by Brian Hodge
Timothy swept an arm across half the table, cleared it to the floor so that Clay might have a place to rest his elbows when he sat. Apologizing when Clay was seated, "I'm sorry it's such a mess around here, I'm on disability, I should pay someone…"
"You've been to Boston? Who is it that's there? I really need to know before I get there, but he won't tell me his name."
"Not even on a name basis with him yet, huh?" Timothy drank, then went scraping through an assortment of electrical components scattered over his half of the table. Wires like snipped arteries, pieces of broken circuit boards. From a tangle of cords he brought out a soldering iron and turned it on, watched it begin to heat. Clay sat mesmerized as a single fleck of some dead fire burned off its tip, sent a wispy coil of smoke toward the ceiling.
"His name is Patrick Valentine. I was there in the summer. I think it was last summer." When Timothy scratched at his forehead, his fingers came away flaked with dead skin. "You really didn't know his name?"
Clay shook his head. No, I didn't.
"Then what are you doing going there so soon? Don't you think you should know a man's name before you let him put you to stud like some horse?" When he raised his eyes from the table and noted the incomprehension in Clay's, Timothy's head sagged toward one shoulder, then he slapped Clay, once, with a stinking hand. It might once have been a strong blow. "You really are a virgin, then, aren't you? You really don't know about that girl he's got up there, that he found somehow, you don't know about her?"
Clay shook his head no, still no, and perhaps he should leave this table. Timothy Van der Leun began rocking back and forth as the soldering iron radiated a shimmer from its smooth beveled tip.
"I really wanted to do it," he whispered, looking somewhere off to Clay's right. "I did, I wanted to, and he wanted me to do it, and so did she —" Twisting like a junkie starting to sweat, wretched memories leavening the fix. "My father used to think he was a real holy man until he realized they couldn't cure me. They used to feel sorry for him, I think, but he never … he never told them the way he used to whip me for those dreams I'd have, or where, the way he'd come in to check the sheets every morning."
Clay felt a struggle in his own hands; wanting to reach out, grip Timothy by the shoulders and shake him until he got back on track. What girl, who are you talking about? Going so far as to raise one hand, but no further. There was something diseased about this man, exuding from every pore. He was as untouchable as a shadow.
"I really wanted to," he said again, though from the deadness at the core of his eyes, desire had burned out long ago. "But I just couldn't get past being there in her bed, looking at her face."
Clay watched him tap the soldering iron against the tabletop the way normal people tapped pencils. More scars for the imitation wood, little furrows smoldering with the acrid reek of burnt plastic. Thinking, Two years between us, just two years — is this what my next two are going to be like? Because if they are, then maybe Graham saved a place for me.
How terribly sad it must be for people who meet brothers, sisters, about whom they have known nothing all their lives, only to find their siblings to be worse shambles than they themselves are. The conclusion would be inescapable: We're congenital losers.
"I wanted to," this time like a vow, "but her face, it was right there … it would've been like humping my own sister, and I just couldn't … do anything."
And Timothy went on, dissolving slowly in his chair, oily tears mingling with sweat that broke freely across his face. Clay sweating too, the house closing around them, warm as an oven. If they died here, the house would bake them into leathered mummies before they were found, brethren of a hideous dynasty.
my own sister
This was an even greater revelation than the name of Patrick Valentine.
Then she's mine, too.
He was about to leave when Timothy smiled hopefully, with jittering thin lips, and pointed across the table, saying, "Give me that jar of Vaseline." Clay slid it over, wiped the film on his pants before it could absorb into his fingers.
Timothy Van der Leun rolled up one sleeve like a junkie ready to plunge the needle, an eager light gleaming in his eyes. All the way up to the bicep, the forearm bared — Clay's face went slack when he saw the sores, the scabs, the thickened blisters. They covered the inner arm like an oozing crust.
"I don't usually start this until night," Timothy told him, "but since you're here…"
He dipped the tip of the soldering iron into the Vaseline — "So it doesn't stick as bad," he said — and as it began to bubble on the tip, he found a clear spot on his arm. Held it there until it began to smoke. The sizzle wasn't as bad as Clay thought it would be. The mice were louder, in their way. But the burnt pork smell was in his nose before he could do anything.
"I know how we went wrong — just look at the way we start out growing from the sperm and the egg," said Timothy. "One cell, two cells, four, eight…" The soldering iron dipped back to the Vaseline. "That's the way we grow. This thing in our cells, I can fix it the same way, I know that now."
Back to his arm, contact, with a soft incinerating hiss and a curl of smoke.
"A few cells at a time," he said, as if he had never known such rationed bliss. "A few cells at a time."
Clay did not leave until Timothy resumed where, the night before, he had left off on his chest.
Thirty
Listening for his return was ostensibly a passive task, but it seemed she was getting little else done. Adrienne sat at the motel room's table while the cursor of the laptop computer blinked hypnotically — final evaluations of Clay, they might yet be of use.
She paced to the window a fourth time and found the parking lot still barren of her car.
"Gee Mom, do you think Clay stayed late after the prom?" asked Sarah from across the room. She was sprawled facedown on the bed, bare feet kicked up over her bottom as she pored through one of her thesis books.
It came so easy to her, waiting did. Life. Everything. Had Sarah ever failed at a single endeavor? Probably she had — she was not, after all, inhuman — but she never once gave the impression that failure was within her range of possibilities. She lived and breathed and ate and slept and made love as if the world would fall naturally into place around her. To lesser mortals she could be intimidating that way.
"He'll be back when he's ready," she said. "You'll know."
Adrienne crossed the room, sank onto the bed beside her, let Sarah play with her hair because she knew Adrienne liked that, the way it unknotted her body, her mind, her soul.
"I wasn't ready for all this," Adrienne said, a confession. "When I agreed to leave Tempe, I didn't think of the way I'd be letting them take all my other patients away from me." Both of Sarah's hands went slowly swirling across Adrienne's scalp. "Clay's been all I've had left in the world to validate me. He's been it. I should have known better than to put myself in that situation."
A position dangerous to them both. Perhaps, subconsciously, it had been too much like a shift into private practice, where there was no profit incentive in a cure, only the continual hope of one.
"I don't validate you?"
"Sure you do. But he validates a part of me you'd never be able to. A part I wouldn't want you to."
Sarah pushed the book aside and slowly lay across her, like a widow flung over the broken body of a mate claimed by war. "If someone told you that in a session, you'd tell her she was compartmentalizing her life, and relying too much on people who might let her down."
"So I'm notoriously blind to my own faults."
"Just so long as you know."
Sarah held to her, and she to Sarah, asymmetric but fitting together nevertheless. Sarah's cheek was pressed along her thigh, hip near her head. Adrienne nuzzled harder against Sarah's hip, breathing deeply to drag the musky scent of her within. A smell could take you anywhere, to any time. Sarah was the one real thing she had on this trip that reminded her of home; even the rainstick had been left in D
enver. Holding Sarah so, breathing her in, she could touch Tempe better than if she'd brought a jar of dirt from the desert. We'll be there again, soon, in our own home, in our own bed … and I will be wiser.
They stayed this way until she heard her car pull up outside, heard the slam of its door. Footsteps, aimless and undecided, then a quick knock. Halfway to answering, Adrienne heard the clunk of the neighboring door through the thin walls. When she opened her own, Clay was not there — only her keyring, lying on the threshold.
She picked them up, held them in the open doorway while a frozen wind flooded past.
Sarah watched from the bed, eyes big and incisive, now her largest feature with her hair still hanging in its curtain of braids. "I know what your first impulse is. But give him some time alone. He needs that respect." A smile. "And close the door. My feet are freezing."
"Put some socks on for a change."
She gave Clay a half hour, then another fifteen minutes just to test herself. And when at last she knocked and he let her in, she saw that he looked more pale than he had late this morning, when borrowing her keys. He sat diminished, as if his bones had shrunk, rocking himself in place with tiny, controlled movements. His staring eyes possessed the frightful wisdom of one who has seen something terrible; with some people, you could just tell. She found his room preternaturally still, none of the vitality here that she felt next door. Without Sarah's presence, how cheerless and arid this place really seemed.
"You found him at home," she said.
He would not look at her, sitting on the edge of the bed, his army field jacket crushed beneath him. "Yeah."
"And he wasn't quite what you'd hoped for?"
"I don't know what I was hoping for. But I don't think I could have hoped for … for this."
She had never been clear on why he had sought out Timothy Van der Leun, what he had hoped to accomplish; all along Clay had been reticent to discuss it. A Boston destination she could understand, but in Van der Leun's case, there had been no tantalizing prior contact. She supposed, simply enough, that it was crucial for Clay to at last come face-to-face with another like himself.
Even if that other self proved hopelessly lost.
"He's destroying himself," Clay said. "Destroying himself and thinking it'll cure him. But maybe … maybe he's right, in a way."
He said he'd rather go for a walk than sit, so she retrieved her coat and met him outside. They headed for the sidewalk along the street, downtown Indianapolis rising in the distance. A few yards away, heavy traffic ground through old slush as clouds of exhaust fogged past them. Here they strolled, upon the urban moors. New Year's Eve — she had almost forgotten — and was there not a hint of frivolity in the petroleum air?
A block had gone by before he told her what Timothy Van der Leun had been doing to himself. She thought of Clay's own bent toward self-mutilation. Likely this now struck him as an inherited tendency, a mad passion buried deep in the genes to which they all might be prone, as vulnerable as the members of some doomed family in the most grotesque Southern Gothic imaginable.
"I don't imagine seeing him that way left you feeling any too reassured," she said.
"Oh, I don't know. Maybe it's the kind of thing I expected all along, and didn't realize it." A crooked smile, thrown up in hurried self-defense. "He had his agenda and he was sticking to it. Same self-immolation agenda as mine, isn't it? Only he's going at it a little more directly."
Damn his cynical hide, anyway. It was her last official day on the job and even if it took until midnight she vowed to get beneath it.
"Agenda," she said, and began to quicken her stride. Her legs were nearly as long as his — let him work to keep up. "So where does this agenda come from?"
"Remember chromosome twelve? I'd say we're looking like a stronger case for biological determinism all the time. If that's the way it is, then I'm prepared to accept that."
"Maybe, but you don't want to have to, do you? You may never admit it to yourself, but you're looking for a way to avoid that conclusion, and you're desperate to find it." When he said nothing she forged ahead. "You don't share the same fate as Timothy Van der Leun unless you allow it. I still maintain you're in control." A deep breath, let's try something. "Nobody knows just yet, but for the sake of argument, let's say that all of chromosome twelve is involved, all three copies. You've done some homework. How many chromosomes do you have left?"
"Twenty-two pairs."
"Forty-four chromosomes to three. Even if you're given over to biological determinism, you still have to account for a lot of genetic encoding in those other forty-four that doesn't have a thing to do, directly or indirectly, with chromosome twelve. It should speak as loud, if not louder. So let it have its say."
Clay grunted, staring at the sidewalk as they glided along. "Are you forgetting what my father and mother were like? I think I'd rather take chromosome twelve."
She rolled her eyes. He was good. Oh, he was good. "But maybe a lot of what was dominant in their genes turned out to be recessive in yours. And vice versa."
"And maybe not."
"But maybe so. A congenital soldier and a passive alcoholic? Neither one sounds very much like you."
He nodded, working his tongue inside his cheek; backed into a corner at last and he knew it. "Well, we could debate this all day and never really be sure of anything, other than that Helverson's syndrome isn't a good thing to have," he finally said. "Just a few cracked eggs in the genetic omelet. They'll have us figured out eventually."
"To a degree. Probably never completely."
"They're reading those DNA codes right this minute, you know. They'll have their map. They'll know us inside and out."
The Human Genome Project — such lofty goals propelled it, but it made her nervous as well. In full-bloom, the power of genetic knowledge would eclipse even that of nuclear fusion, yet thus far no one was even regulating it. Historically, great power was often wielded by clumsy hands at best; at worst, savage ones. For their owners understood only the mechanics of what they manipulated, never the grand underlying mysteries.
"And suppose they do have that map someday," she said. "You can look at a map of the Grand Canyon, but you can never get any true sense of what it's like until you stand at its rim. You can look at the full orchestral score of Beethoven's Fifth, laid out right in front of you, every note … but it's only the bare frame. You can't hear the music in it."
"And what do you think might happen," Clay said, "if you took a page or two from that score, and repeated it at random? It'd wreck the whole symmetry, wouldn't it?"
"It could. But depending on the skill of the musicians, they might just make it work."
He weighed this, kicked idly at a chunk of ice to send it skittering ahead of them along the sidewalk. "Well … Beethoven'd probably still be pissed."
It felt as if they had arrived at a friendly stalemate. She the proponent of self-determination, he the unwilling proselyte still waiting to be convinced. It was an existential dilemma, all right, and she began to wonder if her victory might not come about only in his living of it. That realization on Clay's part could lie years ahead, and she might never hear of it.
Clay frowned, a little bitter, a little bemused. "You know what the genetics labs are finding, now that they're starting to really get into the DNA codes? I read this not long ago."
"What's that?"
"Down on the level of those three billion base pairs that make up the DNA chains? A lot of it, all it is, is junk. Whole long strings of those pairs … they don't make up amino acids, they don't do anything, they're just there. It's all junk, it's static, it's waste. It means nothing."
"I didn't know that." Leave it to him to have found a wrinkle she'd missed.
"Don't you see? It's like life, broken down to the ultimate fractal: a few points of significance, and a lot of filler." He appeared oddly pleased with this conclusion; not triumphant, more worn down with the weight of it, as he walked with shoulders rounded.
They slowed, forced to stop at a corner by a red light as the traffic shifted, flowing before them in automated currents, like a school of minnows — many fish, one mind. The two of them had gone far enough, it seemed, and turned to retrace their steps.
"It's the ultimate joke on us," Clay said. "It has to be. It took so many thousands of years to get to the place where we could finally read it."
"So who told the joke?"
"Ask that and you're getting into a whole new area," he said. "That's the riddle."
*
They went their separate ways back at the motel, she to her room and Clay to his. He professed need of a shower, a long one, that he had left Timothy Van der Leun's feeling very unclean. It could take quite some time, she knew. There were residues that could defile a person in places where water could never flow.
Sarah asked how it had gone and Adrienne covered most of the highlights. Briefing Sarah had become second nature by now, had even begun to feel like the proper thing to do.
"Is he okay?" she wondered.
"He's a survivor." Adrienne hung up her coat, pried the calf-high boots from her legs. "It's what he does. For all I know it may even be what he’s programmed for." Stopping then, "I shouldn't have said that, listen to me, he's winning me over to his point of view."
"Maybe he's programmed to do that, too."
"No, I think that's general human nature," she said. "You've obviously not spent enough time in meat markets listening to the male of the species convince you that his other car really is a Porsche."
"You make it sound so inviting. But anyway," said Sarah, in that dismissive, wheedling way she adopted sometimes, a sign she was readying for a radical turn of thought. "As long as you're being so open-minded this afternoon…"
Adrienne greeted this the way a bull greets the flapping of the cape.
"How do you feel lately about taking Clay to see Kendra Madigan?"
Ah. The hypno-regressionist once more rears her controversial head. Clay's collective unconscious waiting like an oil well for Kendra Madigan's drill? She should have guessed.