Prototype

“No, I don’t,” she said. “I believe there’s a capacity in everyone to fulfill a certain potential. But whether or not they reach it, and how it emerges — say, whether it’s constructive or destructive — depends largely on the experiences they’ve had, and there you get into so many cultural and environmental factors that it’s impossible to even list them all. But then, in most people those experiences are an ongoing process, so I certainly don’t believe they’re locked in.”

“So life experience, this overrides biology.”

“In my book it usually can.”

“So you think I can save myself.” He knew what was coming —

“What do you think?”

Nailed it. “I believe you think so.”

“You know what I meant.”

Clay nodded: Yeah, just sparring with you. “You’re probably right. I suppose I do believe in the power of the individual. But we’re not left alone, we don’t live in vacuums. I’ve tried and it doesn’t work. Other people always want in, even if they have to force themselves in. So that negates the power of the individual. I think it’s mostly in a collective sense that we’re failures. Like a chain being only as strong as its weakest link. The same thing applies to a society. It’s no better, no stronger, than its lowest offenders.”

“That discounts a lot of good that people do for others,” said Adrienne, and he thought she was probably picturing Mother Teresa right now. She would.

“That doesn’t discount it, that just puts it in a context of being hopeless, more or less. It’s individuals that do good, but individuals die. It’s societies that chew everything up, and they keep right on going until there’s nothing left.” He took a deep breath. “I think the world’s been shaking itself down for a long time, trying to bottom out toward a lowest common denominator…

“But that’s just one weak link’s opinion. Got any coffee?”

And they went on for another forty minutes or so, until Clay at last decided he was talked out for one afternoon, then realized they had been at this for more than an hour and a half.

On the way to the door he asked if she and Sarah had plans for the following night, confident they would not. Who else would they know here, who else had they had time to know? Adrienne asked why before she answered.

“Thought you might like to head over to Graham’s awhile,” he said. “You told him you’d like to see his work. Sarah would like it, probably.”

“I’ll ask her.”

“She’ll say yes,” Clay said, so sure of himself that he didn’t look at her when detouring into the kitchen to grab a notepad by the phone and write directions.

* * *

He did not even attempt to show his paintings — that was the thing Clay never understood about Graham. Content to let them be seen only by close acquaintances, and the occasional stranger who had heard of them and wore him down through persistence, Graham consigned them to the walls of his basement apartment and studio. They hung alone, bleak portals made even more so by the absence of frames, somehow more naked and raw that way, and so far as Clay knew, none of them had a name.

“I don’t see why you shouldn’t,” Clay had once said about Graham’s reticence to exhibit. “People go for H.R. Giger, they should go for yours.”

Graham had shaken his head, so appalled at the idea that he had to light a cigarette to put himself right again. “It’s not a question of acceptance. Galleries expect you to stand around that first night and make putrid small talk to people who’d cross the street to avoid you any other time. No, I don’t think so.”

“Like that would stop you from walking out if you felt like it,” Clay had said, knowing this was just one more excuse. Graham had so many they should be numbered. “Anyway, I’ve figured out what the plan is. You’re going to wait until you die early and they’ll find everything and you’ll become this cult celebrity.”

Graham’s face had lifted with a Mona Lisa smile, aloof and knowing; here’s to life and untimely death and skyrocketing market values. “It would be a hilarious inside joke, wouldn’t it?”

Clay had agreed. It was only the young and talented who became gods after their deaths. The mediocre were even more completely forgotten, and the old went on to just rewards. Only the young seeded debates of speculation, what might have been.

At the time he had been jealous, thinking, I’ll die and there won’t be a thing left behind, not one lasting bit of graffiti I scrawled on this world to say I passed through. Now he knew he’d been wrong. At least geneticists would know his name. He wondered if they would store his brain in a jar, or keep even more of him around, like the skeleton of Truganini, last of the extinct Tasmanians, displayed for the generations to follow. Better living through the study of mutants could be their motto.

And thus he was in a contemplative mood arriving at Graham’s on Monday night. Erin, pale blond hair ethereal against her baggy black sweater, was already there to film his arrival, or maybe she had been there all day — he’d not talked with her since she’d spent Friday night with him. Nina came alone; Twitch was at work. Sarah and Adrienne were last, Sarah bringing a few bottles of wine.

They all seemed to get along. One would never know that Sarah was walking in on a roomful of strangers. With Graham she got into a discussion of Dali and Francis Bacon; with Nina she discovered they were both fans of the writing of Charles Bukowski. Even Erin dropped her guard and warmed up rather quickly, and elicited no judgment when she sprang her frequent test, telling how she earned part of her income. Erin shared industry secrets, told Sarah what Clay had already known for some time: splattered semen in still-life cum-shots was hardly ever real, but a mixture of unflavored gelatin for viscosity and dishwashing liquid for pearlescence, and was squirted from a small turkey baster.

“I never thought it quite looked real,” Sarah said.

Adrienne glanced askance at her. “How would you know?”

“I grew up with three brothers, don’t forget. Puberty wasn’t always dry.”

“That might’ve been enough to turn me to women,” Erin said.

Graham made a small grunt. “But think of all the fascinating career highlights you would’ve missed out on.”

She turned back to him, almost coy, as coy as Erin could be when actually herself. “Don’t be jealous, when they’re in my mouth I’m still thinking of you.”

“Where are they when you’re thinking of Clay?”

Erin frosted, just a bit, a fine ice-eyed edge of pique. “Wherever it feels good,” she said, and left it at that.

Clay added nothing, content to stay out of it, thinking only, This can’t last, this triangle. Someone was eventually bound to get seriously hurt, and he doubted he would be the one, no matter what transpired.

Soon, Adrienne talked Graham into giving them a tour of his paintings, and he consented. Walking them through the haphazard placement, in black jeans and T-shirt, an apple picker’s cap atop his limp curls, and an open bottle of wine planted against one hip, he reminded Clay of some lost Parisian, out of place and out of time, and especially out of faith in himself. The canvases came with frequent disclaimers: I should have painted over that one; I was drunk most of that month.

“Compliment him enough,” Clay told Adrienne, “and maybe he’ll give you one. Anything to replace that washed-out impressionist crap in your office.”

He skipped out on most of the tour; had seen them all many times. The grimy metal structures rendered in oils and acrylics; the furnaces, the bridges to nowhere, the girders turned to pretzels by holocausts unknown. But then he realized that, off in one gloomy corner, Graham had begun discussing a painting he had not yet seen. On his way over, he heard Graham say it had been done the whole time Clay had been gone. Bastard, hadn’t even told him about this one.

He admired it beside Adrienne and Sarah, seeing it as they must. The difference in scope was obvious at a glance. While the earlier works had but one subject, with this, the eye hardly knew where to begin. Graham had to have poured nearly every spare moment into this over the weeks Clay had been AWOL, and even then it was… it was…