"Much alcohol at all, it just kills me," he said. "They say this has amino acids, it helps your brain." Taking a drink, then shrugging. "Probably just bullshit."
They circled the floor again, a slow path. On one screen, actors in latex demon makeup menaced a young woman with curved tools of butchery; on the other, a mad-eyed rhesus monkey secured by metal clamps shrieked without sound during the advanced stages of vivisection. She turned her eyes away, the symmetry obscene.
Clay halted at one point, tried to explain that Graham really didn't intend to be cruel to Nina; it just came out sometimes when he had been drinking. His own theory: Graham secretly envied her apparently effortless flexibility. He had his paintings and an occasional sculpture, but these were all he dared try, while Nina was essentially fearless. She constantly attempted to define her own niche, without much success at anything, but at least she tried it all. Painting had been an early experimental passion, but Graham had laughed off her vision and execution as immature, so into the closet it all went. Last year she had tried writing subversive children's literature, not disliking children but resenting them for their innocence, and had penned such twists on convention as The Little Engine That Died and Little Red Riding Crop, in which Red seduced the wolf and found him to be a closet submissive; but no one had cared to publish them. A few months ago she'd tried her hand at designing greeting cards for people who hated holidays, hoping to market the idea of a series of Sylvia Plath Christmas cards, but had been denied the rights to reprint excerpts from the selected poems.
Meanwhile, Graham had his paintings, and did not even feel comfortable straying from the corroded iron realms he had forged for himself.
Of course not, thought Adrienne, he's painting his own prison, a hasty judgment considering she had only heard the works described and had barely even spoken to him; but instinct was often more correct than she gave it credit for.
"Nina," said Clay, "she'll probably outlast us all."
They worked their way around to the sound booth, and Clay rapped at a plastic window overlooking the dance floor, showed his face, then they moved around to a door that looked flimsy enough to withstand one kick, no more. After a moment it was unlocked, and they squeezed into the booth, at most four feet by eight. The volume dropped immediately; you could converse in here without throat strain.
A tall figure was hunched forward, feverishly loading music, a mad Frankenstein busying himself with digital technology. Even alone he would appear too cramped in the booth, the sort of guy whose elbows and knees seemed to have their own renegade senses of direction. A short sandy ponytail hung limp at the nape of his neck, and he wore a beard but no moustache. To Adrienne he looked like a young Amish man gone irrevocably astray.
"Charmed," he said flatly when introduced, and shook with a hand already burdened by a cassette. He missed not a beat and prattled on, ignoring Clay for the moment and talking only to her. "Look at these, would you?"
He forced upon her the cases from two compact discs and one tape, releases by artists she had never heard of: Godflesh, God's Girlfriend, the God Machine. Adrienne gave them back with a vacant smile, much like her own mother's when she had been handed some cryptic crayon drawing: Oh yes, isn't that nice.
"I come up with these thematic blocks, and nobody out there ever catches onto them." Uncle Twitch looked disconsolate. "No one recognizes subtext anymore. I work among philistines."
Adrienne glanced at the two windows, long and narrow and overlooking the concrete dance floor like gunports in a fortress. Beneath them were makeshift shelves for the CD players, a tape deck, a turntable, a mixer, the amplifier. She looked for someplace safe to rest her glass but there was none.
"I'm sorry," she said. "Maybe there's no incentive to tell you."
Twitch looked at her, open-mouthed and perfectly still, then nodded sharply. He reached up to seize a microphone and lever it down before his face. Flipped a switch and his voice cut in over the music like that of an angry prophet: "The first one of you ungrateful cocksuckers who can tell me what the last three tracks had in common gets a free rectal exam!" He jammed the microphone back into place and crossed his arms. "There."
"Subtle," said Clay.
Cheers and jeers from the dance floor; from some unseen quarter most of a cup of draft beer came showering across one window, and Twitch cackled loudly. "That got 'em! Sometimes you just need to know you're not being taken for granted."
He settled, finally looked at Clay. Warmly, she noticed, a small smile creeping onto the corners of a mouth that looked given to smiling frequently, almost against its will.
"I'm glad you're back," he told Clay, lightly, though not without concern. For a moment Twitch looked as if he intended to hug him, then consciously forced it away, as if even an arm tossed about Clay's shoulders for a few seconds would be too much, either feared or unwanted. Worse, it appeared mutually understood.
Here they lingered, the booth calm and cool, a hurricane's eye in fragile isolation from the chaos just yards away. While Clay and Twitch conversed, she remained at one window, a staring face washed black and blue and purple, the colors of fresh bruises. She could watch with more removal than she could ever have summoned at one of the tables; out there a patron, in here an interloper who watched dancers that did not so much dance as spasm, less from celebration than the vaguest kind of rage. The music was well chosen here, the sound of a world grinding its children into grease to lubricate its machines. Here the defiant could stave off that fate awhile longer; or maybe they mocked it, or simply rehearsed the moment when they too would be fed struggling into the maw, like their parents before them. Or perhaps they worshiped it instead, without even realizing; gods took many forms, and the new ones were no less thirsty for blood than the forgotten ancient deities; they just waited until it was spilled in newer ways.
Clay decided to leave the booth long enough to return to the bar, and she decided against following, risking the impression she was dogging his every step.
"He told us," said Twitch, soon.
"Excuse me?"
"About being a freak."
Adrienne turned from the window. "That's not the terminology I like to use."
"I think he prefers it."
"And I don't."
Twitch nodded with appeasement — not worth arguing about. At once she found something endearing in his clumsy way of trying to steer out of this.
"He can be so honest about himself, in the strangest ways," Twitch mused, hands moving restlessly over knobs and switches and sliders, as if they found comfort there. "Is it … is it dangerous for him?"
Adrienne sagged, hands in her pockets. "I can't answer that. I wouldn't if I could."
"He thinks it is. Isn't that all that matters?"
No, but that was most of it, so much so that there was no need to refute. Clay was back soon, spent a few more minutes in the booth before deciding to return to the table. She came along this time, eyes drawn to the reality screen in spite of herself, where a man sat placid and shaven-headed, eyes catatonic, while doctors probed into his opened skull; one cheek ticked as if jerked by a puppeteer.
At their table they found that Erin had left for the dance floor, while Nina sat holding a morosely stupefied Graham as he sagged against her side. His expression looked like something that someone had crumpled up and cast away. He might have been crying recently, or not; most certainly he was drunk beyond repair. And Nina, eyes full of pity, as if she was not sure what else she could feel … she held him, and kissed his forehead, and brushed the hair from his eyes when it fell there. Whatever she whispered into his ear was lost to the greater din.