Prototype

Timothy. “One cell, two cells, four, eight…” The soldering iron dipped back to the Vaseline. “That’s the way we grow. This thing in our cells, I can fix it the same way, I know that now.”

Back to his arm, contact, with a soft incinerating hiss and a curl of smoke.

“A few cells at a time,” he said, as if he had never known such rationed bliss. “A few cells at a time.”

Clay did not leave until Timothy resumed where, the night before, he had left off on his chest.

Thirty

Listening for his return was ostensibly a passive task, but it seemed she was getting little else done. Adrienne sat at the motel room’s table while the cursor of the laptop computer blinked hypnotically — final evaluations of Clay, they might yet be of use.

She paced to the window a fourth time and found the parking lot still barren of her car.

“Gee Mom, do you think Clay stayed late after the prom?” asked Sarah from across the room. She was sprawled facedown on the bed, bare feet kicked up over her bottom as she pored through one of her thesis books.

It came so easy to her, waiting did. Life. Everything. Had Sarah ever failed at a single endeavor? Probably she had — she was not, after all, inhuman — but she never once gave the impression that failure was within her range of possibilities. She lived and breathed and ate and slept and made love as if the world would fall naturally into place around her. To lesser mortals she could be intimidating that way.

“He’ll be back when he’s ready,” she said. “You’ll know.”

Adrienne crossed the room, sank onto the bed beside her, let Sarah play with her hair because she knew Adrienne liked that, the way it unknotted her body, her mind, her soul.

“I wasn’t ready for all this,” Adrienne said, a confession. “When I agreed to leave Tempe, I didn’t think of the way I’d be letting them take all my other patients away from me.” Both of Sarah’s hands went slowly swirling across Adrienne’s scalp. “Clay’s been all I’ve had left in the world to validate me. He’s been it. I should have known better than to put myself in that situation.”

A position dangerous to them both. Perhaps, subconsciously, it had been too much like a shift into private practice, where there was no profit incentive in a cure, only the continual hope of one.

“I don’t validate you?”

“Sure you do. But he validates a part of me you’d never be able to. A part I wouldn’t want you to.”

Sarah pushed the book aside and slowly lay across her, like a widow flung over the broken body of a mate claimed by war. “If someone told you that in a session, you’d tell her she was compartmentalizing her life, and relying too much on people who might let her down.”

“So I’m notoriously blind to my own faults.”

“Just so long as you know.”

Sarah held to her, and she to Sarah, asymmetric but fitting together nevertheless. Sarah’s cheek was pressed along her thigh, hip near her head. Adrienne nuzzled harder against Sarah’s hip, breathing deeply to drag the musky scent of her within. A smell could take you anywhere, to any time. Sarah was the one real thing she had on this trip that reminded her of home; even the rainstick had been left in Denver. Holding Sarah so, breathing her in, she could touch Tempe better than if she’d brought a jar of dirt from the desert. We’ll be there again, soon, in our own home, in our own bed… and I will be wiser.

They stayed this way until she heard her car pull up outside, heard the slam of its door. Footsteps, aimless and undecided, then a quick knock. Halfway to answering, Adrienne heard the clunk of the neighboring door through the thin walls. When she opened her own, Clay was not there — only her keyring, lying on the threshold.

She picked them up, held them in the open doorway while a frozen wind flooded past.

Sarah watched from the bed, eyes big and incisive, now her largest feature with her hair still hanging in its curtain of braids. “I know what your first impulse is. But give him some time alone. He needs that respect.” A smile. “And close the door. My feet are freezing.”

“Put some socks on for a change.”

She gave Clay a half hour, then another fifteen minutes just to test herself. And when at last she knocked and he let her in, she saw that he looked more pale than he had late this morning, when borrowing her keys. He sat diminished, as if his bones had shrunk, rocking himself in place with tiny, controlled movements. His staring eyes possessed the frightful wisdom of one who has seen something terrible; with some people, you could just tell. She found his room preternaturally still, none of the vitality here that she felt next door. Without Sarah’s presence, how cheerless and arid this place really seemed.

“You found him at home,” she said.

He would not look at her, sitting on the edge of the bed, his army field jacket crushed beneath him. “Yeah.”

“And he wasn’t quite what you’d hoped for?”

“I don’t know what I was hoping for. But I don’t think I could have hoped for… for this.”

She had never been clear on why he had sought out Timothy Van der Leun, what he had hoped to accomplish; all along Clay had been reticent to discuss it. A Boston destination she could understand, but in Van der Leun’s case, there had been no tantalizing prior contact. She supposed, simply enough, that it was crucial for Clay to at last come face-to-face with another like himself.

Even if that other self proved hopelessly lost.

“He’s destroying himself,” Clay said. “Destroying himself and thinking it’ll cure him. But maybe… maybe he’s right, in a way.”

He said he’d rather go for a walk than sit, so she retrieved her coat and met him outside. They headed for the sidewalk along the street, downtown Indianapolis rising in the distance. A few yards away, heavy traffic ground through old slush as clouds of exhaust fogged past them. Here they strolled, upon the urban moors. New Year’s Eve — she had almost forgotten — and was there not a hint of frivolity in the petroleum air?

A block had gone by before he told her what Timothy Van der Leun had been doing to himself. She thought of Clay’s own bent toward self-mutilation. Likely this now struck him as an inherited tendency, a mad passion buried deep in the genes to which they all might be prone, as vulnerable as the members of some doomed family in the most grotesque Southern Gothic imaginable.

“I don’t imagine seeing him that way left you feeling any too reassured,” she said.

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it’s the kind of thing I expected all along, and didn’t realize it.” A crooked smile, thrown up in hurried self-defense. “He had his agenda and he was sticking to it. Same self-immolation agenda as mine, isn’t it? Only he’s going at it a little more directly.”

Damn his cynical hide, anyway. It was her last official day on the job and even if it took until midnight she vowed to get beneath it.

“Agenda,” she said, and began to quicken her stride. Her legs were nearly as long as his — let him work to keep up. “So where does this agenda come from?”

“Remember chromosome twelve? I’d say we’re looking like a stronger case for biological determinism all the time. If that’s the way it is, then I’m prepared to accept that.”

“Maybe, but you don’t want to have to, do you? You may never admit it to yourself, but you’re looking for a way to avoid that conclusion, and you’re desperate to find it.” When he said nothing she forged ahead. “You don’t share the same fate as Timothy Van der Leun unless you allow it. I still maintain you’re in control.” A deep breath, let’s try something. “Nobody knows just yet, but for the sake of argument, let’s say that all of chromosome twelve is involved, all three copies. You’ve done some homework. How many chromosomes do you have left?”

“Twenty-two pairs.”

“Forty-four chromosomes to three. Even if you’re given over to biological determinism, you still have to account for a lot of genetic encoding in those other forty-four that doesn’t have a thing to do, directly or indirectly, with chromosome twelve. It should speak as loud, if not louder. So let it have its say.”

Clay grunted, staring at the sidewalk as they glided along. “Are you forgetting what my father and mother