Prototype

Seventeen

Keeping his appointments with Adrienne, Clay began to see, was a matter of faith, faith that something good would come of them. It had become more binding here than during his tenure on Ward Five, when he had nothing else to do. Now he actually had to extend an effort.

He liked the condo better than the hotel. The hotel hadn't worked for him at all, if only for a single session, but what a bust that session had been. Sitting in chairs by the window, the round table dragged aside so that it would be no barrier between them, but that hadn't helped. He'd sat there for most of the time as if a cork were in his brain, and had left with a headache as bad as the pain after he'd smashed his forehead with the cast.

He found he could relax at Adrienne's condo, maybe a quarter of the living room given to a desk and a pair of chairs and a love seat. If he did not let his eyes stray too far he could sustain the illusion it was an actual office. She had obviously gone to some trouble for him.

What he had not counted on, though, was seeing her lover up here. Sarah. An unexpected delight, that. She had to know what he was and what was wrong with him — doctors weren't supposed to talk but he never believed they didn’t — yet not once could he catch her looking at him as if he belonged in a sideshow. She headed out the door after a couple minutes and he almost told them there was no need, but stopped. Adrienne did not seem that loose about it all; had to maintain protocol, if nothing else.

They had exchanged the couch for a love seat, but the routine was familiar by now: his back to the wall, following where thought and memory and psychic wreckage led. There were times he regarded his head as a jar, Adrienne's occasional questions and prompts just more swipes of a kitchen knife to make sure he was scraped out as clean as possible.

Will there ever be an end to this? he wondered, and of course there would be, but when would they have enough? He had to admit he felt better since having someone to unload on, to talk with and not just be talked at, but this remission would surely last no longer than the treatment itself. Still, the thought of turning it into a lifetime habit would be enough to make him opt for Erin's joke. You look like they gave you a lobotomy, she had laughed when seeing the stitches across his brow. Assuming he lived to fifty, he could not picture himself in this same pose, week after week. Go ahead, he would have to tell them at some point, while tapping his frontal lobe. Drill here, make it messy.

There would come an end. Adrienne would someday return home. Maybe she would be the one to decide enough was enough. Or maybe those footing the bills would seal the purse and leave her with no choice. And then? Adrift again and perhaps no better than before, the inside of his head spread thin for everyone's benefit but his own. Perhaps someone, somewhere, waiting for the pressures to again mount within him, watching from afar for his greatest explosion, so they might nod and concur, Yes, we all feared it would happen someday but we could not hold him. Let us learn from this tragic mistake.

So maybe it really was best to try while he had the chance.

I am what my birth made me but isn’t there some way to rise above it? There should be. There must be.

"Let me ask you something," he said, far into the session. "Do you think people are inherently good or bad?"

Adrienne shifted to one side in her chair. "Always asking the easy questions, aren't you?"

He shrugged: Sorry, just being myself. She now knew better than to try ducking these questions, or turning them around back onto him; he had conditioned her well; he could be relentless in pursuing where she stood on matters.

Clay watched as she formulated her answer — the soft tilts of her head, the interplay between hand and ear. Away from the hospital she was no longer wearing her hair pinned back. Good for her; it made her look so much less prim. She now looked like a Nordic athlete.

"No, I don't," she said. "I believe there's a capacity in everyone to fulfill a certain potential. But whether or not they reach it, and how it emerges — say, whether it's constructive or destructive — depends largely on the experiences they've had, and there you get into so many cultural and environmental factors that it's impossible to even list them all. But then, in most people those experiences are an ongoing process, so I certainly don't believe they're locked in."

"So life experience, this overrides biology."

"In my book it usually can."

"So you think I can save myself." He knew what was coming —

"What do you think?"

Nailed it. "I believe you think so."

"You know what I meant."

Clay nodded: Yeah, just sparring with you. "You're probably right. I suppose I do believe in the power of the individual. But we're not left alone, we don't live in vacuums. I've tried and it doesn't work. Other people always want in, even if they have to force themselves in. So that negates the power of the individual. I think it's mostly in a collective sense that we're failures. Like a chain being only as strong as its weakest link. The same thing applies to a society. It's no better, no stronger, than its lowest offenders."

"That discounts a lot of good that people do for others," said Adrienne, and he thought she was probably picturing Mother Teresa right now. She would.

"That doesn't discount it, that just puts it in a context of being hopeless, more or less. It's individuals that do good, but individuals die. It's societies that chew everything up, and they keep right on going until there's nothing left." He took a deep breath. "I think the world's been shaking itself down for a long time, trying to bottom out toward a lowest common denominator…

"But that's just one weak link's opinion. Got any coffee?"

And they went on for another forty minutes or so, until Clay at last decided he was talked out for one afternoon, then realized they had been at this for more than an hour and a half.

On the way to the door he asked if she and Sarah had plans for the following night, confident they would not. Who else would they know here, who else had they had time to know? Adrienne asked why before she answered.

"Thought you might like to head over to Graham's awhile," he said. "You told him you'd like to see his work. Sarah would like it, probably."

"I'll ask her."

"She'll say yes," Clay said, so sure of himself that he didn’t look at her when detouring into the kitchen to grab a notepad by the phone and write directions.

*

He did not even attempt to show his paintings — that was the thing Clay never understood about Graham. Content to let them be seen only by close acquaintances, and the occasional stranger who had heard of them and wore him down through persistence, Graham consigned them to the walls of his basement apartment and studio. They hung alone, bleak portals made even more so by the absence of frames, somehow more naked and raw that way, and so far as Clay knew, none of them had a name.

"I don't see why you shouldn’t," Clay had once said about Graham's reticence to exhibit. "People go for H.R. Giger, they should go for yours."

Graham had shaken his head, so appalled at the idea that he had to light a cigarette to put himself right again. "It's not a question of acceptance. Galleries expect you to stand around that first night and make putrid small talk to people who'd cross the street to avoid you any other time. No, I don't think so."

"Like that would stop you from walking out if you felt like it," Clay had said, knowing this was just one more excuse. Graham had so many they should be numbered. "Anyway, I've figured out what the plan is. You're going to wait until you die early and they'll find everything and you'll become this cult celebrity."

Graham's face had lifted with a Mona Lisa smile, aloof and knowing; here's to life and untimely death and skyrocketing market values. "It would be a hilarious inside joke, wouldn't it?"

Clay had agreed. It was only the young and talented who became gods after their deaths. The mediocre were even more completely forgotten, and the old went on to just rewards. Only the young seeded debates of speculation, what might have been.

At the time he had been jealous, thinking, I'll die and there won't be a thing left behind, not one lasting bit of graffiti I scrawled on this world to say I passed through. Now he knew he’d been wrong. At least geneticists would know his name. He wondered if they would store his brain in a jar, or keep even more of him around, like the skeleton of Truganini, last of the extinct Tasmanians, displayed for the generations to follow. Better living through the study of mutants could be their motto.

And thus he was in a contemplative mood arriving at Graham's on Monday night. Erin, pale blond hair ethereal against her baggy black sweater, was already there to film his arrival, or maybe she had been there all day — he'd not talked with her since she'd spent Friday night with him. Nina came alone; Twitch was at work. Sarah and Adrienne were last, Sarah bringing a few bottles of wine.

They all seemed to get along. One would never know that Sarah was walking in on a roomful of strangers. With Graham she got into a discussion of Dali and Francis Bacon; with Nina she discovered they were both fans of the writing of Charles Bukowski. Even Erin dropped her guard and warmed up rather quickly, and elicited no judgment when she sprang her frequent test, telling how she earned part of her income. Erin shared industry secrets, told Sarah what Clay had already known for some time: splattered semen in still-life cum-shots was hardly ever real, but a mixture of unflavored gelatin for viscosity and dishwashing liquid for pearlescence, and was squirted from a small turkey baster.

"I never thought it quite looked real," Sarah said.

Adrienne glanced askance at her. "How would you know?"

"I grew up with three brothers, don't forget. Puberty wasn't always dry."

"That might've been enough to turn me to women," Erin said.

Graham made a small grunt. "But think of all the fascinating career highlights you would've missed out on."

She turned back to him, almost coy, as coy as Erin could be when actually herself. "Don't be jealous, when they're in my mouth I'm still thinking of you."

"Where are they when you're thinking of Clay?"

Erin frosted, just a bit, a fine ice-eyed edge of pique. "Wherever it feels good," she said, and left it at that.

Clay added nothing, content to stay out of it, thinking only, This can't last, this triangle. Someone was eventually bound to get seriously hurt, and he doubted he would be the one, no matter what transpired.

Soon, Adrienne talked Graham into giving them a tour of his paintings, and he consented. Walking them through the haphazard placement, in black jeans and T-shirt, an apple picker's cap atop his limp curls, and an open bottle of wine planted against one hip, he reminded Clay of some lost Parisian, out of place and out of time, and especially out of faith in himself. The canvases came with frequent disclaimers: I should have painted over that one; I was drunk most of that month.

"Compliment him enough," Clay told Adrienne, "and maybe he'll give you one. Anything to replace that washed-out impressionist crap in your office."

He skipped out on most of the tour; had seen them all many times. The grimy metal structures rendered in oils and acrylics; the furnaces, the bridges to nowhere, the girders turned to pretzels by holocausts unknown. But then he realized that, off in one gloomy corner, Graham had begun discussing a painting he had not yet seen. On his way over, he heard Graham say it had been done the whole time Clay had been gone. Bastard, hadn't even told him about this one.

He admired it beside Adrienne and Sarah, seeing it as they must. The difference in scope was obvious at a glance. While the earlier works had but one subject, with this, the eye hardly knew where to begin. Graham had to have poured nearly every spare moment into this over the weeks Clay had been AWOL, and even then it was … it was…

Astounding, was what it was.

"It reminds me of Bosch," Sarah said.

Graham, pleased, nodded. "There's nothing new left to be done in painting. If it's not just pure form and no content, then it's all self-referential in one way or another. So I figured why not be blatant about the reference."

He went on to explain how he’d taken the right wing from Hieronymus Bosch's triptych The Garden of Delights — the portion depicting Hell as a dark, phantasmagoric landscape teeming with countless figures either suffering or meting out judgment — and reconfigured it for the postindustrial age. The painting crawled with the malevolence of machines; some were alone, others linked by networks of pipe and cable. They ground small, fragile humans into ruined clots beneath their treads, in their hydraulics, between their gears. Where Bosch's silhouetted city raged in flames across the top, here decrepit factories gasped their last in the red glow of smoldering coal pits. Where Bosch's Hell teemed with demons in the form of grotesque hybrid animals, Graham saw traitorous humans, themselves become half-machine.

"What about the triptych concept?" Sarah asked. "Bosch depicted the Earth and Paradise, too. Are you planning on…?"

"I thought about it. But I just couldn't come up with any comparable vision I thought was pleasant enough to bother with." Graham shrugged this way and that, watched his foot as he twisted the tip of his shoe against the bare concrete floor. "In Bosch's day, you know, they still believed in Paradise."

Clay left the three of them talking, wandered back into the living area. Erin was rolling joints on the kitchen counter, and maybe he would partake soon. Wishing already he could join in with the wine, be like everyone else, but not really up to the violent nausea and thunderous headache sure to come. Thank you, chromosome twelve, thank you so much for everything. Sometimes oblivion could be so inviting.

"Hey you." Nina, coming up from behind, fresh from the bathroom in a diaphanous swirl of gypsy cloth and wavy red hair. "You're awfully quiet tonight."

"Sorry," he said, "I never realized."

Plump-cheeked and smiling brightly, she slipped back around behind him, clamped onto his shoulders with hands soft and warm, squeezed twice in an offer of amateur massage before he flexed out of her grip and took a step just beyond reach.

"I forgot," she mumbled with apology, creamy brow furrowed.

He nodded but didn't believe her. She was just testing to see if anything had changed while he'd been away, been cured, if anything in him had inched closer to her view of the way normal people behaved. He was sorry to disappoint. He had just never liked being touched, unless something more animal was sure to come of it. Sex, or fighting — probably both qualified, and weren't even so different. Both involved tearing into someone else. Touching for its own sake was like making a promise that would eventually have to be broken.

"Graham's being sweet tonight, have you noticed?" she said.

"Maybe he remembered to take his Prozac."

"Clay!" she bawled, half-laughing, half-chastising. He did like to make her laugh, on the rare occasions he actually managed. Nina was the sort who looked as if she needed to laugh more, even deserved to. Laughter was kind to her, erasing the damage and hurt accrued just by being alive.

Sometimes he had to wonder why she and Uncle Twitch hung out with the rest of them. They were too optimistic, too kind. They would be cannibalized someday.

"Why shouldn't he be sweet?" said Clay. "He has admirers and he didn't have to do anything to get them over here. He gets to maintain his front."

"Well," Nina shifted her rounded shoulders, a tacit agreement, "you know how he can be. I worry about him sometimes. While you were gone? A couple weeks went by that nobody saw him, not even Erin. I thought maybe he went out on your trail."

"Erin didn't mention that." He shrugged. "He was probably just locked in here working the entire time. Have you seen that new painting?"

"It's not good for him to be that alone, he's not like you. Graham thinks he doesn't need other people, but he does." Nina's eyes were wide and she nodded, an innocent sage.

"Mostly to try to salvage his own ego."

"That's still needing them."

He smiled at her, could not help it. Saint Nina. He wondered how she discussed him behind his back, what kind things she would find to say that, if he heard them, would make him blush or gag, knowing them to be revisionist varnish. When I die, he would get around to telling her someday, you write the obituary.

Clay got up, had to move. Drifted about the maze of the basement apartment, the half walls and squared brick pillars that came down to anchor the house above, and made Graham's home seem smaller than it really was, more complex. In one far corner was a door to a big storage room. When Clay passed it he noticed a faint odor lingering about the corner. He put his nose to the door crack and sniffed — stronger, an old after-scent like brimstone, fires recently burned in the hearts of iron forges.

He opened the door and the scent rolled out of the black. Nothing inside that he could see but a mere shape, massive and still, like a boulder carved raggedly square by ancient Mayan hands, then shrouded in pale drop cloths —

And then a hand, this one flesh and blood, splayed on the door to push it out of his grasp, to close it.

"No," Graham said. "I meant to get a padlock for that door."

"What's in there?"

"No, no. No. Don't ask me about it." Graham twisted in place, looking painfully at the floor for a moment, leaving his hand on the door. "It's not ready yet."

"A sculpture?" But surely not, Graham had never before worked on anything approaching such a scale, nothing he could not set upon a tabletop with ease. Although clearly he had taken some leap with that new painting, upgrading his obsessions into grander dimensions.

"I told you not to ask me." Something burned in Graham's eyes, those dark eyes alight and saying, I'm in control, I know what I'm doing, that look approaching pure transcendence just before someone tries to fly out a window.

"Sorry," Clay said, and it was Graham again, the Graham he had always known. Always? As much always as you could fit into four years.

"You feel like going out?" Graham asked. "Sarah wants to go to The Foundry. Sounds good to me, I'm sick of this place."

Clay said sure, The Foundry, anytime, knowing he had lost his one and only chance for a sneak preview. Graham would have a lock on the door by the time he was here again. Graham kept promises. He was funny that way.