Prototype (49 page)

"Well, there's always the other place downtown," Sarah said. "We could see if that's still going." She tossed a hasty snowball at Adrienne before she could regain the shelter of the car. "If we time it right, maybe they'll even invite us to stay for dinner."

The world was full of asylums, all kinds: those into which you were committed, those you carried around inside, those you let others build for you. Clay watched the first flakes of late afternoon snow drifting past the nineteenth floor and wondered if Valentine even realized what he had created here: just another asylum.

Though it was not without its appeal. At the moment the woody resin scent of marijuana smoke hazed the air. In this asylum they prescribed their own drugs and Valentine didn’t seem to mind. A chromo mute could surrender here, trudge out onto the balcony like a beaten pontiff and tell the world,
Enough, you win, I'll never be what you want, only what you deserve,
then come back inside and wait to age another day.

He and Valentine had dropped by two hours ago, a follow-up to last night's visit, and this time Ellie's gaze lingered on his eyes instead of looking him up and down as a whole specimen. Just beyond her, Daniel Ironwood was taking in every move, and had wandered up even before Clay got his field jacket off, taller by a couple of inches and making sure Clay knew it.

"I meant to ask last night, what happened to your face?" Daniel pointed to the raggedly parallel scabs.

"I cut myself eating," Clay told him.

Ellie appeared borderline sympathetic. "Those look painful as hell," then she shot a sporting glance at Daniel that he missed seeing. "I could kiss it to make it better, but Patrick says you don't like to be touched."

Daniel straightened, striving for still more height, crossed his arms before his chest. "Why don't you get it over with and kiss his ass instead?"

"Well
that's
half-profound." She scruffed both hands across the cropped sidewalls of her hair and up through the length, as if she were about to pull it out. "Look,
Jeopardy!
should be on TV in a few minutes. If you want, I'll be happy to spend some more quality time with you, and if you're really really nice between now and then, this time I promise not to count how many times your lips move and no sound comes out."

"Fuck you," and Daniel stalked off down the hall toward the bathroom.

"Yeah, that's what you're being paid for, isn't it?" Ellie called over his shoulder. "Maybe I should tell Patrick I'm not quite getting his money's worth."

The bathroom door slammed and Valentine stood gloating, as if everything were some grand joke that he had told with perfect timing, and then Ellie turned to him and began to complain of how brutal Daniel had been last night, and she had no reason to believe he would alter his tactics.

"It's only for tonight and tomorrow night," Valentine said, "and after that you don't have to see him if you don't want to. You can put up with him for two more nights."

Clay supposed it was at this point that he began to think,
Wait, there's something going on here I don't know about, something he's not telling me,
and then Ellie said that when they first met she'd actually thought Daniel was fairly sedate and even-tempered for a Helverson's guy, and Valentine smiled his tightest control-freak smile.

"If you need somebody to blame," he said, "blame Clay. Daniel just thought he was coming in for the same casual sex he's always had. But now? Now he's taking a lot more personal interest in sowing that seed. He can't help it, it's sperm competition."

"Could you be a little more manipulative, is that possible?" Ellie twirled one finger around a strand of hair and plucked it out. "Anyway, I'm not looking to blame anybody, all I want is for Daniel to quit acting like he's trying to crack my pelvis in two."

"Then go back and start being nice to him. Get him to quit sulking in the bathroom."

She barked another of her strange, incredulous laughs. "He went in by himself, let
him
decide when he wants to come out. Why should
I
have to coax him?"

Valentine took a step forward and leaned into Ellie's face. "Because if you don't, I'll blacken your eye," then he reached beneath his cable-knit sweater to draw out a gun that Clay hadn't realized he'd been carrying, a heavy revolver that captivated by sheer presence and oiled, black sheen. He spun the cylinder and let the gun dangle errantly from his fist. "And if that doesn't move you, then we'll play the game again, like we did that one time."

Ellie drew herself together, very cool, very aloof, her lips compressing into an expression almost prim as she regarded him for a few moments. "Okay, Patrick. You can have it your way." She began to scoot toward the hall. "You always do."

And when Clay followed Valentine over to sit with him in the living room it wasn't so much that he wanted to, as that he hoped for some explanation that would shed full light on this nineteenth floor cuckoo's nest. Certainly he didn't belong here, and probably he would have left by now if he had anywhere to go, anything to do … any reason to leave and live
for
. He was beginning to get a distinct feeling of being used, rather than educated.

"What
is
this all about, here?" Clay asked. "What is it you want out of those two?"

And when Valentine began to rhapsodize about conception, and breeding stock, and what might the offspring be like parented by not one but
two
Helverson's subjects, it seized Clay's imagination with a dread so palpable he really feared he might be ill.

Helverson's times two? Helverson's squared? Or might the result be a mutation fouler still, never before seen, never anticipated, grotesque potency distilled through the generations.

"You'd do that to some kid
deliberately
?" he whispered.

What a horrible thing, what a perfectly horrible thing, and he recalled those times with Erin when they had lain in bed and the thought of siring a child was the worst act he could think of, the worst crime he could commit upon innocence, even upon a world as corrupt as he knew theirs to be.

"You're a monster. You're a complete monster." It might have stung the man, for while he didn't flinch, he cocked his head to one side almost as if he didn’t comprehend. It might have hurt him … but it was so hard to tell.

Clay stood to turn his back on the man, nearly stumbling on his way to the sliding balcony door, where he leaned against the glass and stared at the snow beginning to fall. When he heard Valentine behind him he knew if the guy so much as rested a hand on his shoulder, that would be it, he would go for his eyes.

"No. I'm not," was all the man said, all he did. "I'm just the first."

But there Clay stayed, Valentine leaving him be, an hour or more passing as life went on too slowly, as Ellie and Daniel came back and seemed at truce, and one of them asked, "So what's wrong with him?" but went unanswered. They began to smoke from her stash, peace pipe maybe, and Clay watched the leaden sky go darker with the first gloom of dusk.

Then he heard something he had never expected to hear, not in this place, with all four of them as isolated from one another as they were from the world at large:

He heard the doorbell.

*

Adrienne's gaze fell naturally upon Clay as soon as they were let in. Fifteen feet away, across this penthouse apartment, there was true pain in what she saw:
Oh, he's worse,
he'd not weathered the trip north well at all. Only three days had passed since she'd seen him, but he appeared thinner, paler, his eyes burning gray hollows. The only genuine color in him came from the savaging he had given the side of his face: the red badge of desperation.

Only then did she truly notice the others.

She thought, oddly, of their brief discussion about Salvador Dali, wondering if Sarah did likewise, for here was surrealism: encountering four faces so wholly similar, staring back. It was academic to see pictures; visceral to enter a home and see a quartet in which individuality appeared sacrificed to a prevailing stigma.

She caught her breath. See them, and one could find it too easy to believe in a purpose underlying their births. Given the suspicion and hostility in at least some of those eyes, perhaps it was precisely as Clay had said. There was something eerily more than human in all those streamlined faces turned her way, like lizards catching sound of a threat.

"Are you sure you're in the right place?" the girl asked. Ellie. Her name, Timothy had said, was Ellie.

"No doubt." Sarah took another step, hands fisted into the slash pockets of her down vest. "There's no other place like this, is there?"

Across the room, their elder rose from the chair in which he seemed to have been brooding for a while. Patrick Valentine had a glare that could cause ulcers.

"Who are you?" he asked.

Adrienne lifted her hand toward Clay, framed against a glass door, a skyline, a thickening snowfall. "I've been Clay's doctor since September."

"Rand. Oh, right." Valentine spared Clay a perfunctory glance, then regarded her with dismissal. "How proud you must be. He looks wonderful."

She ignored him, or tried, because he was obviously the sort of man who would miss nothing, who understood what would hurt and how to exploit it, a man who knew where all the nerves lay.
Don't listen to him.
There was only Clay here, she decided, and spoke his name but nothing more, for everything had abandoned her. All logic, all persuasion … gone.

But maybe it was better this way. Maybe she belonged mute. She needed to say nothing for Clay to see how far she had come, how low she had fallen. He would realize why they had come — that no matter what he did, she still refused to let hope die.

It should have been a simple decision for him. He obviously had come here and found more unhappiness than answers.

And yet…

He hesitated.

"Do we need to talk," she said, finding resolve, "or would that even do any good any more?"

"It's not that simple," said Clay, and why did he insist on making it so difficult for himself? Couldn't he for once just admit the mistake and redress it by taking the quick way out? But no, he couldn't bring himself to make it that easy.

Sarah caught her eye then, Sarah sad and emptying right there beside her.
It's us,
Adrienne realized.
It's the way he sees us, to him we must seem so complete together, that to be with us magnifies every bit of stability and unity he's lacking. He's reminded of it every moment he's with us, and he doesn't see the disagreements or the squabbles, but even if he did it might make everything even more genuine, because he'd realize they never last long…

It's us. We're as much at fault as anyone.

Sarah fumbled blindly for her hand, ever intuitive, sensing that sudden failure in her. She took a step forward to pick up the slack.

"As long as you never see the sun," she said, with a smile — if anyone could turn his awful pallor into a gentle joke it was Sarah — "would you like to come back with us as a consultant? I've got this wild idea for part of my thesis, I want to go looking for cave paintings in old shut-down factories, and you're the only expert I know."

Clay's face softened, wistful, transported to another day. He looked almost hopeful. "Where are you going to start?"

Sarah shrugged. "South Dakota, maybe? If you think it's worth the trip. I figure it's worth a look."

Adrienne didn't immediately catch on. South Dakota? Then the memory fired:
Where Erin went home to,
and if Sarah was the one to talk Clay down from here instead of her, fine, more power to her, whatever worked. And it appeared that she really might, for he looked upon Sarah with as much trust as she had ever seen him grant.

None of which was lost on Valentine. He would look for these weaknesses as a rule. Soft underbellies were made to be torn.

"And what then, Clay, a week from now, a month?" he said. "Is she going to marry you? You think you're going to set up some happy home in the mountains? Raise
normal
babies?"

Adrienne stared.
Whatever's passed between the two of them … Valentine doesn't understand it at all. He can't read it right because he's probably never had a friend in his life.

"If you think anything even remotely like that is going to happen for you," Valentine said, "you're living in a fantasy world that'll destroy you when you get burned out of it."