Brian Hodge: Prototype

Note that Hodge does just about everything a writer can do to avoid that formula and he does it in many different ways. But few of them are simple ways. A simple way would have been pull a reverse — good is evil, evil is good. He plays with that concept with a character, Patrick Valentine, who quotes Nietzsche a lot and seems to think that the “monsters” here represent the “atavism of a more ancient world” and that monstrosity is inevitable.

In the end, well, you’ll have to decide about the ending of this book yourself, but I think you may find that you will feel every character has made a key mistake, made at least one wrong choice at some turn. Long before reaching the conclusion you’ll also understand that the world itself and society, in Prototype , is the end sum of humanity’s many mistakes. (There’s not a lot about the nonfictional world that doesn’t support that idea.)

In fiction, you write resolutions. There is an end. At most, like here, there is an epilogue. As a reader, you close the cover and there is no more. The End. Choices, mistakes, consequences — all over. Whatever impression that writer is going to make has been made.

And Brian Hodge makes a lasting impression with Prototype .

Life’s not like a novel. We don’t write our lives and resolve our dilemmas so easily. But Prototype will at least lead you to consider the higher questions… questions that have a secret relevance to your own life.

John Shirley

February 15, 2006

After the calm, Adrienne looked in on her patient, up from Emergency and now in his room. He was at such peace, and she marveled: The difference between the countenance of a devil and that of an angel is sometimes nothing more than sleep.

It was an archaic association, the kind she would always have to keep to herself. How many fellow psychologists, colleagues and mentors alike, would frown upon such medieval terminology? Angels, devils; good, evil; black, white… no such things. The modern age had sounded the death knell for such absolutes.

There existed but chaos and order, illness and health.

But if the metaphor fits… apply it.

The patient, peaceful now, lay beneath the precautionary restraints across his bed. He was, so far, without name, without history. He was nothing but symptoms and wounds. An IV line snaked into one arm to boost fluid levels; he was suffering from mild dehydration. He had been brought in without ID, and the police had been unable to take fingerprints even after he’d been sedated into sleep: Both hands were heavily stitched, splinted, and bandaged.

Adrienne held little hope for a lucid talk with him tomorrow. Only someone suffering from extreme personality disturbances would not only break his own hands on another’s face, but continue to pummel away until jagged fragments of his own metacarpals protruded from his hands in compound fractures.

The patrol officers who had brought him in earlier tonight, in restraints, told her that he had been picked up on the east side of Tempe, at a shopping strip. That he had spent a good deal of time in the Arizona desert seemed a reasonable deduction. There had been sand and dust inside his boots, with his jacket and jeans heavily coated as well. According to the police, witnesses to the altercation that had landed him here said that three skateboard thugs had tried to relieve him of his wallet as he was leaving a Tex-Mex stand. All three of them, ironically, had been brought in as even more deserving emergency cases.

Comical enough in its beginnings, Adrienne supposed: The kid who’d snatched the wallet from their John Doe’s hand had been knocked from his skateboard by a well-aimed sack of tacos to the head. After which the victim had become the aggressor. He had snatched up the upended skateboard and used its flat, wide top to shatter its owner’s nose.

The melee was joined at once by the other two, valiantly altruistic musketeers, the both of them — in their own eyes, at least. Adrienne well knew that boys in their late teens listened far more readily to testosterone than to common sense.

And they had paid dearly. Between the three of them, their tally of injuries was headed by a broken jaw, two broken noses, nine missing teeth, one shattered elbow, two ruptured testicles, a skull fracture, thirteen broken ribs. One would be urinating blood for days. Then there were the punctures and lacerations caused by the bones protruding from John Doe’s hands.

Adrienne, as a staff psychologist, had not treated them, had scarcely even seen them. Her understanding of the hapless trio’s fate was mainly appraisal from colleagues working the night shift. While grievous injuries they were, Adrienne found it difficult to sympathize. Three-on-one was such an act of vicious cowardice. She despised the pack mentality — an evolutionary carry-over, perhaps, still buried in the primal brain, but a behavioral anachronism. Like a burst appendix, it could cause only misery. Surely human beings were better than that, somewhere within, weren’t they?

Apparently their John Doe, bruised and battered but the last one on his feet, had attempted to lurch away from the scene, and even then had needed two police officers to subdue him. His bone-razor hands were secured behind his back and in he came, 9:22 P.M. this September midweek night. He was an immediate code blue, all available able-bodied personnel converging on the ER entrance to make sure he hurt no one else or did no more damage to himself. His hands may have been bound, but he had feet. And teeth. And a seemingly bottomless reservoir of ferocious energy — adrenaline, most likely. A later blood test checked negative for presence of drugs.

Drugs had, in the end, been their only recourse to stop him. He nearly had to be submerged in Thorazine before it took effect.

Adrienne had witnessed, had felt an unexplained sorrow after the final plunge of the needle into exposed arm, a drama played out by nearly a dozen participants — oh, here was a pack in action. Watching John Doe’s struggles dwindle to twitches, and the fury fade from his eyes as they shut, yet even then still seemed to hate, she had thought of animals she’d seen on documentaries beyond number: fine and noble predators such as lions and tigers and panthers, enraged at the sting of the dart in their hip, and given to spectacular acrobatics even as consciousness ebbed. At the end, wobbly and confused, they invariably seemed like nothing so much as cubs, clumsy and mystified. And then they fell.

John Doe… where did you come from, and where were you going? And what demons followed you within?

Demons in, of course, a wholly figurative sense.

She kept that to herself too.

Adrienne had but a half-hour remaining on her shift, and it went peacefully enough. Midnight came and she knocked off duty but had little desire to leave the hospital. Ensconced in her office, she rang home and got the machine; left a message that she had a patient for whom she wanted to be on-site whenever he came around, and would probably be home later in the morning.

Silence, then. Was any place so quiet as a hospital office after midnight? Off came her shoes and she wiggled her feet for a moment, felt full circulation restore; then she cranked the Levolor blinds into a barrier and raised her slacks’ legs to peel away her knee-highs.