Standing in his living room, while in the window the sun blazed diamond-brilliant off melting snow, he opened the day's mail. A Christmas card from Sarah — it made him smile even though he didn’t believe. And a large envelope with a Boston postmark, whose weekly arrival he had come to count on.
He shuffled through the papers long enough to see that they were research overviews, nothing specific as to case studies; dry reading ahead. Tales of chaos and mayhem were always more captivating.
My brothers,
he had once thought.
My crazy brothers.
Clay saved the brief, handwritten cover letter for last, as always. He would scrutinize the cramped scrawl and try to picture the stranger who had penned it.
I think you deserve a Christmas present,
the note said.
You know you're not alone in the world. But you don't fully know just how alone you're not. Not every Helverson's subject is on the books. Not every one of us is under 35. At least one of us is all of 44.
That's right. Us.
Give me a call sometime. You might even catch me in the mood to talk.
Still no name, but when Clay saw that a phone number had been provided, he realized that his hands had begun to tremble.
Joy to the world, indeed.
It was the one dependable aspect of working with the mentally ill, being able to find your boss in his office on Christmas Eve. They were still psychotic on holidays, and reality still as fluid. Adrienne found the weird stability in that comforting; something to believe in, count on.
"I'm wondering if you might be able to explain something to me that perhaps I should know about," Adrienne said.
She sat with both feet on the floor at her desk, hair tousled and in her eyes. Sarah had gone shopping and this phone was the only way she was sure Tempe still existed, or ever had.
"And that would be … what?" asked Ferris Mendenhall.
"Do you have any knowledge of something called the Cassandra Study?"
"No. I can't say that it sounds at all familiar. This is a study of what?"
"I assume it has something to do with Helverson's syndrome, but beyond that I haven't a clue."
"Where'd you come across the term?"
"I didn't. Clay did. It was mentioned in the latest mailing from whoever it is in Boston that … well, you know. Whoever."
"Mmm
hmm
." Mendenhall sounded irritable. He had said little on the subject of this rogue informant, but she could tell that the longer such a presence was felt, the more he loathed it. It was an element out of control, beyond his sphere of influence. It was, therefore, a small and hateful nugget of chaos. "In what context was this study mentioned?"
She did not need the paper before her to recollect it, so scant was the mention, but still it would have been preferable. Clay, though, had refused to leave the report behind when bringing it along this morning. At least he was sharing information again, which she counted as a major triumph. Possibly a miracle.
"It was in an overview on general conclusions drawn from the latest case studies on Helverson's subjects," she said. "The most up-to-date entries. Including Clay's. But there was this passing reference to something called the Cassandra Study. It said that the study's first significant data wouldn't be available for another three to four years. There was no definition. As if it'd be generally understood by the intended readership."
Mendenhall sighed; here we are on Christmas Eve and I do not need this. "You know, Adrienne, someone is getting a lot of satisfaction out of what's basically cloak-and-dagger bullshit."
"I agree."
Whoever it was
wanted
Clay to know about this study,
wanted
him to learn for himself rather than having it spoon-fed via the mail. Its importance would be magnified a hundredfold if someone had to go digging for it. There was nothing at all incidental about this, the dropping of a single hint in all those pages.
"And Clay Palmer's given you no indication of having been told anything about whoever's been sending him information, is that what I'm to understand?"
"Either he doesn't know or he's keeping it from me. I tend to believe he doesn't know. Whoever it is maintains power by remaining anonymous. But it's not coming from a prankster's mindset. Whoever it is obviously feels a strong need to protect him- or herself. And won't drop the mask until feeling assured of Clay's dependence. So he'll continue to protect that anonymity."
Mendenhall told her that he would get on the phone with someone at Arizona Associated Labs, see if they could shed any light on this study. Told her she had done the proper thing in phoning him instead of routing a call directly to AAL. He knew how to bureaucratically finesse his way around far better than she.
She thought he was about to say goodbye when he said, "You sound tired, Adrienne. You sound exhausted." His voice in her ear like a nagging conscience that hadn't quite gotten it right.
"No I don't, I sound drained. That's what you hear. There's a difference."
"Hmmm." She could almost hear him frowning into the phone, closed-mouthed, his droopy moustache twitching. "Is there anything you need to talk about, unload?"
She nearly laughed, straightening at her desk with her hair tossed back from her forehead, swishing along her shoulders, her head rolling limply back.
Was
there anything she needed to unload?
I have broken enough regulations to probably get me barred from practice. A week ago I stood present while a young man nearly liquefied himself and I did nothing to prevent it. I have watched as almost every inner support of my sole patient got torn from beneath him, and for some reason he still trusts that I have his best interests at heart. And I believe that I am ready to accept whatever comes from him next because I feel as if I've been hit and hit and hit again until I just can't be surprised anymore…
So precisely where would you like to begin?
"It's just been an intense emotional week for everyone around here, Ferris," she said. "And I'm not going to be home for the holidays. I'll get over it."
"I'll call back when I have anything for you. And if it's not later today, then, um … merry Christmas."
"Merry Christmas," she said. Automatic, a parrot's reply, and she hung up.
She found herself staring across the room to the painting that Clay had given her. Graham's bridge to nowhere, an iron island in the sky for seekers marooned. She could almost hear the turbulent river below; had he meant it to be life itself, amniotic waters become raging eddies of confusion? Of course he had — she could see it so clearly now. Graham could view life in no other way. None of them could, try as they might. They all clung valiantly to a precipice, attempting to climb, but the waters rose as inexorable as a tide to sweep them away, one after another.
She could see it in the way Clay had come to her following Graham's suicide. He had needed their session the way recovering addicts crave methadone. He'd come to her this morning and wrenched his way through news of Erin's departure, and his eyes, she imagined, looked like those of schizophrenics in the glory days of electroshock therapy. A blinding light and a lockjaw taste of metal, a whiff of burnt ozone in the forebrain, then a blank slate with hazy recollections of something wrong, somewhere, with someone. Clay had no fight left, it seemed, merely the capacity for acceptance. He was beaten and she had allowed it to happen.
Ferris Mendenhall called back after more than three hours, in the middle of the afternoon. Across the city, across the miles separating them, Adrienne imagined millions of people succumbing to the sloppy temptations of office parties. Would that she had no more worries than making a guileless fool out of herself. But no, no harmless sin for us, we guardians of the mind.
"I found out what the Cassandra Study is," Mendenhall said with slow contemplation. "When you were doing your cramming on genetics, and the double-Y … well, do I need to fill you in on the study that was run out of the Boston Hospital for Women between 1968 and 1975?"
"No," she whispered. "Oh Ferris. They're not doing it again, are they?"
"Yes and no."
Boston again. What was it with that city? The study to which he referred had been the project of a Harvard child psychologist and a pediatrician. They had karyotyped newborn boys in the maternity ward of the Boston Hospital for Women; those found to have an XYY genotype had been marked for systematic tracking, for years. Each boy's behavioral development was to be recorded by home visits, schoolteacher questionnaires, periodic psychological tests; no abnormality would remain undetected. They proposed what was termed anticipatory guidance: counseling to help families cope with whatever problematic behavior might arise.
Their project — and all similar studies — ended after seven years, largely from public outcry over shoddy ethics. Apparently the researchers had never considered the harm done to children by the application of stigmatizing labels, or the potential harm of overreacting to the typical aggression displayed by nearly all little boys. Apparently they had never considered the likelihood of self-fulfilling prophecy.
Yet someone was doing this again, with Helverson's subjects?
Yes and no.
"It was initiated two years ago," Mendenhall said. "Standard screenings of newborns in forty-seven hospitals in twenty-five cities across the country. All they're supposed to do is track the Helverson's babies. There's to be no contact, no counseling, no intervention … just statistical analysis of what happens to them down the road. It all goes into a central database at MacNealy Biotech in Boston. The parents aren't even informed when a baby's found to have the extra chromosome."
"So they've already located more, then?"
"Oh yes," he said, a fatalistic grumble of a laugh.
Her stomach tightened. "How many?"
"After two years, as of last week … six hundred and eighty-three. With a sixteen percent birth increase from year one to year two. Now, that may only be a statistical blip. A big blip, but…"
Adrienne sat, just sat. Holding the phone and listening to its soft electronic silence swallow her whole. Fill her empty hollows. Six hundred and eighty-three. And counting. In two years.
And these were just the known births. Someone who loved to crunch numbers would have compared that birth rate with national averages, maybe that of all industrialized nations, even globally. They would have estimates, how many were really out there. Unfound and unnamed, on no rosters. But out there.
The ones already studied? The adults? The Clay Palmers, the Mark Alan Nances, the Timothy Van der Leuns? They seemed like such rarities because they had been discovered by accident; oh, but what an informed and directed effort could pinpoint.
And in that gulf between the first adults who had been found to carry their rogue chromosome, and these infants, how many resided? How many teenagers, how many grade-schoolers had found themselves maladapted to a world not made for them? How long before they began to make that world over, in their own image?
Six hundred and eighty-three, and birth rates on the rise.
They were filling cribs, and soon enough would fill streets. Perhaps that turbulent makeover had already begun.
"Adrienne? You still with me?"
"Yeah." Always functioning.
"I'm afraid I have some bad news for you. Although it's nothing you weren't expecting eventually." Mendenhall cleared his throat. "AAL informed me this afternoon that they'll be cutting your funding at the end of the year. Which gives you another week to wrap things up with Clay Palmer."
"Wrap things up?" she said. "The kind of issues we're dealing with can't just be
wrapped up
." Her volume was rising. "It's the height of callousness to pretend otherwise."
"You knew this was coming, Adrienne." Mendenhall's voice had gone flatter, sterner. "Therapy never led the priority list. You knew that when you agreed to this."
She drew a strong breath through her nose, let it out the same way, right into the mouthpiece. "Thank you for giving me the news, Ferris. You're a good administrator … and that's about it."
She hung up, and wouldn't it have felt better to rip the phone from its wall plug, hurl it across the room? Of course it would. Clay would have done so.