Not that she was free of self-indulgent curiosity. This too he could spot when she posed questions, or lit up with fascination at some minor revelation he thought insignificant. She had an agenda as mercenary as it was irrelevant to him, but as long as she kept humanity in the foreground he would not begrudge her the rest.
"You'll win some shrink, somewhere, the research grant of a lifetime," Uncle Twitch had told him last year, mostly joking but not entirely, and it had been one of those rare occasions when Graham had actually laughed.
Right out of the psychoanalytical starting gate, Adrienne put him on twice-weekly sessions, Sundays and Wednesdays, and would periodically pop by for brief visits. Spot-checks?
As faces went, he supposed hers was the only one he looked forward to seeing in the hospital; the rest were drones and human dross. Adrienne Rand, though, brought with her this pinched look of interest, as if his room wasn’t just one more stop along the hall. He appreciated that she never exuded patently false cheer. For what it was worth, perhaps she was of more inherent honor than most who wore the Homo sapiens designer tag.
She was tall, only an inch or so under his own five-nine, and with her blond hair pulled back, and the seriousness with which she took his case, it soon became entertaining sport to fantasize her into roles he doubted he would ever tell her about. He saw her in black Nazi leathers and crimson lipstick, a Goddess of Pain and Humiliation who ruled the halls of an unspeakable clinic unknown to the medical mainstream. She would carry a riding crop for effect, and an ominous black bag filled with painful instruments of exploration. A well-greased glove might slide down his throat as she sought to tear out his heart, or up his rectum in search of secrets dirtier still. It might very well be the only thing before which he would have to lie helpless…
Just idle thoughts. Everyone needed diversions while on the mend.
In truth, she gave him no encouragement that such fetishes were part of whatever twisted upbringing she would call her own, so he settled for satisfying her endless curiosity about his past.
He told stories, random synaptic firings with no apparent pattern, and he noticed that the more he remembered, the less Adrienne spoke. She did not have to; she was sucking it out of him with her eyes and her presence alone.
So here it is, Dr. Adrienne Rand. Surely you've heard whining tales of misfits before, but if it means that much to you:
Doesn't everybody have parents who go through life looking at each other as if they both have made a horribly wrong turn somewhere in the distant past, but cannot recall precisely where? Probably it is easier, in the day-to-day, to pretend it never happened than to do something about it. One can fall for years before striking bottom, and it doesn't take nearly the effort of one minute of climbing.
Doesn't everybody have a father who was nearly forty by the time he got around to siring offspring? A father who proudly fought with the Marines in Korea and let no one forget it, and who saw his firstborn as a prospective little soldier to be marched around and around within the house on peculiar drills? Three hours is forever when you're five. Left, right, left, right, and don't you dare cry, you little pussy, if you cry I'll smack you and your mother, and you'll watch. He learned to toe the line, and by the time he was old enough to understand the omnipresent television show called Vietnam, and listen to his father's armchair Pentagon rhetoric about everything that was being mishandled there, young Clay's big fear in life was that it would all end before he was old enough to ship over.
Doesn't every father hold his kid's hand over the gas-stove burner, an exercise in discipline?
Doesn't everybody have a mother whose eyes deaden with every increase in breast droop and hip expansion, and to whom vodka is a wretched god that gives and takes away? A mother who, too often, cries herself to sleep on a sagging couch and clutches her child to her heart and, with reeking breath, murmurs promises of tomorrow? We'll go away, for the rest of our lives, but remember, you can't tell Daddy, it's our own special secret.
Doesn't everybody have brothers and sisters who failed to survive? He was first, the eldest, therefore the strongest. His survival seemed perfectly natural at the time, as one crib death and then three miscarriages claimed all others who might be called siblings. He recollected his small, solitary celebrations with root beer and a hidden cache of firecrackers, because he had outlived yet another.
How insular, this world of childhood, when anything might be perceived as the norm.
"How old were you when your sister died?" Adrienne asked, a Wednesday afternoon in her office. He actually looked forward to the sessions more and more. They were the two hours per week when he felt farthest from his itching bones.
"I was five," he said. "It's one of my first real memories. I can't say for sure, but something about that day had a real Sunday-afternoon feel to it. I think we'd been to church … and I remember a roast smell, all through the house. Beef roast, that was always Sunday food. Special. Family day, you know. All God's children love a good roast."
He looked at Adrienne in her chair, legs crossed at the knee, where her interlocked fingers rested. All she did was nod, but he knew her nods by now, could differentiate among them. Yes, she was saying, go on, tell me more. Feed me.
"I remember my mother, her voice at first, coming out of the nursery and down the hall. High, very high, and loud. Like she was trying to talk, but something was clipping frequencies from her voice, so it was just this … this sound … this creepy sound. Crying, but uglier, just … nonsensical. Like the sound of chaos, if chaos could grieve. I'd never heard anything like that before. It scared the hell out of me. I just stayed put on the dining room floor — I was playing with a toy truck — but even though I was scared, what I really wanted to do was run down the hall and see why she was making that noise. Because whatever it was, if I saw it and I didn't scream, I knew I'd see something I'd never seen before. I didn't know what … maybe like a god suddenly showed up in there or something. It was Sunday, remember."
"Was this the first time your parents were forced to explain death to you?"
Clay nodded. Memories were like dominoes, one tripping another tripping another, until all lay flat and inert. "My father sat me down on the back stoop with him that evening. The sun was going down. One of the neighbors was grilling steaks, must have been. That smell of meat again." He shook his head. "The backyard seemed bigger at twilight. It always scared me then, I thought it was changing on me. I couldn't trust it, it wasn't the same place I'd play during the day. I, umm … I guess I must have asked where they'd taken Amy. It was the only time I can remember seeing him cry. Actual tears on that leathery, pitted face — it seemed so wrong. He told me God sent some people to take Amy away, because He needed more angels." Clay laughed. "I think that was the extent of my father's theological understanding. And if he thought he was giving me comfort, he couldn't have been more wrong. I sat there wondering, if it was that easy, what was to stop them from coming for me the next time?
"'At ease,' he told me. He actually said that, 'At ease.' And then he nodded and told me, just this once, it was okay to cry if I wanted to. I sat there and tried, but nothing happened, so I told him I'd save it for later. He put his arm around me and said he was proud of me for that."
"For staying strong, you mean."
"Not so much strong, as in control. Control, that was a very big issue for my father." He supposed it still was. He had neither seen nor spoken to nor corresponded with either parent since leaving Minnesota four years ago. His father would be sixty-four now; there was no reason to believe him dead. Men like that never died before living a full lifespan and more, inflicting their share of misery on the world. "Maybe that's what shook him up most about my sister's death. And my mother's round of miscarriages after that. It must have been her drinking that did those. She was probably so toxic inside, nothing could live for very long. He used to hit her but she wouldn't stop. Everything was way the hell out of his control. Maybe that's what first taught me that something could be out of his control. It was … liberating. So I became the miscarriage that lived."