"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?