Adrienne had to force herself to breathe. Imagining the scene for herself: an eviscerated man and the carrion stench that must have surrounded him, in the shadow of a valley between mountains of trash, while smoke from refuse fires churned overhead, machinery swaying in the background. She was seasoned, and rarely was she forced to conceal genuine repugnance, but this was one of those moments.
"The sight of him," she said, "it didn't … upset you."
"It was repulsive. But you can't deny it: What's repulsive is also fascinating. I kept staring because it didn't seem real. Five or ten minutes, it must have been. And then one of the cranes swung over, and the whole hillside came avalanching down on him. Buried him completely. So I walked away."
"Without reporting it to anyone?"
He shook his head. "Except for whoever put him there in the first place, I guess I'm the only one who knows he's there."
Clay didn't say anything else, seeming distanced from that afternoon, describing it almost as if it had happened to someone else. She tried to use the growing spotlight of silence to coax more from him, but this time it wasn't working.
"What was it about the experience that made you feel you had to leave home for a while?"
He stared down, as if answers were to be found on the floor. "I'd been looking at him for a minute or two, trying to figure out how long he'd been there. Overnight, I was guessing. And then I had to stop and think:
Well hell, where was
I
last night?
For a few seconds, I didn't know. No memory, nothing. I came out of it after a minute, and I knew I hadn't done it. But that didn't make me feel relieved, not really, because I started thinking,
Well, if it wasn't me, maybe it
could
have been, and could I really
do
that to someone, if I went out of my head?
It was like getting slapped in the face, and hearing somebody tell me, 'You've got a lot bigger problem than you ever thought.'"
Adrienne pulled herself out of it a little at a time — a vague feeling of uncleanness, the clash of values in how she could never have left a murder victim behind, a secret buried by a city's refuse — and likely Clay never knew she was trying so hard not to judge. She spoke again of predatory ethics versus the conscience he obviously had somewhere within, if not always accessible. Spoke of the way people could latch onto symbols of their guilt over events entirely unrelated. He was no killer. Was he?
Not yet.
"When you told me about my chromosomes," he said, mouth curling down, "that about did me in. But I asked, didn't I?"
Adrienne noticed that he was actually trembling. Another peek into vulnerabilities only rarely glimpsed. It reminded her of pets owned when she was younger, taking them to a kennel or the vet; thrust into circumstances beyond their understanding, their warm furry bodies seeming smaller as they huddled, gripped by fear's seizure. Her heart would break, always.
Clay, trembling.
"But I remembered a few weeks ago I said I'd keep talking to you because it could be one more step toward understanding myself. That's why I'm here now. I might not always like what I find out, or even take it very well … but all I want to do is stay in this for the duration."
*
The quest for self-knowledge was a noble endeavor, as she saw it, but it didn’t exist in a vacuum. Clay could look within, and she could show him where, could help dry the tears when what he saw there seemed too ugly or hopeless to bear.
But it had gone beyond that now: Clay one of the rarest genetic commodities in existence, one of less than a dozen living known Helverson's syndrome lab rats on the globe. What had been a routinely simple, balanced doctor-patient dyad was opened up to accommodate new strangers with degrees, with hypotheses, with agendas of own, and a never-ending catalog of questions.
Who comprises his biological family?
Has he any brothers, sisters?
Any children that he has fathered?
Any somatic deviations noted — physiological, biochemical, neurological, and so forth?
Any pronounced differences in his healing faculties?
What behavioral patterns are exhibited when he is confronted with a controlled battery of stress-inducing stimuli?
May we have additional tissue samples?
More, and more, and more.
Specialists all, geneticists with concentrations in development and population and other fields, along with their affiliate researchers in mutation's other ramifications, they made the cross-town pilgrimage from Arizona Associated Labs to see the new prize. Paying heed to the protocol of hospital hierarchy, they were warmly received by Dr. Ferris Mendenhall, who conferred with Adrienne, who in turn approached Clay, partly on their behalf, partly for his own: "They want to learn more about you — they'll be able to find out more than I or anyone else on this hospital staff can."
"It doesn't mean they'll be replacing you, does it?" seemed to be his main concern.
She shook her head. "No. You'll just have busier days here, is all."
Clay shrugged. "That doesn't sound entirely bad, you know."
Adrienne smiled, forcing it, this time touching him on one cast and the thin fingertips protruding from its end. They felt cold before he drew them away. Cold as her silly sense of loss, forced to share, forced to work and play well with others whose interest in Clay was based on his status as an oddity — and really, shouldn't she be beyond this sort of petty resentment?
That doesn't sound entirely bad…?
I do hope you can still say that by the time they decide they're through with you…
If they ever do.
*
Bad? No, not at first, nothing that distressed him, pained him, certainly nothing that bored him. It was all new. The body, oh, they were big on that, poking, prodding, charting, loading him into machines that ground electronically around him and bombarded him with radiation, magnetic fields, whatever could be used to peer inside without the aid of a scalpel. Not that they were far away from that particular violation either.
Blood and hair samples, tissue scrapings, urine specimens — here you go, have one on me. Humans make such wonderful resources, for they are always renewable.
He laid his brain open to them — these doctors who had no need for names, they were just the tall one, the stubby one, the one with clammy hands, the one with the mole on her cheek. With every day that passed, Dr. Adrienne Rand accrued new dimensions of reality by comparison. These others, they were inquisitive to the point of farce, comical in their seriousness, surreal in their relentless clinical precision. They were Nazis.
But if even one could train a penlight on some previously shadowed corner inside him, to illuminate a malignant growth he could squash like a vermin, it might all be worth it.
He free-associated, looked at Rorschach blots, composed extemporaneous stories to accompany flash cards. They measured his intelligence with a battery of tests, qualified his personality traits with the MMPI, inquired of his sex life and his dreams.
They described situations for him and asked how he would react.
You are confronted by a mugger on the street. What do you do?
I'd try to tear the asshole's head off. How do you think I ended up
here
, genius?
You are alone after work in an office and realize your boss has left his filing cabinet unlocked. Somewhere in one drawer, you know that there is a file containing employee evaluations. What do you do?
I'd make copies of all of them and sell them to whoever wanted a look at their own or anybody else's.
You are told by someone you love and have lived with for two years that she is leaving you. How do you react?
Can we … can we stop for today?
What do you do?
What do you do?
What do you do?
It was better than working, he supposed: regular hours but no one whose approval he was trying to maintain. Just be himself and they were satisfied. Although it wasn't as if he was drawing a paycheck, was it? And here he was, exerting as much effort as any of them. They would go back to their labs flushed with success, having peeled back another layer … but only because he had agreed to show it to them. That should be worth something, shouldn't it? For with every day that passed, it felt less and less as if he were going to get much benefit out of this at all. They were happy to see him only because of
what
he was, not
who
, and his problems were only buzzwords in their terminology.
This was no arrangement of mutual beneficiaries.
And then the gene meddlers led him down the primrose path of the past, to shove it into his face. He was the son of his mother and father, all right — but still with his own secrets yet to be explained.
They had arranged for his parents to be screened back home in Minneapolis, the both of them eager to yield up their tired blood for the sake of a son neither seen nor heard from for four years. There had been no sign of Helverson's syndrome in either of them. Naturally. Their DNA had been free of taint, the both of them pure and unadulterated specimens. Proud veteran and loving home-maker, these two were suburbia, they were America at its finest. Fascist and alcoholic, they were every self-perpetuating shame concealed and denied behind a picket fence and a gingham curtain.
Of course they had checked out fine — they had no
need
of chromosomes gone awry. They were ruined in so many other ways.
Did they tell you about the dead ones?
Clay considered asking.
The weaker ones, my brothers and sisters that died in the crib, or never drew a single breath outside the womb at all? They let you in on that family legacy?
Not asking, fearing the answer. Imagining ghouls in lab smocks dispersed in a cemetery, seeking the powdery old bones of babies dead for twenty years. Here's a shovel — we'll expect the karyotype by tomorrow afternoon.
And then the inevitable. Here was a scenario better than any fabricated stress test:
You have spent the last four years of your existence trying to amputate yourself from a spawning ground of hypocrisy and ineffectuality and meaninglessness. You have tried to tell yourself that you have no love left for them, that they forfeited it long ago in ways they could never possibly imagine. You know they tried to kill you one screaming nerve at a time. You were the abortion that lived. And now they want to see you, your parents want to see you. What do you do?
What do you do?
What do you do?
I tell you to go to hell. And then…
I cry.
*
Clinicians, even in his dreams —
meat-metal god-puppets in caverns of iron, deep, deep, where boilers thump and steam-jets hiss scalding clouds that condense to drip from tiny screaming mouths, and gray-cheeked faces of slag pile fetuses heaped halfway to ceiling
in lab coats of rust they welcome him, Clay, star patient, welcome to the convulsion factory: you are meat, you are nerve endings, and you are ours
the examination table a vast slab, corrosive with its crusted layers, black on red on gray, runneled with fluid runoff troughs, and here they spread him, arms and legs akimbo,
Dr. Mengele, I presume?
and in he leans with trigger finger spastic, Clay pinned by rivet-gun crucifixion, wrist, wrist, ankle, foot, the peg nails burning molten red to sear flesh to bone to charred marrow
girders like steel bone, clanking down from ceiling and up from floor to hold him in place, organic straps tightening across his forehead/throat/ribs/hips/knees, becoming one with the slab in symbiotic bondage —
and he feels the pulsing shudder of gears, turn, turn, grind, ratcheting the slab to lengths never hinted at by its cold hard solidity
clank
clank
screams drowned out by piercing bone-saw whine in his ears as they hack at him with tools growing from their limbs like phallic pistons, we will penetrate you in 100 trillion orifices
a stranger is just an enemy you haven't assessed yet
pierced a thousand times over with razored syringes whose plungers slide back to draw blood flowing like rust-water clots