Brian Hodge - Prototype

He sat on Erin’s right, Graham to Erin’s left, she between the two of them like a mediator. Clay had told Adrienne there hadn’t been anything much between him and Erin since that pathetic Friday night, neither one mentioning it since, skirting the matter like a secret shame. He had confessed maybe it was better that way, maybe she would gravitate toward Graham and they both would be happier for it. And himself?

What’s a little more solitude to an emotional hermit? he had said. She’d told him to can the self-pity and take a risk.

She was starting to feel the slightest bit unsteady in her chair when Erin leaned over to touch her arm, a moment Erin looked as if she had been waiting for. She scooted across a seat Adrienne realized was now empty, Clay and Graham having disappeared. Erin waved toward the dance floor, where things had turned très savage.

“Whenever Twitch plays anything by Skrew,” she said, “they can’t resist.” Watching for a moment, the two of them out there, underfed and only partially visible, colliding repeatedly with each other while the stale air was rent with shreds of growling thunder. “It’s like those nature films they shoot up in the Rockies, with the bighorn sheep butting heads.”

“Over you?” Adrienne asked.

Her smile was a shy flicker. “It’d be flattering to think so. But they probably would anyway.” Erin tried to laugh and it came out very wrong. “I wanted to ask you something.”

Adrienne nodded, blinking to clear her eyes. This sounds serious and I have no business hearing serious right now —

Erin checked beyond their huddle to make sure it would go no further; Sarah and Nina were in their own little animated world.

“If,” she said, “if I can convince him to do it, do you think you might, like… talk to Graham? You know… privately? Like you do with Clay?”

“I suppose I could spend a little time with him,” she heard herself saying. “But it would be better if I helped him get with someone who could be more impartial. With that triangle between you and him and Clay, I don’t know, Erin.” Wait, why was she even asking this now? Adrienne leaned in and hoped her eyes would not betray her fallen sobriety. “Is something going on that might have an impact on Clay, that I should know about?”

Erin’s forehead creased as she folded her arms, stick arms over an enviable chest, shaking her head. “No, it’s just Graham, I’m really starting to worry, he’s getting more like Clay in one respect, he’s holding things in more than he ever used to, and I’m afraid for him. Last week…” A steadying breath. “Last week he asked me to marry him and I said no, I wasn’t ready to marry anybody. Can you imagine? I can’t even get the hang of monogamy.”

Adrienne shut her eyes a moment. The pounding from the speakers felt as if it were thickening her brain with scar tissue. “How did Graham react?”

“He spent maybe twenty minutes talking about hanging himself. I don’t know how to deal with this. He finally quit and said he was just kidding, but…” She could not finish.

I don’t know how to deal with it either, Adrienne almost told her, but said she would have a word with Graham, as long as she could make it appear that she and Erin were not conspiring against him — but really, they should discuss this later.

“And that little room, where he’s been sculpting whatever the hell it is,” Erin went on, “even I don’t know what’s going on in there. It’s been like an obsession for him the past week or more. He’s burning something in there, you wouldn’t believe the smell.”

Adrienne supposed that this was when what had started out as a promising evening really began its dive. Such a precarious balance this group walked. Ten minutes could make a difference that almost defied belief. Their whole lives were one bipolar mood disorder.

When Clay and Graham came wobbling back from the dance floor, she saw that Clay was bleeding from a cut on his forehead and Graham looked glumly sheepish, kept rubbing his elbow. She thought of Lady Macbeth, rubbing, rubbing, out, damned spot.

Another hour, two, and Sarah tried to get Adrienne to dance when the motion was less frenzied, but by now the last things she trusted were her feet and her balance. Only perception seemed unimpaired. If anything, it had amplified, the grim subterranean world of The Foundry roaring around her, inside her.

Then someone staged a whipping, a special treat for the night — Nina had mentioned this happened occasionally, but Adrienne had yet to see it, had only once noticed two pairs of handcuffs dangling from one of the chain link partitions.

Garter-belted young woman; scarred male plaything stripped to the waist and cuffed in place, barebacked; the crowd made room as the coil of black leather rose and fell, stretched and recoiled; some cheering and others watching, glazed and mesmerized, the crack of the lash just audible over the hushed sensual throb of whatever music Twitch had cued —

And the worst of it was, this was taking place not fifteen feet away, and to her coagulated reasoning it really had begun to seem normal, perfectly normal behavior for a Wednesday night.

Why else would she have gone streaming away from the table with the others for a closer look?

Beside her, Sarah watched without blinking, and soon lifted one hand before her mouth, two fingers at her lips as she idly pushed her tongue tip back and forth through the cleft between them, as distractedly content as a toddler sucking its thumb.

I’ll lose her someday, Adrienne thought, I won’t be enough, and it didn’t even seem as sad as it should; just another given.

“You want to be over there doing it too, don’t you?”

“I might have to someday.” Sarah nodding, an automaton. “I might have to know. How it feels. From either side. I might.”

She broke from her trance, dropped her hand with a grin as if only now realizing what she had been doing. She reached out to bury that hand in Adrienne’s hair and kissed her deeply as Adrienne left her eyes open, peripherally aware of the flicker of the lash. Sarah tasted of some exotic liqueur, sweet and spicy-bitter, or maybe it only seemed exotic because it was Sarah. It felt as one of those moments of great revelation, understanding why she sometimes wanted to die so happy, and why, at rare other times, she wanted only to run.

“Who loves me?” Sarah breathed into her mouth, with heavy-lidded eyes.

“Everyone,” said Adrienne. “Everyone does.”

Graham’s door at 3:00 A.M., and there were too many of them to stumble through at once. That was the way it felt to her, all of them like parts of the same body, divided by severed nerves. The usual suspects, now that Uncle Twitch was free, plus a couple of others who had tagged along. Young, the both of them: a slim, breastless girl who looked no older than sixteen; her boyfriend, who obviously idolized Graham and clutched to his chest one of the charred-and-spiked baby dolls he had ripped from The Foundry’s ceiling, periodically asking to have it autographed. He’d said he had been here late one night last year, with friends, though Graham did not remember.

“I’m, I’m an artist too,” the boy confessed at one point. It appeared to have taken great effort.

Graham nodded. “How nice for you.” He rolled his head about to loosen his neck, and stroked the girl on her bare shoulder; she seemed to shrink a half step away. “Well if you’re an artist, you really have to learn to share things, foster a sense of community. You knew that already, didn’t you?”

The boy stood looking younger and younger, newly mute as he watched Graham knead the girl’s shoulder. She had not made another move to retreat, but her eyes were sick and confused, back and forth. Her arms folded into a fragile shelter.