Clay began to pack his own snowball. "The noble savage?"
"Even better: a corrupted savage with cunning sharpened by reason instead of five acute senses. Nietzsche would've understood. He wrote, 'What a time experiences as evil is usually an untimely echo of what was formerly experienced as good — the atavism of a more ancient ideal.'"
Clay nodded but said nothing, packing his snowball in silence because there was no point to continuing. Patrick Valentine made an unlikely optimist — imagine that — actually seeing a future in Helverson's syndrome. He could share with the man what he had seen in himself, out on the burnt savannahs of human existence, even though Valentine would almost certainly refuse to believe.
"Human beings eat the world, bit by bit, but most of all we just eat one another," Clay said, and held up his little globe of snow. "All we are is a new model designed to take bigger bites and get it over with." He crunched his teeth into the snowball, as he would an apple, then crumbled the remainder in his fist and sprinkled it over the side.
Valentine watched the object lesson with eyes gone grave, an inquisitor listening to the errors in a heretic's logic.
"You need to kill," he said. "Blood awakens. Blood changes everything."
Thirty-Five
Adrienne was at a loss as to how to proceed, but maybe this was only because she had sacrificed so much sleep the past two days. Perish the thought it was because she had extended herself so far beyond responsibility and reason that any decision seemed destined to be the wrong one.
"Let's examine the facts," Sarah said. How patient she had been throughout this odyssey, how splendid a lover, friend, voice of calm. "It doesn't look like there's a car over there, nothing's moving, the afternoon's getting darker and no lights are coming on. These are the unmistakable signs of an empty house."
"Maybe I should just go see and get it over with."
"Not alone, you're not. You don't have any idea what this man might be capable of, and I've got a feeling he's not someone you should be alone with. Not even for two minutes, Adrienne. Especially if he's the kind of guy who sits around in the dark."
Poised behind the wheel — it felt as if she'd grown here — she might have smiled had she had the energy to spare. Sarah's concern was touching. Moreover, it was unsettling. Little in the world caused Sarah to really worry, to admit that it was beyond her skills and smarts, her charmed existence altogether.
Idling at curbside in the quiet Charlestown neighborhood, a few homes down from the house of Patrick Valentine, the car heater blowing precious warmth, she tallied what little she did know and decided Sarah's concern was far from unwarranted.
Valentine obviously knew how to circumvent channels. Older by around a decade than the oldest confirmed Helverson's subject, he had gotten himself diagnosed without betraying his anonymity. He exercised what appeared to be unlimited access to medical and research records, and on his own had managed to uncover an adult Helverson's female and shield her from identification as well. By use of the mail, he toyed with the psyches of volatile people, exhibiting the aloof disregard of a sociopath.
These were obvious. Then there were the unconfirmable rumors: the guns, the missiles, and most repugnant, his planned foray into eugenics. God help any child conceived under his procurement.
And Clay, you knew at least some of this, you had to know to want to get this far in the first place, you knew and you lied to me about it.
Two days ago, after awakening to the news of his vanishing, she and Sarah had sat in their motel room and, over coffee, tried to choose a next move that would be best for everyone. They could, of course, return to Denver, then Tempe, resuming their lives and never knowing what had become of Clay. But neither had any doubt that he would continue on to Boston. The only issue was whether or not they should follow.
He had left no note, no reason for his abandoning them, and while it hurt, she had to remind herself he would have meant no malice by it. Likely he had been driven by pain, by shame, she and Sarah continual reminders of what he'd faced in himself at Kendra Madigan's. If they continued together, Adrienne surmised, he would look at them and fear they now saw him as something truly lost, whose irredeemable nature was a genetic mandate, with no more hope of a cure than a malignancy whose tendrils were braided through the brainstem.
On his own, at least no one need suspect that but himself.
They would follow, they decided. They would follow and at least let him know that their opinion of him had not changed, not on the basis of a psilocybin vision that may or may not have been valid. That Clay understand she would never, could never, give up on him was crucial, and if it was her final gift, then let him at least be the one to tell her so. She demanded little for herself when it came to patients — and Clay had become so much more — but he owed her this much.
But they could not follow without at least some idea of his destination, and her only key was Timothy Van der Leun. His phone number was unlisted with Indiana Bell information, but her notebook computer still had access to the mainframe at Arizona Associated Labs, and she found it on file there. Timothy’s voice, once he consented to answer his phone early that afternoon, had come from the bottom of a dead soul's gorge.
"I need your help. You're the only one who can help me," she had explained. "I brought Clay Palmer to Indianapolis and now I need to find him again because he needs help…"
"Who?" He'd sounded confused, feverish, so she had to tell him again, Clay Palmer, the one who came to see you last Friday, New Year's Eve. "Oh. Him. Right," Timothy had said. "I remember now." Then, in a thickened voice that nearly caused her to shudder, "Good scars. He had good scars."
She had pleaded and prodded and cajoled, on the theory that having been diagnosed years before Clay, Timothy might already have been contacted by the mysterious mentor in Boston. So long as she could keep him focused, he'd had ample tales to tell, information to share. In his more lucid moments he sounded more forsaken than insane, full of desperate gratitude for a woman to talk with, who valued his opinion on anything, and she tried not to think of what he must look like, smell like, his skin a burnt patchwork of self-made sores.
She tried not to think of his inevitable fate.
So through the ragged clouds of snow and hostility they had driven to Boston, had gotten a hotel room, had acquired maps and charted out what was where. And if Clay wasn’t with Patrick Valentine after all, if he had instead disappeared into the frozen mists like the misbegotten outcast of Mary Shelley's most famous novel, well … perhaps it really would be time to pack in their best intentions and head for home. For the mountains, then the desert.
"Five more minutes," Adrienne said. "Then we'll check."
"Okay."
"Maybe they're asleep. You know the kind of hours he keeps, sometimes."
"I know," said Sarah. "I know."
She reached across to massage the back of Adrienne's neck. In her lap was paper and pen, resting upon the flat of a book, with which she had whiled away their forty-five-minute stakeout. Sarah had filled it with experimental addresses for herself, seeing the way her name looked conjoined with cities and states all over the country: Sarah Lynn McGuire, 123 Fogbound St., Eugene, OR. Sarah Lynn McGuire, 456 Potato Lane, Boise, ID. She did this sometimes, in coffeehouses and comedy clubs, did it the way others doodled stick figures or hearts or future fortunes, Sarah indulging basic wanderlust. "You never know," Adrienne once heard her tell someone who didn't understand, "maybe I'll write one and it'll be like a talisman. I'll look at it and the match will be so perfect, I'll just know it's a place I have to be."