Prototype

anything, forevermore, he was ruined.

Hitchhiking north away from Chapel Hill, Clay did not sleep, in neither car nor truck cab, certainly not during the spells when transportation dried up for a mile or two, to leave him walking beside a highway, shrugged deeply into his field jacket like a displaced veteran, one small bag of belongings to call his own.

He spoke little with those who gave him rides, sharing the miles in silence and paranoia. Wondering if they regretted stopping for him once they got a look at the two narrow scabs raked down the side of his face, and went ahead with their offer out of fear of what vengeance he might inflict for their change of mind. He supposed he did look ghastly enough, close up.

From winter’s mild remission in North Carolina he journeyed straight up into its frozen and cancerous heart, where the winds grew more savage with every state north, and the snows more cruel. Past Washington it was all snarled traffic and insanity, and he scanned the car wrecks for blood and mangled lives. He watched distant smokestacks vomit evil clouds into a sky already engorged, and grimy urban lowlands felt like the most fitting realms through which to pass, teeming with addictions and excrements and neon claustrophobia.

And from time to time he could not help but look out over these bleak valleys that not even snow could beautify, as even the snow smelled of chemotherapy, and think, You made me what I am. So live with the consequences, whatever they are.

Soon he amended: You made us what we are. He was not in this entirely alone.

He would gaze across ruined buildings collapsing of their own weight, on rusted bones of structures never completed — they seemed the fate of all vain tinkerings. He had to laugh in spite of himself, with signs of such grandiose rot all about him, that the final end might come about through something as minuscule as a chromosome. With a species in genetic decline, how long would it take? And why so protracted a fall, when they had built weapons enough to get it over with so much quicker? Something biblical, that would be nice, heaps of rubble that fumed with incessant, sulphurous clouds, where mangy dogs licked the sores of malignant old men. There’s drama for you.

Near New York, he recalled the painting on Adrienne’s office wall, The White Veil, its tranquil glimpse into the first few years of this century. If only he could see it again, just once more, he might not even scoff. Of this century, he was closer to its finale than Metcalf had been to its opening. Would that he had talent enough to do justice to what the century had brought to bear, the potentials it had squandered.

Graham would have understood.

If artists were the prophets of their times, no wonder so many had gone mad. And though he’d never been an artist, and never would, he still had his own excuse.

It just ran deeper than most.

* * *

Clay arrived in Boston late the next morning after leaving North Carolina, more than twenty-four hours and eight hundred miles on the road. He hit the asphalt of the unfamiliar city when a trucker hauling a load of sportswear stopped with a hydraulic hiss to let him out along the eastern, uptown edge. Here the streets radiated like crooked spokes from a central hub.

He headed inland a number of blocks and realized he was on a stretch that appeared to be part of some walking historical tour, demarked by a red stripe on the sidewalk. Here and there a small, well-preserved building with its foundation in colonialism stood in anachronistic contrast to everything that had grown up around it.

He commandeered the next pay phone he saw and dialed the only number he had left to call. Though their sole conversation a week past had been brief, he remembered the voice that answered.

“It’s Clay Palmer,” he said. “I’m here.”

Silence, long and reasoned. From the background came a muddle of voices and cheer and warm meals, as if Patrick Valentine were eating lunch in a pub and had answered by cell phone. Finally, “I was expecting you’d be making this call days ago.”

“There were detours.” He pressed a gloved palm over his ear to muffle the din of traffic. “I couldn’t help that. What do I do next, you’re not going to run me from phone booth to phone booth, are you?”

“Where are you, exactly?”

“Congress Street, near State.”

“You’re on the Freedom Trail?”

“Is that what this is called?” He found a nice mellow irony in that.

“Keep following it north, and I’ll pick you up in front of the Paul Revere House, on North Street. I’ll be coming down from Charlestown, so you should beat me there.”

And that was it, nothing about how they would recognize each other at first sight. There was no need. Surely this was an advantage, one of few. They had their own visual shorthand. An implicit history would unfold the moment the eyes of any two met.

Clay pushed away from the phone, into the glut of uptown workers in midday flux. North, following the Trail.

Now, more so than at any time during the last eight hundred miles, he wondered why he had still come. It could no longer be to seek answers; he had all he needed, all he could bear and more. He had gone where no Helverson’s subject ever had: so deep inside himself that he knew what an apocalyptic creature he really was, a living testament to chaos theory. What else was left but to live it out? He possessed more insight into their aggregate nature than Patrick Valentine could dream of.

Maybe he had come to set the man’s thinking straight, if that was what it needed. Which sounded suspiciously altruistic; he must keep that a secret, naturally.

Clay staked out the curb on North Street, before the colonial simplicity of the Revere House, now and again pacing or jittering in place to keep up his body warmth. Like a junkie waiting for his connection. He felt half-frozen when at last a car glided to the curb. Through a tinted window they appraised each other. Similar eyes set in the same sockets. More lines on Valentine’s face and a bit less hair on his head, but Clay figured if he lived long enough, he too would have the lines, at the very least.

Valentine said nothing, nor did he gesture. Clay circled around to the passenger door, dropped his bag to the floorboard, and settled into the most comfortable seat he had been in for eight hundred miles. He supposed that fabled German craftsmanship was no idle myth. It wasted no time in whipping back into traffic.

“You look terrible,” Valentine told him.

“That figures.”

“Are you hungry?”

“I should be. I don’t know. No.” Perhaps he would be later, when the low-grade flow of adrenaline had pumped its way through his system, once Patrick Valentine and whatever he was had become just more facts of life, digested and assimilated. “Do you plan on telling me who you are, ever?”

“I don’t guess there’s any more reason not to.”

“Well, don’t bother if it’s going to put a strain on you,” pausing a beat, then: “Patrick.”

Valentine scowled at him from behind the wheel, then his brow smoothed with a mirthful tic of his mouth. “How long have you known?”

“A few days is all. You’re not the only one who can exploit information sources.” He measured Valentine for annoyance but saw the man was holding calm; just a look in his eyes, Go on, who was it? “I went to see Timothy Van der Leun.”

“Well, that’s one for you. Resourceful.” His traffic gaze seemed to darken; he might run over children or kittens if it was more convenient than swerving. “How is Tim?”

Clay shrugged. “Terminal,” and that seemed to say it all, to the satisfaction of them both.

As the car carried them north, across the Charlestown Bridge, they spoke of recent pasts and contributions to society. What do you do, my last job I was a garbage man, oh yeah? I sell guns to garbage so they can create more — see the symmetry there? Clay felt the exhaustion of the past two days beginning to drag him down, as if he were wearing a suit of lead, yet still he burned inside with a cold arc. Here he was, at journey’s end, at the side of the world’s oldest unknown Helverson’s subject. The father of them all? It felt that way, in a sense. Patrick Valentine had gone through life with nineteen years of seniority over him, and was neither dead nor imprisoned nor institutionalized, and that made him a creature of some awe.