Prototype

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 spawning 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