Prototype. Part 21

Graham held the door open and they crowded in, slowly, as if the thing would bite. No one saying a word. No one dared.

With a closer look, she could make out individual components: electric motors; power tools of all kinds, table saws and circular saws and jigsaws, drills and lathes and sanders; chainsaw belts had been secured between motor-driven pulleys. All had been joined into a hulking Frankenstein's monster by welded st.i.tches, the metal having been allowed to melt and flow, then cool like metallic tumors.

Even the room had become a part of the creation, the concrete walls and ceiling having been drenched with soot over time. It was all black and gray in here, a world in monochrome.

Once they had taken it in, Adrienne felt the logical next thought ripple through all of them, everyone glancing left and right into neighbors' eyes, realizing something had been going terribly wrong and no one had guessed its magnitude.

Graham could not have intended this to be a sculpture, not in any reasonable sense ... because it could never leave the room.

"I didn't mean for it to get so big," he said, "but it just kept growing."

"Graham?" Erin's voice, tiny, as if she were calling a stranger, or had heard someone say he was maimed.

"Some of it even works, still, that's what took longest to get right," he said, and yes, she really had seen cables and conduit snaking about within, like arteries.

He stepped over to the back wall, stooped. Plugged it in.

The air in the dense room seemed to surge for a surreal moment as motors hummed to tortured life, then began to shriek all at once. The grinding roar was instantly painful, and only Graham did not clap his hands over his ears. Adrienne swore that she saw the structure thrum like a tuning fork, as all those moving parts churned up a breeze that carried a congealed stink of old fires. Saw blades spinning and belts whirring, metal teeth a blur. It made no sense. It was the cold, hard embodiment of illogic. It hung together and functioned when it should have ripped itself into shrapnel.

They fled the room in a spontaneous exodus, and Graham must have let it run another fifteen seconds before pulling the plug. He shuffled out of the blackened room as the cacophony wound down and broke apart into a dozen component voices, high dying whines. When it grew quiet enough, they could hear an upstairs neighbor pounding on the floor, his m.u.f.fled shout.

"Graham, man...?" said Twitch, gangly limbs in awkward poise, as if flight might be imminent. "This is ... this is..."

"In seventeenth-century terminology, it's an infernal machine. And it exists for its own sake." He stood before the doorway and took a little bow, or a sick parody. To Clay: "Now you know what I've been doing with all the sc.r.a.ps you brought me from the dump."

They had scattered around the apartment, each seeming to have chosen his or her turf and rooted there, old friends and young strangers alike. Adrienne knew she was faring no better. Head thumping and ears ringing, she thought, He shocked them. I didn't think it was even possible, but he shocked them.

"What's its name?" Nina asked. "You said it was going to have a name."

Graham nodded. "I didn't even realize it had one until three days ago. But that's when I knew." How frail he looked, how malnourished, his cheekbones sharper, with unruly dark curls hanging to his eyes, those eyes the only thing about him that seemed suddenly, madly, vibrant. "It's called The Dream of Kevorkian."

No one moved, no one spoke.

"I don't get it," said Twitch.

"The suicide doctor," Adrienne said, or thought she made the attempt, and her legs went wobbly.

It couldn't be happening, could not, Graham giving them all a resigned look, saying nothing but the look conveying enough, Well, that's everything, and he retreated into the charred room and the door slammed and it sounded as if another padlock was being fitted into place, this time from the inside.

Jack Kevorkian, the suicide doctor, inventor of the suicide machine - did he dream of contraptions more violent than his own, machines even more brutal than that of Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin?

Nothing was happening in fluid motion anymore, just snapshots of hyperclarity: Nina the first to reach the door, then Sarah, then the rest, fists pounding or twisting at the k.n.o.b, but all they could do was rattle it in its frame. They called out and Adrienne heard her own voice join the clamor, not even sure what she was saying, only that it was a desperate plea.

When the infernal machine resumed its metallic hurricane roar, Erin screamed. A long, agonized scream - As harrowing as the moment of antic.i.p.ation.

As futile as the hope that Graham was only joking.

As piercing as the wet marrow shriek of a bone saw.

Twenty-Five.

He had never been one for obligatory rituals, but Clay now thought perhaps he recognized their necessity.

Denver saw no funeral for Graham Layne Detweiler, his recoverable remains sent to Pennsylvania, back to a home he had not acknowledged for years. What happened there, none of them knew. Denver saw no funeral, but should have.

Some sense of closure was needed, any kind of scab over the open wound that his suicide had been. Its shock had staying power, lingering throughout the days - Graham, alive one moment and gone the next, more than gone, gone in a way that seemed to rend his existence into fibers and mist.

Clay supposed they could have stolen into his apartment and conducted their own ceremony in Graham's charnel room. The Dream of Kevorkian remained intact, probably stymieing everyone from the police to the landlord, and no doubt they could have retrieved some fragment of Graham from the machinery. All those cracks and crevices? There was no way all of him could have been recovered for s.h.i.+pment. Some sc.r.a.p could surely be their prize to tweeze free and bury.

But Clay decided that it was a ghoulish idea, would be more upsetting than comforting to everyone, and kept it to himself.

Besides, they had done one thing, no memorial by any means, but at least one final act to preserve whatever legacy Graham had left behind.

Twitch had been the first to state the obvious, that Graham would have hated the idea of his paintings being gathered with the rest of his belongings and carried east, to be stacked in some airless storage facility because, while his parents would detest them too much to display them, they could not bring themselves to destroy them. Knowing Graham, it would probably not be the where so much as the who.

They took it upon themselves to recover the paintings, Twitch and Clay, with Nina serving as lookout. With a crowbar they ripped away the padlock used to secure the place, then used Erin's door key. It was four in the morning and they drove away having liberated thirty-two canvases.

These were divided up at Twitch and Nina's two days later, like a grim auction, all these metallurgy dreams uneasy reminders, particularly his final painting, the Boschian landscape with its myriad body-chewing machines. Terrible prophecy, that; no one spoke up as wanting it until Nina suggested giving it to Sarah, for Graham had been pleased by her love of it on first viewing, her immediate understanding. He really had been, Nina insisted, even if no one had noticed but her.

Clay made sure that Adrienne was not left out, in the end selecting for her a two-by-three-foot acrylic of a twisted iron bridge that seemed to hover over a raging river the colors of rust and slate, a bridge with no access and no exit, going nowhere. He gave it to her while Sunday-afternoon snow brushed the windows of Twitch and Nina's home, and even before his hands had left the canvas he saw tears slip from Adrienne's eyes. They stared openly at each other, neither pretending the other did not know.

Crying, Adrienne? As unexpected as it was, even more so was that she made no effort to hide it or dam it back. Real tears, real grief, she was fully human after all, more human to him for that than even for her obvious love of Sarah. It was like looking into the wet red eyes of a person he had only thought he'd met, the moment somehow more devastatingly honest than any moment in all their sessions.

Adrienne. Crying.

It was nothing to stare at but stare he did, as the paintings continued to find keepers and curators, peering out of the corner of his eye. Adrienne. Crying. Sarah's arms around her and the two of them leaning into each other. Take one away and the other would fall, but together they balanced just fine.

I want what they have, he thought. Other people managed, so why couldn't he? It was the grand failure of his life, being born, being born so different there wasn't even a name for it until six years ago. He looked at the paintings he had claimed so far, closed doors and piles of slag and sc.r.a.p, and he thought, There it is, my life, it's all right there, he painted it and probably never knew it was me. Because it was him, too.

Adrienne. Crying. Being held.

He met Erin's eyes, almost went to where she sat on the couch but his legs would not move, his arms would not reach, and maybe Graham had had the right idea after all: If the f.u.c.king things don't work right, then cut them off.

Erin had him over to her tiny apartment that night, her invitation almost shy, so unlike the Erin he thought he had known, the Erin he preferred to know. There was so much to say and none of it seemed to come out right, from the very start, so they gave up and tried to go to bed. No camera, just the two of them face-to-face, eye-to-eye, a pair of candles burning on her dresser while outside the snow had gone icy enough to peck at the window. It should have been romantic but seemed instead a desperate, last-ditch attempt at pretending to be that which they were not. She trembled as she kissed him, and when he tried to enter her she was dry, completely dry, as if the rest of her body had sucked up all the moisture and held it for ransom. He rolled off her, his erection dying, and soon Erin burst into more tears than he had ever seen from her.

Tears - she had found them at last.

"What ... what'd I do wrong?" he asked.

She shook her head against the pillow, continuing to dampen it, and he got up, mentally answering for her: You lived, that's what. And went off to sleep on the couch, where he could do no more harm.

He supposed he would have made more of an effort to shatter those walls, any walls, no matter how alien such tender advances would have felt, had he known he would never see her again. Never dreaming she would resort to what she did, never considering the possibility that Erin would pack up what she could and leave the rest, then do the unthinkable: drive away, return to South Dakota, and move back in with her parents. It seemed the ultimate defeat, a living death; the final degradation in a life filled with them - she had the pictures to prove it.

No phone call, no advance warning. He knew it only when Nina came over Wednesday afternoon to tell him, and give him a videotape that Erin had entrusted to her on the way out of town two hours earlier.

"Did you watch it?" he asked.

"She told me not to." Nina stood in the doorway, the only remaining vestige of her New Dehli persona the jeweled bead at her nostril. Jeans and parka and limp hair, just not Nina anymore.

"But did you watch it?"

"I tried to," she confessed, "but I couldn't, I had to turn it off, it hurt too much. But if you want I'll watch it with you."

Clay shook his head, held up a flat hand as if to ward her off, then shut the door. Probably it would have been all right, but this was Nina, and if anyone was the mother of the bunch, she had served that purpose. She would want to comfort him, and while she loved Twitch, things happened. Consolation got out of hand, became something else, never planned for, then never to be talked about because it meant that a new door had been opened and could fly open again.

So he watched alone, as he was surely meant to.

The camera was trained on a chair in her living room, rigid and unmoving, a tripod's point of view. Empty chair, the brittle tick of a clock out of frame, its metronomic advance little slices out of the time they'd had left together while only one of them had been aware of it.

A blur of motion as Erin's skinny bottom receded from an abrupt close-up and she walked to the chair. Facing the camera, saying nothing, a sticklike index finger winding absently around a single hair, tugging it free, letting it fall to the floor. She did it again, her movements slow, even, soothing.

Her eyes roved into their own focus, found the lens. They could always find the lens. She could always pull herself together for that.

"I'm sorry, Clay, I, I can't say goodbye to your face because if you asked one wrong question ... I wouldn't know how to answer. I don't do answers much anymore. If I ever did."

She went on, occasionally halting and staring off, at times slumping lower into the chair, less and less of her visible in the frame until she would become conscious of it, and straighten. Nothing seemed prepared, just Erin, alone with the ticking of that hostile clock, sometimes speaking, sometimes pondering what to say, sometimes trying to hang on to what she had just said. None of it pleasant to listen to: She needed more, there had to be more than this, and while she might have been able to admit to loving him someday, it could never happen with him as remote as an Arctic plateau.

"I do awful things sometimes," she told the camera, "and I need someone to tell me it doesn't matter what I've done. Even if it does, I need to hear that it doesn't."

It didn't go on much longer, for she had already begun to dissolve, big eyes gone hollow and moist, blinking back the goodbye tears as she buried her head for a moment, then raised it, pleading for something beyond words, palms uplifted, shaking.

"I don't even feel like a human being anymore," she said, then crumbled entirely.

Only after it was over did Clay remember sliding to the floor and sagging on his knees before the television, mouth working soundlessly as he watched her wrench herself free of the chair and advance toward the lens. Static frame once more showing nothing alive, just that mechanical ticking, ticking. He clung to the television to preserve the moment, eyes on the empty chair, knowing Erin was somewhere in the room, just out of sight; he could hear rustling movement and a sob caught in her throat. If he could just stop her from ending the recording, there might still be hope. The camera still rolled and contact was held. She might return to her chair and this time, why, this time she might even smile - But then it all vanished, her chair, her clock, her entire life, zapping into white static as sudden as a nuclear blast.

Which might have been preferable, really.

In a holocaust, no one dies alone.

He spent some time screaming after that, wordless sounds that came erupting from the poisoned wellspring within. He imagined that men in wars screamed this way as they lay broken and dying in fields of mud and smoke and land mines, screaming for help or for their mothers, but never truly believing either would come.

No one else in the building banged on their walls, or shouted for him to stop.

He missed that, too.

Throat like a raw sc.r.a.pe, Clay stared at one of the paintings that had become his inheritances.

Iron rungs on an iron wall, centered between rows of rivets resembling cold hard nipples: a ladder. Turn it upside down, right side up, it worked either way, an Escher-like ambivalence. The ladder led from one door to another, virtual twins, opening into the glowing h.e.l.lfires of blast furnaces.

No Escape, the artist might have named this one, if only he had extended the effort. Were Graham not dead already, Clay might just kill him and be done with it. It would be a favor to all of them who had suffered under his tyranny, his blackmail by melancholy.

Why couldn't you hang on? You f.u.c.king coward, why couldn't you just hang on? I should be missing you but now all I can do is hate you because look what you did, look what you cost me.

This was the downside of suicide he'd never considered. Graham had not just killed himself, but all of them. What had they been if not a family? Not the healthiest, nor free of abuse and neglect, but they were better together than they could ever have been alone. And now? Their numbers had been sheared, checks and balances destroyed. All that was left was one couple and a spare.

Plus, for the time being, a pair of inquisitive types who'd found them to be specimens worthy of study.

If he believed in portents, he might have wondered if this past week wasn't precisely that: You have been here long enough, lived your life in its latest rut and dug it as deep as you dare.

A specimen worthy of study - what more was there now? What else was left but well-intentioned friends who could barely take care of themselves, and the will to know why his heart could never be what he wished?

He concluded that he had three families: the family into which he had been born, and left by choice; the family of his heart, which he'd accepted out of mutual need and had just watched die; and the peculiar family of those he'd never met, but whose similarities ran so deep they were biological mandates.

Dim as the future appeared, there could be only one choice. The road was opening bit by bit, week by week. Someone in Boston was seeing to that.

Was it merely coincidence, then, with Graham dead a week and Erin gone a day, with the holiest of the year's holidays just two days away, that the mail brought his greatest surprise yet? Or was some other infernal machine grinding him toward an ultimate destination?

Standing in his living room, while in the window the sun blazed diamond-brilliant off melting snow, he opened the day's mail. A Christmas card from Sarah - it made him smile even though he didn't believe. And a large envelope with a Boston postmark, whose weekly arrival he had come to count on.

He shuffled through the papers long enough to see that they were research overviews, nothing specific as to case studies; dry reading ahead. Tales of chaos and mayhem were always more captivating. My brothers, he had once thought. My crazy brothers.

Clay saved the brief, handwritten cover letter for last, as always. He would scrutinize the cramped scrawl and try to picture the stranger who had penned it.

I think you deserve a Christmas present, the note said.

You know you're not alone in the world. But you don't fully know just how alone you're not. Not every Helverson's subject is on the books. Not every one of us is under 35. At least one of us is all of 44.

That's right. Us.

Give me a call sometime. You might even catch me in the mood to talk.

Still no name, but when Clay saw that a phone number had been provided, he realized that his hands had begun to tremble.

Joy to the world, indeed.

Twenty-Six.

It was the one dependable aspect of working with the mentally ill, being able to find your boss in his office on Christmas Eve. They were still psychotic on holidays, and reality still as fluid. Adrienne found the weird stability in that comforting; something to believe in, count on.

"I'm wondering if you might be able to explain something to me that perhaps I should know about," Adrienne said.