Brian Hodge - Prototype

Clay watched him tap the soldering iron against the tabletop the way normal people tapped pencils. More scars for the imitation wood, little furrows smoldering with the acrid reek of burnt plastic. Thinking, Two years between us, just two years — is this what my next two are going to be like? Because if they are, then maybe Graham saved a place for me.

How terribly sad it must be for people who meet brothers, sisters, about whom they have known nothing all their lives, only to find their siblings to be worse shambles than they themselves are. The conclusion would be inescapable: We’re congenital losers.

“I wanted to,” this time like a vow, “but her face, it was right there… it would’ve been like humping my own sister, and I just couldn’t… do anything.”

And Timothy went on, dissolving slowly in his chair, oily tears mingling with sweat that broke freely across his face. Clay sweating too, the house closing around them, warm as an oven. If they died here, the house would bake them into leathered mummies before they were found, brethren of a hideous dynasty.

my own sister

This was an even greater revelation than the name of Patrick Valentine.

Then she’s mine, too.

He was about to leave when Timothy smiled hopefully, with jittering thin lips, and pointed across the table, saying, “Give me that jar of Vaseline.” Clay slid it over, wiped the film on his pants before it could absorb into his fingers.

Timothy Van der Leun rolled up one sleeve like a junkie ready to plunge the needle, an eager light gleaming in his eyes. All the way up to the bicep, the forearm bared — Clay’s face went slack when he saw the sores, the scabs, the thickened blisters. They covered the inner arm like an oozing crust.

“I don’t usually start this until night,” Timothy told him, “but since you’re here…”

He dipped the tip of the soldering iron into the Vaseline — “So it doesn’t stick as bad,” he said — and as it began to bubble on the tip, he found a clear spot on his arm. Held it there until it began to smoke. The sizzle wasn’t as bad as Clay thought it would be. The mice were louder, in their way. But the burnt pork smell was in his nose before he could do anything.

“I know how we went wrong — just look at the way we start out growing from the sperm and the egg,” said Timothy. “One cell, two cells, four, eight…” The soldering iron dipped back to the Vaseline. “That’s the way we grow. This thing in our cells, I can fix it the same way, I know that now.”

Back to his arm, contact, with a soft incinerating hiss and a curl of smoke.

“A few cells at a time,” he said, as if he had never known such rationed bliss. “A few cells at a time.”

Clay did not leave until Timothy resumed where, the night before, he had left off on his chest.

Listening for his return was ostensibly a passive task, but it seemed she was getting little else done. Adrienne sat at the motel room’s table while the cursor of the laptop computer blinked hypnotically — final evaluations of Clay, they might yet be of use.

She paced to the window a fourth time and found the parking lot still barren of her car.

“Gee Mom, do you think Clay stayed late after the prom?” asked Sarah from across the room. She was sprawled facedown on the bed, bare feet kicked up over her bottom as she pored through one of her thesis books.

It came so easy to her, waiting did. Life. Everything. Had Sarah ever failed at a single endeavor? Probably she had — she was not, after all, inhuman — but she never once gave the impression that failure was within her range of possibilities. She lived and breathed and ate and slept and made love as if the world would fall naturally into place around her. To lesser mortals she could be intimidating that way.

“He’ll be back when he’s ready,” she said. “You’ll know.”

Adrienne crossed the room, sank onto the bed beside her, let Sarah play with her hair because she knew Adrienne liked that, the way it unknotted her body, her mind, her soul.

“I wasn’t ready for all this,” Adrienne said, a confession. “When I agreed to leave Tempe, I didn’t think of the way I’d be letting them take all my other patients away from me.” Both of Sarah’s hands went slowly swirling across Adrienne’s scalp. “Clay’s been all I’ve had left in the world to validate me. He’s been it . I should have known better than to put myself in that situation.”

A position dangerous to them both. Perhaps, subconsciously, it had been too much like a shift into private practice, where there was no profit incentive in a cure, only the continual hope of one.

“I don’t validate you?”

“Sure you do. But he validates a part of me you’d never be able to. A part I wouldn’t want you to.”

Sarah pushed the book aside and slowly lay across her, like a widow flung over the broken body of a mate claimed by war. “If someone told you that in a session, you’d tell her she was compartmentalizing her life, and relying too much on people who might let her down.”

“So I’m notoriously blind to my own faults.”

“Just so long as you know.”

Sarah held to her, and she to Sarah, asymmetric but fitting together nevertheless. Sarah’s cheek was pressed along her thigh, hip near her head. Adrienne nuzzled harder against Sarah’s hip, breathing deeply to drag the musky scent of her within. A smell could take you anywhere, to any time. Sarah was the one real thing she had on this trip that reminded her of home; even the rainstick had been left in Denver. Holding Sarah so, breathing her in, she could touch Tempe better than if she’d brought a jar of dirt from the desert. We’ll be there again, soon, in our own home, in our own bed… and I will be wiser.

They stayed this way until she heard her car pull up outside, heard the slam of its door. Footsteps, aimless and undecided, then a quick knock. Halfway to answering, Adrienne heard the clunk of the neighboring door through the thin walls. When she opened her own, Clay was not there — only her keyring, lying on the threshold.

She picked them up, held them in the open doorway while a frozen wind flooded past.

Sarah watched from the bed, eyes big and incisive, now her largest feature with her hair still hanging in its curtain of braids. “I know what your first impulse is. But give him some time alone. He needs that respect.” A smile. “And close the door. My feet are freezing.”

“Put some socks on for a change.”

She gave Clay a half hour, then another fifteen minutes just to test herself. And when at last she knocked and he let her in, she saw that he looked more pale than he had late this morning, when borrowing her keys. He sat diminished, as if his bones had shrunk, rocking himself in place with tiny, controlled movements. His staring eyes possessed the frightful wisdom of one who has seen something terrible; with some people, you could just tell . She found his room preternaturally still, none of the vitality here that she felt next door. Without Sarah’s presence, how cheerless and arid this place really seemed.

“You found him at home,” she said.

He would not look at her, sitting on the edge of the bed, his army field jacket crushed beneath him. “Yeah.”

“And he wasn’t quite what you’d hoped for?”

“I don’t know what I was hoping for. But I don’t think I could have hoped for… for this .”

She had never been clear on why he had sought out Timothy Van der Leun, what he had hoped to accomplish; all along Clay had been reticent to discuss it. A Boston destination she could understand, but in Van der Leun’s case, there had been no tantalizing prior contact. She supposed, simply enough, that it was crucial for Clay to at last come face-to-face with another like himself.