Prototype

She broke from her trance, dropped her hand with a grin as if only now realizing what she had been doing. She reached out to bury that hand in Adrienne’s hair and kissed her deeply as Adrienne left her eyes open, peripherally aware of the flicker of the lash. Sarah tasted of some exotic liqueur, sweet and spicy-bitter, or maybe it only seemed exotic because it was Sarah. It felt as one of those moments of great revelation, understanding why she sometimes wanted to die so happy, and why, at rare other times, she wanted only to run.

“Who loves me?” Sarah breathed into her mouth, with heavy-lidded eyes.

“Everyone,” said Adrienne. “Everyone does.”

* * *

Graham’s door at 3:00 A.M., and there were too many of them to stumble through at once. That was the way it felt to her, all of them like parts of the same body, divided by severed nerves. The usual suspects, now that Uncle Twitch was free, plus a couple of others who had tagged along. Young, the both of them: a slim, breastless girl who looked no older than sixteen; her boyfriend, who obviously idolized Graham and clutched to his chest one of the charred-and-spiked baby dolls he had ripped from The Foundry’s ceiling, periodically asking to have it autographed. He’d said he had been here late one night last year, with friends, though Graham did not remember.

“I’m, I’m an artist too,” the boy confessed at one point. It appeared to have taken great effort.

Graham nodded. “How nice for you.” He rolled his head about to loosen his neck, and stroked the girl on her bare shoulder; she seemed to shrink a half step away. “Well if you’re an artist, you really have to learn to share things, foster a sense of community. You knew that already, didn’t you?”

The boy stood looking younger and younger, newly mute as he watched Graham knead the girl’s shoulder. She had not made another move to retreat, but her eyes were sick and confused, back and forth. Her arms folded into a fragile shelter.

Adrienne watched from a chair, slumped in and holding tight. It seemed the most solid ground she could find. First impulse was to say something, knock it off, Graham, but she reconsidered: Why should it be her responsibility? If they lived this way it was by choice.

“Don’t,” the boy mumbled, finding his voice, pleading to the floor, “don’t do that, please don’t, don’t.”

Erin came in from the bathroom and quickly sized things up, stomped over to yank Graham by one arm, what the hell do you think you’re doing, and he stumbled away with a groaning laugh that held no mirth, nor even cruelty, only emptiness.

“Just my luck,” he said, “my first protege and he’s a Quaker or something. I wonder what he does for talent.”

I want to go home, Adrienne thought, this was all to see some painting or sculpture and I bet it never even happens now. Too far gone, she dared not drive, and dared not issue Sarah an ultimatum for fear of the choice she would hear.

After hours, midway between midnight and dawn, this chilly basement apartment felt like a speakeasy. It had ceased to be fun a long time ago but they were still trying. Clay channel surfing at the TV, Nina at the stereo, Twitch raiding the refrigerator and bellowing for beer that wasn’t there.

Then Sarah laid one hand on Graham’s shoulder, one on Erin’s, to quell whatever vicious discussion they were having in a corner. After a moment he grew calm, seemed to take it as a restoration of purpose. Sarah walked away but Adrienne kept watching — nothing like the perspective of distance. She was as omniscient as a voyeur. Graham reached out, as timidly as if he had been beaten, to hold Erin. Over her shoulder his face seemed to sag and flow like a melting candle.

You’ll always have my heart, Adrienne thought he said as they broke. That’s the problem.

“Well, shit,” he then said, loud enough to be heard by all, “let’s get this done.”

Graham called them together and led them over to the least-used corner of the basement, around a door that was secured by a stout padlock. His eyes grew distant as he fished a key from beneath his shirt, on a chain around his neck.

“Shazam,” he murmured, and opened the door.

Twitch’s bobbing head was in Adrienne’s way, but even if it weren’t, she doubted she could discern what was in there… just some staggeringly solid shape beyond the door. The smell was freed, dense and acrid, an accumulated stink of scorched metal.

Graham was first in, and flipped on the overhead light.

The word monolithic floated to mind, but she quickly decided it wasn’t right. It implied aloofness, the timeless indifference of something that measures centuries the way mortals measure seconds.

This? This thing? It was unnatural and grotesque and malevolent.

It reached nearly to the ceiling, and three-quarters of the distance from wall to wall, a jagged conglomerate of more small machines than could be counted, more than could even be identified at first glance, or second. One abutted another that flowed into the next, like jumbled refuse that had only partially survived a holocaust’s meltdown; a slag heap left in the declining wake of progress and ambition.

Graham held the door open and they crowded in, slowly, as if the thing would bite. No one saying a word. No one dared.

With a closer look, she could make out individual components: electric motors; power tools of all kinds, table saws and circular saws and jigsaws, drills and lathes and sanders; chainsaw belts had been secured between motor-driven pulleys. All had been joined into a hulking Frankenstein’s monster by welded stitches, the metal having been allowed to melt and flow, then cool like metallic tumors.

Even the room had become a part of the creation, the concrete walls and ceiling having been drenched with soot over time. It was all black and gray in here, a world in monochrome.

Once they had taken it in, Adrienne felt the logical next thought ripple through all of them, everyone glancing left and right into neighbors’ eyes, realizing something had been going terribly wrong and no one had guessed its magnitude.

Graham could not have intended this to be a sculpture, not in any reasonable sense… because it could never leave the room.

“I didn’t mean for it to get so big,” he said, “but it just kept growing.”

“Graham?” Erin’s voice, tiny, as if she were calling a stranger, or had heard someone say he was maimed.

“Some of it even works, still, that’s what took longest to get right,” he said, and yes, she really had seen cables and conduit snaking about within, like arteries.

He stepped over to the back wall, stooped. Plugged it in.

The air in the dense room seemed to surge for a surreal moment as motors hummed to tortured life, then began to shriek all at once. The grinding roar was instantly painful, and only Graham did not clap his hands over his ears. Adrienne swore that she saw the structure thrum like a tuning fork, as all those moving parts churned up a breeze that carried a congealed stink of old fires. Saw blades spinning and belts whirring, metal teeth a blur. It made no sense. It was the cold, hard embodiment of illogic. It hung together and functioned when it should have ripped itself into shrapnel.

They fled the room in a spontaneous exodus, and Graham must have let it run another fifteen seconds before pulling the plug. He shuffled out of the blackened room as the cacophony wound down and broke apart into a dozen component voices, high dying whines. When it grew quiet enough, they could hear an upstairs neighbor pounding on the floor, his muffled shout.

“Graham, man…?” said Twitch, gangly limbs in awkward poise, as if flight might be imminent. “This is… this is…”

“In seventeenth-century terminology, it’s an infernal machine. And it exists for its own sake.” He stood before the doorway and took a little bow, or a sick parody. To Clay: “Now you know what I’ve been doing with all the scraps you brought me from the dump.”

They had scattered around the apartment, each seeming to have chosen his or her turf and rooted there, old friends and young strangers alike. Adrienne knew she was faring no better. Head thumping and ears ringing, she