Prototype

“How much do you remember about last night?”

“I remember losing my temper, but I’d say I was provoked. And I still never got to eat my tacos.” He laughed, weakly. “Once the police got me here, hauled me out of the car… gets kind of fuzzy. I don’t remember you.” Suddenly those watchful gray eyes flashed upon the door. “Have I been charged with anything?”

“Not yet, not that I’ve heard.”

“Think I will?”

“I couldn’t say one way or the other, I’m sorry. Given the degree to which you… defended… yourself last night, I’m sure the police will at least be interested in some follow-up before any decision is made.”

He rolled his head to face the window again. There, for the first time: what seemed to be a glimpse of genuine emotion, an ache in something far deeper than the shattered hands encased in heavy casts.

“As I said,” she went on, “I was there when you were brought in last night. Both your hands had sustained compound fractures. It was necessary to give you Thorazine to prevent you from hurting yourself any more, or someone else.”

“Did you shoot me with it?”

“No.”

“You just watched.” A flat statement, almost an accusation, then he smiled directly toward her with something like twisted pride. “It took a lot, didn’t it?”

Adrienne hesitated, then agreed. “We thought you might have pocketed the first dosage. There was no discernable effect, really.”

“It just takes a lot. I don’t know why.”

Definitely something to look into, once she had access to his case history, more background. He certainly didn’t speak as if he were any stranger to the receiving end of crisis intervention.

“When you were brought in, you had no identification with you. So as far as who you are, I’m afraid I’m going to have to start from scratch. Could you tell me your name?”

“Clay Palmer.” His mouth ticked. “Of the Gehenna Palmers.”

She frowned. “Gehenna?”

“That’s a mythical name for hell. It’s a joke.”

“And where is your home, Clay?”

“Home…” He looked at the ceiling, as if attempting to define the term. “I always thought of my home as my shell of skin. That way I’m never lost. But that’s not what you mean. Is it?”

“This time I did have geography in mind… but we can get around to that later, too.”

“I’ll bet.” He eyed her with a flicker of wicked mirth; he’d just baited her and he knew it. Whether he’d done it deliberately or not was the only thing that wasn’t clear. “I’m from Denver.”

After she got his address, he reeled forth a social security number and his birth date without any prompting. She’d have to double check later, but for now, would take his word for it that he was twenty-five years old.

“You did considerable damage to yourself last night, Clay. I wonder if you could tell me what was going through your mind at the time?”

“You mean what I was feeling?” Laughter, harsh and incredulous. “I’d say I was feeling extremely pissed off. Adrienne.”

“Lots of people feel pissed off. Some of them even act on it. Very few of them go so far as to break their own hands.”

He gazed down along his body, the casts engulfing his lower arms. “My hands, yeah, I miss them this morning. At the time, they were just… means to an end.”

“What end was that?”

He sighed, looked very stricken and exhausted all at once. “I don’t know… conquest?”

She took a quick breath and decided to steer this thing back to case history. “Had you ever been attacked like that before? That you remember?”

He let a small, ironic smile twist one corner of his mouth. “Like that, three-on-one… no… I don’t — no, definitely not.”

She had wondered last night, immediately upon learning the particulars of his case. Because his fight hadn’t ended when all three assailants were on the ground, had it? In some convolution of his brain, he had seen reason to fight the police and emergency room personnel, too. Every reaching hand belonged to an enemy.

Not uncommon, though. When trauma had wrenched a life to its foundations, some people simply withdrew from all but the most overt stimuli. They could not differentiate foe from ally. She recalled the case of the jogger gang-raped and beaten in Central Park. Even having been clubbed unconscious, the woman had flailed about and fought the trauma-center team while on the table.

But therein lay the difference: Clay Palmer had successfully fought his assailants and still gone past the brink of shutdown.

What had happened to him in the past, to generate such fear, such virulent rage? What lay buried like a bomb in that mind?

“Clay, is there anybody you’d like us to notify, that you’re here, that you’re safe?”

“Nobody. Adrienne.”

Mental note: He was baiting her again, that name thing. The last two times she had called him by name, he’d turned around and done likewise, though in deliberately obvious fashion. Not quite sarcasm, not quite as afterthought… more like he was letting her know he wasn’t going to be swayed by attempts to buddy up through co-opting his first name. She couldn’t blame him, actually. Often as not, she associated the tactic with creepy salesmen she didn’t want to deal with at all, much less buy from.

“Any family or friends in Denver, or locally…?”

“I said nobody.”

Adrienne nodded. “If you change your mind, I’ll be happy to take care of it for you. And convey any message you might like to pass along.”

“Even if it’s obscene?”

She maintained a level gaze, even returned his earlier wry smile. “I’ll let discretion play the better part of judgment.”

“Just checking. Probing the bounds of your honor.” For a moment his gaze roved about the room, this cheerless and spartan chamber, and through his eyes she sought the human being behind them. When he wasn’t looking at her, wasn’t playing the role of guardian at the gate of his privacy, he seemed to drift upon small painful currents within. If only she could see him free and unencumbered, observe how he moved, how he sat. How he might enter a room and commandeer it for his own, or find its most sheltered corner and make it his harbor. The body told much… but his was silenced. And in its restriction, it was as if his eyes were compensating by what they communicated, like sharpened hearing to the newly blind.

But this she knew: He would not be the type who found it easy to ask for help. Which didn’t mean he was not without other questions: “How old are you?”

Adrienne saw no harm in answering. “I’m thirty-four.”

“Baby boomer, huh?”

She couldn’t help but smile. “Just barely. In that bulging demographic chart that looks like a pig in a python, I’m pretty much at the pig’s curly little tail.” And on that cusp, Adrienne supposed, she did not truly belong to the body proper. Cut off the pig’s tail, and it may squeal, but it will never miss the thing. She was a vestigial appendage, with no generation to call her own. She lived in the temporal gulf between those who came before and those who followed.

“The boomers,” he said. “Our civilization’s last big gasp of self-indulgence. At least I know my place.”

“And where’s that?”

“I’m with the people on the side, holding the shovels.” Clay Palmer cleared his throat. “Are we through?”

“Yes. I think that’s enough for now.” Adrienne stood, put away her notebook. “About all we’ve done this morning is introduce ourselves. We’ve talked a bit about last night… but there’s a lot that led up to last night that we never touched on. I think we should, and… I hope you feel the same. And I hope you’ll want to continue talking