Prototype (11 page)

Clay shifted back and forth on the couch — all at once he just couldn't get comfortable there. So he left it, wandered across the room until he could sag against the windowsill and stare out at a world he'd not been part of for nearly three weeks.

"I thought about trying to become a Buddhist once," he said to the glass, to a world that would never hear him, "because they always seem so peaceful. That was very appealing, I thought it might help." He had begun to rhythmically strike his casts together, clunk clunk clunk, hammer and anvil, harder, louder — how must that feel vibrating through his knitting bones? Then he stopped. "But it's so passive, I just … I couldn't.

"But I did read this story that made so much sense. A story about Buddha. Someone came up to him, trying to figure out what it was about him that made him so wise, so in tune. They asked him, 'Are you a god?' He said, 'No.' Then they tried again, 'How about a saint, are you a saint?' Same thing, 'No.' Finally had to ask, 'Well, what are you, then?' And Buddha said, 'I am awake.'"

Adrienne smiled. It was a beautiful little fable and for a moment she thought how much Sarah would love it, its profound simplicity. But Clay had not shared it in delight, and she watched as he knocked his head against the window, eyes shut, breath fogging the glass.

"You related to something in that story," she said.

"I woke up one day, or month, or year — who knows how long it took, these things never just come over you full-blown, it takes time. I mean, I know there's something seriously screwed up about me, too, but … I started seeing everything around me for what it was. And I realized it was all I could do to stand it, living in a world where everybody seems satisfied with so little. I'm not talking about material things, I mean their
lives
. Give them their little ruts and they're happy. Or maybe not, but they settle for it, because they don't know any other way out. And nobody encourages them to find it."

Adrienne dared not interrupt his flow, watching as he drew himself together, stood taller, squarer at the window.

"It's all just part of the grand mediocracy," he said.

"Mediocrity, you mean?"

Clay shook his head. "Mediocrity is a quality. Mediocracy is the process that perpetuates it." He must have noticed her vague uncertainty. "The word, I mean, I made it up."

She nodded, and liked the word a great deal.

He explained: "In a democracy, the people are in charge. Theoretically. In an autocracy, it's a despot. In a theocracy, the church rules. So, in a mediocracy…" He left it open, passing it to her.

"Society is ruled by that which is mediocre," she finished, feeling a click within, a reversal of roles. He had become the lecturer and she the pupil.

She had wanted to learn from him? Of course. She had just thought she would remain in charge the whole time, and in a small way hated to lose the moment when she saw him turn again, back to the window, to stare. Hated world, intolerable world, world that rejects and is rejected.

"I'm awake," he whispered, "but all it does is hurt."

*

She thought of ruts over the next couple of days. How easy to fall into them, how difficult to recognize them from inside. Was she living in one as of late?

She worked, she treated patients. She came home, she slept. Books, always there to be read, nonfiction mostly, biographies and psychology texts, the occasional mystery. Her parents had retired two years ago to Prince Edward Island and she faithfully wrote them every other week. Now and again, a drive into the desert to watch the dawn, and feel the warming embrace as the newborn sun scorched the purity of land, to remember why she had come down here. Anything else? No, not much of note.

And she had to admit that, were it not for Sarah, it might sound dreadfully sterile. Sarah was a live-in safeguard against things becoming too routine. Sarah who prodded, "See this? Let's go here," and, "Look, look who's playing, you're coming with me, aren't you?" Sarah never had to prod very hard. Adrienne
wanted
a social life, but the world was geared to those whose nights were free. It was her schedule — how the hell was she supposed to have a real social life when she didn't clock in until four in the afternoon?

Re-evaluation often came out of unlikely inspirations: this time a patient who had brought her back face-to-face with the reasons she had gone into psychology in the first place.

Ruts meant no new purpose, no fresh goals. And so, that night after work, following the session with Clay, she stayed up until four completing her initial letter of proposal for a possible grant to study male aggression. She had already been to the university psychology department to see what was available, found herself drawn to one involving correlations between violence and authoritarian backgrounds. Perfect.

Of course, with the pace of funding agencies, both state and federal, she stood almost no chance of getting approval in time to take advantage of Clay's presence in Tempe. He would be long gone, discharged. There was no reason to expect Ferris Mendenhall to approve his stay for that long, assuming Clay would even
want
to stay.

Still, it didn't mean that, were a grant approved, she might not be able to make later contact.

Without exaggeration, Clay Palmer was unlike any other patient she had ever treated. She'd had ample contact with sociopaths and schizophrenics, and with patients whose maladaptation to the world had turned them into dysfunctional wretches. In their company Clay would fit, but he was the first of them to speak so rationally as a theoretician.

The mediocracy. Would Friedrich Nietzsche have spoken similarly, in this day and age, had he found himself in the asylum at the age of twenty-five?

Note to herself: See if there was anything available on the treatment Nietzsche had been receiving at the end of his life. It had been, after all, during the dawn of the psychoanalytic method.

Now, if she could just get the results of the karyotype so they could put that behind them.

Adrienne had been expecting it to arrive without ceremony, by courier perhaps, finding it in with her mail some afternoon when reporting for her shift.

The last thing she had expected was the Friday phone call from Arizona Associated Labs, ten minutes after her arrival. The voice on the other end was bewildered and excited in the same breath.

The results were nothing Adrienne had heard of before.

Worse, they were nothing the caller had ever seen.

She tried to banish the word from her mind. Such an ugly word, rife with connotations unfair to a victim of biology's whims and nature's passion for variety. Still, the word lingered, applicable, technically correct.

Mutation.

No wonder she had detected such a thrill in the voice of the geneticist who had called with the news. He had been looking at something so unusual its implications weren’t even understood.

That weekend, Adrienne spent every free moment poring over genetics texts to give her at least some working knowledge of the subject, conversational footing in a science where even most M.D.'s were lacking. She burned both midnight and noonday oil, barely needing sleep. Sarah did not resent this in and of itself, only that for once Adrienne refused to share that which was consuming her. Tough. Sarah miffed was only a temporary condition, and this business of chromosomal mutation was just a bit beyond the usual pale of lives gone astray.

The core of the human animal, Adrienne knew, was written out in a seemingly endless sequence of protein codes, three billion base pairs in all, linked into the twining dual strands of a double helix, one of nature's most elegant structures. Three billion links in the chain of DNA, an identical text found in the nucleus of nearly every cell in the body. She found mind-boggling the sheer numbers and the infinitesimal scale on which they existed. Scaled-up analogies were the only thing that helped her grasp the enormity of the miracle. One she found especially vivid: It was as if a rope with a diameter of two inches and a length of 32,000 miles was neatly arranged within an organic vessel the size of a domed stadium. Behold, a single nucleus.

The rope, however, was not of continuous length. Human DNA was apportioned among forty-six chromosomes, two of which, the X and the Y, determined gender, the remainder existing in twenty-two matched pairs. Every trait of structure and function and bearing that characterized one as a human being — as well as an individual among the world's billions — was encoded in the 50- to 100,000 genes found along the chromosomes. Most of the time, when anything went wrong on a genetic level, what and where was a mystery, although the number of genes associated with specific diseases and defects was increasing all the time.

Of genetic disorders, she learned there were around 3500. Among those, a mere twelve were so obvious they could be sighted off a karyotype at a glance.

Among them were conditions such as
Klinefelter's
syndrome and Turner's syndrome and others afflicting normal gender designation. Too many X chromosomes, or not enough. Then there was the XYY male genotype that had provoked such hotly contested debate.

Down's syndrome was also among this dozen, whose mentally retarded and physically impaired progeny carried a third copy of chromosome twenty-one, instead of the normal pair.

Twelve abnormalities, all unique.

But then there was Clay Palmer, who exhibited a thirteenth not even in any book she consulted: a triple set of chromosome twelve.

This was most unexpected.

And very, very new.

"How does this manifest itself in my patient?" she had asked.

"That's the wrong question. It's premature," she was told by a geneticist named Ryker. "Inasmuch as I can't even tell you what this
means
."

In the physical nature of the defect, it was most obviously closest to Down's syndrome, an identical glitch but involving a different pair of chromosomes. Clearly, Clay Palmer exhibited none of the symptoms characteristic of Down's. He was highly intelligent, physically healthy, with no skull deformation or slanted eyes, no indication of heart disorder.

Chromosome twelve. Here too were located genes associated with hemolytic anemia, lipoma, myxoid liposarcoma, type-one vitamin D dependency, and —

Acute alcohol intolerance.

This could be a find. Clay had been hospitalized more than once for alcohol poisoning.

Her weekend was lost in a density of specialization and the vast interior landscape, never without a book, reading wherever opportunity presented itself: kitchen, office, bathroom, behind the wheel while stopped at traffic lights, on the sofa while failing to realize that for the past ten minutes Sarah's feet had been in her lap. In learning there was safety, for to set the books aside was to remove the diversion and nakedly confront the fact that she was absolutely petrified.

Because what does it mean? What does this
mean
in terms of his body and his mind?

In her hospital sat a young man who by turns sought to tear himself and other people to pieces, the worst of his impulses held in check by a fragile grasp on the hope that he might learn to become something better. Whether a noble quest or a fool's errand, Clay Palmer had seemingly yet to decide, but the outcome was largely up to her. If she was correct, Clay might only be months away from committing the ultimate irrevocable crime, after which intervention would become a moot point. His future would consist of prison, or death.

He had looked to her for help. And she was going to have to look him in the eye and tell him the truth, along with the words she hated most of all:

I'm sorry … I don't know.

*

And how inadequate these words sounded to her ears. Who, though, among healers of body and mind, felt adequately trained in dealing out disappointment? Who felt comfortable admitting there were syndromes beyond their expertise, beyond even their knowledge? What pompous pretenders they all were at times. Their understanding of the totality of human life was barbarously crude, not far beyond using leeches and trephining holes into the skull to release evil spirits.

When Clay looked at her, it was with the same lost melancholy another's face might have worn after being told a parent had died, or a sibling, a favorite grandparent … someone who had always been there, now gone. It was the face of downward spirals, and Adrienne pictured Clay sliding helplessly along a coil of double helix.

Thirty-two thousand miles. He might never hit bottom.

"It's me, then." His whisper was as soft as the sound of a knife on a throat.