Prototype

it.

No phone call, no advance warning. He knew it only when Nina came over Wednesday afternoon to tell him, and give him a videotape that Erin had entrusted to her on the way out of town two hours earlier.

“Did you watch it?” he asked.

“She told me not to.” Nina stood in the doorway, the only remaining vestige of her New Dehli persona the jeweled bead at her nostril. Jeans and parka and limp hair, just not Nina anymore.

“But did you watch it?”

“I tried to,” she confessed, “but I couldn’t, I had to turn it off, it hurt too much. But if you want I’ll watch it with you.”

Clay shook his head, held up a flat hand as if to ward her off, then shut the door. Probably it would have been all right, but this was Nina, and if anyone was the mother of the bunch, she had served that purpose. She would want to comfort him, and while she loved Twitch, things happened. Consolation got out of hand, became something else, never planned for, then never to be talked about because it meant that a new door had been opened and could fly open again.

So he watched alone, as he was surely meant to.

The camera was trained on a chair in her living room, rigid and unmoving, a tripod’s point of view. Empty chair, the brittle tick of a clock out of frame, its metronomic advance little slices out of the time they’d had left together while only one of them had been aware of it.

A blur of motion as Erin’s skinny bottom receded from an abrupt close-up and she walked to the chair. Facing the camera, saying nothing, a sticklike index finger winding absently around a single hair, tugging it free, letting it fall to the floor. She did it again, her movements slow, even, soothing.

Her eyes roved into their own focus, found the lens. They could always find the lens. She could always pull herself together for that.

“I’m sorry, Clay, I, I can’t say goodbye to your face because if you asked one wrong question… I wouldn’t know how to answer. I don’t do answers much anymore. If I ever did.”

She went on, occasionally halting and staring off, at times slumping lower into the chair, less and less of her visible in the frame until she would become conscious of it, and straighten. Nothing seemed prepared, just Erin, alone with the ticking of that hostile clock, sometimes speaking, sometimes pondering what to say, sometimes trying to hang on to what she had just said. None of it pleasant to listen to: She needed more, there had to be more than this, and while she might have been able to admit to loving him someday, it could never happen with him as remote as an Arctic plateau.

“I do awful things sometimes,” she told the camera, “and I need someone to tell me it doesn’t matter what I’ve done. Even if it does, I need to hear that it doesn’t.”

It didn’t go on much longer, for she had already begun to dissolve, big eyes gone hollow and moist, blinking back the goodbye tears as she buried her head for a moment, then raised it, pleading for something beyond words, palms uplifted, shaking.

“I don’t even feel like a human being anymore,” she said, then crumbled entirely.

Only after it was over did Clay remember sliding to the floor and sagging on his knees before the television, mouth working soundlessly as he watched her wrench herself free of the chair and advance toward the lens. Static frame once more showing nothing alive, just that mechanical ticking, ticking. He clung to the television to preserve the moment, eyes on the empty chair, knowing Erin was somewhere in the room, just out of sight; he could hear rustling movement and a sob caught in her throat. If he could just stop her from ending the recording, there might still be hope. The camera still rolled and contact was held. She might return to her chair and this time, why, this time she might even smile —

But then it all vanished, her chair, her clock, her entire life, zapping into white static as sudden as a nuclear blast.

Which might have been preferable, really.

In a holocaust, no one dies alone.

He spent some time screaming after that, wordless sounds that came erupting from the poisoned wellspring within. He imagined that men in wars screamed this way as they lay broken and dying in fields of mud and smoke and land mines, screaming for help or for their mothers, but never truly believing either would come.

No one else in the building banged on their walls, or shouted for him to stop.

He missed that, too.

* * *

Throat like a raw scrape, Clay stared at one of the paintings that had become his inheritances.

Iron rungs on an iron wall, centered between rows of rivets resembling cold hard nipples: a ladder. Turn it upside down, right side up, it worked either way, an Escher-like ambivalence. The ladder led from one door to another, virtual twins, opening into the glowing hellfires of blast furnaces.

No Escape, the artist might have named this one, if only he had extended the effort. Were Graham not dead already, Clay might just kill him and be done with it. It would be a favor to all of them who had suffered under his tyranny, his blackmail by melancholy.

Why couldn’t you hang on? You fucking coward, why couldn’t you just hang on? I should be missing you but now all I can do is hate you because look what you did, look what you cost me.

This was the downside of suicide he’d never considered. Graham had not just killed himself, but all of them. What had they been if not a family? Not the healthiest, nor free of abuse and neglect, but they were better together than they could ever have been alone. And now? Their numbers had been sheared, checks and balances destroyed. All that was left was one couple and a spare.

Plus, for the time being, a pair of inquisitive types who’d found them to be specimens worthy of study.

If he believed in portents, he might have wondered if this past week wasn’t precisely that: You have been here long enough, lived your life in its latest rut and dug it as deep as you dare.

A specimen worthy of study — what more was there now? What else was left but well-intentioned friends who could barely take care of themselves, and the will to know why his heart could never be what he wished?

He concluded that he had three families: the family into which he had been born, and left by choice; the family of his heart, which he’d accepted out of mutual need and had just watched die; and the peculiar family of those he’d never met, but whose similarities ran so deep they were biological mandates.

Dim as the future appeared, there could be only one choice. The road was opening bit by bit, week by week. Someone in Boston was seeing to that.

Was it merely coincidence, then, with Graham dead a week and Erin gone a day, with the holiest of the year’s holidays just two days away, that the mail brought his greatest surprise yet? Or was some other infernal machine grinding him toward an ultimate destination?

Standing in his living room, while in the window the sun blazed diamond-brilliant off melting snow, he opened the day’s mail. A Christmas card from Sarah — it made him smile even though he didn’t believe. And a large envelope with a Boston postmark, whose weekly arrival he had come to count on.

He shuffled through the papers long enough to see that they were research overviews, nothing specific as to case studies; dry reading ahead. Tales of chaos and mayhem were always more captivating. My brothers, he had once thought. My crazy brothers.

Clay saved the brief, handwritten cover letter for last, as always. He would scrutinize the cramped scrawl and try to picture the stranger who had penned it.

I think you deserve a Christmas present, the note said.

You know you’re not alone in the world. But you don’t fully know just how alone you’re not. Not every Helverson’s subject is on the books. Not every one of us is under 35. At least one of us is all of 44.

That’s right. Us.

Give me a call sometime. You might even catch me in the mood to talk.

Still no name, but when Clay saw that a phone number had been provided, he realized that his hands had begun to tremble.

Joy to the world, indeed.