One…
After another…
After another…
And it became obvious that there was at least one physical manifestation of Helverson's common to each of them.
They looked as if they could be brothers.
By the third one Adrienne wasn't even reading, just tearing into the files to get at the pictures, spreading them out into rows. All of them stared up from the tabletop like a bizarre family reunion. Variations, to be sure: hair color, eye color, skin tone. But structurally, the resemblance was eerie, all of them much like Clay: the subtle arch and curve of bones made streamlined, contoured as if to lean into wind; small bladelike noses and firm chins, and jawlines that curved efficiently around; watchful eyes, wary, few of them smiling. It was even noticeable beneath the more overtly Asian traits of the two Japanese.
They were not unattractive — to the contrary, in most cases — but taken together, they could not help but be unsettling. And in the smooth contours of their faces, so perfect in image after image, there was something almost reptilian about them—
And damn it, she was regarding them as a group again.
Yet it was so hard not to. Like brothers, as if some father with wanderlust had, thirty-five years ago, began to circle the globe and sow the seeds of a deviant progeny. His sperm somehow overpowering the theoretically equal influence of maternal genes, to leave these women's wombs growing with children solely of his creation.
Again, she was letting her imagination roam too far. Further reading showed that even such an astronomically low possibility as a common father had been ruled out. Genetic testing was nothing if not precise in ascertaining parental lineage, although the remote possibility of some very distant common ancestor had not yet been ruled out. For the time being, though, they had only chromosome twelve in common.
She was brought back to thoughts of Down's syndrome and the stunning resemblance between most of those who bore it. Short and stocky, with slanted eyes and similarly shaped heads, frequently affectionate like eternal children, they had always struck her as brothers and sisters of their own extended family, beyond the claims of blood kinship. They were their own; apart, yet linked.
And here, now? Before her?
The opposite of Down's?
Was it such a farfetched notion? For, in time, didn't nature strive to balance everything with its polar counterpart?
Nature did, so often, exhibit a love affair with symmetry.
*
She monitored Clay daily after having broken the news of the karyotype to him. Physically he would be fine, his bludgeoning of the window having caused nothing worse than some damage to the cast and a hairline fracture in a healing carpal bone, while the claw marks on his torso had been bandaged.
He emerged from sedation uncommunicative, less sullen than simply withdrawn, and gradually coming out of that within a few days. He was showing improvement by the time Adrienne learned of the others, although she had decided to withhold that from him until he was back on more stable emotional ground. Naturally he would want to know what they were like. Understandably, he would find the truth of no encouragement.
"I accept it," he finally told her, during their next Sunday session. Looking drawn and pale, too many weeks away from a sun that he apparently needed, like a tonic, from time to time.
And she told him that was important, accepting the fact of Helverson's, as long as he wasn't accepting some preconceived notion that it rigidly predestined his life. Nature, nurture, the debate had raged for centuries, and would likely never be settled to the satisfaction of everyone. It was important he keep in mind that he was more than mere proteins and programming.
"Do you think it's possible we know when things are wrong with us?" he asked. "Deep, fundamental differences that set us apart. Even if we don't have names for them, or even know where to point in ourselves … we just know? You think so?"
"Obviously you do," she said, turning it back.
He glared for a moment, and she saw the faces of the others buried in him, as if he carried ghosts. "Can't we have sixty seconds of conversation without you deflecting it around into some therapeutic proverb?"
Adrienne blinked. Very good, Clay. It was actually a boost to see him rise up like that. If he hadn't gotten some of his fighting spirit back, he wouldn't have cared.
"I think," she told him, slow enough to measure every word, "some people have a greater self-awareness than others … and I think it's possible that could extend to the physical or chemical makeup of their bodies."
"Thank you," he said, with a rare smile of victory. It faded soon enough, replaced by a look of haunting recollection. "I never told you why I came down this way."
"You told me you had a lot of thinking to do."
He nodded. "But why then? Why up and decide one day that I needed it more than I did the day before?"
"Something happened?"
"Something I saw." Clay took a deep breath, leaned back with his eyes shut in their darkened hollows, saying nothing until he began to bite his lower lip. "I don't hold jobs well," he began at last. "You probably guessed that already. But for the past year or so I worked for the Department of Sanitation in Denver. And that was all right, I got along okay doing that. I guess I've lost that one now, too, though.
"When we'd finish the pickup rounds and haul the truck back to the dump, sometimes I'd go wandering around all those mountains of trash. Everything the city was retching up, there it was. We could poke through it, and if there was anything we wanted, it was ours. Most of the time I wasn't even looking for my own benefit, I was looking for stuff for Graham. Remember Graham?"
"The artist." It had been weeks since Clay had mentioned him.
Clay nodded, sat straighter. "I'd bring him things I thought he'd like to use, for inspiration or whatever. Scraps of metal, bits of machinery. He's doing something with power tools and appliances and things like that, but he won't tell anybody what it is, so I'd just grab anything that looked halfway interesting.
"So there it was, one afternoon, the middle of September, one of those days when you can barely feel it, but there's a chill coming. And I was scouting around this one edge of the dump where I probably shouldn't have been, because that's where the cranes were working. They lower those scoops, like big swinging mouths from metal dinosaurs, and rearrange the piles. They'd tell us it's dangerous to get around, but what the hell, that's when you can turn up the most interesting junk.
"I came around one side of this smelly mountain, saw where part of it had fallen away, where there was this little hollow. I just stopped, and stared.
"There was a dead man in there. Not like he'd been dumped and that was the most convenient place they could find. I think he'd been killed there, maybe even some kind of ritual thing. His wrists, they'd been spread out and tied to something half-buried in the trash — the legs of an old desk, it might have been. There he was, just slumped down, sitting in all this dried blood. He'd been gutted, all this stuff strewn out of his abdomen. Not random, either, there was order to it. But none of it seemed human to me, because he'd been there long enough for it to start drying out, so what it really looked like, to me, was pipes and tubes and conduits, like that. I'd never seen anybody's plumbing before, and that's what it's like. Meat machinery. So there he was, all dirty white, and not moving — plastic bags and paper and just general shit hanging off him. And all I could do was stare."
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.