Her eyes narrowed as she tried to summon a composite of the feelings such paintings must evoke. Something about them conjured a cold and harsh sense of brutality. "What kind of imagery in them do you recall?"
"Oh … gears. Girders. Smokestacks. Twisted bridges that don't go anywhere. Piles of scrap iron." Clay bit into one corner of his mouth. "Graham calls them post-industrial landscapes. His studio and apartment, all those paintings around … he once called it the junkyard of the world."
"And this is a world of … what?" She was curious. Decay? Progress in rampant decline? Fill in the blank.
He thought for a moment. "A world of barriers. I mean, what's metal for, if not keeping things in their places?"
Adrienne recalled the condition of Clay's clothing the other night, when he had been brought in. The boots caked with dust, both inside and out, the dusty jeans and jacket and shirt. With mild dehydration and sunburn on top of it all. The obvious conclusion was that he was not long out of the open desert.
"That world reflected in Graham's paintings," said Adrienne, like the sliding of a gentle probe. "Is that the world you wanted to get away from for a while?"
He didn't answer, not for a minute, maybe more. One never realized how much time was compressed into one minute until hearing it tick away, waiting for a reply in a dead-silent room. She took care to watch his face for the emotions it betrayed, and clearly he was wrestling with those barely understood compulsions that drove him.
"I guess it was," he finally admitted, as if it were some sort of moral defeat. "But everybody needs that, sometimes, so I don't know how much you can read into it."
Enough, she thought. In this society the call of the wild was rarely answered in much less than a Winnebago. Or at least with a backpack and four-wheel drive. Clay's had been a much more primal response.
"This need must have been considerably stronger in you than in most people, wouldn't you say?"
"Probably." He shrugged, apparently unconcerned with pursuing a comparison. "I was on the road, hitching and walking, close to a week. The desert? I guess I came into Tempe about three days after I got off the road completely, but I didn't want to stay long, I still wanted to keep going." He wet his lips. "Do you know what it's like to walk for three days and not see asphalt?"
Adrienne shook her head. "No, I don't, really. Maybe you could fill me in."
Clay tilted his head back, gazing at the ceiling, through it. "Something gets stripped away. It's hard to say what it is, exactly, but it leaves you. And you're not sorry to see it go. The only things you hear are things that have already been making noise for a few million years. You regress … part of you hits this embryonic state. It's easier to pick yourself apart this way. To look inside and do some serious thinking. That's what it's like."
"If you went out there to do some soul-searching," she said, "were you able to walk away with any conclusions?"
"One big one, for sure: Jesus must have gotten really hungry after forty days."
Okay, she deserved that. She knew better than to ply him with such a direct question. One observation, though: Whatever the trip had represented to him, likely it had been a failure.
And his choice of mythic analogy was interesting, on second thought. Maybe she could work with this after all.
"Jesus went into the wilderness to confront — and ultimately overcome — a devil. In very loose terms, do you think it's possible you were doing the same thing?"
He rolled his eyes. "I don't have a messiah complex and I don't have delusions of grandeur."
Adrienne nodded, conceding. "But you do have a sense of the mythic. Friday morning? 'Clay Palmer … of the Gehenna Palmers'? You may have been joking, just as you said, and then again you may have been telling me in a very subtle way that your earlier family life was hell. Either way, the mythic element is there." The Jungian disciple in her, browsing the storehouse of the collective unconscious: those basic elements and symbols that resonated in humankind the world over, regardless of culture. "You don't need a messiah complex or delusions of grandeur to relate to a story about a journey of confrontation and self-discovery. Or to go on one."
Eight hundred miles he'd come, but clearly he had been more concerned with seeking a goal, rather than running from something behind him.
"Was that what this trip was all about?" she asked. "Your own journey of self-discovery?"
Clay Palmer may have been a stranger, but as she watched him honestly try to wrestle with this one, she realized that some evasive shadow in both their souls was quite similar. How well she understood that mysterious lure of the desert, its siren song of hot gusts and desolate winds, chilly nights, and the harsh, unforgiving fact of its very existence. It had pulled her away from the city of her birth at a time when her entire life had been in flux.
And while she couldn't see it from her bedroom window, she at least knew it was there.
Her transition had been made, of course, via all the socially acceptable routes. New job, new house, new friends, and, if a bit less orthodox, a new love. Clay, however, had stripped away all such niceties until only an elemental core remained. And what was this inside her — an amusing twinge of jealousy over the purity in his method?
"Confront this, Adrienne," he finally said. "I don't fit into the world, and it took a long time, and it still isn't easy, but I finally started trying to accept that. Fine. But that doesn't mean I don't think somebody or something, somewhere, still owes me a damn good explanation."
Four
Days passed, bones began to knit…
And itch. In years gone by there had been summers in which he had lain naked and brooding on forest floors, or near the shores of lakes, and as he invariably would have forgotten mosquito repellent, they would come near to consuming him alive. They would leave him covered with a raw quilt of bites that he would scratch until blood welled and he was left almost mad with the screaming constancy of sensation.
The itch of skin, the itch of bone. Between the two, he preferred the former; the latter was agonizingly more than skin deep. Would that he had the ability to turn inside-out, or plunge a hand deep within, and scrape along every hidden channel that plagued him.
But he would get through it. No one could itch forever.
Of the pills prescribed to stabilize his expected mood swings, Clay wondered if they didn't work more by power of suggestion than by anything else. Perhaps he was just on a natural remission as far as those tendencies were concerned. There were no threats here; more than anything, he was surrounded by a routine that stultified by its blandness, boredom. But if slipping pills down his gullet in daily rations made them feel safe, fine. He knew better. If he had to kick, or bite, or swing those casts like weighty gauntlets, he knew he could, without hesitation.
And what would Dr. Adrienne Rand say then?
It would be a blow to her, all the time she'd put in on him thus far. Given past experience with the prior skull dabblers who had shown him to their couches, the burden of proof that she wasn't just going through more motions was definitely on her shoulders. And she had held up all right. He knew the difference by now. Familiarity had bred a general contempt for most of her ilk, but for now he was willing to grant that she had a genuine core of human interest. "Help me, Adrienne," he could cry, like a child awakening in the night, and she would come running.