Prototype

flailing in tight circles. “What if I like myself even better another way? How can I know unless I try it?”

“I understand.” Adrienne tried to nod with reassurance. Poor thing, she knows what I am and she’s afraid I’m going to pick her apart right here at this table. “I live with someone who’s the same way about a lot of things. She has trouble making up her mind if it means excluding some other option.”

Nina began to nod right along with her, wide pleasant face radiant with proxy kinship to a nameless stranger — yes, that’s it, exactly.

“A few weeks ago she asked if it was her fault that everything looked so interesting. It stumped me.”

“And by living with her, you mean…”

“We sleep in the same bed, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“That’s cool,” said Nina. “I tried sleeping with other women but it just didn’t work for me. Hetero and hopeless, I guess.”

Graham, his face high-cheekboned and oddly aristocratic, blew a dour gust of smoke. “I’m sure you can find a support group somewhere.”

“Piss off,” she told him.

Graham pushed black, tumbledown bangs from his eyes, flashed a look of impish mockery at Clay, then back to Nina. “I’m just letting her know you’re a neurotic flake, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it.”

Nina drew back in indignation. “Graham, I hate to tell you this, but you’re an asshole tonight.”

Erin propped her chin on a fist, looking down at the table, and said, “A lot of that going around lately.”

Nina had recovered quickly, leaning toward Graham with forces marshaled. “Some people think change is healthy. Some people' — a glance toward the sound booth — “find change sexually arousing. Every few weeks or so, Twitch gets to ravage a new woman and we don’t have to worry about disease entering the picture.”

Erin looked up, interest renewed. “This is a good time to ask something I’ve always wondered. What if Twitch likes ravaging one of the earlier women better?”

“Well you can just piss off too,” said Nina, and now she really was beginning to get agitated.

“What, what did I say?” Erin cried. “It’s a valid question.”

“Well, it doesn’t deserve an answer.”

Graham nudged Erin’s shoulder. “It’s already happened,” he declared, very sure of himself, and did not give Nina a chance to respond. “Which one was it, let me guess: the dominatrix? Or was it the post-Woodstock earth- mother with the Birkenstocks?” A shrewd smile, a carnivore’s smile. “Which one moaned louder?”

“Graham — ”

“And does he ever breathe a sigh of relief when one’s gone?”

Nina drew back in her chair, seeming to shield herself behind the scattering of empty bottles, bleeding from unseen slices. Eyes that moments ago had shone brightly were now dismal and frantic, without grounding. She looked to Clay but got nothing. To Adrienne it was like watching someone being poked with a stick, seeking support from an older brother, and finding only a turned back.

Save for Clay, she did not know these people, but could she sit there and let this happen? Say nothing? Would they even listen to her? She had stiffened in her chair, and before she could say a word, it was as if Clay knew precisely when to nudge her arm.

“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