Prototype

been cut. It hadn’t even taken him two minutes to accept it, passively, as if it were expected, unavoidable. For once she might have welcomed a minor tantrum. It would have at least united them against a common foe opposed to continuing whatever progress they had made.

“At the very least,” Sarah said, softening, “whether we go there or not, don’t you think the decision should be Clay’s?”

Adrienne crossed her arms. “You know what he’ll say.”

“Uh huh,” Sarah nodded. “So do you. That’s why you’re mad.”

Tapping her foot — there was nothing else to argue with. “Well it is my car,” she said, as petulantly as she could, and then there was nothing to do but laugh with the terrible gallows humor of surrender.

* * *

An old year waned, a new year took its place.

They greeted it quietly, privately. In motels, there were no holidays, there was only waiting. They watched the television and drank a few bottles as midnight came and went — ginger ale only, so Clay could share in the flow.

She was back on speaking terms with Sarah; the silence hadn’t lasted long. It had seemed pointless to begin the new year on opposing sides of contention. If carried into the car tomorrow, mile after mile, it would feel intolerable.

She noticed that Clay spent time doodling on the notepad beside the phone, leaving the sheet behind when he retired to his room. She inspected it, found a simple drawing of a bottle blowing a cork through a blizzard of confetti, with the mutant phrase, Wring out the old, wring in the new.

And he was gone, in a sense, a part of him. Symbolic though that midnight deadline may have been, the pendulum slice of the clock had severed… something.

With midnight’s chime she had been discharged, as surely as a soldier returning from foreign lands. A soldier come home to hear someone tell him, You’re a civilian once more. Maybe you committed some questionable acts in the name of duty, but we’ll not speak of that again. Your responsibility is over. Oh, and one more thing…

Try to blend in, would you?

Thirty-One

They rode into the new year, taking turns driving.

The drone of the car became lulling, Sarah’s mortal enemy; she hated to risk a nap. It felt crucial to be awake and alert, lest something slide past the window during her slumber, something she might never have occasion to see again.

Civilization seemed to grow denser the farther east they traveled, more and more land sacrificed to bland gods forged from steel and asphalt and reflecting glass. They rolled through the clotted express lanes of cities whose buildings stood like vast tombs, glowing from dead light within, and hermetically sealed against the cold and snow and rain, against voices that dared raise doubts, sealed against thought itself. These hives bred conformists by the millions.

But much of the countryside was hardly more reassuring, its fields lying fallow, stark as skeletons bleached by time. These, the graves of rusting, sharp-boned hulks that used to be tractors and combines, bogged down in mud or mired in financial tar pits.

And Chapel Hill, North Carolina, waited — for Clay, mostly, but Sarah couldn’t deny her own curiosity. Clay’s had been piqued as soon as she had suggested this detour. She’d had to be the one to do it. Adrienne had refused to actively involve herself in advancing such a scheme, going along only for the skeptical ride, as it were.

Clay had seemed to relish this new control over his destiny — at last, a choice. His mysterious mentor in Boston would keep for another few days, now that a newer obsession burned: the chance to incise deeper into his brain than any scalpel could reach. Perhaps they could peel back the layers and see what lay beneath, underlying his entire existence. He had spoken of such possibilities with fevered hope, while Sarah prayed the odyssey might prove worthwhile.

She feared that, come one place or another, Clay was hurtling toward some ultimate confrontation; if only he could be ready when it arrived.

They made it a two-day trip to Chapel Hill, and it was rife with stops along the way. Most anywhere served to shatter the monotony of the interstate. Sarah began to see the importance of seeking out whatever human oddities she could find during these brief sojourns, the people who stumbled to the cadence of their different drummers.

In convenience stores she browsed racks of postcards, in Tennessee buying a dozen of the ugliest she could find to send to their friends back home. Clay helped her choose while Adrienne pumped unleaded, and as Sarah paid for the cards he pointed at the nametag worn by the plump checkout clerk. Kathleen — August Employee of the Month, it read.

“Quit living in the past,” he told her, and she began to cry. Fifteen miles down the road Sarah wondered if the girl would quit her job instead. It might do the trick.

She laid out the postcards the next morning over breakfast, writing one long sequential letter that flowed over all twelve. On each she gave instructions as to who was receiving the next card.

“What are you doing?” Adrienne asked, on her third cup of coffee and only now coming alive.

“I’m manipulating our friends from across the country,” she said. “They’ll have to get together for a party and everyone brings a postcard just to make sense of anything. It’ll be in our honor and we won’t even be there. I’ll let you know when it’s time for you to sign the last card.”

Through the steaming scents of pancakes and bacon and eggs she noticed Clay’s unwavering gaze, locked from across the table upon the postcards. “You can sign it too,” Sarah told him.

“What’s it like,” he said quietly, “having a dozen people to write to? When I first left Minneapolis, I tried sending a few letters to people from high school, but no one answered.”

Perhaps it was too early in the morning, her every essence exposed and unprotected, but the question bit, and bit hard. It came perilously close to drawing tears, for as she saw him stare at the postcards, ugly things though they were, she realized that he would view them as something far more. Seeing them as people he would never meet, never know, lives he could never touch even if he had the skills.

“It’s like… being part of a tribe,” Sarah said. Having noticed that Adrienne had paused with bitten lip, her coffee cup halfway between table and tongue.

He looked across the diner, at the menagerie of travelers and locals, nothing in common but the morning and four greasy walls. “The modern tribal character, I don’t think it’s defined by its members. You know who really defines it?”

“Who?”

“Its outcasts,” he said, then got up, and said he would wait in the car, that to wait in the cold would do him good, and she understood.

One could shiver only if one was alive.

* * *

Sarah continued to dwell upon tribes along the road, as they crossed into North Carolina. Clay had given driving a whirl this morning, giving it up when a headache sent him to the backseat. He moaned and wondered aloud if the bones of the skull did not at times loosen just enough to crash into one another for the sake of the pain it would cause, plate tectonics between parietal and occipital, temporal and sphenoid.

“I need a tribe, a primitive tribe, where everything is so elemental,” he said, rising up to gaze out the window. “Science failed me, pretty much, I think. Psychology’s just held its own — no offense. Maybe what I really need is a shaman.”

Adrienne looked at Sarah from behind the wheel, and it seemed friendly enough. They had been peaceable but had kept their hands to themselves for the past couple of days, and the primary thing she’d felt for Adrienne —