, some straight and true, while others grow like lone pine trees on the sides of barren mountains, twisted by winds into ghastly shapes that are freaks of nature, one of a kind, fundamentally abhorrent.

Were these the boys who learned to bite in self-defense? Who smiled, bully-blood on their lips and chins, at bigger boys who for the first time knew pain and tears and their own high-pitched shrieks? Were these the boys who, no longer tormented, were shunned instead, abandoned to sit alone on green playgrounds with their sack lunch or a book or their own thoughts, the object of sullen loathing and — admit it — fear?

In his experience, in his humble estimation, they were.

For doesn’t everybody stumble across their own survival mechanisms deep within, as if inscribed upon tablets that cannot be read, yet are nevertheless comprehensible? The most ancient languages are learned by instinct.

This was his world, the one into which he had been born, the world that had penned its inarguable natural laws upon his heart, then demanded obedience or death.

How odd, then, that his fellow citizens had passed so many laws against what seemed to come most naturally.

But maybe it was him, all him, all wrong. At times he fretted about his heredity, some hideous genetic mistake inside, as had once been attributed to mass-murderer Richard Speck. Adrienne told him he need not worry, such claims had been mostly sensationalism. It was more vital that he focus on what he could control, could understand.

And it came about fifty minutes into this, his fourth session in her office. Two full minutes of silence passed before he fell back into his present self from the past, and realized his broken bones did not itch. They would later, surely they would, but for now it was like realizing there was an end to the routine that had so quietly engulfed him.

He would be discharged soon, would be on his way. Back to Denver, yes… but where?

This was solitude; this was the loneliness spoken of by hermits isolated within crowds. This was the