Prototype

The name and other information Clay had given her had been verified and his records accessed from two Denver-area hospitals. All dated from the past four years, though along with these came records from Minneapolis, compiled over the several years prior to his relocation to Denver. On Sunday, Adrienne came in to her office an hour early to go through it all, uninterrupted.

Eleven times over the past seven years he had made trips to emergency rooms; stitches in his shoulder, his thigh, his cheek; a few broken bones — ribs alone, three times — and once a dislocated elbow. In Minneapolis he had thrice been brought in for alcohol poisoning. Twice in Denver he had been involuntarily committed for a week of psychological evaluation, then released. Lithium had been prescribed once before, and Carbamazepine another time, in an attempt to combat poor impulse control, but there was no follow-up to see how these affected him, or even if he had taken them on any regular schedule.

One scribbled note caught her attention: Some resistance to Thorazine.

The dry understatement of the weekend.

In his evaluations, Adrienne found brief passages of interest: Professes an inability to form close interpersonal attachments yet still speaks with affection of a small number of friends… reports frequent sleep disturbances, with insomnia and night terrors most common… exhibits preoccupation with undergoing vasectomy… spent 5 1/2 hours in apparent self-induced trance this afternoon but emerged with full knowledge of break — schizophrenia not indicated… body exhibits scars from self-mutilation but all appear to date from patient’s teens, with no recent manifestations visible.

Still, the bulk of it was simplistic and cursory and nothing she hadn’t already surmised from having spent ten minutes with him the morning after a violent spell.

If only his mind had been treated as thoroughly as his body. Typical.

Since it had required the police to get him to the hospital in the first place, Adrienne also had the local force obtain a transcript of his record from Denver. It was nothing she didn’t already expect: primarily a history of petty violent altercations in which he was lucky enough that no one was seriously injured. On three separate occasions he had done a month or two of jail time for misdemeanor assault. Fined for discharge of a firearm in his apartment. Some property damage, as well. Arrested last year for demolishing a BMW with a length of pipe; charges dropped due to lack of evidence. Arrested three years ago for breaking four glass display-case windows in a convenience store; charges dropped because of failure to establish positive ID.

And where there were records, odds were there were incidents never reported.

I didn’t finally kill someone, did I? he had asked.

No. He hadn’t. But the probability that he was headed in that direction was too likely. One slip of his broken hands the other night, and a jagged shank of exposed bone could easily have opened someone’s jugular or carotid.

Prime objective: The last thing she was going to do was repeat the mistakes of her predecessors. It wasn’t enough to look over Clay Palmer for a few days, pronounce him competent to deal with the outer world, prescribe some pills he may not even bother taking, and send him back into the feeding frenzy of modern society.

She closed the files.

Adrienne tapped a fingernail on her desktop and took a long look at herself, the mirror inside. This growing interest in her mysterious wandering pugilist wasn’t merely a therapist’s concern, was it? Admit it — the clinician was rising up within her too. Clay Palmer was part of an entire fascinating field ripe for study, something she had long been interested in, if not always actively. Sometimes the field seemed prevalent enough without having to seek it out. She’d grown up within a culture of accelerated war and its glorification, had been educated in a time when a campus rape no longer came as a surprise when announced on the morning news; she now lived in an age when in so many factions it had become socially acceptable sport to beat others half to death because of their ancestry or who they liked to sleep with or what god they prayed to, or didn’t.

She could wallow in statistics and never tire of them. Ninety percent of violent crimes were committed by men. Each Super Bowl Sunday, domestic violence against wives and girlfriends made a leap averaging forty percent. The previous year, twenty-five percent of all deaths of males aged fifteen to twenty-four were by gunshot.

Why? She really wanted to know. Testosterone could shoulder only so much of the blame.

God bless — in a wholly non-denominational way — every woman who actively crusaded in opposition to violence against other women; but too many took such statistics and hammered them into a license to condemn all things male. It couldn’t be that simple. Their outrage was understandable, but nothing was ever understood that way, much less resolved.

If she was seen as sympathizing with the enemy, so be it. Not every blow, regardless of the recipient’s gender, was struck out of purely evil intent. She had observed too many perpetrators of violence an hour or two after the act, shedding genuine tears of anguish and resembling nothing so much as little boys, bewildered at what their growing bodies had been capable of.

Sometimes they hurt, too, these bringers of pain. They deserved to pay for their acts, yes, but how much better for everyone if they lived in a culture in which they were better able to understand such destructive impulses in the first place, and learn to master them. Preventative medicine — no crime, no victim.

Adrienne had to wonder if her renewed fascination with violence in men didn’t coincide with the dissolution of her marriage and the subsequent lapsing — for the time being, at least  — of the hetero side of her sexuality. Since she had initiated divorce proceedings against Neal, she had gone to bed with only one other man, a dreadful one-night stand born as much of wine as of desire. Since moving to Tempe, and with Sarah’s eventual entrance into the picture two and a half years ago, she’d not even had any real impulse to make it with another man.

Was she sufficiently distanced from intimacy with men that now they had assumed the fascinating aura of creatures to be studied? Perhaps so. Live in a rain forest, and you take it for granted; live in a city, and that forest exudes a powerful allure to the explorer of terra incognita.

And for some explorers, there is no territory so enticing as that which can kill them.

Adrienne checked the time. A quarter past four. On duty and she didn’t even know it. She picked up her phone and buzzed down to Ward Five.

“This is Dr. Rand,” she said. “Could you have an orderly bring Clay Palmer up for his session?”

* * *

When Clay arrived, Adrienne almost had second thoughts about turning down the orderly’s offer to linger behind; in his eyes was the implicit end of the offer — just in case, you know. It would have sent a poor signal, though. She wanted Clay to trust her? She had to trust him.

He looked drawn, tired, but reasonably well. Good color beneath his fading sunburn and nicks and bruises. He had been recently shaved, so most of that scruffy drifter quality had been sacrificed to the razor. The casts made the visible portion of his arms appear deceptively thin, the lean, ropy arms of a gangly teenager. His eyes flicked about the room, taking in decor here, books there, the layout in general. Cataloging, almost. She had met veterans of recent wars and skirmishes who did much the same: came into a room evaluating it for weapons and for cover. She briefly wondered if a military stint in his background had been overlooked, then decided no. He’d had no time, not with that file she’d just read.

“Where do you want me?” he asked.

She gestured. “Whichever you prefer. I just want you to be comfortable.”

He chose the couch over either of the two plush chairs set before it, but would not recline; sitting, instead, with his back to the wall while she took a chair. She eased into the session with small talk — how are you feeling, fine, how are your hands, fine — the little opening moments that could either be a cautious dance or a subtle sparring match.

She asked if he would mind if she recorded their conversation, and he said no. From her desk she took a small Sony, about half the size of a paperback book, and placed it on a table adjacent to them, set it rolling. She never understood counselors who used voice-activated recorders; even the duration of a pause could sometimes be more telling than words.

“This is the part where we start talking about my sex life and toilet training, isn’t it?” His streamlined face was half-turned her way, his eyebrows mock-inquisitive arches.

“Only if they seem relevant.”

“I’d say they are. These casts?” He lifted them, ponderous weights from which mere fingertips protruded. “I can barely aim myself steady enough to hit the toilet.” A self-effacing little grin of embarrassment, but something about it rang hollow. “And I definitely can’t whack off. Can I count on a little relief from you?”