Prototype

“You’re taking a good long look at Clay in his natural environment to see how it relates to him. I just want to take a look at his natural environment to see how it relates to everyone.”

And this was it, wasn’t it? Adrienne looked at her bluntly. “You’re in my territory now.”

“That’s what really bothers you, isn’t it?”

Adrienne sat still for a moment, then nodded.

Sarah cocked one corner of her mouth, like a disgruntled teenager. “You have a problem with sharing sometimes.”

It should have stung. Another time it might have, but not now. Because it felt justified? “It’s an occupational hazard.”

Sarah took the wine bottle, rolled it between flattened palms for contemplative moments. “Answer me one thing: What do you think I’m going to do to Clay, or anyone else?”

“Do?” Adrienne blinked. “I’m not sure I follow — ”

“Yes you do. What effect do you think I’m going to have on the reason you’re here?”

Adrienne tried to answer, found she could not. This had cut the legs from beneath her. With Clay’s friends — or whatever they were to him — she wasn’t even sure she should remain in contact. They had met and she had learned what they were like and perhaps that should be enough, although to be honest, a couple of them, Nina and Twitch, she had rather liked.

She pictured Sarah with them, all of them, plus any other peripheral folks who drifted along. Anthropologically speaking, fieldwork involved living with a group for a time and assimilating a part of them. She wasn’t so sure she liked the tone of what Sarah would be taking in.

Based on what she had seen the other night, they were bitter and spiteful, they had no direction in their lives, and when they weren’t staring morosely at the world at large, they were picking at one another. Well, sometimes you had to make a conscious effort to see the light of day, and it really was worth the effort; tell yourself, Get on with it, that the world didn’t end for you unless you let it happen. Adrienne knew that, as a professional, she wasn’t supposed to react to others judgmentally, but sometimes you still just felt like slapping someone.

And this was the emotional environment that Sarah would be assimilating? Adrienne could see nothing constructive coming of this —

And she realized how ridiculous that sounded. As if she were turning into her own mother, anybody’s mother, circa the teen years: I don’t like those friends of yours, they’re a bad influence.

So what did that leave her with, simple jealousy?

“We take the same kind of oath, you know,” Sarah told her. “You’re not an M.D. but that doesn’t matter. Do no harm.’ That applies to you, too. From my end, it’s ‘Never endanger the informant.’ And we wouldn’t be working at cross-purposes. I might even be of help to you. I come at things from a different perspective. So I might see something that you miss.”

Adrienne nodded. I’m the only one here who came to make an impact. She didn’t…

She came to be impacted.

“I’ll leave this up to you,” Sarah said. “If you say no, I’ll live with that.”

Adrienne straightened, sharply. “Don’t do this to me. I don’t make your decisions for you and I’m not starting with this one.”

Sarah took a long, slow drink of the wine. Reached over to retrieve her down vest from where she had dropped it on the floor, held it on her lap. Was it as manipulative a gesture as it felt? So subtle, so damnably subtle. In the moment Adrienne felt lost, helpless, imagining how Sarah must have been with her father ten, fifteen years ago. Twisting him around her finger as teenage girls are wont to do. She might have gotten anything.

“What are we going to do, Adrienne?” she asked.

“Stay,” was all that finally rose to her lips, as she pulled the vest from Sarah’s lap, hands, intentions. “Stay.”

Seventeen

Keeping his appointments with Adrienne, Clay began to see, was a matter of faith, faith that something good would come of them. It had become more binding here than during his tenure on Ward Five, when he had nothing else to do. Now he actually had to extend an effort.

He liked the condo better than the hotel. The hotel hadn’t worked for him at all, if only for a single session, but what a bust that session had been. Sitting in chairs by the window, the round table dragged aside so that it would be no barrier between them, but that hadn’t helped. He’d sat there for most of the time as if a cork were in his brain, and had left with a headache as bad as the pain after he’d smashed his forehead with the cast.

He found he could relax at Adrienne’s condo, maybe a quarter of the living room given to a desk and a pair of chairs and a love seat. If he did not let his eyes stray too far he could sustain the illusion it was an actual office. She had obviously gone to some trouble for him.

What he had not counted on, though, was seeing her lover up here. Sarah. An unexpected delight, that. She had to know what he was and what was wrong with him — doctors weren’t supposed to talk but he never believed they didn’t — yet not once could he catch her looking at him as if he belonged in a sideshow. She headed out the door after a couple minutes and he almost told them there was no need, but stopped. Adrienne did not seem that loose about it all; had to maintain protocol, if nothing else.

They had exchanged the couch for a love seat, but the routine was familiar by now: his back to the wall, following where thought and memory and psychic wreckage led. There were times he regarded his head as a jar, Adrienne’s occasional questions and prompts just more swipes of a kitchen knife to make sure he was scraped out as clean as possible.

Will there ever be an end to this? he wondered, and of course there would be, but when would they have enough? He had to admit he felt better since having someone to unload on, to talk with and not just be talked at, but this remission would surely last no longer than the treatment itself. Still, the thought of turning it into a lifetime habit would be enough to make him opt for Erin’s joke. You look like they gave you a lobotomy, she had laughed when seeing the stitches across his brow. Assuming he lived to fifty, he could not picture himself in this same pose, week after week. Go ahead, he would have to tell them at some point, while tapping his frontal lobe. Drill here, make it messy.

There would come an end. Adrienne would someday return home. Maybe she would be the one to decide enough was enough. Or maybe those footing the bills would seal the purse and leave her with no choice. And then? Adrift again and perhaps no better than before, the inside of his head spread thin for everyone’s benefit but his own. Perhaps someone, somewhere, waiting for the pressures to again mount within him, watching from afar for his greatest explosion, so they might nod and concur, Yes, we all feared it would happen someday but we could not hold him. Let us learn from this tragic mistake.

So maybe it really was best to try while he had the chance.

I am what my birth made me but isn’t there some way to rise above it? There should be. There must be.

“Let me ask you something,” he said, far into the session. “Do you think people are inherently good or bad?”

Adrienne shifted to one side in her chair. “Always asking the easy questions, aren’t you?”

He shrugged: Sorry, just being myself. She now knew better than to try ducking these questions, or turning them around back onto him; he had conditioned her well; he could be relentless in pursuing where she stood on matters.

Clay watched as she formulated her answer — the soft tilts of her head, the interplay between hand and ear. Away from the hospital she was no longer wearing her hair pinned back. Good for her; it made her look so much less prim. She now looked like a Nordic athlete.