Prototype

because she likes women.

Graham chose to ignore it, like a wounded animal that might grow only more vicious. “It has nothing to do with being twisted or insensitive, it’s being honest enough to admit that if you know you have nothing better to look forward to, why not at least embrace that much? We’re each alone enough as it is, and for sure we die that way. Is it that threatening to you to admit it?”

Adrienne rested her chin on clenched fingers. “And Buddha said, ‘I am awake.’”

“You’re not alone, Graham,” said Erin. “You do have me.”

“Half-alone, then.”

Nina was looking at Uncle Twitch, throwing her hands in the air. “Why do I invite him? Why do I keep inviting him? He’s like a solar eclipse!”

Twitch frowned. “Well, would you rather talk about your mom’s hysterectomy?”

Nina turned back toward Graham. “Not everybody shares your conviction that nothing out there in the universe loves us.”

He began to laugh. “I didn’t notice you bowing your head when we sat around the table.”

“It doesn’t mean I don’t believe in something.” And Nina began to slip down into her chair, her ideological footing clearly less sure here. Sarah thinking, No, don’t back off now, you were doing so well. Nina bit her lip. “I mean… I’m not all that comfortable calling it God, like that, but… something’s there.”

“Oh, there’s a God, all right,” said Erin, staring glumly at her plate. She speared a lettuce leaf. “The bad news is, She’s got PMS.”

It continued like that throughout the rest of the meal, then dessert. Discussion that often grew heated, but never quite savage enough to draw blood, and Sarah wondered if it were not, simply enough, their way. That if in their world, their lives, given their backgrounds, this was the manner in which they assured one another they mattered and that the ultimate expression of dislike came not in barbed words, but indifference. Prickly though it may have been at times, she saw something cohesive about their little unit.

Graham grew increasingly quiet, smoking by the window and staring through the veil of snow to the street, watching the occasional car that slowed. Twitch went clicking up and down the television channels, despairing of football, and above it they could barely hear Erin, vomiting in the bathroom. Adrienne asked if she did that often, and Twitch shrugged, saying, “Well, it is a holiday.”

They soon fought, Erin and Graham — over what, Sarah could not tell, but she wondered if it might not have something to do with Clay. Probably it would have been better had he been here. Somehow it could be so much less threatening to compete with flesh and blood, than a phantom present only in conversation.

Sarah’s eyes met Graham’s once, as Erin grabbed her video camera and cradled it as tenderly as a child, as she threatened to leave, and before he could turn away, Sarah noticed the shimmer of tears in his eyes. Soon they retired to the privacy of Twitch and Nina’s bedroom, and she heard one low sob as someone cried, not sure who it was, and then for a long while could hear nothing at all. She supposed that was good, hoping it meant they were just quiet lovers, more vocal in their depression than in their ardor.

The four of them left to carry on with Thanksgiving drank wine, Uncle Twitch proving to have an unexpected gift for spices and flame, as he first mulled it with cloves and cardamom seeds and cinnamon sticks. They sat about the living room and ignored the TV, pleasantly lethargic now that the worst of the psychodrama appeared to have been played out.

Nina moved across the room to sit on the couch as Sarah took the floor, so Nina could weave her hair into a curtain of long thin braids. Nina’s fingers were soft, warm, deft, the gentle tug and pull soothing. She could sleep like this, some echo of childhood surrender into the total security of two hands. Hoping only that Adrienne would not take it wrong; it was not that kind of surrender. She would store this tactile arousal until they got home, could get a fire lit — a fire would be divine — and she would make love with Adrienne for hours. Flushed and firm, their bodies would glow, and they would be flawless. Firelight smoothed over every blemish. Perhaps it was this magic luster, above even heat and light, that made fire such an object of primordial veneration.

Eyes too heavy to open, she groped to find Adrienne’s hand, held it while the sun died beyond the windows and the snow whispered cold promises.

“I wish he’d been here today,” said Uncle Twitch, with a reflectiveness born of wine. “He should’ve been here.”

Adrienne stirred. “Clay?”

“Who else.”

And she smiled, a wistful little smile that Sarah saw upon opening her eyes.

“I’ve been sitting here turning it over and over, what bothers me about everyone being so willing to concede defeat, Clay most of all, over that goddamned chromosome. You know what it is? It’s the superstition.” Adrienne drew knees toward chin, wrapped both arms around them. “We’ve haven’t really gotten over spilled salt and broken mirrors, just replaced them with stranger things we can’t explain. So we’re afraid of them. As long as the technology holds up, we’ll always have that shadow just on the other side of understanding.”

“And poor Clay had to find a big one inside himself,” Nina said.

“He’ll deal with it,” said Twitch. “I don’t think we give him enough credit sometimes.” He held arms open wide as Nina, finished with Sarah’s hair, sank into his lap, and they held each other. “He deals with some of the most god-awful stuff but always comes out of it. I think we need him more than he needs us. I look at him sometimes, and think, well, if he can get through, I guess I can too.”

Nina nodded into his chest. “Graham needs him most.”

Sarah roused from her dreamy languor. “So the rest of you find him inspiring?”

“He’s still alive, isn’t he?”

Twitch nodded. “He reduces a lot of his life to fundamentals and doesn’t miss the frills. I envy the hell out of him for that.” His eyes seemed to pinch as he nuzzled distractedly into Nina’s hair, something eating at him: all the things he wanted for Nina and himself, perhaps, wanted and might never admit; all the things he wanted to give her and could never afford. “For a long time I had this romantic notion about poverty. For everything out there I looked at and knew I didn’t want any part of, it seemed that trying to live the impoverished artist’s life was the most honest thing I could do. That’s okay when you’re twenty-two, you can get away with it then. But thirty-one…?” Clinging to Nina. “It was just one more hollow icon, wasn’t it?”

Nina was stroking his beard, his ponytail. “You’ll find what you want to do, you’ll find it.” Trying to smile. She could be so brave, if only she had a cause. “We’ll find what we’re good at.”

Sarah hated herself for her first thought. No, no, you probably won’t, but I don’t think it’s your fault, it’s just that no one bothered teaching you how to recognize it when you see it.

They stayed for another hour, then went down to the street and scraped the snow from the car. Sarah stood in the chill, face tilted to the sky, until a nugget of sadness felt cleansed. And in the car Adrienne kissed her, told her she liked the braids, and said that all in all, this Thanksgiving had the edge over the last one she had been forced to spend with in-laws; so think about that.

Twenty

He would never have admitted it to anyone, but sometimes Valentine wondered if he wasn’t a better man for having lost his testicles. Really. Looking back before the cancer, he wondered how much time he had spent just trying to protect them, relieve them, meet their incessant demands. They could be worse than even the worst children he could imagine, because those little monsters you could at least ship away for a weekend, or even walk out on the rest of their lives. With gonads, you had no options.

Naturally, he had mourned their loss. Years of anguish and grieving it had taken, but eventually he had realized it was like being liberated from, well, a ball and chain.

It had bestowed upon his mind a clarity of vision he had never known outside of dreams. He could track a line of thought and wring from it all he hungered for. Without that distracting flood of hormones, ideas came to him