Prototype

by Brian Hodge

  Uncle Twitch paused while dishing out his third helping of couscous. "I looked into nihilism once," he mused, "but there was nothing to it."

  Nina paid no attention, leaning over her end of the table. "I really can't believe you sometimes, Graham. I should know better by now, but it always manages to surprise me, just how insensitive you can be. Are you really that nasty inside, or is just some act you think gives you credibility as an artist?"

  He clasped his hands in mock admiration. "Very good, most impressive, very insightful. Especially for a junior college dropout." Graham turned to Adrienne. "You're the professional, how did she score?"

  Sarah watched Adrienne draw a thin breath. "Not that I'm diagnosing, you understand, but actually," speaking with cool surgical precision, "she may have a point."

  Graham had not expected this, clearly, and Sarah watched the minute narrowing of one eye. Aching with him in some small touch of empathy, even though he had invited it on himself. Yes, I know what it's like to hope for an ally who refuses the job. Ask me and I'll tell you about a big brother who denies he has a sister just because she likes women.

  Graham chose to ignore it, like a wounded animal that might grow only more vicious. "It has nothing to do with being twisted or insensitive, it's being honest enough to admit that if you know you have nothing better to look forward to, why not at least embrace that much? We're each alone enough as it is, and for sure we die that way. Is it that threatening to you to admit it?"

  Adrienne rested her chin on clenched fingers. "And Buddha said, 'I am awake.'"

  "You're not alone, Graham," said Erin. "You do have me."

  "Half-alone, then."

  Nina was looking at Uncle Twitch, throwing her hands in the air. "Why do I invite him? Why do I keep inviting him? He's like a solar eclipse!"

  Twitch frowned. "Well, would you rather talk about your mom's hysterectomy?"

  Nina turned back toward Graham. "Not everybody shares your conviction that nothing out there in the universe loves us."

  He began to laugh. "I didn't notice you bowing your head when we sat around the table."

  "It doesn't mean I don't believe in something." And Nina began to slip down into her chair, her ideological footing clearly less sure here. Sarah thinking, No, don't back off now, you were doing so well. Nina bit her lip. "I mean … I'm not all that comfortable calling it God, like that, but … something's there."

  "Oh, there's a God, all right," said Erin, staring glumly at her plate. She speared a lettuce leaf. "The bad news is, She's got PMS."

  It continued like that throughout the rest of the meal, then dessert. Discussion that often grew heated, but never quite savage enough to draw blood, and Sarah wondered if it were not, simply enough, their way. That if in their world, their lives, given their backgrounds, this was the manner in which they assured one another they mattered and that the ultimate expression of dislike came not in barbed words, but indifference. Prickly though it may have been at times, she saw something cohesive about their little unit.

  Graham grew increasingly quiet, smoking by the window and staring through the veil of snow to the street, watching the occasional car that slowed. Twitch went clicking up and down the television channels, despairing of football, and above it they could barely hear Erin, vomiting in the bathroom. Adrienne asked if she did that often, and Twitch shrugged, saying, "Well, it is a holiday."

  They soon fought, Erin and Graham — over what, Sarah could not tell, but she wondered if it might not have something to do with Clay. Probably it would have been better had he been here. Somehow it could be so much less threatening to compete with flesh and blood, than a phantom present only in conversation.

  Sarah's eyes met Graham's once, as Erin grabbed her video camera and cradled it as tenderly as a child, as she threatened to leave, and before he could turn away, Sarah noticed the shimmer of tears in his eyes. Soon they retired to the privacy of Twitch and Nina's bedroom, and she heard one low sob as someone cried, not sure who it was, and then for a long while could hear nothing at all. She supposed that was good, hoping it meant they were just quiet lovers, more vocal in their depression than in their ardor.

  The four of them left to carry on with Thanksgiving drank wine, Uncle Twitch proving to have an unexpected gift for spices and flame, as he first mulled it with cloves and cardamom seeds and cinnamon sticks. They sat about the living room and ignored the TV, pleasantly lethargic now that the worst of the psychodrama appeared to have been played out.

  Nina moved across the room to sit on the couch as Sarah took the floor, so Nina could weave her hair into a curtain of long thin braids. Nina's fingers were soft, warm, deft, the gentle tug and pull soothing. She could sleep like this, some echo of childhood surrender into the total security of two hands. Hoping only that Adrienne would not take it wrong; it was not that kind of surrender. She would store this tactile arousal until they got home, could get a fire lit — a fire would be divine — and she would make love with Adrienne for hours. Flushed and firm, their bodies would glow, and they would be flawless. Firelight smoothed over every blemish. Perhaps it was this magic luster, above even heat and light, that made fire such an object of primordial veneration.

  Eyes too heavy to open, she groped to find Adrienne's hand, held it while the sun died beyond the windows and the snow whispered cold promises.

  "I wish he'd been here today," said Uncle Twitch, with a reflectiveness born of wine. "He should've been here."

  Adrienne stirred. "Clay?"

  "Who else."

  And she smiled, a wistful little smile that Sarah saw upon opening her eyes.

  "I've been sitting here turning it over and over, what bothers me about everyone being so willing to concede defeat, Clay most of all, over that goddamned chromosome. You know what it is? It's the superstition." Adrienne drew knees toward chin, wrapped both arms around them. "We've haven't really gotten over spilled salt and broken mirrors, just replaced them with stranger things we can't explain. So we're afraid of them. As long as the technology holds up, we'll always have that shadow just on the other side of understanding."

  "And poor Clay had to find a big one inside himself," Nina said.

  "He'll deal with it," said Twitch. "I don't think we give him enough credit sometimes." He held arms open wide as Nina, finished with Sarah's hair, sank into his lap, and they held each other. "He deals with some of the most god-awful stuff but always comes out of it. I think we need him more than he needs us. I look at him sometimes, and think, well, if he can get through, I guess I can too."

  Nina nodded into his chest. "Graham needs him most."

  Sarah roused from her dreamy languor. "So the rest of you find him inspiring?"

  "He's still alive, isn't he?"

  Twitch nodded. "He reduces a lot of his life to fundamentals and doesn't miss the frills. I envy the hell out of him for that." His eyes seemed to pinch as he nuzzled distractedly into Nina's hair, something eating at him: all the things he wanted for Nina and himself, perhaps, wanted and might never admit; all the things he wanted to give her and could never afford. "For a long time I had this romantic notion about poverty. For everything out there I looked at and knew I didn't want any part of, it seemed that trying to live the impoverished artist's life was the most honest thing I could do. That's okay when you're twenty-two, you can get away with it then. But thirty-one…?" Clinging to Nina. "It was just one more hollow icon, wasn't it?"

  Nina was stroking his beard, his ponytail. "You'll find what you want to do, you'll find it." Trying to smile. She could be so brave, if only she had a cause. "We'll find what we're good at."

  Sarah hated herself for her first thought. No, no, you probably won't, but I don't think it's your fault, it's just that no one bothered teaching you how to recognize it when you see it.

  They stayed for another hour, then went down to the street and scraped the snow from the car. Sarah stood in the chill, face tilted to the sky, until a nugget of sadness felt cleansed. And in the car Adr
ienne kissed her, told her she liked the braids, and said that all in all, this Thanksgiving had the edge over the last one she had been forced to spend with in-laws; so think about that.

  Twenty

  He would never have admitted it to anyone, but sometimes Valentine wondered if he wasn't a better man for having lost his testicles. Really. Looking back before the cancer, he wondered how much time he had spent just trying to protect them, relieve them, meet their incessant demands. They could be worse than even the worst children he could imagine, because those little monsters you could at least ship away for a weekend, or even walk out on the rest of their lives. With gonads, you had no options.

  Naturally, he had mourned their loss. Years of anguish and grieving it had taken, but eventually he had realized it was like being liberated from, well, a ball and chain.

  It had bestowed upon his mind a clarity of vision he had never known outside of dreams. He could track a line of thought and wring from it all he hungered for. Without that distracting flood of hormones, ideas came to him like smiles from the gods.

  Like this game. This new game. This indulgence. The old fantasy had continued to burn strong enough to force him to seek a compromise, making of it a variation on a very old theme, but even this middle ground had unique thrills all its own.

  One gun, a Colt Python .357 revolver. One bullet, hollow point. Which chamber in the cylinder? He would leave it to chaos to sort out those one-in-six odds.

  When the moment was right.

  He met Teddy where Boston met the Bay, along the wharves and the plaza before the New England Aquarium. Teddy the family man — stand downwind of him when he belched and you could catch a whiff of yesterday's meals. A numbing Atlantic wind swept in off the water, encountered the city's first rank of buildings, and whipped itself into confusion. It roared, nature's scream at mankind's impudence.

  "Think you could've picked someplace windier?" Teddy cried above the gale. It made a wreck of the careful sculpting he did to conceal early pattern baldness. "I hear at MIT, they got this wind tunnel, check aerodynamics, that kind of shit."

  "Let's go in, let's look at the fish," Valentine said.

  They crossed the plaza, leaning into the wind, while out in the harbor it chopped the water into low whitecaps. Farther out, a pair of freighters chugged and rolled against a horizon gray as iron.

  Friday afternoon and the aquarium was doing slow business. The day after Thanksgiving, most of the human herd had holiday shopping on their minds. Couldn't wait to spend their money, feed the machine, instead of learning about these creatures that owned the other seventy percent of the world.

  They strolled past exhibit tanks, stocked with fish from the North Atlantic to the South Pacific, glassed-in replicas of their home seas. Floating along with rippling gills, or nosing the glass to peer out at the fragmentary world on the other side, sometimes those fish looked wiser than most people he had met.

  "Look at that one," said Teddy, pointing. "Looks like Bob Hope, doesn't he?"

  Present company included, Valentine feared. But Teddy was a good employee, and there was business to do, the sort of business it was never wise to discuss over telephones.

  "What's the status on the Alabama shipment?" he asked.

  "Lydell says he'll have the last of the M16s converted by tonight. I got a van and driver lined up to run them down from his place to the Chelsea drop until the launchers get here." Teddy maneuvered back and forth before a tank of lionfish and checked his reflection; couldn't quit worrying about that hair. "Sunday at the latest on those. Breckton says he made the payoff and got the armory keys last night."

  They took their time along a coral reef and went over the logistics of moving the shipment south. Frequently, the real money to be made from selling arms wasn't so much in the merchandise itself, but in its transportation. For smaller shipments such as this, he liked small vans, because they attracted little attention on the highway; but the big problem with vans was that, once loaded with all that ordnance, they rode down low on their shocks. State troopers noticed that sort of thing, so the suspensions had to be rebuilt ahead of time.

  It was a panic shipment all the way: white supremacists in the thick of Alabama, sure their world was close to caving in. They had committed nearly all of their war chest to a shipment of M16s to be converted to full automatic fire, and M79 grenade launchers with crates of both smokers and explosive rounds. Valentine had already been able to lay hands on the cream of their order: four Gustav 84-mm recoilless rifles, originally designed to penetrate a Soviet main battle tank at up to 400 meters, and enough to inflict grievous fuckage on any armored vehicle that any federal agency might roll onto their compound.

  They expected this as a matter of due course. Everybody had an Armageddon hard-wired to some damn timetable — these backwoods lads because they’d been unable to control one of their own.

  The incident had made national news three weeks ago, each network trumpeting it as Exhibit A of national disgrace and more proof positive of a barbarous age. Valentine remembered it well, having savored every telecast. A bigot named Hardy Sutton had, late one night, drunkenly run his car off the road and into a swiftly flowing creek. Drowning amid the beer cans would have been imminent, had a passing motorist driving home from the late shift not stopped to dive in and pull him to dry ground.

  Afterward, Sutton had apparently been unable to live with himself, knowing his rescuer had been black. Co-workers reported behavior of a man in rapid deterioration. Within the week, Sutton had taken a small submachine pistol and not only killed his savior, but also wiped out the rest of the man's family before reserving the final trigger pull for his own head. A trace on the weapon pointed a finger back to members of an Aryan resistance faction.

  Some people simply could not withstand a challenge to their preconceptions, for which Valentine was eternally appreciative. It led to a more interesting world. And people spent billions to give muscle to their hatreds.

  Once he and Teddy had the details worked out, Teddy decided to skip out on the rest of the aquarium, and Valentine continued alone. His topcoat hung well-fitted to his frame, and he walked slowly, back straight, every step smooth and deliberate. Hands in his coat pockets, the right one caressing the Python revolver.

  On one of the aquarium's many levels was an exhibit known as "The Edge of the Sea" — rocks and shallow water, like a small tidal pool. They kept it stocked with durable, crusty little creatures, while an employee stood by encouraging curious visitors to pick them up, examine, learn. Kids loved it.

  Here Valentine lingered, standing a couple of feet behind a father and two grade-schoolers, a boy and a girl. It smelled like a long custody weekend — Dad's got the kids, got to make every moment count or they would hate him one day. With the kids' attention distracted, Dad had that look of sad, weary panic: Am I doing the right thing, are they having fun?

  Inside his roomy pocket, Valentine maneuvered the revolver, trained it on Dad's back. Thumbed back the hammer, heard a click too soft for anyone else's ears, like a whispered secret.

  One bullet, the cylinder spun more than an hour ago, waiting like a stilled roulette wheel the dealer had yet to check.

  Blond-haired boy, braces already, holding up a horseshoe crab and wiggling it in his sister's face. She only laughed.

  Valentine's hand, slick on the grip — if this moment could only last forever. The anticipation, the perfect and delicious element of random chance, a stranger selected on a moment's whim, with a one-in-six chance of a magnum bullet tearing his spine in two. He might even live to appreciate the irony.

  Finger, tightening on the trigger…

  Mass murder, the old fantasy, would never do. With this substitute, the prelude was all. Valentine had decided he would allow himself one day per month, one spin of the cylinder, one random target who would never realize what the smiling, well-dressed stranger had in his pocket. And when everything was perfect, one pull of the trigger. Such strict discipline. Like letting
the demons out of their boxes, but making sure all they had was a day pass.

  He squeezed the trigger —

  — and heard the click as the hammer fell on an empty chamber.

  He shut his eyes and took a deep breath, his skin tingling, heart soaring, bowels loose and free of knots.

  Fine. This took care of November. He would not be greedy.

  Valentine continued on his way, up to the top level, then descended the ramp that spiraled down around the 180,000-gallon ocean tank in the center of the aquarium. He and the sharks just inches from each other.

  Who would it be next month, he wondered, and what was he doing at this very instant? Or she? Neither of them even knowing the other existed, Valentine sure only that their paths would cross the day after Christmas. Perhaps next time he would even look his choice in the face while playing the game. And perhaps not.

  Knowing only that no one could ever say he did not have the balls to pull the trigger.

  *

  Before he went home late that afternoon, Valentine dropped by to see Ellie. Ellie would surely be home. She rarely went out during daylight, stating with indifference that she didn't like the sun, but he suspected it was more phobic than she let on. He had been around her two or three times when she was drugged, something she'd picked up on the streets, and once she had whimpered for an hour about skin tumors.

  He kept her in fine style, a business-district penthouse that was even nicer than his Charlestown home, or would be if she took enough trouble to keep it up. Certainly more than Ellie was used to, or had any right to expect, but he supposed the place was just as much for himself as her. From nineteen floors up, the streets and everything in them were just things to frown down at, turn your back on. For the right price, anyone could feel like royalty.

  Ellie let him in, and he said little for the longest time, content to sit with her on opposite sides of the living room and watch some game show on TV. He sank back into the plush depth of a sectional sofa, kicked his feet up on a coffee table whose top was a thick slab of gray and black marble. He could still remember when the surface held a reflection, now so smudged and dusty the shine was a memory. Two bags of taco chips were going stale on it at the moment.