Prototype (20 page)

"Come on," he said, "let's go introduce you to Twitch."

Staring, torn,
I'm needed here —

More insistent: "Come
on
," voice low and compelling even through the ratcheting music. She followed him out of the cage into greater light, denser sound, a disorienting assault. She pulled in closer to Clay, her mouth at his ear.

"You could have stopped that, couldn't you?"

"Probably," he shouted back.

"But you didn't."

"It'll stop anyway."

Why, you cold prick
— it crossed her mind before she was able to filter it out. Objectivity had died without a whimper. What a plunge this was, ripped from the four safe walls that comprised her zone of efficiency in Tempe, set down where she wasn't even sure which rules had flipped. The dynamics of exchange were completely different here.

I am a fraud and I'm totally unqualified to be doing this.
The sudden need for Sarah swept over her. Sarah would lead by example. Sarah would thrive here, would have immersed herself upon arrival. Sarah would take to them naturally because that's what Sarah
did
, and in that moment the only thing that terrified her more than Sarah deciding she should stay home after all, was if she came, and the rest of them, Clay especially, decided they had no use for Adrienne at all.

Clay in the lead, they weaved through the throng of long hair and shaved heads, leather and flannel, T-shirts and dark wraiths, all of them like members of allied tribes who had come together for noisy ritual, drawn by a summons they may not even have comprehended. They were
in here
, they were not
out there
, and it was enough.

He first led her to the bar, where she got a gin, and he some red-orange concoction in a plastic glass. A smart drink, he told her: quantum punch.

"Much alcohol at all, it just kills me," he said. "They say this has amino acids, it helps your brain." Taking a drink, then shrugging. "Probably just bullshit."

They circled the floor again, a slow path. On one screen, actors in latex demon makeup menaced a young woman with curved tools of butchery; on the other, a mad-eyed rhesus monkey secured by metal clamps shrieked without sound during the advanced stages of vivisection. She turned her eyes away, the symmetry obscene.

Clay halted at one point, tried to explain that Graham really didn't intend to be cruel to Nina; it just came out sometimes when he had been drinking. His own theory: Graham secretly envied her apparently effortless flexibility. He had his paintings and an occasional sculpture, but these were all he dared try, while Nina was essentially fearless. She constantly attempted to define her own niche, without much success at anything, but at least she tried it all. Painting had been an early experimental passion, but Graham had laughed off her vision and execution as immature, so into the closet it all went. Last year she had tried writing subversive children's literature, not disliking children but resenting them for their innocence, and had penned such twists on convention as
The Little Engine That Died
and
Little Red Riding Crop
, in which Red seduced the wolf and found him to be a closet submissive; but no one had cared to publish them. A few months ago she'd tried her hand at designing greeting cards for people who hated holidays, hoping to market the idea of a series of Sylvia Plath Christmas cards, but had been denied the rights to reprint excerpts from the selected poems.

Meanwhile, Graham had his paintings, and did not even feel comfortable straying from the corroded iron realms he had forged for himself.

Of course not,
thought Adrienne,
he's painting his own prison,
a hasty judgment considering she had only heard the works described and had barely even spoken to him; but instinct was often more correct than she gave it credit for.

"Nina," said Clay, "she'll probably outlast us all."

They worked their way around to the sound booth, and Clay rapped at a plastic window overlooking the dance floor, showed his face, then they moved around to a door that looked flimsy enough to withstand one kick, no more. After a moment it was unlocked, and they squeezed into the booth, at most four feet by eight. The volume dropped immediately; you could converse in here without throat strain.

A tall figure was hunched forward, feverishly loading music, a mad Frankenstein busying himself with digital technology. Even alone he would appear too cramped in the booth, the sort of guy whose elbows and knees seemed to have their own renegade senses of direction. A short sandy ponytail hung limp at the nape of his neck, and he wore a beard but no moustache. To Adrienne he looked like a young Amish man gone irrevocably astray.

"Charmed," he said flatly when introduced, and shook with a hand already burdened by a cassette. He missed not a beat and prattled on, ignoring Clay for the moment and talking only to her. "Look at these, would you?"

He forced upon her the cases from two compact discs and one tape, releases by artists she had never heard of: Godflesh, God's Girlfriend, the God Machine. Adrienne gave them back with a vacant smile, much like her own mother's when she had been handed some cryptic crayon drawing:
Oh yes, isn't
that
nice.

"I come up with these thematic blocks, and nobody out there ever catches onto them." Uncle Twitch looked disconsolate. "No one recognizes subtext anymore. I work among philistines."

Adrienne glanced at the two windows, long and narrow and overlooking the concrete dance floor like gunports in a fortress. Beneath them were makeshift shelves for the CD players, a tape deck, a turntable, a mixer, the amplifier. She looked for someplace safe to rest her glass but there was none.

"I'm sorry," she said. "Maybe there's no incentive to tell you."

Twitch looked at her, open-mouthed and perfectly still, then nodded sharply. He reached up to seize a microphone and lever it down before his face. Flipped a switch and his voice cut in over the music like that of an angry prophet:
"The first one of you ungrateful cocksuckers who can tell me what the last three tracks had in common gets a free rectal exam!"
He jammed the microphone back into place and crossed his arms. "There."

"Subtle," said Clay.

Cheers and jeers from the dance floor; from some unseen quarter most of a cup of draft beer came showering across one window, and Twitch cackled loudly. "
That
got 'em! Sometimes you just need to know you're not being taken for granted."

He settled, finally looked at Clay. Warmly, she noticed, a small smile creeping onto the corners of a mouth that looked given to smiling frequently, almost against its will.

"I'm glad you're back," he told Clay, lightly, though not without concern. For a moment Twitch looked as if he intended to hug him, then consciously forced it away, as if even an arm tossed about Clay's shoulders for a few seconds would be too much, either feared or unwanted. Worse, it appeared mutually understood.

Here they lingered, the booth calm and cool, a hurricane's eye in fragile isolation from the chaos just yards away. While Clay and Twitch conversed, she remained at one window, a staring face washed black and blue and purple, the colors of fresh bruises. She could watch with more removal than she could ever have summoned at one of the tables; out there a patron, in here an interloper who watched dancers that did not so much dance as spasm, less from celebration than the vaguest kind of rage. The music was well chosen here, the sound of a world grinding its children into grease to lubricate its machines. Here the defiant could stave off that fate awhile longer; or maybe they mocked it, or simply rehearsed the moment when they too would be fed struggling into the maw, like their parents before them. Or perhaps they worshiped it instead, without even realizing; gods took many forms, and the new ones were no less thirsty for blood than the forgotten ancient deities; they just waited until it was spilled in newer ways.

Clay decided to leave the booth long enough to return to the bar, and she decided against following, risking the impression she was dogging his every step.

"He told us," said Twitch, soon.

"Excuse me?"

"About being a freak."

Adrienne turned from the window. "That's not the terminology I like to use."

"I think
he
prefers it."

"And I don't."

Twitch nodded with appeasement — not worth arguing about. At once she found something endearing in his clumsy way of trying to steer out of this.

"He can be so honest about himself, in the strangest ways," Twitch mused, hands moving restlessly over knobs and switches and sliders, as if they found comfort there. "Is it … is it dangerous for him?"

Adrienne sagged, hands in her pockets. "I can't answer that. I wouldn't if I could."

"He thinks it is. Isn't that all that matters?"

No, but that was most of it, so much so that there was no need to refute. Clay was back soon, spent a few more minutes in the booth before deciding to return to the table. She came along this time, eyes drawn to the reality screen in spite of herself, where a man sat placid and shaven-headed, eyes catatonic, while doctors probed into his opened skull; one cheek ticked as if jerked by a puppeteer.

At their table they found that Erin had left for the dance floor, while Nina sat holding a morosely stupefied Graham as he sagged against her side. His expression looked like something that someone had crumpled up and cast away. He might have been crying recently, or not; most certainly he was drunk beyond repair. And Nina, eyes full of pity, as if she was not sure what else she could feel … she held him, and kissed his forehead, and brushed the hair from his eyes when it fell there. Whatever she whispered into his ear was lost to the greater din.

Clay nudged Adrienne’s foot to get her attention.

"Told you, you're not in Kansas anymore," he said, and drew out a chair and sat heavily upon it, to wait … until, she supposed, the night ended.

Quincy Market was one of Boston's main melting pots, and that was why Patrick Valentine loved it so. It was more than just the food, although that was incentive enough. Here, all the cuisines of the world converged, small counter stands packed along a gray stone hall that looked more suited to housing a wing of government. You could walk from end to end, side to side, slowly, taking time to breathe, to savor, and conduct a global tour via aromas alone.

Or you could sit and watch the passing humanity, and the world would come to you. He knew of no place else where he could see such diversity among those with whom he had to share the planet, and it always did him good to keep in touch this way, keep him mindful of why he was
what
he was.

Sometimes he indulged fervid old fantasies, imagining the break in the humdrum that he could bring to the herds who came to feed with firm belief that the day would be a day like all others. How many could he kill in, say, five minutes of forever? He was a man who knew weaponry, who had made it his business, and his hands seemed made to hold it. His fingers and palms fit machine-tooled steel as the hands of passionate men fit their lovers. With the compression of one index finger he could awaken them all from their walking comas, and bring home to them the truth of the world, and worlds beyond: All things tend toward entropy.

But not today; not ever. How he had managed to quell such impulses as a younger man remained elusive, but mystery augmented relief; surely some greater process had been at work to stay his trigger finger. Ignorant of his heritage then, and now wiser by extremes, he had a greater purpose, the best kind: one he had created for himself.

A Thursday afternoon; alone, then not. The man who joined Valentine at his table brought with him the scent of a shivering city and breath that smelled of cherry throat lozenges.

"Are you eating today?" Valentine asked him.

The man coughed into his fist and shook his head, eyes red and watery as he tried to smooth his graying, gale-blown hair. He owned, by many accounts, one of the finest minds in a city filled with exceptional minds, but publicly downplayed it well enough. Stanley Wyzkall may have been the director of applied research in MacNealy Biotech's genetics division, but it was possible that rumors were true: His wife was in charge of his wardrobe.

"Something to drink, then?" Valentine asked, and Wyzkall told him a hot coffee would be nice. He left to patronize a Greek vendor, souvlaki for himself and coffee for them both. When he returned he found a fat manila envelope waiting on his side of the table, and it was just like Christmas, six weeks early.