Prototype

shit. If there was one thing I could respect most about you, it was that you were always brutally honest. Don’t you even know how rare that is, how much it’s meant to me?”

Turning his hands up, shaking his head. “You’re not ugly, I never found you ugly.” But why couldn’t he go the extra mile? Why did his throat constrict around the rest, why couldn’t he tell her she was beautiful?

For so long he had felt aged, even ancient at times, as worn and cracked as old leather. Yet he felt too young now, as ineffectual as a child, three feet off the floor and watching as towering parents battled it out with fists and whipcrack words meant to hurt where fists could never reach. Don’t fight, don’t fight, the only thing a child can say; he was no more qualified now to intercede in misery than he must have been twenty years ago.

Don’t hurt, Erin. Don’t hurt.

She drew a breath between clenched teeth, smoothed a phantom tear away from the corner of her eye. “I remember, I was eight, I think. There was some stupid citywide kids’ beauty contest I heard about at school, all these other girls were entering and I thought I wanted to, too. You can laugh if you want, the idea of me being interested in something like that.”

Clay shook his head. He had never considered Erin as a child. Never thought of her as tiny, impressionable, innocent.

“You’re not laughing.” She sniffed, did it for him. “I asked my mother about it and she told me to ask my father. I asked him and he told me no, he wasn’t about to waste thirty-five dollars on the entry fee, not when I could never win.”

He watched her tremble for a moment, face half-hidden by a spill of hair, the visible half more than he wanted to see. A small sympathetic spasm rippled through his center and he dug fingernails into knees to stop it.

“Why do they do those things to us, Clay? Why do they do things like that?”

“There’s…” he said, trying to find words. “There’s some other way?”

He tried to move, succeeded only in sliding off the couch onto the floor, on the same level as she but a room and chasms away. He thought to try to reach — it was a small room — but his arm would still fall short. He was sinking, drowning in the same chilly air he had breathed all day, would breathe all night, would breathe all his life.

“I did another layout today,” she said, “and they wanted me to look ugly. Scared and ugly. They posed me with five guys this afternoon, all of them at once, and they were, they were… they were…” Erin went through some kind of contortion, as if she were retching without sound, with nothing emerging; dry heaving her soul. “I could smell them sweating under the lights, and they were… they were in me, everyplace, and holding me down, I couldn’t even breathe anymore, and every time the photographer would yell for me to look more scared or more ugly, they’d… they’d all just laugh. And do me harder, all of them, in this weird rhythm they got into, like they were some kind of group machine or something.” Voice breaking into a sobbing wail, “This morning I got up thinking I was going to like it, that I’d have fun with it! But it was like they didn’t even need me! I’d always, I’d always, I’d always tell myself these other people, they weren’t sex partners, but… but this is the first time anybody’s ever made me feel that way, like I was nothing to them. Why did it have to be different this time?”

Clay had no answer, not even the beginnings of one. Thinking, But Adrienne would, then dismissing it immediately.

“Why do I feel all the wrong things, the things I don’t want to feel and not the things I do?” Erin pushed the hair from her face and slowly sat up, back against the wall, arms wrapped around her knees to turn her into a tight little ball.

He watched her raise her eyes to him, plaintive eyes, eyes of a beggar seeking scraps at a back door: whatever you can spare. I should go to her —

A sound, then, like the breaking of a violin string in the middle of a pitifully beautiful solo: her voice: “Why won’t you hold me, Clay?”

Hold her? Hold her? He could not even answer her.

“Sometimes I just want you to… to…” Shaking her head in defeat.

“Why didn’t you go to Graham’s tonight instead?”

Erin snapped her head up as if she had been slapped, fresh hurt washing down her face. And while her nose could run, still she shed no tears. “Graham? I couldn’t tell this to Graham. I’d tell him about this afternoon and it’d be like digging his heart out with a fork. If I did that to him I’d hate myself even more.”

He almost smiled at that. Erin, as wretched as she felt, still managing to brush the dust off something close to altruism. Perhaps she deserved better than either him or Graham, only no one knew it, least of all her.

“Please hold me!” she cried. “Please!” And how expectantly she waited, suddenly poised and tense, just waiting for something other than herself around which she could throw her arms. Her empty arms.

The body, the mind — how strange when the former freezes up, and the latter seems at its peak. Had he really been this way since birth, his priorities hopelessly awry? He had never been afraid to hurt. Hurt was so dependable it seemed natural, the only thing anyone could count on. It was pleasure that seemed suspect. Maybe because, once it diminished, as it inevitably had to, the hurt seemed even more powerful, twice as real as before.

When they grew tired of looking at each other in their stalemate, neither making the first move, Erin got up and slowly shrugged on her coat and, without a word, left him slumped in the spot that had claimed him for its own…

Thereby proving him right.

He still might have been wrong, might have touched her and found that to be close was not such a prickly thorn after all. But better to err on the side of caution.

* * *

He tried to drink but even the taste was venom. Three shots of vodka and he was clinging to the kitchen sink while the lining of his stomach nearly turned inside out. He was recalcitrant when it came to feeling? This he could feel just fine, every contracting fiber of gut muscle.

Clay tried calling her later, but never a human pickup, just Erin’s answering machine. He almost left a message on the fifth attempt, but again slammed the receiver back down when he tried to speak and found he had no words to suit him. The failure got less shameful as he went along.

Maybe she was there, curled beneath a blanket in the dark, counting each abortive call. Or maybe she was at Graham’s.

He smashed the bottle of vodka but it did not help; followed suit with three plates, then sat among the shards and carved on himself with one, watched the blood ooze down his arm; hung his head and found he had a few tears in reserve even if Erin had none. This much breaking of glass — used to be, he could count on his downstairs neighbors to bang on their ceiling, call out for him to knock off the noise, but no more. He wondered if they were now afraid of him.

He knew what the problem was. Knew exactly what the fucking problem was. They’d had him on lithium since late September, and why he was still taking it he didn’t know. More than two weeks since he’d relieved Adrienne of her duties and still he was popping the pills like daily communion. He supposed he had faith in them to some degree: Lithium is my shepherd, I shall not kill.

No more, though. It was dulling him inside, suffocating his one chance at anything like love and grace in the world. They prescribed it because they wanted him alone; he would be easier to study that way.

When he flushed them away, he thought the act should at least make him feel better than it actually did.

Facing himself in the mirror, he saw the smudgy dark circles beneath his eyes, the thin scar over the left. Remembering when he had stood here and taken the twelve stitches out himself. No doctor would get near his eyes with scissors if he could help it.

Maybe he needed a job, something to fill his days. Certainly the need would be upon him eventually. He had