Prototype

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