Prototype

Thirteen

Home again, such as it was — coming back, he felt as if he were an 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 outre 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