Prototype

Deserts he crossed and mountains he climbed, nourished by the land and that with which it teemed. Old clothes tore and rotted and fell away to be replaced by hardier skins, while his head and face sprouted with hair thicker than any he had known before. It must have been years that he wandered, that he climbed, and his feet grew tough and his hands callused, and his voice grew vast with the song of primeval solitude. He was earth and wind and sky and water. He was beast and dream.

And the almas waited.

He loved them long before he saw them, knowing that whatever they were, when he found them it would not matter. Be they hermits of folklore, or the descendants of feral children, or some dead-end evolutionary branch, prototypes of humanity with all their potential intact, who lived now as forgotten anachronisms. They were as wrong for the world he had abandoned as he was himself — he remembered that much, too, not quite recalling the problem, only sure of one thing: I am not like others, not like others.

He roamed the slopes and plateaus, and sometimes he would find the remains of their fires — more than once still warm, he was but hours behind them — and the bones of their kills, picked clean. In the shelter of caves he would find evidence of their lingering, earthen pigments used to pay homage to a mighty bisonlike creature that would surely die a very hard death. In all his years up here he had seen no such animal, and it was a long time before he realized: They passed it down. They remember what used to be, as a people, if not as individuals. This is how they keep it alive because if they let it die, a part of them dies too.

He wished that where he’d come from they had known things like that.

So he followed, but the almas were as elusive as they were nomadic, as shy as their legends said. There were times when he began to wonder if he were becoming somehow incorporated into their folklore. And why not, they must have found him a creature of sufficient mystery: a solitary being with a strangely shaped head but clothing not unlike their own, who walked in fog and left lonely tracks in the snow. Perhaps they thought him a spirit, or a god. Or a demon.

He knew only that they seemed to grow to trust him, allowing him to get closer and closer over the years before turning and melting into the hillsides. Half a mile became a quarter, became an eighth, until as little as fifty yards might separate them, and the almas would stand immobile, stocky and powerful atop a hill, silhouetted against a sky of blue, or gray, or sunset red. They would stare at one another through mists and rains and burning suns, but the almas would always vanish before he could walk in on their camp.

Still, he took their small tokens as encouragement to keep trying, objects they could not have left behind by accident in their haste to flee. A soft-furred pelt, a flint knife, a clutch of wild flowers lashed by rawhide to a bone. Such gifts he came to cherish, whether they were left in simple trade, or in appeasement driven by awe.

So he followed, and dreamt of the day when they would no longer run from him, and he began to imagine fathering a child, the idea no longer repellent, as it had seemed long ago. What might such a child be like? Perhaps, backward as the almas were, that which was best in them might cancel out what was worst in him, and so the child — or children — could grow to be something new, better than either of them, a more worthy survivor.

If only they would let him get closer, close enough to touch.

They had to; this could not be all there was.

And, too, if only that damned blazing star would quit searing from the sky to blind him at the most inopportune moments —

* * *

“Pupillary response… none.”

The results were always the same, year after year — shine a penlight into his eyes and it might as well have been shone down a mineshaft. Pupils fixed, pursuant to damage to the frontal lobe, she’d been told more than once; patient catatonic. He had, for the greater part of a decade, not uttered a single word, nor focused his eyes on anything in his field of vision, nor reacted to one sound around him. It was as if Clay Palmer had simply gone away.

Each summer Adrienne flew northeast to visit her parents in their retirement on Prince Edward Island. From there it was a simple matter to drop down to Logan Airport in Boston, then rent a car and drive out to Worcester to visit with Clay in the state hospital that had been the longest-lived home of his adult life.

Never had he given any indication of being aware of her, but she visited anyway, hoping against experience that in the year since her last visit he might have shown some meager improvement. Always a disappointment, though, and Adrienne supposed by the time she was forty she had given up hope, had accepted, and, all things considered, was grateful that Clay had grown no worse.

He had, ironically, managed to keep his youth over the years, his skin still smooth as a twenty-five-year-old’s because he never used it and it never saw the sun. His impassive countenance became a living museum exhibit of Helverson’s syndrome, worst-case scenario, the streamlined bones no longer going anywhere. And as fine lines circumscribed her mouth, crossed her forehead, circled her eyes, she began to resent his stasis. Age, damn you! — a fool’s command, and she thought of spending hours folding his face with wrinkles in hope that at least a few might take root. It wasn’t fair; he was thwarting her in body as well as mind.

Although it wasn’t as if he looked perfect, now, was it? She thought it terrible the way they kept his hair trimmed so short in this place, for easy maintenance, when they should have let it fall unruly over his brow. It would at least conceal that broadly scarred concavity across his forehead.

In a dayroom alive with the shufflings and mutterings of his ward mates — a chamber that took her back to her duties on Ward Five — she would spend a full afternoon with Clay, sitting with him at a table and for a time trying to penetrate his never-ending stare. Where did you go? she would think, sometimes even feeling a tweak of jealousy because his surrender to it was so complete. It denied her everything.

She would then take to conversation that was entirely one-sided, wondering if anything was getting through. Giving him updates on her life because she didn’t know what else to talk about — she should reminisce about all the fun times they’d had? — and she would reveal herself in a peculiar role-reversal she had never anticipated. Clay sat like the perfect therapist, never a word, a pale iconic presence whose silence only prompted her to go on, find something else, there must be more.

He heard of changes in locale. Tempe had understandably gone sour, Sarah everywhere she looked and many places she didn’t, and so she had tried Albuquerque but hadn’t fit; perhaps her need for the desert was no more. For now it was San Diego and holding. Probably she had come to her oceanic phase, in love with saltwater and the security of the tides.

He heard of lovers present and past, of Karen and Sally and Adam; of the brief marriage to Geoff, which ended in amicable defeat. She thought to try celibacy for a time but had fallen off that wagon in four months. He heard of Val and Franz and Melanie, and others, and after a time she began to think, I see him once a year and I’m still probably boring him, because it always sounds the same. Only the names have been changed to protect the wounded.

And she remembered when she could love, easily, eagerly, and wondered what was wrong, why none of them ever seemed right, why they would invariably drift apart. It should be easy to find someone, the advantage was hers — after all, she had the whole of both sexes to choose from.

She confessed this to Clay, but if he knew what the problem was he wasn’t saying.

She would sit and hold his hand sometimes, taking it as her pathetic triumph that he no longer pulled away. Wherever he had gone, she could never follow, and so she took to making up inner lives just so she might pretend she knew: He had found a family, or a lover he could never drive away, or a womb in which he curled, bathed in all the potential that might yet be fulfilled.

Life is a short dream, the ancient Romans had said, and so once a year she would stay through late afternoon, and kiss him on the cheek, and wish him godspeed on his.

While she went back out and tried to make sense of her own.

In the ninth year of his stay Adrienne left as she always did  — a little sad, a little relieved, a little fearful over the thought of how her life might change, or mightn’t, in the year to come before her next visit. Annual rituals were harsh that way, always forcing your head around to face the future. She took the elevator down to ground level, sharing it with several others to whom she paid no mind. Its doors slid open and all of them went about their lives.