Prototype

thought, He shocked them. I didn’t think it was even possible, but he shocked them.

“What’s its name?” Nina asked. “You said it was going to have a name.”

Graham nodded. “I didn’t even realize it had one until three days ago. But that’s when I knew.” How frail he looked, how malnourished, his cheekbones sharper, with unruly dark curls hanging to his eyes, those eyes the only thing about him that seemed suddenly, madly, vibrant. “It’s called The Dream of Kevorkian.”

No one moved, no one spoke.

“I don’t get it,” said Twitch.

“The suicide doctor,” Adrienne said, or thought she made the attempt, and her legs went wobbly.

It couldn’t be happening, could not, Graham giving them all a resigned look, saying nothing but the look conveying enough, Well, that’s everything, and he retreated into the charred room and the door slammed and it sounded as if another padlock was being fitted into place, this time from the inside.

Jack Kevorkian, the suicide doctor, inventor of the suicide machine — did he dream of contraptions more violent than his own, machines even more brutal than that of Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin?

Nothing was happening in fluid motion anymore, just snapshots of hyperclarity: Nina the first to reach the door, then Sarah, then the rest, fists pounding or twisting at the knob, but all they could do was rattle it in its frame. They called out and Adrienne heard her own voice join the clamor, not even sure what she was saying, only that it was a desperate plea.

When the infernal machine resumed its metallic hurricane roar, Erin screamed. A long, agonized scream —

As harrowing as the moment of anticipation.

As futile as the hope that Graham was only joking.

As piercing as the wet marrow shriek of a bone saw.

Twenty-Five

He had never been one for obligatory rituals, but Clay now thought perhaps he recognized their necessity.

Denver saw no funeral for Graham Layne Detweiler, his recoverable remains sent to Pennsylvania, back to a home he had not acknowledged for years. What happened there, none of them knew. Denver saw no funeral, but should have.

Some sense of closure was needed, any kind of scab over the open wound that his suicide had been. Its shock had staying power, lingering throughout the days — Graham, alive one moment and gone the next, more than gone, gone in a way that seemed to rend his existence into fibers and mist.

Clay supposed they could have stolen into his apartment and conducted their own ceremony in Graham’s charnel room. The Dream of Kevorkian remained intact, probably stymieing everyone from the police to the landlord, and no doubt they could have retrieved some fragment of Graham from the machinery. All those cracks and crevices? There was no way all of him could have been recovered for shipment. Some scrap could surely be their prize to tweeze free and bury.

But Clay decided that it was a ghoulish idea, would be more upsetting than comforting to everyone, and kept it to himself.

Besides, they had done one thing, no memorial by any means, but at least one final act to preserve whatever legacy Graham had left behind.

Twitch had been the first to state the obvious, that Graham would have hated the idea of his paintings being gathered with the rest of his belongings and carried east, to be stacked in some airless storage facility because, while his parents would detest them too much to display them, they could not bring themselves to destroy them. Knowing Graham, it would probably not be the where so much as the who.

They took it upon themselves to recover the paintings, Twitch and Clay, with Nina serving as lookout. With a crowbar they ripped away the padlock used to secure the place, then used Erin’s door key. It was four in the morning and they drove away having liberated thirty-two canvases.

These were divided up at Twitch and Nina’s two days later, like a grim auction, all these metallurgy dreams uneasy reminders, particularly his final painting, the Boschian landscape with its myriad body-chewing machines. Terrible prophecy, that; no one spoke up as wanting it until Nina suggested giving it to Sarah, for Graham had been pleased by her love of it on first viewing, her immediate understanding. He really had been, Nina insisted, even if no one had noticed but her.

Clay made sure that Adrienne was not left out, in the end selecting for her a two-by-three-foot acrylic of a twisted iron bridge that seemed to hover over a raging river the colors of rust and slate, a bridge with no access and no exit, going nowhere. He gave it to her while Sunday-afternoon snow brushed the windows of Twitch and Nina’s home, and even before his hands had left the canvas he saw tears slip from Adrienne’s eyes. They stared openly at each other, neither pretending the other did not know.

Crying, Adrienne? As unexpected as it was, even more so was that she made no effort to hide it or dam it back. Real tears, real grief, she was fully human after all, more human to him for that than even for her obvious love of Sarah. It was like looking into the wet red eyes of a person he had only thought he’d met, the moment somehow more devastatingly honest than any moment in all their sessions.

Adrienne. Crying.

It was nothing to stare at but stare he did, as the paintings continued to find keepers and curators, peering out of the corner of his eye. Adrienne. Crying. Sarah’s arms around her and the two of them leaning into each other. Take one away and the other would fall, but together they balanced just fine.

I want what they have, he thought. Other people managed, so why couldn’t he? It was the grand failure of his life, being born, being born so different there wasn’t even a name for it until six years ago. He looked at the paintings he had claimed so far, closed doors and piles of slag and scrap, and he thought, There it is, my life, it’s all right there, he painted it and probably never knew it was me. Because it was him, too.

Adrienne. Crying. Being held.

He met Erin’s eyes, almost went to where she sat on the couch but his legs would not move, his arms would not reach, and maybe Graham had had the right idea after all: If the fucking things don’t work right, then cut them off.

Erin had him over to her tiny apartment that night, her invitation almost shy, so unlike the Erin he thought he had known, the Erin he preferred to know. There was so much to say and none of it seemed to come out right, from the very start, so they gave up and tried to go to bed. No camera, just the two of them face-to-face, eye-to-eye, a pair of candles burning on her dresser while outside the snow had gone icy enough to peck at the window. It should have been romantic but seemed instead a desperate, last-ditch attempt at pretending to be that which they were not. She trembled as she kissed him, and when he tried to enter her she was dry, completely dry, as if the rest of her body had sucked up all the moisture and held it for ransom. He rolled off her, his erection dying, and soon Erin burst into more tears than he had ever seen from her.

Tears — she had found them at last.

“What… what’d I do wrong?” he asked.

She shook her head against the pillow, continuing to dampen it, and he got up, mentally answering for her: You lived, that’s what. And went off to sleep on the couch, where he could do no more harm.

He supposed he would have made more of an effort to shatter those walls, any walls, no matter how alien such tender advances would have felt, had he known he would never see her again. Never dreaming she would resort to what she did, never considering the possibility that Erin would pack up what she could and leave the rest, then do the unthinkable: drive away, return to South Dakota, and move back in with her parents. It seemed the ultimate defeat, a living death; the final degradation in a life filled with them — she had the pictures to prove