Prototype

“Listen to me,” he muttered. “I never used to talk this much. I guess that’s one difference Adrienne made in me.”

She saw her opportunity. Whether clumsy or not, Sarah knew she had better seize it. “You know, you could go back and work on a few more.”

He was shaking his head even before she was finished. “I got into those sessions so I could find out about myself, what was wrong, if there was any hope I could change. Even after they found the extra chromosome I thought there was still hope, that maybe it didn’t really make any difference. But I think, deep down, I knew better all along. And nothing against Adrienne, but I learned more from those reports than we ever could’ve gotten out of psychotherapy.”

Sarah rose to her knees, feeling the grit and grime pressing through, and it was as if her own career’s self- esteem were riding on this. Please, please, see that it’s for your own good.

“Can you ever know too much?” she said. “What would it hurt to learn more?”

“There’s no need for more. I know what I need to know now. I found out what I wanted to know all along.” He bent forward, scarred hands twisting at the frayed collar of the field jacket. The look of resignation on his face could have broken the resolve of a priest. “The moths,” he said. “The moths were what their world forced them to become. They were a product of their time and place, because that’s what they needed to be to survive. I’m not any different, not really. I’m just one of those first fucked-up moths.”

Don’t say that about yourself, don’t condemn yourself to that. It crossed her mind but she was losing her inner voice, her sense of how to plead her case. The worst person to argue with was the one who made more horrible sense than you knew you could. Much as she wanted to believe otherwise, optimism could rarely win against bitter experience.

“Thirteen moths, with the same face,” he said, and laughed, a sad and hopeless echo in the chill, from steel and concrete, over the distant drip of pooling water. “I got another envelope from Boston today. Pictures this time. Twelve pictures.”

Nineteen

The next day was Thanksgiving, bringing a fine snow that fell for hours in a lazy windless drift. The invitation came from Nina the night before. They usually convened for the major holidays, she told Sarah, because with families elsewhere or estranged or both, they were all the family any of them had.

“Do you want to go?” Sarah asked Adrienne.

“You do, don’t you?”

“Well… I guess,” trying not to sound too eager, and it hit Adrienne just right, and she began to laugh at such poorly feigned nonchalance, the first real laugh she’d turned loose in a week. Sarah smiled broadly, the inadvertent savior.

“Sure, why not,” Adrienne said. “I can’t think of anything more depressing than sitting around here and trying to pretend it’s just another day.”

“That’s the Pilgrim spirit.”

Nina and Twitch lived in a third-floor walk-up on the fringes of Capitol Hill, above a twenty-four-hour copy shop. They gathered at half past noon, and Sarah quickly sized up that tradition played little role in their celebration, if it could be called that at all — pretty much as she had anticipated. They gave no thanks, offering no prayers because, she surmised, none had much faith that prayers were heard. The menu was piecemeal, each contributing some culinary specialty or two: Uncle Twitch’s chili of flaming torments, Nina’s baked Jamaican salt-fish and a vegetable stir-fry, couscous and baklava for dessert from Erin. Graham not only brought a Greek salad, but furnished the centerpiece as well, a papier-mache turkey nailed to a cutting board and opened as if dissected, body cavity stuffed with Monopoly money.

“He makes a different one every year,” explained Erin as she circled it with her video camera.

“I’m glad to see he’s back in form,” said Twitch. “Last year was a disappointment. An Indian drowning in a pumpkin pie, what the hell was that all about?” He waved his arms in spastic confusion.

Graham stood smoking by the window, staring down three floors to a deserted street. “How many times do I have to explain this to you, Twitch? It wasn’t pumpkin, it was shit. Who ever heard of putting corn in pumpkin pie?”

“Shit, my ass,” said Twitch. “It came out of a can with a label, said Libby’s, right on it.”

“That’s why I put the corn in, idiot, so you could tell the difference.” Graham fumed with smoke and friendly disgust. “Give you a simple historical metaphor and it’s like you’re still lost in a forest.”

Erin turned her camera on Uncle Twitch, telling Sarah and Adrienne, “He’s just still pissed ’cause he cut a piece and tried to eat it.”

Twitch frowned, grumbling. “Well, the least he could’ve done was baked the thing.”

“That’s when we took a vote,” said Nina, touching Adrienne on the wrist. “No more organic centerpieces.”

Conspicuous by his absence was Clay, and at least this group was traditional in one respect: They spent much time talking of the one who had failed to make it to the table this year. No one knew what he was doing with his day, and Sarah noticed that the longer they dwelt on him, the less Erin ate, picking at her food, rearranging it with a fork.

“When he called he told me you saw him yesterday,” Nina said to Sarah. “How was he?”

“He seemed okay, we must’ve talked forty or fifty minutes.” She slipped a hand beneath the table to Adrienne’s leg, and their eyes met. Thinking, Please don’t hold it against me that he opened up to me this time, and I’m not even the authority here, but she did ask. Saying it all in a glance. Questioning, too: How far can I go here?

“It’s all right,” Adrienne said, mostly sincere, but wasn’t it pierced with a sliver of resentment? How could that be helped? “Go ahead.”

Sarah squeezed her knee. Maybe Adrienne would see it was fortuitous that Clay had shared with her instead, at this point: Constrained by no oath of confidentiality, Sarah could freely tell these others who had known him for years, people who might help him because he was part of their daily lives.

“On the one hand, it was good to see him stronger than he must’ve been feeling recently,” she said. “But then again there was something painful to watch about it. There was this… I don’t know… nihilistic acceptance, I guess, of his condition. Like most of him had just given up to the worst he could believe about it.”

“So what’s wrong with nihilistic acceptance?” Graham asked. “If you ask me, that sounds like the most honest way to deal with it.”

Nina threw her fork down upon her plate. “Because it means he’s writing himself off for good, Graham! That’s what’s wrong with it!”

He arched his eyebrows in a half smirk. “The truth hurts, doesn’t it?”

Uncle Twitch paused while dishing out his third helping of couscous. “I looked into nihilism once,” he mused, “but there was nothing to it.”

Nina paid no attention, leaning over her end of the table. “I really can’t believe you sometimes, Graham. I should know better by now, but it always manages to surprise me, just how insensitive you can be. Are you really that nasty inside, or is just some act you think gives you credibility as an artist?”

He clasped his hands in mock admiration. “Very good, most impressive, very insightful. Especially for a junior college dropout.” Graham turned to Adrienne. “You’re the professional, how did she score?”

Sarah watched Adrienne draw a thin breath. “Not that I’m diagnosing, you understand, but actually,” speaking with cool surgical precision, “she may have a point.”

Graham had not expected this, clearly, and Sarah watched the minute narrowing of one eye. Aching with him in some small touch of empathy, even though he had invited it on himself. Yes, I know what it’s like to hope for an ally who refuses the job. Ask me and I’ll tell you about a big brother who denies he has a sister just