Prototype

by Brian Hodge

  not like others

  not like others

  biological override, he thought it told him, and he began to cry, for he thought he understood his part now, a role he never wanted to play in any god's creation, no matter what the name of the god, when the worst impulses of a species become a written imperative

  And as the savannah shriveled to a blackened crisp around him, as he heard the death wails of distant cities, he began to piece together the simple logic that had eluded him long enough:

  with no natural enemies, it is inevitable that we become our own

  It would make a fine epitaph.

  *

  Clay was sobbing even before Kendra brought him back over the brink of consciousness, mid-evening by now, and Adrienne watched him cross the threshold from the inner worlds to the outer. Thinking, Welcome back, and oh, poor Clay, what did you learn there at the end, and can you ever see things out here the same way again?

  One look into his newly opened eyes and she knew she need not ask to know the answer; only wondering, with her own heart feeling so suddenly sunk, how would his feel?

  I've lost him. God damn her, I have lost him forever.

  They began to converge upon him, reaching with hands gone tender with concern, but he would have none of it. Backing away, lurching out of his chair and dropping to one knee with muscles gone stiff from hours of disuse, Clay screamed at them not to touch him. He was dragging the half-full urinary bag behind him like a distended organ. He ripped the tube free and hurled the bag across the room, where it slammed into the wall with a splash of liquid. A gray ceramic mask with black-rimmed eyes and a grotesque stitched-over mouth was jarred loose from the impact, and fell to crack into fragments on the floor.

  "Are you satisfied now?" Adrienne snapped at Kendra, the woman's eyes grave, but what an awful time for I-told-you-so's.

  Clay pushed past them, dropped to the floor amid cold urine and broken shards to find the biggest piece, as if his violently trembling hand was made for it.

  He managed to carve two jagged lacerations down his face, from temple to jaw, before they stopped him. It was much longer before they were able to stop the bleeding.

  The tears might go on indefinitely.

  *

  Back at the motel she and Sarah got him settled in for the night, slipping him two tranquilizers from a bottle she had no legal right to, technically, but what hospital did not bend pharmaceutical law so long as privileges were not abused?

  She considered taking one, too, but didn't, in case Clay would later need her alert. If she did not understand in full what he'd haltingly told her, told Sarah, it had been enough to convey agonizing generalities: what Clay was, or believed he was, or hallucinated himself to be — one of a vanguard of intraspecies self-destruction, spewed out by a world under the gun.

  She and Sarah slept back-to-back, as if the reality of their own drawn faces was too much for one night. Sarah rose before her to a blood-sky dawn, drawing sustenance from air like ice, and went to check on their baleful companion of the road and vision quests. Through sleight of hand, Sarah had kept his key last night, just in case.

  "He's gone," Sarah came back to report, quietly, with a grinding finality. Quick to laugh and quick to love, she had never been one to cry for no good reason. But when she found one, tears could come in a deluge.

  Adrienne sat up, drawing the covers around her to the neck, as tight as a shroud, and shut her eyes when Sarah said it again, this time like an accusation aimed at herself.

  "He's gone."

  Thirty-Four

  The world was the same one he had seen throughout this trip — throughout each of his wanderings — yet it was different in all the worst ways. Imbued with new significances now that he was able to see things as they really were.

  Ignorance was bliss and he had never even realized. Too much fundamental knowledge cast all possibility for beauty and wonder to the furnace. His smiles, his laughter … these had been rare enough, as his life had gone, but he had dared hope that one day he might look back on these years as growing pains, and know that he had come through that fire to be a better man who could smile and laugh with ease, maybe even love, and know that these pleasures had been earned.

  But now? He would never again know such simple graces; he knew himself instead. For anyone and anything, forevermore, he was ruined.

  Hitchhiking north away from Chapel Hill, Clay did not sleep, in neither car nor truck cab, certainly not during the spells when transportation dried up for a mile or two, to leave him walking beside a highway, shrugged deeply into his field jacket like a displaced veteran, one small bag of belongings to call his own.

  He spoke little with those who gave him rides, sharing the miles in silence and paranoia. Wondering if they regretted stopping for him once they got a look at the two narrow scabs raked down the side of his face, and went ahead with their offer out of fear of what vengeance he might inflict for their change of mind. He supposed he did look ghastly enough, close up.

  From winter's mild remission in North Carolina he journeyed straight up into its frozen and cancerous heart, where the winds grew more savage with every state north, and the snows more cruel. Past Washington it was all snarled traffic and insanity, and he scanned the car wrecks for blood and mangled lives. He watched distant smokestacks vomit evil clouds into a sky already engorged, and grimy urban lowlands felt like the most fitting realms through which to pass, teeming with addictions and excrements and neon claustrophobia.

  And from time to time he could not help but look out over these bleak valleys that not even snow could beautify, as even the snow smelled of chemotherapy, and think, You made me what I am. So live with the consequences, whatever they are.

  Soon he amended: You made us what we are. He was not in this entirely alone.

  He would gaze across ruined buildings collapsing of their own weight, on rusted bones of structures never completed — they seemed the fate of all vain tinkerings. He had to laugh in spite of himself, with signs of such grandiose rot all about him, that the final end might come about through something as minuscule as a chromosome. With a species in genetic decline, how long would it take? And why so protracted a fall, when they had built weapons enough to get it over with so much quicker? Something biblical, that would be nice, heaps of rubble that fumed with incessant, sulphurous clouds, where mangy dogs licked the sores of malignant old men. There's drama for you.

  Near New York, he recalled the painting on Adrienne's office wall, The White Veil, its tranquil glimpse into the first few years of this century. If only he could see it again, just once more, he might not even scoff. Of this century, he was closer to its finale than Metcalf had been to its opening. Would that he had talent enough to do justice to what the century had brought to bear, the potentials it had squandered.

  Graham would have understood.

  If artists were the prophets of their times, no wonder so many had gone mad. And though he'd never been an artist, and never would, he still had his own excuse.

  It just ran deeper than most.

  *

  Clay arrived in Boston late the next morning after leaving North Carolina, more than twenty-four hours and eight hundred miles on the road. He hit the asphalt of the unfamiliar city when a trucker hauling a load of sportswear stopped with a hydraulic hiss to let him out along the eastern, uptown edge. Here the streets radiated like crooked spokes from a central hub.

  He headed inland a number of blocks and realized he was on a stretch that appeared to be part of some walking historical tour, demarked by a red stripe on the sidewalk. Here and there a small, well-preserved building with its foundation in colonialism stood in anachronistic contrast to everything that had grown up around it.

  He commandeered the next pay phone he saw and dialed the only number he had left to call. Though their sole conversation a week past had been brief, he remembered the voice that answered.

  "It's Clay Palmer," he said. "I'm here."

  Sile
nce, long and reasoned. From the background came a muddle of voices and cheer and warm meals, as if Patrick Valentine were eating lunch in a pub and had answered by cell phone. Finally, "I was expecting you'd be making this call days ago."

  "There were detours." He pressed a gloved palm over his ear to muffle the din of traffic. "I couldn't help that. What do I do next, you're not going to run me from phone booth to phone booth, are you?"

  "Where are you, exactly?"

  "Congress Street, near State."

  "You're on the Freedom Trail?"

  "Is that what this is called?" He found a nice mellow irony in that.

  "Keep following it north, and I'll pick you up in front of the Paul Revere House, on North Street. I'll be coming down from Charlestown, so you should beat me there."

  And that was it, nothing about how they would recognize each other at first sight. There was no need. Surely this was an advantage, one of few. They had their own visual shorthand. An implicit history would unfold the moment the eyes of any two met.

  Clay pushed away from the phone, into the glut of uptown workers in midday flux. North, following the Trail.

  Now, more so than at any time during the last eight hundred miles, he wondered why he had still come. It could no longer be to seek answers; he had all he needed, all he could bear and more. He had gone where no Helverson's subject ever had: so deep inside himself that he knew what an apocalyptic creature he really was, a living testament to chaos theory. What else was left but to live it out? He possessed more insight into their aggregate nature than Patrick Valentine could dream of.

  Maybe he had come to set the man's thinking straight, if that was what it needed. Which sounded suspiciously altruistic; he must keep that a secret, naturally.

  Clay staked out the curb on North Street, before the colonial simplicity of the Revere House, now and again pacing or jittering in place to keep up his body warmth. Like a junkie waiting for his connection. He felt half-frozen when at last a car glided to the curb. Through a tinted window they appraised each other. Similar eyes set in the same sockets. More lines on Valentine's face and a bit less hair on his head, but Clay figured if he lived long enough, he too would have the lines, at the very least.

  Valentine said nothing, nor did he gesture. Clay circled around to the passenger door, dropped his bag to the floorboard, and settled into the most comfortable seat he had been in for eight hundred miles. He supposed that fabled German craftsmanship was no idle myth. It wasted no time in whipping back into traffic.

  "You look terrible," Valentine told him.

  "That figures."

  "Are you hungry?"

  "I should be. I don't know. No." Perhaps he would be later, when the low-grade flow of adrenaline had pumped its way through his system, once Patrick Valentine and whatever he was had become just more facts of life, digested and assimilated. "Do you plan on telling me who you are, ever?"

  "I don't guess there's any more reason not to."

  "Well, don't bother if it's going to put a strain on you," pausing a beat, then: "Patrick."

  Valentine scowled at him from behind the wheel, then his brow smoothed with a mirthful tic of his mouth. "How long have you known?"

  "A few days is all. You're not the only one who can exploit information sources." He measured Valentine for annoyance but saw the man was holding calm; just a look in his eyes, Go on, who was it? "I went to see Timothy Van der Leun."

  "Well, that's one for you. Resourceful." His traffic gaze seemed to darken; he might run over children or kittens if it was more convenient than swerving. "How is Tim?"

  Clay shrugged. "Terminal," and that seemed to say it all, to the satisfaction of them both.

  As the car carried them north, across the Charlestown Bridge, they spoke of recent pasts and contributions to society. What do you do, my last job I was a garbage man, oh yeah? I sell guns to garbage so they can create more — see the symmetry there? Clay felt the exhaustion of the past two days beginning to drag him down, as if he were wearing a suit of lead, yet still he burned inside with a cold arc. Here he was, at journey's end, at the side of the world's oldest unknown Helverson's subject. The father of them all? It felt that way, in a sense. Patrick Valentine had gone through life with nineteen years of seniority over him, and was neither dead nor imprisoned nor institutionalized, and that made him a creature of some awe.

  Clay took discreet care to study him, the way every move seemed so deliberate, and the way his eyes soaked up his surroundings as if evaluating them for ever more opportunism. He was obviously a very hard man, who had risen from the wreckage of his worst impulses and mastered them, given them the deadly cutting focus of a laser.

  Could it be he had actually beaten Helverson's? No, more impressive still: made it work for him? The mere thought of such a feat had seemed ludicrous before.

  They arrived at Valentine's house — here again, another show of what had always seemed beyond him, anything more than three rooms on a top floor. He told Clay he had company at present, although this would be changing tonight, and this afternoon this company was out of the way with a business associate, so Clay need not worry about being disturbed.

  He was ushered to a guest room, supplied with towels, shown the bathroom, where he showered away the film of road grime that greased his body. He wiped steam from the mirror and hoped to see something better than what he had taken into the shower, but it was not so. His eyes still drooped and his bones looked more prominent than ever, as if his skeleton were trying to burst free.

  When dry, Clay trudged to the bed, the latest port in the latest storm. He sank into it, hoping he would not dream, that exhaustion would claim even those fissures of the brain they said never slept.

  But dream he did, tossing through murky visions of a desolate factory whose boilers churned late into the night, as he walked through steam and corridors to emerge in an industrial cavern lit by a suffusing red glow. Gears whined and magnetos spun, and he stood on the edge of a concrete pit filled not with solvent but with naked human bodies that writhed like worms in a can. How it beckoned, take a plunge into the gene pool, and as he stared into its fleshy depths every now and again something would churn up through the mass to differentiate itself — an arm here, a leg there, a face elsewhere, endless recombinations of each — until a threatened overflow was shunted off down a pipeline. He wondered where it would eventually empty out, and if they would all walk away from the spill or crawl like amphibians, and no telling what would be wrong with them by the time they splashed into the world, but then the world was always waiting for another new disease.

  They would have their place in it after all.

  *

  He awoke after dark. Along mid-evening, Valentine told Clay there was somebody he wanted him to meet, so they ventured out in the car again. Valentine would explain himself no further, seeming to retreat into a cold, hard shell of purpose. Clay recalled the cryptic ramblings of Timothy Van der Leun: You really don't know about that girl he's got up there? It would've been like humping my own sister. He decided to play along, act surprised. Knowing Valentine's name was one thing. Knowing incomplete details about his peculiar fetishes or missions was something better kept quiet.

  They picked up Beacon Street and he peered into the snowy wooded depths of the Common as they passed, wondering if it was anything like New York's Central Park: quaint by day, but after dark a hunting preserve for nocturnal predators and naïve nocturnal prey. Several blocks later they dropped down through the Back Bay, rolled along the downtown canyons.

  The tower to which Valentine escorted him seemed to pierce clouds, yet was still made diminutive by the nearby Prudential Building. They took the elevator to the nineteenth floor and were admitted into an apartment by someone who seized the whole of his attention the instant he saw her.

  Valentine made introductions but Clay heard them as if at a distance. Ellie, he said her name was. By now Clay had grown oddly accustomed to seeing his face on other males. Even that new one,
Daniel, was no great surprise as he slouched in a lounger across the room, seeming to glare from behind inscrutably dark lenses.

  But here was new overload … a new gender. The first of her kind? As far as he was concerned, she was. He need not pretend to be captivated. What a postmodern Eve she made, arms folded across her chest, wearing black tights and a shapeless gray sweater, appraising him with eyes that had never learned to turn away in coy aversion. Graham would have loved her, her smile with its near-mystic potential for cruelty. Nina would desperately want to be her friend, learn where she had her hair razored and dyed.

  "Welcome to God's Little Cesspool," she said, and smartly arched her eyebrows at Valentine before returning to a cross-legged perch on the floor.

  "She's beautiful, isn't she, Clay? In her way. Don't you think so?" asked Valentine.

  Clay found it such an unlikely remark from the man he wasn't sure it hadn't been sarcastic. Although Valentine seemed more interested in how Daniel Ironwood reacted to it than in Clay's response. Jealous? Was he trying to make Daniel jealous?

  Whatever the intention, it appeared to provoke some rise out of him.

  "What the hell's he doing here tonight, Patrick?" Daniel slid forward in his chair, muting down the TV with a remote. "You too for that matter. You know what night this is."

  Valentine squared himself, going to stone. "Just a friendly social call. You have a problem with that?"

  But Daniel was not backing down. "What is it you're running up here, some kind of winter camp for chromo mutes? I was hoping for a little privacy tonight, or are you forgetting?"

  "Oh you, you're so cute when you can't adapt to change," said Ellie, and she actually sounded lighthearted, an amused mediator. She looked up at Clay. "This is purgatory, is what this is. This is where we come after a life of unrequited sex."

  "Then where do you go after here?" he asked.

  "For me, a convent, I think that's all that's left. The rest of you, you're on your own." Ellie rocked back and forth on the floor with a bark of feral laughter. "I was made to wear a wimple and rosaries."