Prototype (48 page)

Valentine left the other two, came over to bid him step onto the smallish balcony. Clay frowned but followed; the man would not have brought him all this way to throw him nineteen floors to the street. The sliding glass door slammed behind him and the warmth of the apartment was forsaken. The winds up here were frigid but bracing, oddly welcome, cleaner than at ground level. The sound of traffic became a long-distance echo.

"They'll work it out," Valentine said. He went to the very edge of the balcony, fearless despite the snow and ice underfoot, and leaned against the railing. In his long topcoat and contoured skull he looked ready to fly. "Arguments are important. A sign of passion. All the bodily systems are primed then."

Clay turned to the glass, the curtain open on the other side. Beyond, Ellie and Daniel squabbled, silently to Clay … but, if body language was any indication, with waning vehemence. He had no doubt that if pressed, she would hold her own with ease. Wondering, too, what it would be like to be with a woman so akin to himself they could be joined halves of the same damaged egg, a broken yin to a shattered yang. Such a genetically incestuous union could be glorious, or terrifying. Maybe they would immolate themselves in the flames of taboo and leave nothing but smoldering ash.

"Somehow I can't believe your only purpose here is to run a matchmaking service for us," Clay said. "There has to be more on your mind than that."

Valentine faced him, now leaning back against the railing. What trust, or what confidence in his own authority; one shove and he could plunge to an icy death. "I have the world on my mind. And our place in it. I've lived years you never have. That makes me a valuable resource to you. It makes you a legacy to me."

"Why do you even care? I wouldn't."

"Because I'm the one that job falls to." Valentine pulled his hands from his pockets, scooped snow from the railing and began to pack it into a tight ball. "Have you ever killed anyone?"

"No. But there were doctors who said it was just a matter of time."

Valentine kneaded the snowball, smoother and rounder, veins popping out all across his muscular hands. "Sometimes you'll hear people say the first kill is always the hardest, and after that it gets easier. But they're ignorant on the subject. You can discount everything they say. It's the second that's the hardest. Because you've done it once, and this time you know what to expect and you know how messy it can be. How long it can take some people to die. That's when you have to look inside yourself and ask if you have what it takes to do it all over again. Nothing can be very hard when you're ignorant … only when you're fully informed."

He lifted the snowball, a perfect sphere of dense white ice. "From this height, the right angle? It just might kill." He lobbed it over the railing toward the sidewalk below. "That's the beauty of random chance. All you have to do is be willing to take the gamble."

Clay strolled to the edge, peered over and down. He saw the occasional pedestrian trudging through this winter's night, but no signs of calamity, of death from above. "You lost this one."

"And somebody won and never knew it. And all's right with the world. I could drop another tomorrow during rush hour and win, and all would still be right with the world." Valentine dusted his hands of melting snow and pocketed them. "I hope you understand that, Clay. Of the rest of
them
down there, not one in a hundred thousand would understand. But I think
we
should appreciate that element of life, because even though we may be new beings, I think what they consider wrong with us has instead unlocked something that's been buried for a very long time. The propensity for assuming a natural mastery — because we're not weighed down by the same petty little sentiments."

Clay began to pack his own snowball. "The noble savage?"

"Even better: a corrupted savage with cunning sharpened by reason instead of five acute senses. Nietzsche would've understood. He wrote, 'What a time experiences as evil is usually an untimely echo of what was formerly experienced as good — the atavism of a more ancient ideal.'"

Clay nodded but said nothing, packing his snowball in silence because there was no point to continuing. Patrick Valentine made an unlikely optimist — imagine that — actually seeing a future in Helverson's syndrome. He could share with the man what he had seen in himself, out on the burnt savannahs of human existence, even though Valentine would almost certainly refuse to believe.

"Human beings eat the world, bit by bit, but most of all we just eat one another," Clay said, and held up his little globe of snow. "All we are is a new model designed to take bigger bites and get it over with." He crunched his teeth into the snowball, as he would an apple, then crumbled the remainder in his fist and sprinkled it over the side.

Valentine watched the object lesson with eyes gone grave, an inquisitor listening to the errors in a heretic's logic.

"You need to kill," he said. "Blood awakens. Blood changes everything."

Adrienne was at a loss as to how to proceed, but maybe this was only because she had sacrificed so much sleep the past two days. Perish the thought it was because she had extended herself so far beyond responsibility and reason that any decision seemed destined to be the wrong one.

"Let's examine the facts," Sarah said. How patient she had been throughout this odyssey, how splendid a lover, friend, voice of calm. "It doesn't look like there's a car over there, nothing's moving, the afternoon's getting darker and no lights are coming on. These are the unmistakable signs of an empty house."

"Maybe I should just go see and get it over with."

"Not alone, you're not. You don't have any idea what this man might be capable of, and I've got a feeling he's
not
someone you should be alone with. Not even for two minutes, Adrienne. Especially if he's the kind of guy who sits around in the dark."

Poised behind the wheel — it felt as if she'd grown here — she might have smiled had she had the energy to spare. Sarah's concern was touching. Moreover, it was unsettling. Little in the world caused Sarah to really worry, to admit that it was beyond her skills and smarts, her charmed existence altogether.

Idling at curbside in the quiet Charlestown neighborhood, a few homes down from the house of Patrick Valentine, the car heater blowing precious warmth, she tallied what little she did know and decided Sarah's concern was far from unwarranted.

Valentine obviously knew how to circumvent channels. Older by around a decade than the oldest confirmed Helverson's subject, he had gotten himself diagnosed without betraying his anonymity. He exercised what appeared to be unlimited access to medical and research records, and on his own had managed to uncover an adult Helverson's female and shield her from identification as well. By use of the mail, he toyed with the psyches of volatile people, exhibiting the aloof disregard of a sociopath.

These were obvious. Then there were the unconfirmable rumors: the guns, the missiles, and most repugnant, his planned foray into eugenics. God help any child conceived under his procurement.

And Clay, you knew at least some of this, you had to know to want to get this far in the first place, you knew and you lied to me about it.

Two days ago, after awakening to the news of his vanishing, she and Sarah had sat in their motel room and, over coffee, tried to choose a next move that would be best for everyone. They could, of course, return to Denver, then Tempe, resuming their lives and never knowing what had become of Clay. But neither had any doubt that he would continue on to Boston. The only issue was whether or not they should follow.

He had left no note, no reason for his abandoning them, and while it hurt, she had to remind herself he would have meant no malice by it. Likely he had been driven by pain, by shame, she and Sarah continual reminders of what he'd faced in himself at Kendra Madigan's. If they continued together, Adrienne surmised, he would look at them and fear they now saw him as something truly lost, whose irredeemable nature was a genetic mandate, with no more hope of a cure than a malignancy whose tendrils were braided through the brainstem.

On his own, at least no one need suspect that but himself.

They would follow, they decided. They would follow and at least let him know that their opinion of him had not changed, not on the basis of a psilocybin vision that may or may not have been valid. That Clay understand she would never,
could
never, give up on him was crucial, and if it was her final gift, then let him at least be the one to tell her so. She demanded little for herself when it came to patients — and Clay had become so much more — but he owed her this much.

But they could not follow without at least some idea of his destination, and her only key was Timothy Van der Leun. His phone number was unlisted with Indiana Bell information, but her notebook computer still had access to the mainframe at Arizona Associated Labs, and she found it on file there. Timothy’s voice, once he consented to answer his phone early that afternoon, had come from the bottom of a dead soul's gorge.

"I need your help. You're the only one who can help me," she had explained. "I brought Clay Palmer to Indianapolis and now I need to find him again because
he
needs help…"

"Who?" He'd sounded confused, feverish, so she had to tell him again, Clay Palmer, the one who came to see you last Friday, New Year's Eve. "Oh. Him. Right," Timothy had said. "I remember now." Then, in a thickened voice that nearly caused her to shudder, "Good scars. He had good scars."

She had pleaded and prodded and cajoled, on the theory that having been diagnosed years before Clay, Timothy might already have been contacted by the mysterious mentor in Boston. So long as she could keep him focused, he'd had ample tales to tell, information to share. In his more lucid moments he sounded more forsaken than insane, full of desperate gratitude for a woman to talk with, who valued his opinion on anything, and she tried not to think of what he must look like, smell like, his skin a burnt patchwork of self-made sores.

She tried not to think of his inevitable fate.

So through the ragged clouds of snow and hostility they had driven to Boston, had gotten a hotel room, had acquired maps and charted out what was where. And if Clay wasn’t with Patrick Valentine after all, if he had instead disappeared into the frozen mists like the misbegotten outcast of Mary Shelley's most famous novel, well … perhaps it really would be time to pack in their best intentions and head for home. For the mountains, then the desert.

"Five more minutes," Adrienne said. "Then we'll check."

"Okay."

"Maybe they're asleep. You know the kind of hours he keeps, sometimes."

"I know," said Sarah. "I know."

She reached across to massage the back of Adrienne's neck. In her lap was paper and pen, resting upon the flat of a book, with which she had whiled away their forty-five-minute stakeout. Sarah had filled it with experimental addresses for herself, seeing the way her name looked conjoined with cities and states all over the country:
Sarah Lynn McGuire, 123 Fogbound St., Eugene, OR. Sarah Lynn McGuire, 456 Potato Lane, Boise, ID.
She did this sometimes, in coffeehouses and comedy clubs, did it the way others doodled stick figures or hearts or future fortunes, Sarah indulging basic wanderlust. "You never know," Adrienne once heard her tell someone who didn't understand, "maybe I'll write one and it'll be like a talisman. I'll look at it and the match will be so perfect, I'll just know it's a place I have to be."

I want to go to these places, too,
Adrienne thought now.
However many may seize you, I want to try them on with you and see how they fit us both.
She really hoped she meant that, would mean it tomorrow and next week and a year from now, and that it wasn't just the wintry miles of failure and desolation talking.

"Okay," Adrienne said. "Time's up."

She put the car into gear, rolled ahead and down the street, to the house that Valentine built. They got out and picked their way along the front walk, up to the dark-windowed, two-story Cape Cod. Beneath its snowy blanket it looked sinister, she decided, as if it had something to hide.

"I had an optimistic thought," she said quietly, watchful. "If Clay's been here, now that he's made the trip and confronted his unknown, maybe it satisfied something in him and he'll be ready to leave."

Sarah nodded and raised one hand, pulling off her mitten so Adrienne could see her crossed fingers.

They mounted the porch. Rang the doorbell, and when that failed to rouse anyone, began to pound until she realized, no, no one was here, and selfishly, this brought relief. They retraced their steps, and she wondered if Valentine — or Clay — might later notice their prints and wonder like paranoiacs about what mysterious pair had come knocking.