Prototype

Clay took discreet care to study him, the way every move seemed so deliberate, and the way his eyes soaked up his surroundings as if evaluating them for ever more opportunism. He was obviously a very hard man, who had risen from the wreckage of his worst impulses and mastered them, given them the deadly cutting focus of a laser.

Could it be he had actually beaten Helverson’s? No, more impressive still: made it work for him? The mere thought of such a feat had seemed ludicrous before.

They arrived at Valentine’s house — here again, another show of what had always seemed beyond him, anything more than three rooms on a top floor. He told Clay he had company at present, although this would be changing tonight, and this afternoon this company was out of the way with a business associate, so Clay need not worry about being disturbed.

He was ushered to a guest room, supplied with towels, shown the bathroom, where he showered away the film of road grime that greased his body. He wiped steam from the mirror and hoped to see something better than what he had taken into the shower, but it was not so. His eyes still drooped and his bones looked more prominent than ever, as if his skeleton were trying to burst free.

When dry, Clay trudged to the bed, the latest port in the latest storm. He sank into it, hoping he would not dream, that exhaustion would claim even those fissures of the brain they said never slept.

But dream he did, tossing through murky visions of a desolate factory whose boilers churned late into the night, as he walked through steam and corridors to emerge in an industrial cavern lit by a suffusing red glow. Gears whined and magnetos spun, and he stood on the edge of a concrete pit filled not with solvent but with naked human bodies that writhed like worms in a can. How it beckoned, take a plunge into the gene pool, and as he stared into its fleshy depths every now and again something would churn up through the mass to differentiate itself — an arm here, a leg there, a face elsewhere, endless recombinations of each — until a threatened overflow was shunted off down a pipeline. He wondered where it would eventually empty out, and if they would all walk away from the spill or crawl like amphibians, and no telling what would be wrong with them by the time they splashed into the world, but then the world was always waiting for another new disease.

They would have their place in it after all.

* * *

He awoke after dark. Along mid-evening, Valentine told Clay there was somebody he wanted him to meet, so they ventured out in the car again. Valentine would explain himself no further, seeming to retreat into a cold, hard shell of purpose. Clay recalled the cryptic ramblings of Timothy Van der Leun: You really don’t know about that girl he’s got up there? It would’ve been like humping my own sister. He decided to play along, act surprised. Knowing Valentine’s name was one thing. Knowing incomplete details about his peculiar fetishes or missions was something better kept quiet.

They picked up Beacon Street and he peered into the snowy wooded depths of the Common as they passed, wondering if it was anything like New York’s Central Park: quaint by day, but after dark a hunting preserve for nocturnal predators and naive nocturnal prey. Several blocks later they dropped down through the Back Bay, rolled along the downtown canyons.

The tower to which Valentine escorted him seemed to pierce clouds, yet was still made diminutive by the nearby Prudential Building. They took the elevator to the nineteenth floor and were admitted into an apartment by someone who seized the whole of his attention the instant he saw her.

Valentine made introductions but Clay heard them as if at a distance. Ellie, he said her name was. By now Clay had grown oddly accustomed to seeing his face on other males. Even that new one, Daniel, was no great surprise as he slouched in a lounger across the room, seeming to glare from behind inscrutably dark lenses.

But here was new overload… a new gender. The first of her kind? As far as he was concerned, she was. He need not pretend to be captivated. What a postmodern Eve she made, arms folded across her chest, wearing black tights and a shapeless gray sweater, appraising him with eyes that had never learned to turn away in coy aversion. Graham would have loved her, her smile with its near-mystic potential for cruelty. Nina would desperately want to be her friend, learn where she had her hair razored and dyed.

“Welcome to God’s Little Cesspool,” she said, and smartly arched her eyebrows at Valentine before returning to a cross-legged perch on the floor.

“She’s beautiful, isn’t she, Clay? In her way. Don’t you think so?” asked Valentine.

Clay found it such an unlikely remark from the man he wasn’t sure it hadn’t been sarcastic. Although Valentine seemed more interested in how Daniel Ironwood reacted to it than in Clay’s response. Jealous? Was he trying to make Daniel jealous?

Whatever the intention, it appeared to provoke some rise out of him.

“What the hell’s he doing here tonight, Patrick?” Daniel slid forward in his chair, muting down the TV with a remote. “You too for that matter. You know what night this is.”

Valentine squared himself, going to stone. “Just a friendly social call. You have a problem with that?”

But Daniel was not backing down. “What is it you’re running up here, some kind of winter camp for chromo mutes? I was hoping for a little privacy tonight, or are you forgetting?”

“Oh you, you’re so cute when you can’t adapt to change,” said Ellie, and she actually sounded lighthearted, an amused mediator. She looked up at Clay. “This is purgatory, is what this is. This is where we come after a life of unrequited sex.”

“Then where do you go after here?” he asked.

“For me, a convent, I think that’s all that’s left. The rest of you, you’re on your own.” Ellie rocked back and forth on the floor with a bark of feral laughter. “I was made to wear a wimple and rosaries.”

“That isn’t what I was told,” said Daniel. He had retreated a few inches into his chair, coiled and sullen.

“Oh, slutty insinuations now, is it?” She rubbed her temples with the slightest air of theatricality. “Strangest thing, I’m starting to feel a headache coming on, it could last all night. I might have to ask you all to leave.” She leveled a glance at Daniel, just shy of ferocious. “Alphabetical order by last name.”

Valentine stepped forward to smooth them out, telling them to knock it off, while Clay was struck by the immense rarity of this summit. Four of them, Helverson’s progeny all, two on the books and the other two off. Had this many ever been in one place at one time? Bickering already, though, and whereas he had been overcome by a disgusted pity for Timothy Van der Leun, for Daniel Ironwood he wasted no time fomenting a razored dislike. Entirely reactionary, of course — Don’t want me here? Fine, asshole, I’m not crazy about your company either.

Four of them. How many would it take in a room before they hit critical mass and began the bloody scramble for territory and dominion?

As Valentine gesticulated to the seated Daniel, Clay sank onto the couch, leaned forward to run a finger through the dust on the heavy black and gray marble-top table. Did he know any symbols for disillusion that he could draw? No. Pity. It would have felt proper, commemorating the moment when he realized that even among his own genetic kind he really did not belong, not in any familial sense. There was no feeling of unity, nor even gallows humor — Hey, sorry about your DNA, I’d donate you mine if I thought it would help — but rather a pervading sense of a struggle for leverage. Double their numbers in here and they might well begin killing each other.

Valentine left the other two, came over to bid him step onto the smallish balcony. Clay frowned but followed; the man would not have brought him all this way to throw him nineteen floors to the street. The sliding glass door slammed behind him and the warmth of the apartment was forsaken. The winds up here were frigid but bracing, oddly welcome, cleaner than at ground level. The sound of traffic became a long-distance echo.

“They’ll work it out,” Valentine said. He went to the very edge of the balcony, fearless despite the snow and ice underfoot, and leaned against the railing. In his long topcoat and contoured skull he looked ready to fly. “Arguments are important. A sign of passion. All the bodily systems are primed then.”

Clay turned to the glass, the curtain open on the other side. Beyond, Ellie and Daniel squabbled, silently to Clay… but, if body language was any indication, with waning vehemence. He had no doubt that if pressed, she would hold her own with ease. Wondering, too, what it would be like to be with a woman so akin to himself they could be joined halves of the same damaged egg, a broken yin to a shattered yang. Such a genetically incestuous union could be glorious, or terrifying. Maybe they would immolate themselves in the flames of taboo and leave nothing but smoldering ash.