Prototype

Twenty-One

These were the most unlikely of missives, and would take serious contemplation to assimilate into his worldview.

Had he believed in any thinking power greater than himself, this could have been a guardian angel come to his aid.

Had he believed in prayer, this might have been an answer.

But Clay believed in neither — so what other than a fluke could it be? He had a Boston postmark and nothing else, an entire city in which to plant his imaginings … who it must be, and why, and how this relayer had come by the information that Adrienne and her backers thought too sensitive to let him in on.

He had at first suspected it to be more of their chicanery: We'll poke him this way, see how he responds. But it had continued as if according to a deliberate agenda, heedless of his reaction, by someone who might not even have a means of gauging it. Tantalizing rations of information, one envelope per week with something new. First the general overviews, then the pictures. This week, case studies of the five North American Helverson's subjects known before he had been tagged as number six. Keep this up, before long he would be as informed as Adrienne. Maybe more so.

Maybe that was the plan.

He could face the east, as if toward Mecca, and come close to sensing some distant kindred heart, beating in a stranger's chest. Who are you and how do you know my name, how do you know my aberration?

And just what does it matter to you?

Whoever it was, this person had touched his life from across the country, and while no name had yet been shared, in a sense he felt a little less alone, and far less dependent on psychotherapy. He had been snipped free from the bureaucratic umbilical cord of a think tank in a desert city into which he had wandered by chance. He didn't need them anymore.

He had this.

And Clay realized why he could not believe in angels: They were obsolete. What was their job but to bring information, to herald announcements? Now they had been bettered. The messengers of the information age had fiber-optic wings; their chariots, jets filled with sacks of airmail; their trumpet knell from the sky, now the programming of satellites in orbit. The angels had fallen, clipped and shorn.

And if it would have been nice to believe in the comfort of their radiant presence, the welcome rustle of their wings, rather than in the cold hard hum of technology, at least the latter was dependable. It required no more than the touch of a button, and was there whether he believed in it or not.

Go ahead, he directed toward the east, more than a thought, not quite a whisper. You started this, now finish it. You know what I am, and whoever you are, you probably don't know why I'm this way any better than I do … but can you at least tell me if I can be anything more…?

Or if this is all there is, all there ever will be. All there ever can be.

Save me.

While the anger at a world he had not asked to join — not in this mutant body, at least — often seemed too much, more and more it seemed as if it simply were not enough.

*

She came into the apartment the way she had come into his life a few years back — quietly, hesitantly, even sadly, and Clay supposed his first thought was but an echo of an earlier one, maybe even the very first thing he had thought about her: She looks broken.

Footsteps soft and small across the floor — she was walking as if even her legs had been snapped and were not to be trusted. No video camera with her for a change, both arms busy hugging across her front. Erin shed her coat, then sank onto the couch beside him and they were bathed in the news anchor's chatter from the TV. She remained so still he had to check to make sure she was breathing.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

Her hair straggled like yellowed weeds from beneath her hat. "What do I smell like?"

Clay frowned, almost laughed. Finally bent close enough to put his nose to her, where Erin's slim neck curved into shoulder.

"Soap," he said. "Shampoo."

Oh, she seemed to mouth, full lips pale, pressing together. When she looked at him, her face could have been no more naked had she been skinned alive.

"Is that all?"

He tried again and got nothing, nothing more than the city through which she had come, the city and the cold. She smelled of December, but didn't they all?

"I think so," he said. "Is there something I missed?"

No answer, just Erin, Erin on a winter's evening as a chill gripped the attic apartment the way it always did when dusk turned black. Thin veins of frost rimed the windows, and she went to one such web, as if drawn, hypnotized. She looked at the frost as a jumper looks at a ledge; it became her entire world. She scraped a fingertip along the pane, a white crescent of ice thickening beneath her nail.

"Sometimes," she said without turning, "sometimes I think every man should have a gay experience. Taking … taking the passive role. Just once, as long as he remembers it. Remembers what it's like to have his body invaded."

Sinking by the window then, down on her haunches and her head lowered into arms that were already pretzeled about her body; she turned halfway and tumbled back against the wall but barely made a noise, as if she weren't really there. Posed for too many pictures, maybe, each one slicing away a few more layers of cells — a specimen donor for voyeurs' fantasies.

When she raised her face, Erin's eyes were red and her mouth was stretched wide. "What's wrong with me?" she screamed. "I can't even cry anymore! I tried for an hour and the tears wouldn't come and I want them to, I want my tears back!"

He remained on the couch where she had left him, staring from across the living room. This would be how deer feel in headlights, snared by some approaching sensory overload, petrified and about to die for it.

He should go to her — Clay knew it as surely as he knew the scars on the back of his hand. He should touch her if she wanted to be touched, hold her if she wanted to be held, kiss her if she wanted to be kissed. It should be automatic. He shouldn’t even have to think about this, because where did thinking get him? Got him to realizing just how many broken parts he must really have inside, and maybe he'd shattered them all himself over the years, in one fit of rage after another, until nothing was left.

Slit me open, he thought, and would I even feel it then…?

Feel enough to connect them? Or would Erin find nothing more inside than a coagulated mass of scar tissue, so thick it defeated even the knife?

"What happened?"

"Tell me the truth." She sounded so desperate to hear it. If she could hold onto words, her clenched fists would burst them like watery boils. "Just tell me the truth. Am I ugly? Do you think I'm ugly?"

Shaking his head: "No." How could she even wonder? Never had he known her to exhibit the slightest insecurity about her looks, even when they were her stock-in-trade. Shedding her clothes came as easily as others found removing their shoes. He had always assumed if there were any doubts, she had locked them deep within, and built walls around the locks, and posted guards to protect the walls. He had thought her impregnable.

As secured as Troy.

"Liar!" she cried, as she curled onto her side on the floor, beneath the window. "Don't let me down now, you shit. If there was one thing I could respect most about you, it was that you were always brutally honest. Don't you even know how rare that is, how much it's meant to me?"

Turning his hands up, shaking his head. "You're not ugly, I never found you ugly." But why couldn't he go the extra mile? Why did his throat constrict around the rest, why couldn't he tell her she was beautiful?

For so long he had felt aged, even ancient at times, as worn and cracked as old leather. Yet he felt too young now, as ineffectual as a child, three feet off the floor and watching as towering parents battled it out with fists and whipcrack words meant to hurt where fists could never reach. Don't fight, don't fight, the only thing a child can say; he was no more qualified now to intercede in misery than he must have been twenty years ago.

Don't hurt, Erin. Don't hurt.

She drew a breath between clenched teeth, smoothed a phantom tear away from the corner of her eye. "I remember, I was eight, I think. There was some stupid citywide kids' beauty contest I heard about at school, all these other girls were entering and I thought I wanted to, too. You can laugh if you want, the idea of me being interested in something like that."

Clay shook his head. He had never considered Erin as a child. Never thought of her as tiny, impressionable, innocent.

"You're not laughing." She sniffed, did it for him. "I asked my mother about it and she told me to ask my father. I asked him and he told me no, he wasn't about to waste thirty-five dollars on the entry fee, not when I could never win."

He watched her tremble for a moment, face half-hidden by a spill of hair, the visible half more than he wanted to see. A small sympathetic spasm rippled through his center and he dug fingernails into knees to stop it.

"Why do they do those things to us, Clay? Why do they do things like that?"

"There's…" he said, trying to find words. "There's some other way?"

He tried to move, succeeded only in sliding off the couch onto the floor, on the same level as she but a room and chasms away. He thought to try to reach — it was a small room — but his arm would still fall short. He was sinking, drowning in the same chilly air he had breathed all day, would breathe all night, would breathe all his life.

"I did another layout today," she said, "and they wanted me to look ugly. Scared and ugly. They posed me with five guys this afternoon, all of them at once, and they were, they were … they were…" Erin went through some kind of contortion, as if she were retching without sound, with nothing emerging; dry heaving her soul. "I could smell them sweating under the lights, and they were … they were in me, everyplace, and holding me down, I couldn't even breathe anymore, and every time the photographer would yell for me to look more scared or more ugly, they'd … they'd all just laugh. And do me harder, all of them, in this weird rhythm they got into, like they were some kind of group machine or something." Voice breaking into a sobbing wail, "This morning I got up thinking I was going to like it, that I'd have fun with it! But it was like they didn't even need me! I'd always, I'd always, I'd always tell myself these other people, they weren't sex partners, but … but this is the first time anybody's ever made me feel that way, like I was nothing to them. Why did it have to be different this time?"

Clay had no answer, not even the beginnings of one. Thinking, But Adrienne would, then dismissing it immediately.

"Why do I feel all the wrong things, the things I don't want to feel and not the things I do?" Erin pushed the hair from her face and slowly sat up, back against the wall, arms wrapped around her knees to turn her into a tight little ball.

He watched her raise her eyes to him, plaintive eyes, eyes of a beggar seeking scraps at a back door: whatever you can spare. I should go to her —

A sound, then, like the breaking of a violin string in the middle of a pitifully beautiful solo: her voice: "Why won't you hold me, Clay?"

Hold her? Hold her? He could not even answer her.

"Sometimes I just want you to … to…" Shaking her head in defeat.

"Why didn't you go to Graham's tonight instead?"

Erin snapped her head up as if she had been slapped, fresh hurt washing down her face. And while her nose could run, still she shed no tears. "Graham? I couldn't tell this to Graham. I'd tell him about this afternoon and it'd be like digging his heart out with a fork. If I did that to him I'd hate myself even more."

He almost smiled at that. Erin, as wretched as she felt, still managing to brush the dust off something close to altruism. Perhaps she deserved better than either him or Graham, only no one knew it, least of all her.

"Please hold me!" she cried. "Please!" And how expectantly she waited, suddenly poised and tense, just waiting for something other than herself around which she could throw her arms. Her empty arms.

The body, the mind — how strange when the former freezes up, and the latter seems at its peak. Had he really been this way since birth, his priorities hopelessly awry? He had never been afraid to hurt. Hurt was so dependable it seemed natural, the only thing anyone could count on. It was pleasure that seemed suspect. Maybe because, once it diminished, as it inevitably had to, the hurt seemed even more powerful, twice as real as before.

When they grew tired of looking at each other in their stalemate, neither making the first move, Erin got up and slowly shrugged on her coat and, without a word, left him slumped in the spot that had claimed him for its own…

Thereby proving him right.

He still might have been wrong, might have touched her and found that to be close was not such a prickly thorn after all. But better to err on the side of caution.

*

He tried to drink but even the taste was venom. Three shots of vodka and he was clinging to the kitchen sink while the lining of his stomach nearly turned inside out. He was recalcitrant when it came to feeling? This he could feel just fine, every contracting fiber of gut muscle.

Clay tried calling her later, but never a human pickup, just Erin's answering machine. He almost left a message on the fifth attempt, but again slammed the receiver back down when he tried to speak and found he had no words to suit him. The failure got less shameful as he went along.

Maybe she was there, curled beneath a blanket in the dark, counting each abortive call. Or maybe she was at Graham's.

He smashed the bottle of vodka but it did not help; followed suit with three plates, then sat among the shards and carved on himself with one, watched the blood ooze down his arm; hung his head and found he had a few tears in reserve even if Erin had none. This much breaking of glass — used to be, he could count on his downstairs neighbors to bang on their ceiling, call out for him to knock off the noise, but no more. He wondered if they were now afraid of him.

He knew what the problem was. Knew exactly what the fucking problem was. They'd had him on lithium since late September, and why he was still taking it he didn't know. More than two weeks since he’d relieved Adrienne of her duties and still he was popping the pills like daily communion. He supposed he had faith in them to some degree: Lithium is my shepherd, I shall not kill.

No more, though. It was dulling him inside, suffocating his one chance at anything like love and grace in the world. They prescribed it because they wanted him alone; he would be easier to study that way.

When he flushed them away, he thought the act should at least make him feel better than it actually did.

Facing himself in the mirror, he saw the smudgy dark circles beneath his eyes, the thin scar over the left. Remembering when he had stood here and taken the twelve stitches out himself. No doctor would get near his eyes with scissors if he could help it.

Maybe he needed a job, something to fill his days. Certainly the need would be upon him eventually. He had squirreled away five thousand in savings from his stint as a garbage man. Fine for now, but it wouldn't last through spring. A job, something mindless, like the rest of them, Nina and Twitch and Graham, working below their abilities but above their interest. A job…?

No, it would never be enough.

I have to get out of here, he thought. Breathe other air and purge the lithium from his system, maybe he could return in a few days and be better for Erin; be real. If those assholes in Tempe hadn't wanted his wallet, maybe he could have achieved an epiphany months ago; burned himself blind in the Arizona desert and vomited out every bitter root he had been fed since birth. Dragged himself home half-alive, but at least that half would have been worth the effort it took just to live.

He would try, try again, and if he could have furthered the cause by praying to anything he believed might answer, he would have done that, too.

He could pray toward the east, toward his guardian messenger.

But no — that was just one more vessel in which to misplace faith that would probably turn out to disappoint. They all did, in the end.

*

North this trip, a direction only a fool would take this time of year, but fools could be mad and could even be holy, and the paths of holy madmen led somewhere.

He would find one such path — he had to.

Unburdened by his car, on foot as seemed proper, Clay wore layers of clothes and carried only what fit in the pockets of his heavy field jacket. He trekked across the city for an hour and blocked out its roar with his Walkman tape player and earphones. The night was cold against his face but at least it was dry, and finally he caught a bus, boarding it in a swirling cloud of diesel stink and riding with fellow passengers who lived in their tiny islands of air and met no one's eyes. He rode as far north as he could, then got off and trudged several blocks to the highway.

Three in the morning and he caught a lift with an eighteen-wheeler. Anyone hitching in December must need the ride. Might be crazy, but not dangerous crazy, or so the driver told Clay.

Rolling through the night, the ribbon of highway far below, with a billion cold pinprick stars overhead. He had burned before, so maybe this trip he should freeze. He would turn west eventually, climb as far into the mountains as he could, feel them rise majestic and savage beneath his feet, and the sooner, the better. It had become an urgent need to stand dwarfed by trees that grew as plentiful as grass, and between earth and stars, bare himself to a roaring winter wind that would try to strip him naked and turn him blue. Perhaps he could survive only minutes, seconds even — but the seconds would be his. His tonic. His truth.

If it left him nothing but his name, turned the rest of him into a blank scoured clean by wind and ice and snow, perhaps that might be best. He could try building again.

Around four, the driver veered into the rest stop before the Fort Collins turnoff to catch a nap before continuing, so Clay went striding across the lot with half a moon in the west, half a beacon, as all around him the big rigs grumbled like restless sleepers, snorting and farting into the sky. Diesel fumes burned his nose and he trudged into the silent rest stop, locked himself in a stall, and, sitting on the toilet, managed to sleep until an hour past dawn.

Clay hoofed west into Fort Collins. The sun was up and baked the night's chill out of the earth. Beneath his clothes he finally broke sweat. Fort Collins was a college town, he had been here before but couldn't recall why; thought it was a lot like Boulder, only less self-conscious about what it was and was not.

An oasis on the edge of the mountains — here he spent the rest of the morning, on into the afternoon. Found a sandwich shop where he passed two hours pouring down coffee and silencing the dull hollow in his belly, reading the local free weeklies just so he looked as if he had something to do. Liking the feel of it all — the vagabond life really did suit him at times. He could watch the students who were wrapping up their semester and see the sleepless tension in their eyes, and felt like the freest man in town. Plenty of knowledge to go around, but did they really know how to think? A lot did not, he suspected, else they wouldn't be here, so ready to sacrifice themselves just to be content with such meager crumbs of lives once they were finished. No one to hire them and nothing to do.

Late afternoon, he ducked off a side street into a music store, We Sell New And Used, little hole-in-the-wall shop that smelled of dusty album jackets and earlier incense, with walls half-papered over with do-it-yourself announcements. Clay prowled the shelves of cassettes, missing Erin in a way he had not thought possible. Whatever it was they had, last night he might have wrecked it without saying a word, because he'd not said a word, not any words that really mattered.

Don't hurt, Erin. And don't hate me because I don't know how to keep you from it.

He found what he was looking for, a few tapes by Gene Loves Jezebel. All the same to him, he didn't really know their music, but Erin loved them; knew titles, lyrics, everything; they were a perennial favorite and that was good enough. He could play this through his Walkman and let it work whatever magic it might; make it easier for him to feel the space at his side was a little less empty.

He selected one of the tapes by merit of artwork alone, took it to the counter and slid it to the guy on duty. Gave the short plastic carousel of promotional tapes a spin while waiting for the kid to ring him up.

The kid paused with his finger over the cash register, tape in hand. Loose hair to his shoulders, flannel over a concert T-shirt that one more washing would destroy. His narrowing eyes smacked of disapproval.

"Are you still listening to them?" he asked.

"Yeah," said Clay. "Are you still selling them for minimum wage?"

The kid smirked and did not answer, took his money, and Clay realized it was the hardest thing he'd done in weeks, giving his cash to this guy. The in-store music seemed to boost in volume, shrieking needles of sound. Clay wondered if the kid noticed the trembling of his hand when he took his change.

The kid did not bothering sacking the tape, just stood tall and superior and flipped it across the counter.

"Enjoy," he said. "Dick."

Clay slipped it into a roomy pocket, stood looking down at his shoes for a moment. They had carried him far in one night, but it was never far enough. Never. He looked up.

He put on his gloves.

"Problem?" the kid asked, with grossly exaggerated concern.

"Uh huh," he said, and punched the brat as hard as he could, felt the nose squash like a plum. Watched him buckle facedown onto the counter, then could not stop himself from grabbing the carousel of promo tapes and lifting it high. He clubbed him once, on the back of the head. Clubbed him again.

It might have been only one more time.

It might have been forty.