Prototype (45 page)

The eyes of the world were on them, and the eyes of time, as well.

"Let's sit down," Kendra said.

There were just enough chairs. Her attention now fell squarely on Clay. She asked if he had ever been hypnotized before. He had, a few years ago, by a psychologist in Minneapolis, and had gone under with ease. This was no surprise — highly intelligent people usually did.

She explained the underlying principles of what they would be doing throughout the day, the procedures used. Some of the background he'd already heard from Adrienne and Sarah — the notion of the collective unconscious, a deep pool of archetypal images and fundamental human knowledge, transcendent of culture and unfathomably ancient, that resided in the evolved mind the same as a history of function resided in other organs. A fellow Jungian, Kendra could not believe that the human psyche was blank at birth.

Clay listened without impatience, as if he had heard none of it before. Just a sharp crease of expectation across his contoured face, the face of someone poised on a windswept brink, awaiting signs and sigils that would mean something to him at last.

And if at times it sounded ludicrous, that the collective unconscious could be tapped by hypnosis, even conversed with, there was no doubt that Kendra Madigan passionately believed in what she was doing, to the extent that she was willing to risk arrest. She had no license to possess or dispense psychoactives.

It was this willingness to put her neck on the line that made Adrienne's reservations harder to voice. Still, she could not remain compliantly silent. Someone
should
play the devil's advocate, so Clay could make as fully informed a choice as possible.

"If you've already accessed the collective unconscious," Adrienne said, "and it's what it's theorized to be — an aggregate species knowledge — then what's the point of putting anyone else through the process? Aren't you going to get the same basic results every time?"

Kendra smiled as if enjoying the challenge — ah, a worthy opponent. "I did, at first, until I started to refine techniques. Regardless of the commonalities we carry around inside us, each of us is still an individual. We can relate to universals through an individual perspective. I've found that, by the time subjects can speak of what's being confronted, by the time the information is routed through the verbal areas of the brain, they're usually imprinting it with their own uniqueness. Their deepest self-knowledge that most are never even aware of."

"They can see their purpose in an overall scheme, then?" concluded Sarah.

Kendra nodded. "I believe many can, yes."

"And suppose a subject is in a fragile state of mind," said Adrienne, "and may not be equipped to handle the knowledge. Do you bear the responsibility for what happens to him?"

"Yes," she said, quite firm. "But just so we know where each of us stands … what kind of responsibility do you have in mind?"

"I know your methods. They can't be free of danger." Adrienne drew her composure and fingertips together in one calm movement. "If you harm him in any way … I'll have you up for review."

Kendra nodded once more, and Adrienne had to give her this: You could not ruffle this woman. "You'll do what you must."

Clay stirred in his chair. "Adrienne, how old am I?"

She started, not expecting this. "Twenty-five."

"An adult, right? Now let me get this straight: Back in Tempe, you told a group of researchers that I was sane, that I was competent to make my own decisions, and that you'd testify to it in court, if it came to that. Is that right?"

Her mouth was going dry. "Yes."

"Then butt out."

It was so brusque, Adrienne wasn't even sure she'd heard him correctly, until Kendra spoke up, an unlikely ally.

"Clay," she said sharply, sternly, eyes piqued with a hint of what must have been a fierce demeanor underlying her calm grace. "This woman is concerned enough about you to accompany you more than halfway across the country. If she and I have a professional disagreement, that's fine, I'm accustomed to them. But I would appreciate your respect for her concern. She's earned that."

Well, blow me down,
Adrienne thought, fairly astounded. She watched Clay lower his gaze, chastised. He turned to her, a crease showing between his eyes.

"Sorry," he said softly. "But this is important to me. So trust me. I want to do this. I have to."

Adrienne nodded, resigned. It did not imply her blessings.

Kendra had him swallow a pair of tablets — psilocybin derived from
Psilocybe mexicana
mushrooms, she explained, one of nature's numerous keys to unlocking psychological doors. In general, her best results had come from using psilocybin, although some subjects seemed to react more favorably to mescaline.

She sent him to the bathroom to sheathe his penis in a Texas catheter. The tube coiled out of his jeans, down to a urine bag that he hung from a special hook on the chair. This would be no brief hypnosis, she cautioned, and subjects often voided their bladders — sometimes from simple prolonged need, other times from loss of sphincter control while plunging deep into more turbulent regions.

Blinds drawn, the room was dimmed until the masks seemed to float around them like ancient nobles peering through the dusk. Clay sat in his chair, a voyager breathing deeply to calm himself. Kendra set before him a small portable table, on which stood a pyramid of black plastic and metal, as tall as a hardback book tented spine-up. When she toggled a switch recessed into its back, a socket in front began to pulse with soft light. Adrienne could not see the bulb itself — probably a good thing — only the languid strobing across Clay's face, shadow/light/shadow/light, his impassive features in continual alternation.

"I want you to stare into the light, Clay, the center of the light."
 
Kendra's voice was cultivated and practiced, as smooth as a perfect lullaby. "There's only the light … and the sound of my voice…"

For minutes she lulled him onward, the set of Clay's eyes — frequently so hard and wary — softening with glazed surrender.
Don't go,
Adrienne almost said, an inexplicable sorrow coursing through her, as if he were leaving the room, the country, the year, with a risk that he might never return whole.

Kendra gradually took him through his life in reverse, leapfrogging a year or two at a time. "Where are you now?" she would ask, and he would answer in small, soft syllables: at home … at school … looking at my baby sister who forgot how to breathe. Days of pain and sorrow, yet they rarely disturbed the serenity of his countenance. He knew peace in this inner realm.

Adrienne felt an elbow nudging her side; Sarah nodded toward the door, the hallway, a question in her eyes. They stepped out as quietly as possible, pulling the door closed.

"I know you're here as a prisoner of circumstances," Sarah said, "but can you at least entertain a slightly open mind?"

"I don't know. I'm … I
am
trying." She tried to step away for a moment, gather her thoughts. "It's easy to be seduced by the novelty of it … but I don't know." She spun on her heel to plant herself before Sarah again. "Don't you think I
want
to believe in what she says she can achieve? I do. I
do
. But I'm concerned about what it could do to Clay. And a part of me still thinks no, this is too simplistic. The collective unconscious? There isn't even agreement that there
is
such a thing."

"But you believe it exists."

"Yes."

"And you believe it can emerge in dreams, right?"

Again she agreed, recalling what had, above all, convinced her. A case documented by Jung in
Man and His Symbols
, in which a fellow psychiatrist had brought him a booklet handwritten by the man's daughter, given to her father as a Christmas present. She was but ten, the vignettes she had written a series of a dozen dreams she'd had while eight years old. The dreams were filled with imagery and symbolism she could never have been aware of on any level but intuitive: dreams of death and regeneration, of beasts devouring creation, of dancing pagans storming heaven. She had dreamt the myths of the world.

A year after committing them to paper, she had died. In her dreams, so unlike those of a child, it was as if some hidden cleft of her mind had known what was imminent.

"Yes," said Adrienne. "I believe it does."

"Then it's there. For you, it's there." Sarah clasped both of Adrienne's hands between her own, rubbing. "And if it emerges in dreams, it's because it has a need to. And if that need is there, well … who's to say it might not flow toward another outlet if it's made available?"

"Maybe you're right. I want you to be right." She stepped forward, into the safer harbor of Sarah's waiting arms.
I want you to be right, I want it there, waiting for us on the other side of consciousness, saying, I was here all along — you just never asked me until now.

Perhaps she was not nearly so opposed to Kendra Madigan and her techniques as she was to the idea of turning Clay over to someone who could offer him something she could not. It could have been anyone and she would have found a reason. We healers, what a territorial breed we are. Like the missionaries of different faiths who vie for the privilege of being first to convert the savages.

"Let's go back in," Sarah said, then gave Adrienne's hands a kiss and, holding firm, led the way.

The regression continued, Kendra Madigan taking Clay back to a loose and liquid awareness of prenatal existence, for which he seemed to have few words, although body language spoke with its own eloquence. He folded into a fetal position while scooting deeper into the curve of the chair, gently rocking himself back and forth, as if cresting the buoyant waves of a warm ocean.

"Now I want you to go back even farther, Clay," Kendra said, "back before there ever was a Clay. You'll remember if you let yourself. But you can't go straight back, because there's only so far you can go in that direction … only so much Clay can remember on his own because there wasn't always a Clay. But you're part of something much older. So you have to find a new thread to follow. You still have to keep going back … but sideways this time. Do you understand what I mean by that?"

His head raised a fraction. "Yes…"

"That's glorious, Clay, that's wonderful. Now … I'm going to leave you for a while, but I'll be back. I'm going to leave you to find your own way. I want you to follow the paths that open up, and listen to the drums. Go where the drums lead. Deeper, and deeper … and deeper…"

Kendra pulled away and reached for a remote control. With a few pecks of her finger there came from hidden speakers a low and steady rhythm, hypnotic in its own right. It thumped like echoes off a canopy of green, woven with the brown of ancient boughs. Adrienne found herself drifting with it, a timeless resonance taking root in heart, in bones, in soul.

She watched as Clay slowly uncoiled from his fetal position, lowering both feet to the floor again, and his hands to his sides, rolling his head limply back until he appeared to stare into the ceiling, beyond the ceiling. His jaw drooped, slack, then he came forward again, slumping while his head nodded toward his chest. It took several moments before she realized the rise and fall of his breathing was synchronizing itself to the drums.

Nearly ninety minutes had passed since Clay had first gone under. Kendra murmured parting reassurance to him, then shooed them from the room.

"He's responding," Adrienne said in the rec room, "he's responding to something in there, in that state. And even I could feel … something."

"Oh yes." Kendra settled luxuriantly into a nearby lounger, raised her feet. "Powerful stimuli, aren't they?" Suppressing a warm laugh at the expense of, Adrienne surmised, the intrigued skeptic.

"How long will you leave him alone?"

"I'll check on him from time to time, but I won't resume any real contact for two to three hours."

Sarah had found her way to the inversion bar, hanging upside down by bent knees. The tips of her long braids whisked at the mat beneath. "It's not really new, Adrienne, what she's doing in there, you know? It's pretty damn ancient."

Kendra nodded. "Simple shamanic techniques, mostly. And those go back thirty, forty thousand years, it's believed. The drumming, the use of natural hallucinogens? You'll find them in nearly every primitive society the world over. They all came up with the same methods, independently, and the reason they've been around so long is because they
work
, girl. My main contribution is to put a more modern slant on the way they're applied. I give someone a pill or two so he doesn't have to gobble a handful of mushrooms or peyote that might make him sick. Instead of a live drummer to maintain a trance beat, I have it on compact disc, set to repeat until I turn it off. The main reason I start the hypnosis before the psychoactives have a chance to take effect is that when they do, I want the subjects carrying in as little baggage from the outside world as possible. Then after someone's under? It's just a matter of investing enough time to pick around the way any trained shrink might." She spread her hands. "Who's ready for lunch?"