by Brian Hodge
The factory; now there was a blister to poke. Clay had let Sarah share his inner sanctum when he probably would have waved his chair at Adrienne until she retreated. Jealous? Hell yes.
" — and he told me about the moths, that whole biological and environmental agenda under the surface, you know who I've kept thinking about?"
Adrienne gripped the wheel. This could only be weird. "Who?"
"Remember Kendra Madigan?"
She drew a blank for a moment, and then it hit her, hit her hard. "You've got to be kidding."
"No. I'm not. It might be an interesting thing to try with him, if he'd want to."
Adrienne, shaking her head, was adamant. "Interesting. That's a blithe way to put it. Especially when something like that is likely to do more harm than anything."
But this was Sarah she was talking to; typical Sarah, who now and then clung to the oddball and superstitious because she wanted to believe in a shortcut, and she would not be dissuaded. They saw eye-to-eye on much, but here they parted company.
They had heard of Kendra Madigan even before she had come to Tempe for a lecture and debate at the university a year and a half ago. She had been written up in a one-page article Sarah had seen in Newsweek, and Psychology Today had humored her if nothing else.
A professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a practicing hypnotist and psychologist, Kendra Madigan had written a book in which she claimed to have pioneered a hypnosis so deep it was possible to access the collective unconscious, the species memory that transcended the individual. No one of much note took her seriously, dismissing the technique as so much New Age hokum, although they stopped short of accusing her of fraud. She was, at worst, deluded, her ideas all the more controversial for her use of natural hallucinogens on some subjects. Predictably enough, her reception at Arizona State had been mixed, both enthusiastically pro and skeptically con.
Naturally, Sarah had been enthralled.
"You know what it's like?" Sarah asked. "It's like you're just giving lip service to Carl Jung, and not really putting your money where your ideology is. How can you anchor yourself in Jung like you do and deny the collective unconscious?"
"I never said I was denying it. Did I ever once say that?" Adrienne gripped the wheel harder. This was good, actually. Kept her from dwelling on Clay. "I think it informs most people on a preverbal level, symbolically, maybe in dreams. But you can't convince me someone can give it a voice and ask it questions. That comes close to being as ludicrous as psychics who claim they channel twenty-thousand-year-old entities."
"Oh, forget it." Sarah drew together with a frown. "We've had this argument before."
"It's not an argument, it's a discussion."
"Whatever it is, I'm not budging."
Good for you, Adrienne thought. One of us should be sure of herself.
She took her eyes off the highway as dawn struggled, let her gaze drift left, to the mountains. Great vast ranges of rock and earth, they looked so tame from here. Snow-drenched peaks sat wreathed in cataracts of cloudy mist like Olympian dwellings.
It was right that Clay had come this direction. Had she been forced to track him, she would have known instinctively. Deserts and mountains, the refuges of hermits … these called to him with a voice clearer than that of any human being. He professed to be an atheist but she was not convinced he meant it, seemingly compelled to touch something so great it might destroy him. Or maybe it was because he was so inefficient at destroying himself. Either way, he was a believer in search of a higher power.
They picked their way through Fort Collins, following the sketchy directions Clay had provided; found a route that led out the other side of town, to the northwest, toward the foothills at the base of a mountain drive. The city had thinned to its barest elements, the final fringes before civilization ended.
He had called from a pay phone at an all-night diner and gas station, a rustic outpost set amid generations of pines. They found him inside at a booth, as far from the other early diners as he could get, everyone under a warm comforting miasma of pancakes and cinnamon rolls, coffee and sausage gravy.
Clay said nothing as they approached, laced his hands around a steaming cup; she wondered how many times it had been filled, if that glaze in his eyes was due to caffeine or something deeper.
Adrienne slid into the booth across from him.
Sarah hitched her mittened thumb back over her shoulder. "Why don't I head over to the counter awhile, okay?"
"That's all right," Clay said, "you can stay."
"No," Adrienne said, looked at Sarah. "Go on, it'd be best if we were alone."
She complied, and Clay raised his head, his eyebrows, in mild surprise at her take-charge mood. He looked dreadful, paler than during his final visits, with days of stubble and his hair falling toward his eyes, sweaty and matted from two nights beneath the stocking cap beside him.
"If you called me because you need a taxi," she said, "then I'm afraid I may have to leave without you. If you called me to talk … I'm here."
It came close to an ultimatum, tough talk, but the time had come for that. It was the push of the crowbar that got the story started, interrupted by a waitress, and she took coffee only. He told her about Friday night, some pitiful encounter with Erin. She tried to listen with professional distance but things had gone too far. She pictured the two of them on that floor, too crippled to even hold each other — the most heartbreaking image she had yet associated with him, worse even than the authoritarian abuses by his father; worse than the boy given permission to cry, just the once, for his dead baby sister and discovering he could not.
He told her of hitting the road again, of walking into Fort Collins. Of the record store. And there was remorse in his voice, his eyes; genuine remorse, held in check of course, but present, and that was something to cling to.
"I just kept hitting him," he whispered. "I don't know why."
And as long as he felt bad about it, that made it all right? No, it didn't. Some kid whose worst offense was poor public-relations skills was dead or hospitalized. Yet all she could do was analyze how Clay might be kept in the clear. He had paid with anonymous cash; the shop's only other customer was behind him and would give a poor description; he had worn gloves and left no prints on the plastic carousel. He might never be connected with this.
But if he was, and it came out that she had decided to shield him from the consequences, she could lose her license and might even face prosecution. She shut her eyes.
I am aiding and abetting a felony. She was making a value judgment of ghastly proportions: Clay's crime was less than would be the crime of sending him to prison.
Neither of them spoke for a minute or more. She looked at him sitting there in his ancient field jacket and the layers beneath, saw him as a mountain man driven by the snows down from his chosen isolation. Unfit for society once he got there, living by some simpler brutal law hardwired into his brain.
"After you broke off our sessions, there was something that occurred to me, that I wanted to tell you," she said. "But you wouldn't let me. I'd been listening to tapes of old sessions, and going through your file … and what I wanted to tell you then was: You may think you have no control over yourself, but you do. Because with all the conflicts you've been in, you could've killed somebody … yet you haven't. I wanted to tell you that you must've had something inside that was holding you back. Even if you never believed it was there, Clay, it was."
"Was," he repeated. "Did you hear yourself?"
She nearly winced. "Clay, I don't know what applies anymore. Whatever it is you've done, I don't even know how bad it is." She drew in tighter with a smoldering and unexpected anger. He was turning into her career's most spectacular failure. They taught you not to take such things personally, although doctors did it anyway. "But I'll tell you what I do know: Ever since you started getting those envelopes from Boston, you've acted as if you've completely given up on yourself. You. Have given. Up."
"Am I your doctor?"
It was as blunt a demand as she'd made, and quieted him; he wouldn't be accustomed to that tone of voice. He set his cup down and she saw the child in him, fleetingly, still tethered to stakes more than twenty years old.
"Yes," he surrendered.
There was no triumph in hearing it. No relief. Worse, for a moment she thought she might have hoped he'd say no. Coward.
"Am I going to jail?"
"I don't know," less an answer than a sigh. I am not proud of myself, any way I turn, I am not going to feel proud of myself. "Maybe we should wait and see what you've done before…" Before what? Rationalizing it any further? "Before deciding that."
"Thank you," he whispered, and she could not recall him ever having said that before.
"There's something we need to air right now," she said. "This case, it quit being remotely normal a long time ago. I'm not even sure when that happened, probably before you left the hospital, and since then it's only gotten more deviant. I've gone out on one limb after another, I've done things I swore I'd never do, I'm doing them right now —"
Adrienne caught her tongue. Clay wasn’t the one to tell this to; she should be talking to a fellow professional, should be on the phone with Ferris Mendenhall the way recovering alcoholics call their sponsors. She had gone too far. And was not prepared to stop.
"What I need to know from you is this: What do you want?"
Clay looked only perplexed.
"In the beginning you wanted an explanation about why you react to things the way you do. You wanted understanding. For better or for worse, it looks like you got it. No thanks to me, for the most part, I realize that. But that can't be all. I refuse to believe that's all there was motivating you. So if I'm still your doctor, what else is it you want?"
Clay scratched at his stubbled chin, then looked at her with the smile of one who hopes for the return of lost loves, resurrection of the dead; things that can never be.
"I want to live in a different world," he said.
"I can't help you with that."
Nodding, Clay sighed. "It's a loveless world, you know."
This she denied, pointing toward the counter, where Sarah sat with her back to them, picking at a plate of something; braided and unlike anyone else around, all the shift workers, the early rising sportsmen.
"I am in love," she told him quietly. "Deeply in love. It's the best and most healing thing in the world. But I wouldn't be in love if I didn't allow myself to take that risk."
"I won't deny that." He chose his words with care, as if taking refuge on the safer ground of theory. "But institutionally, it's still a loveless world. The way we're taught to survive, get ahead, to prosper? You can't tell me that love plays any part in that." Frowning now. "That confused me for the longest time, when I was younger."
There he went again, making sense. She was still trying to cobble together a response when Clay went rampaging on. He may have given up on himself, but he never quit trying to root out an explanation.
"What do I want?" He grunted a tiny laugh. "Think about this: What do you think cancer wants?"
She had come to dread these asides. They felt as if he were taking her by the hand and leading her through minefields. Any moment an unexpected truth might explode in her face, while his path was so oblique she could never see them coming.
"You know what cancer is, don't you? It's rapid growth, is all it is, there's nothing magic about it. Cells start multiplying too fast, and so they form their own mass. It gets so, it's like the mass has a mind of its own. It doesn't fit in with the rest of the body but it wants to live anyway. And the more it thrives…" he said, leaving it open for her.
"The more the body suffers," Adrienne finished. The coffee began to curdle in her stomach like a sour pool. Cancer. He was comparing himself to cancer.
"Tumors," he murmured, his eyelids drifting. Had he gone the entire night without sleep? "If that's the way it goes in the human body, why not the body politic? They've decided now that the world's just one big complex organism anyway. So why shouldn't it get cancer? Everybody else is these days." He groaned. "I think it all just started growing too fast one day. Everything. Everybody. So tumors were inevitable, social tumors. Serial killers. Mass murderers. I'm just part of a new kind of tumor that got squeezed out of it all."
Adrienne breathed deeply, everything inside her crying out to be ill. The coffee had gone toxic, while even the scent of food had become oppressive, nauseous. She imagined all the Helverson's subjects, in united voice, reciting their manifesto: We are the cancers, the aberrations unable to serve the whole organism. We are the tumors birthed in decay and nourished on rot.
To which she could think of only one rebuttal.
"A tumor can't change its nature, Clay. A human being can."
"In theory," he said. "If a tumor had self-awareness, do you think it would want to kill its host? I don't think it would, it'd want to come to some coexistence." Pondering now, the dawn of new thoughts. "And maybe that's what I want…
"A separate peace."
Twenty-Three
They got him home and he stayed put, and, to Adrienne's great relief, accessible. No more avoiding her phone calls, he promised; back to his sessions. His latest bout of wanderlust had been aborted after just thirty-three hours, and she and Sarah were the only ones who even knew he had been gone.
It felt like more than a secret. It settled within her as a grim and ugly pact shared by conspirators who had buried a body by moonlight, who had smoothed the earth over as best they could, and swore an oath.
Thankfully, however, it had not literally come to that.
She had bought the Sunday edition of the Fort Collins Coloradoan from a vending machine before they had left town, and found nothing on the assault in the record store. She picked up the next day's edition in Denver and learned that, whatever his transgressions, Clay was no killer. The CSU junior he'd attacked had been hospitalized with a skull fracture and lacerations; not good, but a long way from a murder victim. The police had only the vaguest description of his assailant, and she reasoned that, if they investigated much at all, they would concentrate locally. What reason would they have of suspecting the assailant to be a drifter? How many drifters, in the winter, went shopping for cassettes?
Clay conformed to no pattern.
He'll get away with this, she thought. He'll get away with this because I let him.
Adrienne got him, under some protest, to resume taking lithium; got him another bottle to replace those he had flushed. She got him to agree to three sessions in six days — a crisis schedule, but surely this qualified.
She did not shy away from his attack on the student. In the eyes of the world they might pretend it never happened, but not with each other. She had him dissect it, analyze his feelings at each stage; they took it apart until they could scrutinize the incident frame by frame, like a shaky film of an assassination.
She hammered away to reinforce the notion that he had a conscience, and since it was operable after the fact he should be able to employ it beforehand. It would require that he make an effort to pause before acting on impulse, and imagine having completed whatever he might be tempted to do. Carry it to its ends: Who would be hurt, who would suffer? He should close his eyes, if need be, and feel his way through the pain that lay in wait for everyone; better to summon forth imaginary guilt than render the real thing necessary.
Neither did she ignore Clay's new hypothesis that he and the others were social malignancies. Although the more she gave it thought, the more it seemed that Clay had intuitively hit upon something that made a bit of sense on a literal level, as well as metaphorically. Biochemically, some people simply were programmed for violence, and the surroundings in which they grew up could have a tremendous influence.
She knew th
at aggression had a chemical basis. In the brain’s vast web of circuitry, behavioral messages were relayed by chemicals known as neurotransmitters, two of which — serotonin and norepinephrine — regulated aggression. In studies, men whose spinal fluid was found to have high levels of serotonin, which carried inhibitory messages, routinely scored low on aggression; those higher in norepinephrine were correspondingly more aggressive. That was why Clay had been prescribed lithium in the first place; it worked by boosting serotonin levels. She was not convinced it was wholly effective on him — it did not work on psychotics and calculating predators — but it could not hurt.
Yet it was those environmental factors that really intrigued her. It had been proven that a child's early surroundings could even influence his biochemistry. Young boys from homes in which they faced situations that provoked aggressive responses were often found to have begun adapting to that environment: Their systems had begun to produce less serotonin, more norepinephrine.
They were gearing up to survive.
So why not take a wild leap and superimpose that process upon a much larger picture? Suppose the bodies — the very genetic encoding — of human beings were responding to the colossal pressures exerted by a world whose rate of change was increasing exponentially.
Was it so mad a thought? It had taken a billion years for the brains of the first vertebrates to evolve into the intelligence of primates. In a mere two million, self-aware humanity had developed and assumed dominion. From common ancestors, the Australopithecus and Homo genera diverged, the former dying out, a failed lineage, while the latter thrived. Homo habilis learned to use tools, and was replaced by Homo erectus, who mastered fire and hunting, who was in turn replaced by Homo sapiens, who mastered all else after emerging perhaps 40,000 years ago. Within the past 6000, modern civilization had arisen; the past 4500, enduring architecture. The past three hundred, the industrial age. The past fifty, nuclear fusion. The past thirty, the ability to set foot on another celestial body. And since then had come the manufacture of artificial hearts and fiber-optic filaments, and the development of laser microsurgery.