Prototype

“The last time I checked, that’s not in my job description,” she said. At times such as this she wished she wore glasses; nobody looks more like they mean serious business than someone tugging off glasses with one hand. She continued, voice even-tempered and professional: “A remark like that is way out of line and we both know you’re aware of that. Dirty little propositions quit shocking me a long time ago, so if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather get past that phase of your evaluation of me. Good enough?”

He did nothing for several moments, then grinned lazily down toward the couch with a single conciliatory nod. Whatever test that had been, it appeared that she’d passed.

So proceed.

“Neither of us brought this up on Friday morning, when we first spoke, but there’s something I’m still wondering about. Not that it’s necessarily important — more for my own curiosity. What brought you down this way from Denver?”

“I just wanted to get away by myself for a while.”

“You wanted to be completely alone, then.” More a statement of clarification than a question. You had to be careful with direct questions; too many and a session could turn into an interview that yielded facts, but ignored the richer vein of feelings.

“I wanted to get away from everything I was familiar with. So about a week and a half ago, I just left. You know how you go for a walk to think, to clear your head.”

“If you wanted to be alone, you could have locked your door and not answered it, and unplugged your phone.”

He cleared his throat, uncertainty shifting across his face. “I knew that wasn’t going to be enough. Sometimes that is enough, it works… but it’s a very passive way of going about it. Sometimes you need that distance. It didn’t even seem right to drive it. So I didn’t.”

Adrienne eased forward in her chair. “Eight hundred miles is quite a walk to do some thinking.”

“I had a lot to think about.”

“And what was that?”

“Besides, I was hitchhiking some of the time. The way I see it, that’s not cheating, that’s allowed.”

She said nothing — let the silence weigh upon him until he decided to do something about it. Her question hung there and he was perfectly aware of it; she could tell in a flicker of eye contact. What she could not yet discern was if his evasion was genuine, or one more little game.

Clay slid forward on the couch. The hospital robe bunched beneath his legs and he stood. Wandered across the office to stand before her print of Metcalf’s The White Veil while she looked at his back, framed against the tranquil snowscape.

“Impressionism, right?”

“Yes.”

“French or American?”

“American.”

He nodded, still presenting his back to her. “I know this guy who’s an artist. His work… it’s nothing like this. He doesn’t see the world this way.”

“Is this a friend of yours?”

Slowly, Clay turned his back on the scene and returned to the couch. She decided his evasion, as well as his lengthy contemplation, were genuine.

“Friend is an outmoded concept, isn’t it? Graham… I get along with him, I wish him well, I like his work. We… we protect each other in a way. But I wouldn’t even think of dying for him, so I don’t think I’d make a very good candidate for friend, no.”

Adrienne nodded. She could tell, for the time being at least, that the way to Clay’s psyche was going to be a serpentine path. He did not seem to mind ruminating philosophically about matters, but dealing bluntly with his own feelings was a thornier task. She’d have to start out reading him mostly by his reactions to things. Pick away here and there and see what flaked away, like rust.

“Why don’t you describe Graham’s work to me. The things you like about the way he sees the world.”

Clay shut his eyes a moment, moved as if to run one hand through his hair, then stopped. Her breath caught in her throat for an instant. A concussion, that’s all he needed right now.

“His work doesn’t present the world like that,” waving one cast toward The White Veil. “Fuzzy, soft focus… diffused. Even though that’s a winter scene, it’s still warm. Why do you have it hanging there, anyway? That world’s dead. Is this supposed to be some kind of memorial?”

She frowned. “‘That world’s dead’ — I don’t quite understand what you mean by that.”

“Artistically, I mean. Been there, done that. Let’s look at something relevant.” Perhaps she was on the right track — Clay was starting to appear rather captivated. “Who honestly needs a snowy hillside anymore? It means nothing in terms of anyone’s life. Maybe it meant something when it was painted, but now it’s completely devoid of relevance.”

“Some would say beauty exists for its own sake, regardless of its time.”

“But most of the time it doesn’t mean anything. It’s like Marx’s take on religion: an opiate. It’s a false pat on the head to tell you not to worry, everything’s fine.”

“So, what you’re saying about Graham’s work is that it reflects, say, a harsher truth that you find to be more real.”

“Right.” He nodded. “Right. It’s not metalwork, but a lot of it looks that way. Even though he uses oils, mostly, oils and acrylics. Looks very metallic. His paintings, they’re ugly as hell, but it’s that bizarre kind of ugly where you can look at it and find a perverse beauty, know what I mean? They look filthy, most of them. Not pure and clean like that.” He spared another long look at The White Veil, then seemed to dismiss it with a shake of his head. “I don’t mean filthy in a pornographic sense. I mean the way metal looks before… I don’t know… before it rolls through a Detroit factory and gets shaped and smoothed out and painted and waxed. Raw metal.”

Her eyes narrowed as she tried to summon a composite of the feelings such paintings must evoke. Something about them conjured a cold and harsh sense of brutality. “What kind of imagery in them do you recall?”

“Oh… gears. Girders. Smokestacks. Twisted bridges that don’t go anywhere. Piles of scrap iron.” Clay bit into one corner of his mouth. “Graham calls them post-industrial landscapes. His studio and apartment, all those paintings around… he once called it the junkyard of the world.”

“And this is a world of… what?” She was curious. Decay? Progress in rampant decline? Fill in the blank.

He thought for a moment. “A world of barriers. I mean, what’s metal for, if not keeping things in their places?”

Adrienne recalled the condition of Clay’s clothing the other night, when he had been brought in. The boots caked with dust, both inside and out, the dusty jeans and jacket and shirt. With mild dehydration and sunburn on top of it all. The obvious conclusion was that he was not long out of the open desert.

“That world reflected in Graham’s paintings,” said Adrienne, like the sliding of a gentle probe. “Is that the world you wanted to get away from for a while?”

He didn’t answer, not for a minute, maybe more. One never realized how much time was compressed into one minute until hearing it tick away, waiting for a reply in a dead-silent room. She took care to watch his face for the emotions it betrayed, and clearly he was wrestling with those barely understood compulsions that drove him.

“I guess it was,” he finally admitted, as if it were some sort of moral defeat. “But everybody needs that, sometimes, so I don’t know how much you can read into it.”

Enough, she thought. In this society the call of the wild was rarely answered in much less than a Winnebago. Or at least with a backpack and four-wheel drive. Clay’s had been a much more primal response.

“This need must have been considerably stronger in you than in most people, wouldn’t you say?”

“Probably.” He shrugged, apparently unconcerned with pursuing a comparison. “I was on the road, hitching and walking, close to a week. The desert? I guess I came into Tempe about three days after I got off the road completely, but I didn’t want to stay long, I still wanted to keep going.” He wet his lips. “Do you know what it’s like to walk for three days and not see asphalt?”