by Brian Hodge
He sat on Erin's right, Graham to Erin's left, she between the two of them like a mediator. Clay had told Adrienne there hadn't been anything much between him and Erin since that pathetic Friday night, neither one mentioning it since, skirting the matter like a secret shame. He had confessed maybe it was better that way, maybe she would gravitate toward Graham and they both would be happier for it. And himself?
What's a little more solitude to an emotional hermit? he had said. She'd told him to can the self-pity and take a risk.
She was starting to feel the slightest bit unsteady in her chair when Erin leaned over to touch her arm, a moment Erin looked as if she had been waiting for. She scooted across a seat Adrienne realized was now empty, Clay and Graham having disappeared. Erin waved toward the dance floor, where things had turned très savage.
"Whenever Twitch plays anything by Skrew," she said, "they can't resist." Watching for a moment, the two of them out there, underfed and only partially visible, colliding repeatedly with each other while the stale air was rent with shreds of growling thunder. "It's like those nature films they shoot up in the Rockies, with the bighorn sheep butting heads."
"Over you?" Adrienne asked.
Her smile was a shy flicker. "It'd be flattering to think so. But they probably would anyway." Erin tried to laugh and it came out very wrong. "I wanted to ask you something."
Adrienne nodded, blinking to clear her eyes. This sounds serious and I have no business hearing serious right now —
Erin checked beyond their huddle to make sure it would go no further; Sarah and Nina were in their own little animated world.
"If," she said, "if I can convince him to do it, do you think you might, like … talk to Graham? You know … privately? Like you do with Clay?"
"I suppose I could spend a little time with him," she heard herself saying. "But it would be better if I helped him get with someone who could be more impartial. With that triangle between you and him and Clay, I don't know, Erin." Wait, why was she even asking this now? Adrienne leaned in and hoped her eyes would not betray her fallen sobriety. "Is something going on that might have an impact on Clay, that I should know about?"
Erin's forehead creased as she folded her arms, stick arms over an enviable chest, shaking her head. "No, it's just Graham, I'm really starting to worry, he's getting more like Clay in one respect, he's holding things in more than he ever used to, and I'm afraid for him. Last week…" A steadying breath. "Last week he asked me to marry him and I said no, I wasn't ready to marry anybody. Can you imagine? I can't even get the hang of monogamy."
Adrienne shut her eyes a moment. The pounding from the speakers felt as if it were thickening her brain with scar tissue. "How did Graham react?"
"He spent maybe twenty minutes talking about hanging himself. I don't know how to deal with this. He finally quit and said he was just kidding, but…" She could not finish.
I don't know how to deal with it either, Adrienne almost told her, but said she would have a word with Graham, as long as she could make it appear that she and Erin were not conspiring against him — but really, they should discuss this later.
"And that little room, where he's been sculpting whatever the hell it is," Erin went on, "even I don't know what's going on in there. It's been like an obsession for him the past week or more. He's burning something in there, you wouldn't believe the smell."
Adrienne supposed that this was when what had started out as a promising evening really began its dive. Such a precarious balance this group walked. Ten minutes could make a difference that almost defied belief. Their whole lives were one bipolar mood disorder.
When Clay and Graham came wobbling back from the dance floor, she saw that Clay was bleeding from a cut on his forehead and Graham looked glumly sheepish, kept rubbing his elbow. She thought of Lady Macbeth, rubbing, rubbing, out, damned spot.
Another hour, two, and Sarah tried to get Adrienne to dance when the motion was less frenzied, but by now the last things she trusted were her feet and her balance. Only perception seemed unimpaired. If anything, it had amplified, the grim subterranean world of The Foundry roaring around her, inside her.
Then someone staged a whipping, a special treat for the night — Nina had mentioned this happened occasionally, but Adrienne had yet to see it, had only once noticed two pairs of handcuffs dangling from one of the chain link partitions.
Garter-belted young woman; scarred male plaything stripped to the waist and cuffed in place, barebacked; the crowd made room as the coil of black leather rose and fell, stretched and recoiled; some cheering and others watching, glazed and mesmerized, the crack of the lash just audible over the hushed sensual throb of whatever music Twitch had cued —
And the worst of it was, this was taking place not fifteen feet away, and to her coagulated reasoning it really had begun to seem normal, perfectly normal behavior for a Wednesday night.
Why else would she have gone streaming away from the table with the others for a closer look?
Beside her, Sarah watched without blinking, and soon lifted one hand before her mouth, two fingers at her lips as she idly pushed her tongue tip back and forth through the cleft between them, as distractedly content as a toddler sucking its thumb.
I'll lose her someday, Adrienne thought, I won't be enough, and it didn't even seem as sad as it should; just another given.
"You want to be over there doing it too, don't you?"
"I might have to someday." Sarah nodding, an automaton. "I might have to know. How it feels. From either side. I might."
She broke from her trance, dropped her hand with a grin as if only now realizing what she had been doing. She reached out to bury that hand in Adrienne's hair and kissed her deeply as Adrienne left her eyes open, peripherally aware of the flicker of the lash. Sarah tasted of some exotic liqueur, sweet and spicy-bitter, or maybe it only seemed exotic because it was Sarah. It felt as one of those moments of great revelation, understanding why she sometimes wanted to die so happy, and why, at rare other times, she wanted only to run.
"Who loves me?" Sarah breathed into her mouth, with heavy-lidded eyes.
"Everyone," said Adrienne. "Everyone does."
*
Graham's door at 3:00 A.M., and there were too many of them to stumble through at once. That was the way it felt to her, all of them like parts of the same body, divided by severed nerves. The usual suspects, now that Uncle Twitch was free, plus a couple of others who had tagged along. Young, the both of them: a slim, breastless girl who looked no older than sixteen; her boyfriend, who obviously idolized Graham and clutched to his chest one of the charred-and-spiked baby dolls he had ripped from The Foundry's ceiling, periodically asking to have it autographed. He'd said he had been here late one night last year, with friends, though Graham did not remember.
"I'm, I'm an artist too," the boy confessed at one point. It appeared to have taken great effort.
Graham nodded. "How nice for you." He rolled his head about to loosen his neck, and stroked the girl on her bare shoulder; she seemed to shrink a half step away. "Well if you're an artist, you really have to learn to share things, foster a sense of community. You knew that already, didn't you?"
The boy stood looking younger and younger, newly mute as he watched Graham knead the girl's shoulder. She had not made another move to retreat, but her eyes were sick and confused, back and forth. Her arms folded into a fragile shelter.
Adrienne watched from a chair, slumped in and holding tight. It seemed the most solid ground she could find. First impulse was to say something, knock it off, Graham, but she reconsidered: Why should it be her responsibility? If they lived this way it was by choice.
"Don't," the boy mumbled, finding his voice, pleading to the floor, "don't do that, please don't, don't."
Erin came in from the bathroom and quickly sized things up, stomped over to yank Graham by one arm, what the hell do you think you're doing, and he stumbled away with a groaning laugh that held no mirth, nor even cruelty,
only emptiness.
"Just my luck," he said, "my first protégé and he's a Quaker or something. I wonder what he does for talent."
I want to go home, Adrienne thought, this was all to see some painting or sculpture and I bet it never even happens now. Too far gone, she dared not drive, and dared not issue Sarah an ultimatum for fear of the choice she would hear.
After hours, midway between midnight and dawn, this chilly basement apartment felt like a speakeasy. It had ceased to be fun a long time ago but they were still trying. Clay channel surfing at the TV, Nina at the stereo, Twitch raiding the refrigerator and bellowing for beer that wasn't there.
Then Sarah laid one hand on Graham's shoulder, one on Erin's, to quell whatever vicious discussion they were having in a corner. After a moment he grew calm, seemed to take it as a restoration of purpose. Sarah walked away but Adrienne kept watching — nothing like the perspective of distance. She was as omniscient as a voyeur. Graham reached out, as timidly as if he had been beaten, to hold Erin. Over her shoulder his face seemed to sag and flow like a melting candle.
You'll always have my heart, Adrienne thought he said as they broke. That's the problem.
"Well, shit," he then said, loud enough to be heard by all, "let's get this done."
Graham called them together and led them over to the least-used corner of the basement, around a door that was secured by a stout padlock. His eyes grew distant as he fished a key from beneath his shirt, on a chain around his neck.
"Shazam," he murmured, and opened the door.
Twitch's bobbing head was in Adrienne's way, but even if it weren’t, she doubted she could discern what was in there … just some staggeringly solid shape beyond the door. The smell was freed, dense and acrid, an accumulated stink of scorched metal.
Graham was first in, and flipped on the overhead light.
The word monolithic floated to mind, but she quickly decided it wasn't right. It implied aloofness, the timeless indifference of something that measures centuries the way mortals measure seconds.
This? This thing? It was unnatural and grotesque and malevolent.
It reached nearly to the ceiling, and three-quarters of the distance from wall to wall, a jagged conglomerate of more small machines than could be counted, more than could even be identified at first glance, or second. One abutted another that flowed into the next, like jumbled refuse that had only partially survived a holocaust's meltdown; a slag heap left in the declining wake of progress and ambition.
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 stitches, 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 muffled 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 scraps 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 knob, 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 anticipation.
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 shipment. Some scrap 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.
