Prototype

Astounding, was what it was.

“It reminds me of Bosch,” Sarah said.

Graham, pleased, nodded. “There’s nothing new left to be done in painting. If it’s not just pure form and no content, then it’s all self-referential in one way or another. So I figured why not be blatant about the reference.”

He went on to explain how he’d taken the right wing from Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Delights — the portion depicting Hell as a dark, phantasmagoric landscape teeming with countless figures either suffering or meting out judgment — and reconfigured it for the postindustrial age. The painting crawled with the malevolence of machines; some were alone, others linked by networks of pipe and cable. They ground small, fragile humans into ruined clots beneath their treads, in their hydraulics, between their gears. Where Bosch’s silhouetted city raged in flames across the top, here decrepit factories gasped their last in the red glow of smoldering coal pits. Where Bosch’s Hell teemed with demons in the form of grotesque hybrid animals, Graham saw traitorous humans, themselves become half-machine.

“What about the triptych concept?” Sarah asked. “Bosch depicted the Earth and Paradise, too. Are you planning on…?”

“I thought about it. But I just couldn’t come up with any comparable vision I thought was pleasant enough to bother with.” Graham shrugged this way and that, watched his foot as he twisted the tip of his shoe against the bare concrete floor. “In Bosch’s day, you know, they still believed in Paradise.”

Clay left the three of them talking, wandered back into the living area. Erin was rolling joints on the kitchen counter, and maybe he would partake soon. Wishing already he could join in with the wine, be like everyone else, but not really up to the violent nausea and thunderous headache sure to come. Thank you, chromosome twelve, thank you so much for everything. Sometimes oblivion could be so inviting.

“Hey you.” Nina, coming up from behind, fresh from the bathroom in a diaphanous swirl of gypsy cloth and wavy red hair. “You’re awfully quiet tonight.”

“Sorry,” he said, “I never realized.”

Plump-cheeked and smiling brightly, she slipped back around behind him, clamped onto his shoulders with hands soft and warm, squeezed twice in an offer of amateur massage before he flexed out of her grip and took a step just beyond reach.

“I forgot,” she mumbled with apology, creamy brow furrowed.

He nodded but didn’t believe her. She was just testing to see if anything had changed while he’d been away, been cured, if anything in him had inched closer to her view of the way normal people behaved. He was sorry to disappoint. He had just never liked being touched, unless something more animal was sure to come of it. Sex, or fighting — probably both qualified, and weren’t even so different. Both involved tearing into someone else. Touching for its own sake was like making a promise that would eventually have to be broken.

“Graham’s being sweet tonight, have you noticed?” she said.

“Maybe he remembered to take his Prozac.”

“Clay!” she bawled, half-laughing, half-chastising. He did like to make her laugh, on the rare occasions he actually managed. Nina was the sort who looked as if she needed to laugh more, even deserved to. Laughter was kind to her, erasing the damage and hurt accrued just by being alive.

Sometimes he had to wonder why she and Uncle Twitch hung out with the rest of them. They were too optimistic, too kind. They would be cannibalized someday.

“Why shouldn’t he be sweet?” said Clay. “He has admirers and he didn’t have to do anything to get them over here. He gets to maintain his front.”

“Well,” Nina shifted her rounded shoulders, a tacit agreement, “you know how he can be. I worry about him sometimes. While you were gone? A couple weeks went by that nobody saw him, not even Erin. I thought maybe he went out on your trail.”

“Erin didn’t mention that.” He shrugged. “He was probably just locked in here working the entire time. Have you seen that new painting?”

“It’s not good for him to be that alone, he’s not like you. Graham thinks he doesn’t need other people, but he does.” Nina’s eyes were wide and she nodded, an innocent sage.

“Mostly to try to salvage his own ego.”

“That’s still needing them.”

He smiled at her, could not help it. Saint Nina. He wondered how she discussed him behind his back, what kind things she would find to say that, if he heard them, would make him blush or gag, knowing them to be revisionist varnish. When I die, he would get around to telling her someday, you write the obituary.

Clay got up, had to move. Drifted about the maze of the basement apartment, the half walls and squared brick pillars that came down to anchor the house above, and made Graham’s home seem smaller than it really was, more complex. In one far corner was a door to a big storage room. When Clay passed it he noticed a faint odor lingering about the corner. He put his nose to the door crack and sniffed — stronger, an old after-scent like brimstone, fires recently burned in the hearts of iron forges.

He opened the door and the scent rolled out of the black. Nothing inside that he could see but a mere shape, massive and still, like a boulder carved raggedly square by ancient Mayan hands, then shrouded in pale drop cloths —

And then a hand, this one flesh and blood, splayed on the door to push it out of his grasp, to close it.

“No,” Graham said. “I meant to get a padlock for that door.”

“What’s in there?”

“No, no. No. Don’t ask me about it.” Graham twisted in place, looking painfully at the floor for a moment, leaving his hand on the door. “It’s not ready yet.”

“A sculpture?” But surely not, Graham had never before worked on anything approaching such a scale, nothing he could not set upon a tabletop with ease. Although clearly he had taken some leap with that new painting, upgrading his obsessions into grander dimensions.

“I told you not to ask me.” Something burned in Graham’s eyes, those dark eyes alight and saying, I’m in control, I know what I’m doing, that look approaching pure transcendence just before someone tries to fly out a window.

“Sorry,” Clay said, and it was Graham again, the Graham he had always known. Always? As much always as you could fit into four years.

“You feel like going out?” Graham asked. “Sarah wants to go to The Foundry. Sounds good to me, I’m sick of this place.”

Clay said sure, The Foundry, anytime, knowing he had lost his one and only chance for a sneak preview. Graham would have a lock on the door by the time he was here again. Graham kept promises. He was funny that way.

Eighteen

Why was the question Adrienne kept coming back to about Clay and the other dozen. What spotty knowledge she had of genetics had been picked up just since Clay’s karyotype had been run, but it simply did not seem feasible that Helverson’s syndrome could have remained undetected until six years ago, not when karyotypes had been run since 1956. Were it that rare, it seemed statistically unlikely that thirteen subjects would then be found in just six years, had this mutation been in the gene pool for centuries.

But suppose it were a more recent mutation, spontaneously arising within the last generation or two?

Such dramatically swift changes were not impossible. The higher incidence of hypertension among black Americans was now thought to trace back to the days of slavery, when the bodies of Africans in oceanic transit — chained below deck for weeks in sweltering holds and denied adequate water — quickly learned to retain vital salts rather than sweat them out. A swiftly adapted biological survival mechanism that, ironically, was now impairing lives rather than sustaining them.

But again, Helverson’s: Why? What possible function could it serve? She could not,