Prototype. Part 28

The world was the same one he had seen throughout this trip - throughout each of his wanderings - yet it was different in all the worst ways. Imbued with new significances now that he was able to see things as they really were.

Ignorance was bliss and he had never even realized. Too much fundamental knowledge cast all possibility for beauty and wonder to the furnace. His smiles, his laughter ... these had been rare enough, as his life had gone, but he had dared hope that one day he might look back on these years as growing pains, and know that he had come through that fire to be a better man who could smile and laugh with ease, maybe even love, and know that these pleasures had been earned.

But now? He would never again know such simple graces; he knew himself instead. For anyone and anything, forevermore, he was ruined.

Hitchhiking north away from Chapel Hill, Clay did not sleep, in neither car nor truck cab, certainly not during the spells when transportation dried up for a mile or two, to leave him walking beside a highway, shrugged deeply into his field jacket like a displaced veteran, one small bag of belongings to call his own.

He spoke little with those who gave him rides, sharing the miles in silence and paranoia. Wondering if they regretted stopping for him once they got a look at the two narrow scabs raked down the side of his face, and went ahead with their offer out of fear of what vengeance he might inflict for their change of mind. He supposed he did look ghastly enough, close up.

From winter's mild remission in North Carolina he journeyed straight up into its frozen and cancerous heart, where the winds grew more savage with every state north, and the snows more cruel. Past Washington it was all snarled traffic and insanity, and he scanned the car wrecks for blood and mangled lives. He watched distant smokestacks vomit evil clouds into a sky already engorged, and grimy urban lowlands felt like the most fitting realms through which to pa.s.s, teeming with addictions and excrements and neon claustrophobia.

And from time to time he could not help but look out over these bleak valleys that not even snow could beautify, as even the snow smelled of chemotherapy, and think, You made me what I am. So live with the consequences, whatever they are.

Soon he amended: You made us what we are. He was not in this entirely alone.

He would gaze across ruined buildings collapsing of their own weight, on rusted bones of structures never completed - they seemed the fate of all vain tinkerings. He had to laugh in spite of himself, with signs of such grandiose rot all about him, that the final end might come about through something as minuscule as a chromosome. With a species in genetic decline, how long would it take? And why so protracted a fall, when they had built weapons enough to get it over with so much quicker? Something biblical, that would be nice, heaps of rubble that fumed with incessant, sulphurous clouds, where mangy dogs licked the sores of malignant old men. There's drama for you.

Near New York, he recalled the painting on Adrienne's office wall, The White Veil, its tranquil glimpse into the first few years of this century. If only he could see it again, just once more, he might not even scoff. Of this century, he was closer to its finale than Metcalf had been to its opening. Would that he had talent enough to do justice to what the century had brought to bear, the potentials it had squandered.

Graham would have understood.

If artists were the prophets of their times, no wonder so many had gone mad. And though he'd never been an artist, and never would, he still had his own excuse.

It just ran deeper than most.

Clay arrived in Boston late the next morning after leaving North Carolina, more than twenty-four hours and eight hundred miles on the road. He hit the asphalt of the unfamiliar city when a trucker hauling a load of sportswear stopped with a hydraulic hiss to let him out along the eastern, uptown edge. Here the streets radiated like crooked spokes from a central hub.

He headed inland a number of blocks and realized he was on a stretch that appeared to be part of some walking historical tour, demarked by a red stripe on the sidewalk. Here and there a small, well-preserved building with its foundation in colonialism stood in anachronistic contrast to everything that had grown up around it.

He commandeered the next pay phone he saw and dialed the only number he had left to call. Though their sole conversation a week past had been brief, he remembered the voice that answered.

"It's Clay Palmer," he said. "I'm here."

Silence, long and reasoned. From the background came a muddle of voices and cheer and warm meals, as if Patrick Valentine were eating lunch in a pub and had answered by cell phone. Finally, "I was expecting you'd be making this call days ago."

"There were detours." He pressed a gloved palm over his ear to m.u.f.fle the din of traffic. "I couldn't help that. What do I do next, you're not going to run me from phone booth to phone booth, are you?"

"Where are you, exactly?"

"Congress Street, near State."

"You're on the Freedom Trail?"

"Is that what this is called?" He found a nice mellow irony in that.

"Keep following it north, and I'll pick you up in front of the Paul Revere House, on North Street. I'll be coming down from Charlestown, so you should beat me there."

And that was it, nothing about how they would recognize each other at first sight. There was no need. Surely this was an advantage, one of few. They had their own visual shorthand. An implicit history would unfold the moment the eyes of any two met.

Clay pushed away from the phone, into the glut of uptown workers in midday flux. North, following the Trail.

Now, more so than at any time during the last eight hundred miles, he wondered why he had still come. It could no longer be to seek answers; he had all he needed, all he could bear and more. He had gone where no Helverson's subject ever had: so deep inside himself that he knew what an apocalyptic creature he really was, a living testament to chaos theory. What else was left but to live it out? He possessed more insight into their aggregate nature than Patrick Valentine could dream of.

Maybe he had come to set the man's thinking straight, if that was what it needed. Which sounded suspiciously altruistic; he must keep that a secret, naturally.

Clay staked out the curb on North Street, before the colonial simplicity of the Revere House, now and again pacing or jittering in place to keep up his body warmth. Like a junkie waiting for his connection. He felt half-frozen when at last a car glided to the curb. Through a tinted window they appraised each other. Similar eyes set in the same sockets. More lines on Valentine's face and a bit less hair on his head, but Clay figured if he lived long enough, he too would have the lines, at the very least.

Valentine said nothing, nor did he gesture. Clay circled around to the pa.s.senger door, dropped his bag to the floorboard, and settled into the most comfortable seat he had been in for eight hundred miles. He supposed that fabled German craftsmanship was no idle myth. It wasted no time in whipping back into traffic.

"You look terrible," Valentine told him.

"That figures."

"Are you hungry?"

"I should be. I don't know. No." Perhaps he would be later, when the low-grade flow of adrenaline had pumped its way through his system, once Patrick Valentine and whatever he was had become just more facts of life, digested and a.s.similated. "Do you plan on telling me who you are, ever?"

"I don't guess there's any more reason not to."

"Well, don't bother if it's going to put a strain on you," pausing a beat, then: "Patrick."

Valentine scowled at him from behind the wheel, then his brow smoothed with a mirthful tic of his mouth. "How long have you known?"

"A few days is all. You're not the only one who can exploit information sources." He measured Valentine for annoyance but saw the man was holding calm; just a look in his eyes, Go on, who was it? "I went to see Timothy Van der Leun."

"Well, that's one for you. Resourceful." His traffic gaze seemed to darken; he might run over children or kittens if it was more convenient than swerving. "How is Tim?"

Clay shrugged. "Terminal," and that seemed to say it all, to the satisfaction of them both.

As the car carried them north, across the Charlestown Bridge, they spoke of recent pasts and contributions to society. What do you do, my last job I was a garbage man, oh yeah? I sell guns to garbage so they can create more - see the symmetry there? Clay felt the exhaustion of the past two days beginning to drag him down, as if he were wearing a suit of lead, yet still he burned inside with a cold arc. Here he was, at journey's end, at the side of the world's oldest unknown Helverson's subject. The father of them all? It felt that way, in a sense. Patrick Valentine had gone through life with nineteen years of seniority over him, and was neither dead nor imprisoned nor inst.i.tutionalized, and that made him a creature of some awe.

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 a.s.sociate, 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 ma.s.s 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 sh.e.l.l 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 pa.s.sed, 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 G.o.d'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 h.e.l.l'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 s.e.x."

"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, s.l.u.tty 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, a.s.shole, I'm not crazy about your company either.

Four of them. How many would it take in a room before they hit critical ma.s.s and began the b.l.o.o.d.y 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 gla.s.s 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 pa.s.sion. All the bodily systems are primed then."

Clay turned to the gla.s.s, 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.

"Somehow I can't believe your only purpose here is to run a matchmaking service for us," Clay said. "There has to be more on your mind than that."

Valentine faced him, now leaning back against the railing. What trust, or what confidence in his own authority; one shove and he could plunge to an icy death. "I have the world on my mind. And our place in it. I've lived years you never have. That makes me a valuable resource to you. It makes you a legacy to me."

"Why do you even care? I wouldn't."

"Because I'm the one that job falls to." Valentine pulled his hands from his pockets, scooped snow from the railing and began to pack it into a tight ball. "Have you ever killed anyone?"

"No. But there were doctors who said it was just a matter of time."

Valentine kneaded the s...o...b..ll, smoother and rounder, veins popping out all across his muscular hands. "Sometimes you'll hear people say the first kill is always the hardest, and after that it gets easier. But they're ignorant on the subject. You can discount everything they say. It's the second that's the hardest. Because you've done it once, and this time you know what to expect and you know how messy it can be. How long it can take some people to die. That's when you have to look inside yourself and ask if you have what it takes to do it all over again. Nothing can be very hard when you're ignorant ... only when you're fully informed."

He lifted the s...o...b..ll, a perfect sphere of dense white ice. "From this height, the right angle? It just might kill." He lobbed it over the railing toward the sidewalk below. "That's the beauty of random chance. All you have to do is be willing to take the gamble."

Clay strolled to the edge, peered over and down. He saw the occasional pedestrian trudging through this winter's night, but no signs of calamity, of death from above. "You lost this one."

"And somebody won and never knew it. And all's right with the world. I could drop another tomorrow during rush hour and win, and all would still be right with the world." Valentine dusted his hands of melting snow and pocketed them. "I hope you understand that, Clay. Of the rest of them down there, not one in a hundred thousand would understand. But I think we should appreciate that element of life, because even though we may be new beings, I think what they consider wrong with us has instead unlocked something that's been buried for a very long time. The propensity for a.s.suming a natural mastery - because we're not weighed down by the same petty little sentiments."

Clay began to pack his own s...o...b..ll. "The n.o.ble savage?"

"Even better: a corrupted savage with cunning sharpened by reason instead of five acute senses. Nietzsche would've understood. He wrote, 'What a time experiences as evil is usually an untimely echo of what was formerly experienced as good - the atavism of a more ancient ideal.'"

Clay nodded but said nothing, packing his s...o...b..ll in silence because there was no point to continuing. Patrick Valentine made an unlikely optimist - imagine that - actually seeing a future in Helverson's syndrome. He could share with the man what he had seen in himself, out on the burnt savannahs of human existence, even though Valentine would almost certainly refuse to believe.

"Human beings eat the world, bit by bit, but most of all we just eat one another," Clay said, and held up his little globe of snow. "All we are is a new model designed to take bigger bites and get it over with." He crunched his teeth into the s...o...b..ll, as he would an apple, then crumbled the remainder in his fist and sprinkled it over the side.

Valentine watched the object lesson with eyes gone grave, an inquisitor listening to the errors in a heretic's logic.

"You need to kill," he said. "Blood awakens. Blood changes everything."

Thirty-Five.

Adrienne was at a loss as to how to proceed, but maybe this was only because she had sacrificed so much sleep the past two days. Perish the thought it was because she had extended herself so far beyond responsibility and reason that any decision seemed destined to be the wrong one.

"Let's examine the facts," Sarah said. How patient she had been throughout this odyssey, how splendid a lover, friend, voice of calm. "It doesn't look like there's a car over there, nothing's moving, the afternoon's getting darker and no lights are coming on. These are the unmistakable signs of an empty house."

"Maybe I should just go see and get it over with."

"Not alone, you're not. You don't have any idea what this man might be capable of, and I've got a feeling he's not someone you should be alone with. Not even for two minutes, Adrienne. Especially if he's the kind of guy who sits around in the dark."

Poised behind the wheel - it felt as if she'd grown here - she might have smiled had she had the energy to spare. Sarah's concern was touching. Moreover, it was unsettling. Little in the world caused Sarah to really worry, to admit that it was beyond her skills and smarts, her charmed existence altogether.