Brian Hodge - Prototype

As Daniel sat on the floor, tiring of no response to his prod, Valentine stared at him and had to wonder if this was how fathers felt, real fathers, who looked into the faces of their sons and saw not only themselves, but that one final chance to vicariously achieve those precious goals that had exceeded their grasp. Fathers could be sad that way, and stoic.

He supposed it had always been that way.

He supposed that, whatever else changed in the world, it always would.

Adrienne was proud of herself. Up before nine, a shower and a hurried breakfast in the room, twenty minutes on the road to Kendra Madigan’s home, and not a single derisive comment the whole time. She was either growing up or becoming inured to this odyssey of Clay’s. Certainly her stake in it had dwindled with each day and passing mile, until there were moments when she felt like little more than a concerned bystander.

“It’s after ten,” she said along the way. “What do you want to bet there’s a supervisor or two in Tempe who’ll be wondering where I am before the day’s out?”

“It’s Monday morning,” Sarah chimed. “Do you know where your job is?”

Kendra Madigan lived in a quiet neighborhood with a great many trees. The homes were modern but tried not to be. A screened porch here, a row of columns there, a backyard gazebo visible up the block… small touches of an elder South that appeared stapled onto the new, rather than serving as parts of a genuine whole.

She answered her own door, which briefly took Adrienne by surprise. Subconsciously awed, perhaps, that the woman had thrice published controversial — and best-selling — books on the shadowy layers of the human mind. Didn’t people of her ilk employ assistants to dispose of such trivialities as doorbells? Kendra Madigan didn’t, and that made her somehow more real, more — dare she entertain the thought? — potentially likable. But even charlatans had their charms, did they not?

She looked much as Adrienne recalled from her appearance in Tempe, if sporting a touch more gray in her closely trimmed hair. At the moment she wore light yellow sweat-clothes that fit her impeccably. Her skin was richly black and she was in her late forties, given to posture and a gait that Adrienne persisted in seeing as statuesque. She did not so much walk as glide, would not so much sit as levitate.

“I do remember your face now,” she told Sarah while leading them in. “Those occasional letters you wrote? I never could quite put a definite face with them, but let me tell you, you’re who I hoped you would be.”

“Letters?” Adrienne said.

Sarah blushed, caught in the act. “I bought my own stamps.”

Kendra Madigan turned to Clay, even before introductions were formally made. Very smooth, Adrienne observed. Drawing him in at the first possible opportunity.

“When I lectured at the ASU campus,” she told Clay, “they gave a reception that afternoon. Boring things, horrible things, most everyone standing around engaged in intellectual pissing contests, but if they’re meeting your fee you do feel an obligation. At this one, one of the grad students was… well, let’s describe him as very vocal in his condemnation of me, on theoretical grounds.”

“He was being an asshole,” Sarah translated.

Kendra bestowed a luminous smile. “And you’re the one who doused his flame by managing to spill two brimful glasses of champagne into his lap. I remember well, it was the highlight of the afternoon. I never complimented you as I should’ve, though. You almost made it appear accidental.”

“Looks like I left too early that day,” Adrienne said, and it felt as one of those rare bittersweet moments in which you glimpse a lover in a light all her own — Sarah, wholly apart from Adrienne, as if there might not have been an Adrienne, ever. Just Sarah alone, acting on impulse and later neglecting to recount the story. She wished she could have seen it, Sarah delivering comeuppance, sophomoric though it was. She should have been there.

Kendra led them through the house, charming, disarming, a weaver of spells. From a distant room a grandfather clock intoned a solemn half-hour stroke — ten-thirty. As they passed a broad, open stairway that led to the second floor, Adrienne grew curious to see her bedroom, her private bath; see the real mistress of the house. Was she a closet sloven?

A rec room ran along the back of the house, and here Kendra took their coats, hanging them in a closet. She sat for a moment to unfasten strangely hooked collars from around her ankles, then pointed to a metallic framework in one corner that Adrienne had assumed was used for chin-ups.

“I was doing my morning gravity inversion when you rang,” she said. “Fifteen minutes per day. Wonderful for facial skin, they say, and I’ll vouch for that. But now I hear it puts dangerous blood pressure on the eyes. They never cease finding the ghastly side effects, do they? Beautiful or blind, why does it have to be such a choice?”

Clay shrugged. “Either way, your back should hold out fine.”

“Yes. Yes ,” she said, as if never having considered this. “In life there are few constants, but that must be one of them. You’re absolutely right.”

She maintained the small talk for several minutes, and to Adrienne it was apparent that she was attempting to set them all at ease, especially Clay. Had they slept soundly? Where were they staying? Some fierce weather they must have come through farther north. Obviously their situation deviated from the norm she would be used to, with no time to work leisurely around to a protracted session. Now and again, to Clay alone she would direct a question or two, fairly innocuous, subtle in its probing; gaining a feel for the way he answered, how he responded to her.

Adrienne focused primarily on Clay during such exchanges, her first occasion to watch him relating to another therapist. She began to wonder if she’d not been too hard on herself, too preoccupied with her failure to deliver grand miracles to see evidence of the smaller ones that had been wrought over their months of effort. For this was not the same Clay she had first encountered, who tested his therapist as an adversary. This was not the Clay who had suggested she compensate for his inability to masturbate.

This was a Clay Palmer who was open to trust.

And if he could trust, he had hope.

Kendra requested they follow her down a hall to her office, and what a far cry it was from those Adrienne was used to. Sarah had grown wide-eyed and loose-necked, shuffling a slow pirouette, staring with a naked and grasping wonder at the masks that lined the walls. Here were faces of ritual that, Kendra told them, predated all texts, all histories, faces dipped from wellsprings of myth. Masks from the Old World and the New, from both hemispheres; from Mexican village to Borneo rain forest, from Inuit ice field to African bush. Faces for death and for life, faces for healing, for the supplication of implacable nature, faces for the appeasement of gods whose names she would never hear. And while Adrienne rationally knew that behind those empty eye sockets lay nothing but walls, she still felt watched.

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.