Brian Hodge - Prototype

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?”