"Hey you." Nina, coming up from behind, fresh from the bathroom in a diaphanous swirl of gypsy cloth and wavy red hair. "You're awfully quiet tonight."
"Sorry," he said, "I never realized."
Plump-cheeked and smiling brightly, she slipped back around behind him, clamped onto his shoulders with hands soft and warm, squeezed twice in an offer of amateur massage before he flexed out of her grip and took a step just beyond reach.
"I forgot," she mumbled with apology, creamy brow furrowed.
He nodded but didn't believe her. She was just testing to see if anything had changed while he'd been away, been cured, if anything in him had inched closer to her view of the way normal people behaved. He was sorry to disappoint. He had just never liked being touched, unless something more animal was sure to come of it. Sex, or fighting — probably both qualified, and weren't even so different. Both involved tearing into someone else. Touching for its own sake was like making a promise that would eventually have to be broken.
"Graham's being sweet tonight, have you noticed?" she said.
"Maybe he remembered to take his Prozac."
"Clay!" she bawled, half-laughing, half-chastising. He did like to make her laugh, on the rare occasions he actually managed. Nina was the sort who looked as if she needed to laugh more, even deserved to. Laughter was kind to her, erasing the damage and hurt accrued just by being alive.
Sometimes he had to wonder why she and Uncle Twitch hung out with the rest of them. They were too optimistic, too kind. They would be cannibalized someday.
"Why shouldn't he be sweet?" said Clay. "He has admirers and he didn't have to do anything to get them over here. He gets to maintain his front."
"Well," Nina shifted her rounded shoulders, a tacit agreement, "you know how he can be. I worry about him sometimes. While you were gone? A couple weeks went by that nobody saw him, not even Erin. I thought maybe he went out on your trail."
"Erin didn't mention that." He shrugged. "He was probably just locked in here working the entire time. Have you seen that new painting?"
"It's not good for him to be that alone, he's not like you. Graham thinks he doesn't need other people, but he does." Nina's eyes were wide and she nodded, an innocent sage.
"Mostly to try to salvage his own ego."
"That's still needing them."
He smiled at her, could not help it. Saint Nina. He wondered how she discussed him behind his back, what kind things she would find to say that, if he heard them, would make him blush or gag, knowing them to be revisionist varnish. When I die, he would get around to telling her someday, you write the obituary.
Clay got up, had to move. Drifted about the maze of the basement apartment, the half walls and squared brick pillars that came down to anchor the house above, and made Graham's home seem smaller than it really was, more complex. In one far corner was a door to a big storage room. When Clay passed it he noticed a faint odor lingering about the corner. He put his nose to the door crack and sniffed — stronger, an old after-scent like brimstone, fires recently burned in the hearts of iron forges.
He opened the door and the scent rolled out of the black. Nothing inside that he could see but a mere shape, massive and still, like a boulder carved raggedly square by ancient Mayan hands, then shrouded in pale drop cloths —
And then a hand, this one flesh and blood, splayed on the door to push it out of his grasp, to close it.
"No," Graham said. "I meant to get a padlock for that door."
"What's in there?"
"No, no. No. Don't ask me about it." Graham twisted in place, looking painfully at the floor for a moment, leaving his hand on the door. "It's not ready yet."
"A sculpture?" But surely not, Graham had never before worked on anything approaching such a scale, nothing he could not set upon a tabletop with ease. Although clearly he had taken some leap with that new painting, upgrading his obsessions into grander dimensions.
"I told you not to ask me." Something burned in Graham's eyes, those dark eyes alight and saying, I'm in control, I know what I'm doing, that look approaching pure transcendence just before someone tries to fly out a window.
"Sorry," Clay said, and it was Graham again, the Graham he had always known. Always? As much always as you could fit into four years.
"You feel like going out?" Graham asked. "Sarah wants to go to The Foundry. Sounds good to me, I'm sick of this place."
Clay said sure, The Foundry, anytime, knowing he had lost his one and only chance for a sneak preview. Graham would have a lock on the door by the time he was here again. Graham kept promises. He was funny that way.
Eighteen
Why was the question Adrienne kept coming back to about Clay and the other dozen. What spotty knowledge she had of genetics had been picked up just since Clay's karyotype had been run, but it simply did not seem feasible that Helverson's syndrome could have remained undetected until six years ago, not when karyotypes had been run since 1956. Were it that rare, it seemed statistically unlikely that thirteen subjects would then be found in just six years, had this mutation been in the gene pool for centuries.
But suppose it were a more recent mutation, spontaneously arising within the last generation or two?
Such dramatically swift changes were not impossible. The higher incidence of hypertension among black Americans was now thought to trace back to the days of slavery, when the bodies of Africans in oceanic transit — chained below deck for weeks in sweltering holds and denied adequate water — quickly learned to retain vital salts rather than sweat them out. A swiftly adapted biological survival mechanism that, ironically, was now impairing lives rather than sustaining them.
But again, Helverson's: Why? What possible function could it serve? She could not, in good conscience, consider it an illness.
While a gross mutation, it was not a debilitating condition on par with Down's and Wolf-Hirschborn syndromes. There was no developmental abnormality as with any of several misprints affecting the sex chromosomes. So far as she could discern, Helverson's syndrome manifested itself — aside from benign facial-structure similarities, and such frequently reported quirks as resistance to sedatives and alcohol intolerance — in emotional and psychological affect. But detrimentally so: Its carriers seemed ill-equipped to contend with standard human stresses and interactions. If there was a common thread running through the dozen case studies, and now Clay's life, this was it.
Experience can override biology, she had assured him, but here the data challenged that precept. Among the thirteen, there was not a single exception to what looked to be a depressing rule.
All along she had wanted to believe that, as in countless other behavioral disturbances, genetics may have played a factor in predisposing someone to certain tendencies, but whether or not these were manifested was due to upbringing and environmental conditions. An authoritarian father, an abusive mother, a loveless home … one or more trigger mechanisms. A room packed with gunpowder may sit calmly for a lifetime, as long as it’s never introduced to a spark.
While she could not know everything about the first dozen, their backgrounds seemed to transcend even those broad criteria. One of the Americans, a twenty-seven-year-old named Timothy Van der Leun, whose home was listed as Indianapolis, was the son of a Lutheran minister whose family had cooperated fully in research, and had been found to be quite loving and healthy. Yet Van der Leun's life had been plagued by much the same turmoil as the rest.