It was a dream, anyway.
And then they gave up looking, and went for burgers.
Outside of Minnesota's twin cities, Clay had never been east of the Mississippi. It had been a great river of adventurous unknown in another era. Passing over it the day before, as it churned frigid and gray with slabs of ice, he wondered how Mark Twain had seen it in his time. How its primal pull had felt surging up through the deck of a steamboat; if its ancient muddy allure was anything like the one now compelling him to the East Coast.
The river was behind him now, a state and a half back, but its chilly currents lingered in imagination. It was how he may have traveled a century or more ago, poling himself along atop a raft, anticipating change around every bend. He would have known nothing of chromosomes then; genetics would have provided no scapegoat. Ignorance might really have been bliss.
No more, though. A little knowledge was a dangerous thing, it had been said, and Clay supposed that was true. It could leave you with an addict's craving for more.
Here he was, living proof: Indianapolis, midday on New Year's Eve, alone with the car for the first time since they had left Denver. He thought it was an encouraging vote in his favor that Adrienne had let him take her car.
Timothy Van der Leun lived in a tiny house on the southwest side, where I-70 slashed through a flatland of warehouses and grim smokestacks. Clay had phoned from last night's motel, after consulting his illicit files for the number. He got a confused sort of hello, then hung up after a moment of listening to Van der Leun listening to him breathe. He knew of nothing to say. Better to just go.
He found the street on a local map, then in the car. The block was filled with houses just like one another, small and cramped, creeping toward decrepitude, as if they held dour secrets and were exhausted from the strain. No trees at all to speak of, just scrawny head-high twigs of things. Poisoned by the air, maybe, or by the snow whose last dregs stuck to the lawn like gray scum.
The narrow porch sagged beneath his weight, and Clay knocked. He did not trust the bell to function.
He had to knock again before the door opened, as slowly as if the person behind it were crippled, arthritic. An ever-widening slice of the house greeted him, dim as a cave, all the blinds and curtains drawn.
And then the master of the house.
The face was familiar.
He clung to the door with more weight than should have been borne by his gaunt frame; lost inside his clothes, long, loose sleeves flapping at his knobby wrists. He peered out with eyes that seemed to need moments to shift focus from wherever they had been before, and when they did, his gaze locked on with the fierce melancholy of someone staring at a shattered mirror while waiting for the pieces to meld again.
Yet still Clay could say nothing. What possible words would not be trivialized by their shared countenance?
Mutation, huh?
and then a lost grin.
What a bitch.
"Are you a real one?" Timothy Van der Leun asked. Clay did not know what he meant. "Real. With scars. Let me see your scars if you're real."
Freezing wind behind him, the smelly heat of the house before him, Clay stood on the porch and took off his gloves. Turned his hands down to show the red slashes across their backs; skinned his hair away from his forehead to reveal the most recent one above his eye. His badges, all; his scarlet letters of admission.
"I have more," he said, "but I'm not taking off my clothes for you."
But Timothy Van der Leun was already nodding, "Okay, you're real," turning away, shuffling back inside the house and leaving the door open for him to follow.
Clay shut it behind him; waited for his eyes to adjust to the dim halls, dim rooms. It reeked of heat throughout, a thermostat allowed to go mad, but the air was worse, thick with the scent of things burned, then allowed to spoil. If he were offered food here, he would never accept.
"Which are you?" Timothy's voice, from the shadows, and this time Clay knew the meaning.
"Denver."
Timothy tilted his gaze, quizzical, a thin head on a bony stalk above the flapping sails of his shirt. "A new one."
Clay realized what they were standing in must have been the living room, surrounded by overflowing junk-pile boxes and brittle old wrappings from convenience foods. They littered the floor like tiny shrouds, and when Timothy moved over to a chair they crackled underfoot. Down he sank, his arms wrapped protectively around his middle.
"When did they finger you?"
"This past fall." Clay found another chair but beneath him it seemed to fit wrong, as if for skewed bones, or perhaps his own had begun to warp into other shapes, other forms. Anything might happen beneath this roof, far from the face of the sun. "It was an accident."
"We were all by accident," Timothy said. One hand dropped to the floor beside his chair, crabbed around, came up with a bottle. He put it to his mouth and took a ferociously long pull from it, then offered to share.
Clay looked at the bottleneck, the squared glass … dripping, dripping, amber blood that flies might die from if they lapped it up. He shook his head. "I can't."
Timothy nodded. "I heard that was a problem with some of us," then the whiskey spilled down the front of his palpitating throat as he poured it again. "It never was with me."
Clay watched him drink, silently, as the house hung as still around them as a rotting carcass, save for the televised murmur from another room, probably the bedroom. He found himself drawn again and again to that other face, so like his own, yet not. He had thought for days that this meeting might be like walking in upon a brother he had lost from birth, that the both of them would know enough not to speak, that what they shared beneath the skin would fill the silences.
But it was not like that at all — more the tearing of a membrane between himself and what might have been, or worse, might yet be. Not brothers at all, they went deeper: fibers unraveled from the same umbilical cord that might have strangled lesser babies. They could look at each other, and the small differences — black hair or blond, clean or encrusted — were made insignificant. Anything that varied in their lives they need neither ask nor tell about, for they had lived in all the same skins.
"Where," said Clay, "did you learn about the others? Who told you?"
Timothy opened his mouth, then shut it while he prodded the question for veiled implication. "Where are you going now,
where are you going?
" He curled in on himself. "If you're from Denver — you're not going to Boston, are you?"
"I don't have anyplace else left to go."
"It's where we all go last, I think," and Timothy trembled, as if another thought might be torn free, then surged from the chair. Stray papers fluttered to join a hundred others on the floor. "I can't sit here, come back here with me, okay, come back here," leading down a narrow hall where tilted old pictures leered from the walls. "Seeing you here, it's just …
it's just…" Repeating it over and over, a mantra.
Clay followed into what had been a kitchen, maybe not even all that long ago, but it had since been taken over by piles of newspapers and magazines spilling from cartons whose corners had ruptured. Unseen mice scurried under the cartons; their droppings speckled the counter. Timothy sat at the table, silhouetted against a window covered by a cataract of brittle, brownish paper.
And the smell was worse back here, in Timothy's wake, that sweet black stink of burnt dinners left to spoil in a room of nicotine light.
Timothy swept an arm across half the table, cleared it to the floor so that Clay might have a place to rest his elbows when he sat. Apologizing when Clay was seated, "I'm sorry it's such a mess around here, I'm on disability, I should pay someone…"
"You've been to Boston? Who is it that's there? I really need to know before I get there, but he won't tell me his name."
"Not even on a name basis with him yet, huh?" Timothy drank, then went scraping through an assortment of electrical components scattered over his half of the table. Wires like snipped arteries, pieces of broken circuit boards. From a tangle of cords he brought out a soldering iron and turned it on, watched it begin to heat. Clay sat mesmerized as a single fleck of some dead fire burned off its tip, sent a wispy coil of smoke toward the ceiling.
"His name is Patrick Valentine. I was there in the summer. I think it was last summer." When Timothy scratched at his forehead, his fingers came away flaked with dead skin. "You really didn't know his name?"
Clay shook his head.
No, I didn't.
"Then what are you doing going there so soon? Don't you think you should know a man's name before you let him put you to stud like some horse?" When he raised his eyes from the table and noted the incomprehension in Clay's, Timothy's head sagged toward one shoulder, then he slapped Clay, once, with a stinking hand. It might once have been a strong blow. "You really are a virgin, then, aren't you? You really don't know about that girl he's got up there, that he found somehow, you don't
know
about her?"
Clay shook his head no, still no, and perhaps he should leave this table. Timothy Van der Leun began rocking back and forth as the soldering iron radiated a shimmer from its smooth beveled tip.
"I really wanted to do it," he whispered, looking somewhere off to Clay's right. "I did, I wanted to, and he wanted me to do it, and so did she —" Twisting like a junkie starting to sweat, wretched memories leavening the fix. "My father used to think he was a real holy man until he realized they couldn't cure me. They used to feel sorry for him, I think, but he never … he never told them the way he used to whip me for those dreams I'd have, or
where
, the way he'd come in to check the sheets every morning."
Clay felt a struggle in his own hands; wanting to reach out, grip Timothy by the shoulders and shake him until he got back on track.
What girl, who are you talking about?
Going so far as to raise one hand, but no further. There was something diseased about this man, exuding from every pore. He was as untouchable as a shadow.
"I really wanted to," he said again, though from the deadness at the core of his eyes, desire had burned out long ago. "But I just couldn't get past being there in her bed, looking at her face."
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.