Prototype

balcony, on the theory and practice of killing.

The third one is by far the hardest.

* * *

He made his way back to the living room, where Adrienne had not moved. He was spent by now. All the days, all the miles, too little sleep and precious little food — he was consuming himself from the inside. He had glimpsed his body in a mirror back there and it had looked wasted.

He fell into Valentine’s chair, one foot on the man himself, and used the remote to turn on the television. Flipped around but found nothing of redemption so he turned it off. The silence left a yawning void.

Adrienne was watching him from the floor, not so certain that her own turn wasn’t coming next — or so her gaze struck him — and he knew he had done far worse than kill her already. The thought made him cry and he hurled the knife away, down the hall.

Clay slid to the floor, crawled to her, and from beneath the comforter one arm extended. She raised herself enough so that they were able to fit together, her head resting against his shoulder, sticky though it now was. An arm around him next, and a hand upon his knee.

But it was no good. Despite everything, the old sour repugnance had returned already, his skin crawling beneath her hands. What is it, he wondered, they’ve got to be dead first?

Adrienne seemed to sense it, perhaps a stiffening across his shoulders, and she pulled away with a single downcast nod. Content to brush two fingertips against his chest, as much as he was able to tolerate.

“So many scars,” she said. “It’s too late. Isn’t it?”

“We tried. So the scars won anyway. We tried.” As if that were supposed to be some consolation.

He crawled away from her, rubbing the scar on his forehead, from early November. Twelve stitches, it had taken? What an amateur. He could do better than that, and crawled toward the marble table.

I want to live in a different world, he had told Adrienne weeks ago, and if he had seen only the worst of worlds, it did not mean he had abandoned hope entirely.

There would be a better world, somewhere, there must be. He would find it, that world where he could touch Erin’s face and whisper her name as many times as she wished to hear it, and know that he could love her without reservation. That world where she could touch him lavishly and his skin would not reject any hand that was not brutal enough to bruise. This place, it had to exist — this could not be all there was.

Anything but that.

He knelt before marble, its smooth rock edge become the ledge upon the precipice. Eyes gone blurry, he stared down until he was one with the stone, its mottled gray and black a universe. It beckoned.

He answered.

He whipped his head down, let his brow crack across marble, and the inside of his skull went white and vast. Skin split; he was as blind as Valentine at the end. Clay reeled, rising up onto both knees, face tipped to an unseen sky, Icarus flying too high. He whipped his head down again, harder than before, all his strength this time, and forever he fell… from the eye of the sun, from the pain of a frozen moon…

Falling from grace.

* * *

And she was alone.

Clay’s head had twice hit with a sound like a bursting melon, and the second time he crumpled to the floor, bleeding from a forehead gone sickly concave. In his boneless heap he twitched with convulsive spasms until they shorted themselves out, then fell still but for shallow breaths.

Adrienne found a phone and punched out 911, let the receiver tumble to the floor when it became obvious she had no voice for the task. They would trace it; they would come.

But she couldn’t wait until then, could no longer breathe the air of this slaughterhouse, so with the last of her ebbing strength she dragged Sarah across to the glass door. Dragged her onto the balcony, to huddle with her beneath the comforter in the farthest corner, under the chilly kiss of falling snow.

Sightless eyes, she closed them. Silent lips, she kissed them. Braided hair, she stroked it. She raised Sarah’s sweater and caressed her navel, still healing from the ring that pierced it, and she kissed that as well.

And then? Just held her, until rougher hands would inevitably pry them apart.

Her face running with melting snowflakes, she thought of the rainstick left far behind. If she had it here, she would slam it upon the railing, break it open and let its pebbles and bone chips cascade to the street below.

Sarah would approve, at least, and understand.

Nineteen floors up, while down in the street they all walked past at the end of their workday, and none of them had a clue what went on above. So Adrienne settled back and began to shiver, waiting for the sirens but never quite sure when they arrived.

That was the trouble. There were always sirens.

PART FOUR/DUST OF A FADED DECADE

“But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone.”

— Mary Shelley

Frankenstein

Thirty-Seven

He had lost sight of the past, wondering if for every year he spent distancing himself from civilization, those memories had not become more and more like some vestigial organ that had withered to a nub, to someday drop away entirely. The primitives, he had heard it said, possessed no true sense of time, past and future only the broadest of conceits, sacrificed to a raw and overwhelming now.

Was he, in part, proving the theorists right, bridging that gap by becoming a living atavism? Would that no one ever got the opportunity to find out. He had tried their route; he’d been there before.

As for the route he had chosen, its first steps he scarcely remembered; they seemed as unimportant as his name, his lineage. Once even dirt roads have been forsaken in favor of desert vistas and high crags, one can wander for years without need of the past. It made no one any less human.

He could no longer recall how he had found himself here, but some nights, when on the verge of sleep with rocks at his back and the fire at his front, he stirred with the idea that something must have been terribly painful long ago, when he was young, with fewer scars, and that it was better left in a world given up for dead. Memories were sly things, not to be trusted, for their faces could change so over time. Treacherous change he did not need. Better he immerse himself in something stable and endless, a place that time could never defile, because what was time but a sense of order imposed by human hands?

A desert was such a place.

To the Gobi he had come, drawn by its call, its immensity, by everything it promised not to be. It offered neither truth nor lies, it simply was, and that was all he asked for. That, and the fulfillment of some tale he knew he had heard, with reason to believe, but far enough ago that its teller had been lost to him.

Once upon a time he had heard of the almas, and their story lay lodged within him so deeply it might have been a memory planted for the sole purpose of sending him to an elder world in which hours had no meaning. A world in which lives progressed by days and nights, by the passing of the seasons and the cycles of the moon. He needed no more clock than these.