"I just kept hitting him," he whispered. "I don't know why."

And as long as he felt bad about it, that made it all right? No, it didn't. Some kid whose worst offense was poor public-relations skills was dead or hospitalized. Yet all she could do was a.n.a.lyze how Clay might be kept in the clear. He had paid with anonymous cash; the shop's only other customer was behind him and would give a poor description; he had worn gloves and left no prints on the plastic carousel. He might never be connected with this.

But if he was, and it came out that she had decided to shield him from the consequences, she could lose her license and might even face prosecution. She shut her eyes.

I am aiding and abetting a felony. She was making a value judgment of ghastly proportions: Clay's crime was less than would be the crime of sending him to prison.

Neither of them spoke for a minute or more. She looked at him sitting there in his ancient field jacket and the layers beneath, saw him as a mountain man driven by the snows down from his chosen isolation. Unfit for society once he got there, living by some simpler brutal law hardwired into his brain.

"After you broke off our sessions, there was something that occurred to me, that I wanted to tell you," she said. "But you wouldn't let me. I'd been listening to tapes of old sessions, and going through your file ... and what I wanted to tell you then was: You may think you have no control over yourself, but you do. Because with all the conflicts you've been in, you could've killed somebody ... yet you haven't. I wanted to tell you that you must've had something inside that was holding you back. Even if you never believed it was there, Clay, it was."

"Was," he repeated. "Did you hear yourself?"

She nearly winced. "Clay, I don't know what applies anymore. Whatever it is you've done, I don't even know how bad it is." She drew in tighter with a smoldering and unexpected anger. He was turning into her career's most spectacular failure. They taught you not to take such things personally, although doctors did it anyway. "But I'll tell you what I do know: Ever since you started getting those envelopes from Boston, you've acted as if you've completely given up on yourself. You. Have given. Up."

He stared into his coffee, swirling it. "Well, you know, a minute ago I thought I even heard my doctor talk about my little internal lifeline in the past tense."

"Am I your doctor?"

It was as blunt a demand as she'd made, and quieted him; he wouldn't be accustomed to that tone of voice. He set his cup down and she saw the child in him, fleetingly, still tethered to stakes more than twenty years old.

"Yes," he surrendered.

There was no triumph in hearing it. No relief. Worse, for a moment she thought she might have hoped he'd say no. Coward.

"Am I going to jail?"

"I don't know," less an answer than a sigh. I am not proud of myself, any way I turn, I am not going to feel proud of myself. "Maybe we should wait and see what you've done before..." Before what? Rationalizing it any further? "Before deciding that."

"Thank you," he whispered, and she could not recall him ever having said that before.

"There's something we need to air right now," she said. "This case, it quit being remotely normal a long time ago. I'm not even sure when that happened, probably before you left the hospital, and since then it's only gotten more deviant. I've gone out on one limb after another, I've done things I swore I'd never do, I'm doing them right now -"

Adrienne caught her tongue. Clay wasn't the one to tell this to; she should be talking to a fellow professional, should be on the phone with Ferris Mendenhall the way recovering alcoholics call their sponsors. She had gone too far. And was not prepared to stop.

"What I need to know from you is this: What do you want?"

Clay looked only perplexed.

"In the beginning you wanted an explanation about why you react to things the way you do. You wanted understanding. For better or for worse, it looks like you got it. No thanks to me, for the most part, I realize that. But that can't be all. I refuse to believe that's all there was motivating you. So if I'm still your doctor, what else is it you want?"

Clay scratched at his stubbled chin, then looked at her with the smile of one who hopes for the return of lost loves, resurrection of the dead; things that can never be.

"I want to live in a different world," he said.

"I can't help you with that."

Nodding, Clay sighed. "It's a loveless world, you know."

This she denied, pointing toward the counter, where Sarah sat with her back to them, picking at a plate of something; braided and unlike anyone else around, all the shift workers, the early rising sportsmen.

"I am in love," she told him quietly. "Deeply in love. It's the best and most healing thing in the world. But I wouldn't be in love if I didn't allow myself to take that risk."

"I won't deny that." He chose his words with care, as if taking refuge on the safer ground of theory. "But inst.i.tutionally, it's still a loveless world. The way we're taught to survive, get ahead, to prosper? You can't tell me that love plays any part in that." Frowning now. "That confused me for the longest time, when I was younger."

There he went again, making sense. She was still trying to cobble together a response when Clay went rampaging on. He may have given up on himself, but he never quit trying to root out an explanation.

"What do I want?" He grunted a tiny laugh. "Think about this: What do you think cancer wants?"

She had come to dread these asides. They felt as if he were taking her by the hand and leading her through minefields. Any moment an unexpected truth might explode in her face, while his path was so oblique she could never see them coming.

"You know what cancer is, don't you? It's rapid growth, is all it is, there's nothing magic about it. Cells start multiplying too fast, and so they form their own ma.s.s. It gets so, it's like the ma.s.s has a mind of its own. It doesn't fit in with the rest of the body but it wants to live anyway. And the more it thrives..." he said, leaving it open for her.

"The more the body suffers," Adrienne finished. The coffee began to curdle in her stomach like a sour pool. Cancer. He was comparing himself to cancer.

"Tumors," he murmured, his eyelids drifting. Had he gone the entire night without sleep? "If that's the way it goes in the human body, why not the body politic? They've decided now that the world's just one big complex organism anyway. So why shouldn't it get cancer? Everybody else is these days." He groaned. "I think it all just started growing too fast one day. Everything. Everybody. So tumors were inevitable, social tumors. Serial killers. Ma.s.s murderers. I'm just part of a new kind of tumor that got squeezed out of it all."

Adrienne breathed deeply, everything inside her crying out to be ill. The coffee had gone toxic, while even the scent of food had become oppressive, nauseous. She imagined all the Helverson's subjects, in united voice, reciting their manifesto: We are the cancers, the aberrations unable to serve the whole organism. We are the tumors birthed in decay and nourished on rot.

To which she could think of only one reb.u.t.tal.

"A tumor can't change its nature, Clay. A human being can."

"In theory," he said. "If a tumor had self-awareness, do you think it would want to kill its host? I don't think it would, it'd want to come to some coexistence." Pondering now, the dawn of new thoughts. "And maybe that's what I want...

"A separate peace."

Twenty-Three.

They got him home and he stayed put, and, to Adrienne's great relief, accessible. No more avoiding her phone calls, he promised; back to his sessions. His latest bout of wanderl.u.s.t had been aborted after just thirty-three hours, and she and Sarah were the only ones who even knew he had been gone.

It felt like more than a secret. It settled within her as a grim and ugly pact shared by conspirators who had buried a body by moonlight, who had smoothed the earth over as best they could, and swore an oath.

Thankfully, however, it had not literally come to that.

She had bought the Sunday edition of the Fort Collins Coloradoan from a vending machine before they had left town, and found nothing on the a.s.sault in the record store. She picked up the next day's edition in Denver and learned that, whatever his transgressions, Clay was no killer. The CSU junior he'd attacked had been hospitalized with a skull fracture and lacerations; not good, but a long way from a murder victim. The police had only the vaguest description of his a.s.sailant, and she reasoned that, if they investigated much at all, they would concentrate locally. What reason would they have of suspecting the a.s.sailant to be a drifter? How many drifters, in the winter, went shopping for ca.s.settes?

Clay conformed to no pattern.

He'll get away with this, she thought. He'll get away with this because I let him.

Adrienne got him, under some protest, to resume taking lithium; got him another bottle to replace those he had flushed. She got him to agree to three sessions in six days - a crisis schedule, but surely this qualified.

She did not shy away from his attack on the student. In the eyes of the world they might pretend it never happened, but not with each other. She had him dissect it, a.n.a.lyze his feelings at each stage; they took it apart until they could scrutinize the incident frame by frame, like a shaky film of an a.s.sa.s.sination.

She hammered away to reinforce the notion that he had a conscience, and since it was operable after the fact he should be able to employ it beforehand. It would require that he make an effort to pause before acting on impulse, and imagine having completed whatever he might be tempted to do. Carry it to its ends: Who would be hurt, who would suffer? He should close his eyes, if need be, and feel his way through the pain that lay in wait for everyone; better to summon forth imaginary guilt than render the real thing necessary.

Neither did she ignore Clay's new hypothesis that he and the others were social malignancies. Although the more she gave it thought, the more it seemed that Clay had intuitively hit upon something that made a bit of sense on a literal level, as well as metaphorically. Biochemically, some people simply were programmed for violence, and the surroundings in which they grew up could have a tremendous influence.

She knew that aggression had a chemical basis. In the brain's vast web of circuitry, behavioral messages were relayed by chemicals known as neurotransmitters, two of which - serotonin and norepinephrine - regulated aggression. In studies, men whose spinal fluid was found to have high levels of serotonin, which carried inhibitory messages, routinely scored low on aggression; those higher in norepinephrine were correspondingly more aggressive. That was why Clay had been prescribed lithium in the first place; it worked by boosting serotonin levels. She was not convinced it was wholly effective on him - it did not work on psychotics and calculating predators - but it could not hurt.

Yet it was those environmental factors that really intrigued her. It had been proven that a child's early surroundings could even influence his biochemistry. Young boys from homes in which they faced situations that provoked aggressive responses were often found to have begun adapting to that environment: Their systems had begun to produce less serotonin, more norepinephrine.

They were gearing up to survive.

So why not take a wild leap and superimpose that process upon a much larger picture? Suppose the bodies - the very genetic encoding - of human beings were responding to the colossal pressures exerted by a world whose rate of change was increasing exponentially.

Was it so mad a thought? It had taken a billion years for the brains of the first vertebrates to evolve into the intelligence of primates. In a mere two million, self-aware humanity had developed and a.s.sumed dominion. From common ancestors, the Australopithecus and h.o.m.o genera diverged, the former dying out, a failed lineage, while the latter thrived. h.o.m.o habilis learned to use tools, and was replaced by h.o.m.o erectus, who mastered fire and hunting, who was in turn replaced by h.o.m.o sapiens, who mastered all else after emerging perhaps 40,000 years ago. Within the past 6000, modern civilization had arisen; the past 4500, enduring architecture. The past three hundred, the industrial age. The past fifty, nuclear fusion. The past thirty, the ability to set foot on another celestial body. And since then had come the manufacture of artificial hearts and fiber-optic filaments, and the development of laser microsurgery.

All this, while the DNA of h.o.m.o sapiens was still ninety-nine percent identical to that of the chimpanzee.

With such a wrenching burst of development, might not a genetic whiplash like Helverson's syndrome at least be feasible?

Adrienne had heard it said that h.o.m.o sapiens had ceased to evolve because there was no more need. The end goal served by evolution is success in breeding, and certainly that success was indisputable. h.o.m.o sapiens had become not only the most successfully prolific species on earth; it had become the sole species possessing the ability to destroy itself.

Perhaps those who claimed that modern humanity didn't need to evolve any further were just being smug about their top rung on the ladder. Maybe they'd not considered that more fine-tuning would become necessary to psychologically adapt to the world that had emerged out of their unchallenged dominion.

Grand schemes; even bolder conjecture. But she had heard no explanation for Helverson's syndrome that made any more sense, so she would at least entertain it.

Grand schemes. Bold conjecture. And an indifferent nature that encouraged diversity and variation, so that to the victor would belong the spoils.

Still, in the end, it came down to individuals, who struggled to be born, struggled to live with the differences that made them mutants among their own kind, and who struggled against the death that waited for them all. Who struggled mightily, even n.o.bly, regardless of who had made them, and how...

And why.

At the end of the week, Sarah came home late in the afternoon with a ring in her navel. Giddy and hyper, she could have climbed walls, could have dazzled distant stars with the gleam in her eyes.

She finally stood still long enough to pose with legs braced wide, leaning back with her hips and belly thrust forward as she tugged up her black T-shirt, the ominous Club Cannibal shirt she used to sleep in. "Don't you love it?"

Adrienne stared.

Sarah's navel was centered like a pearl in the firm lush swell of her belly, and the ring was skewered through its thick top lip, a simple uroboros of silver. The surrounding skin was red and inflamed, but not as much as Adrienne might have expected. A few thin streaks of dried blood were left on her skin.

"I had it done at this piercing gallery Nina goes to for her ears, and it was so great, they're really serious about what they do there, and look at it as a ritual, and they play whatever music you'd like while it's being done, and they talk to you and hold your hand, and whoever's hanging out at the time can watch if you don't mind."

Adrienne blinked. "Did you?"

"Did I mind?" Sarah was incredulous, then broke into a broad smile. "Of course not, I sort of liked that I wasn't going through it alone. When people are watching it's like this encouragement to endure the pain better, it's this support system even though they're mostly strangers you'll never see again." She had scarcely paused for breath since walking in. Sarah let the shirt fall loosely back into place while twining up against her, running her hands along Adrienne's sides and breathing heavily through parted lips. "But I can't tell you how much I wanted your tongue on me when it was happening, I could have come all the way to the ceiling."

And when they kissed, she was so deep and forceful; Adrienne had never been kissed like that by another woman, not even by Sarah in the past, a brutish kiss that she had thought the ploy of men. It weakened the knees, and then Sarah tore away with wet mouth and a wild back-toss of her head, and swept across the room to collapse upon the sofa.

"They told me this happens to some people, they'll get this incredible endorphin rush for the next three or four hours, it's just like a drug, and wouldn't you know, I'm one of the lucky ones!" She laughed and drummed her fists upon the sofa, her feet upon the floor, then parted her legs to slide both hands down along her inner thighs. Eyes focusing back on Adrienne, alight with an all-consuming hunger. "There's still time, let's go to bed, we have to go to bed, if we don't I'm going to explode."

So they did, and Adrienne went into the bedroom and undressed as if half-outside herself: This isn't me, this is just a sh.e.l.l, and the real me is across the room watching. For the first time in their relationship the s.e.x reminded her of nights in her marriage when she had submitted not out of any genuine desire, more that she didn't have the will to say no, because there was nothing else she had to do.

Their lips and tongues and fingers lacked for no heat, but five minutes in she knew what the problem was: She had been left behind. Sarah was soaring, on a high all her own, and both the blessing and the curse was that Sarah was too far aloft to notice. They had to be careful not to grind upon her stomach, but still Sarah was electrified and wild, so sensitive a feathery touch could turn her convulsive with rapture. Her head would thrash side to side, its cascade of thin braids became whips. And with Adrienne's mouth buried between her thighs, never had Sarah's legs felt more powerful as when they clenched together, as if to crush the head that had brought her so shudderingly far. She had become more than mortal; it was like making love with a force of nature. To deny her anything she wanted would be to risk death.

Somewhere in the shadow of it Adrienne lay exhausted. There might not even be enough air in the room for them both. How sore she would be tomorrow. This would be how the servants of savage deities would feel: beloved meat, knowledgeable and privileged, but meat nonetheless.

In the interim, one tiny misgiving had grown, and burst from her mouth before she even knew it would.

"If you didn't want to go through that piercing alone," she said, "then why didn't you take me along? I didn't even know you were planning on doing it."

"I don't know. Nina was there, and..." She turned onto her side, facing inward. Calmer now, what a relief. "I didn't want to bother you. You had a session with Clay earlier."

"You couldn't have waited until I didn't?"

"You had your work, and ... and I had mine."

Work. She'd really said that.

Adrienne's hand stole over to Sarah's belly, touched the hot red skin around her navel. The ring. A bit of clear fluid was oozing from the piercing. For weeks, Sarah would daily have to doctor this with antiseptic until it healed.

"This was work to you."

Sarah nodded. "I wanted to know what it was like, getting a body piercing. Ears don't count, everybody does their ears, that's nothing."

"Your thesis."

"Yeah." Sarah grinned, salacious and heavy-lidded. "There's no rule saying I can't enjoy it, too. What, don't tell me you don't like it. You like it, don't you?"

Her gaze tracked to Sarah's navel again. It drew the eye naturally, and part of her wanted to lower her mouth to it, trace her tongue around the little folds, like tiny pudenda, taste the metal. Too soon, though, let it heal. Yet the ring felt intimidating. Neither of them wore a thing at the moment, yet it seemed as if Sarah were more naked, somehow, her bared body all the more emphasized. Naked and strong.

"I like it," she whispered. "I just wish I'd been there."

"Don't be mad" - stroking Adrienne's hair - "I had to do this for myself. For them, too, it's so much more prevalent a part of their culture. Graham has nipple piercings - I bet you didn't know that about him, did you? Nina told me that Twitch went in twice to get his c.o.c.k pierced and chickened out both times." She laughed. "Erin was there too. This afternoon. I had her tape it."

Videotape, too. Why hadn't she just sent out invitations?

"I understand why they do it now," Sarah said, the carnal beast sated for the time being, the inquisitive Sarah emerging. "It's an experience you just can't compare with having your ears done. These people - Nina and Twitch and Erin and Graham and Clay, and the others I've met at the clubs and all around - they're so low in the social strata, they're forced to a.s.sert some control in their lives in other ways, and this is one of them. You never feel more alive and in control of yourself as when you trust someone else to run a piece of sharp metal through you. I never would've believed how strong that feeling comes through when you're lying there if I hadn't done it myself."

Adrienne tracked a finger through the sweat between Sarah's b.r.e.a.s.t.s. "It sounds like a rite of pa.s.sage."

"That's exactly what it is. You know what they are out there? I mean, think about them all, at the clubs, and on the streets. It's tribal. They don't formalize it, but it's still a tribal society." Sarah rolled onto her back, staring upward. "I miss the ceiling fan from home. That always feels so good now." A shrug. "That's all most everyone is these days, just a collection of isolated tribes, finding more and more reasons to be suspicious of each other. In primitive cultures there's only room for one view, really, just to survive, but ours ... hundreds, thousands maybe. And we're not any different back home in Tempe. All our friends, just about, are just like us. You, me, them, we're this little tribe of m.u.f.f-divers."

Adrienne frowned. "Don't confine me like that, all right?"

"No, I guess I can't, can I?" Sarah propped herself up on her elbow. "Because you can't make the commitment. You've still got one foot on the other side of the fence."