Prototype by Brian Hodge

his glasses slightly askew railed against it all with varying degrees of eloquence, sometimes with guests at his side, sometimes taking phone calls, and he was absolutely full of shit. This was, for Clay, the main attraction. Milton Wheeler was an idol in the making and could not lose. If he lived, the far right would eventually canonize him. If he were killed, then he would be its martyr.
    Though for all Wheeler's propagandizing, Clay found that every now and again he did make an eerie kind of sense.
    Monday evening, mid-October, an epiphany:
    "A stranger is just an enemy you haven't assessed yet," he said, and the studio audience murmured its agreement.
    "Did you hear that?" It was the patient in the chair beside Clay, forty years of twitches mellowing under medication. She always held two fingers as if they clamped a cigarette.
    "Yeah," said Clay.
    "Do you believe that?"
    "I think so. Don't you?"
    She pointed at the TV with her two fingers that never did anything alone. "That fat little man wants to be Jesus. Only he's too heavy, he'd tear loose and fall off the cross. That's why he's so pissed off all the time."
    Clay cocked his head, staring at the screen, considering this. He half-shrugged, half-nodded. It was as good an explanation as any for what motivated the man. "But they make better nails now."
    "Well, somebody needs to go tell him, then." She brought her fingers to her lips and, with no cigarette to puff, scratched her chin. "Are you busy now?"
    "I'm waiting," he told her, inspired by the unlikely wisdom of Milton Wheeler and this woman's messianic imagery, "for a table to be prepared for me in the presence of my enemies."
    "Oh," she said. "Okay."
    Clay watched until a nurse came along and noticed what was playing and switched to something less volatile, so he returned to his room and endured sundown — hated cusp of transition and advent of shadowed menace. The world stopped at the window, but the barrier was only glass and metal. Everything had a melting point.
    A stranger is just an enemy you haven't assessed yet.
    He had learned this lesson early in life, had merely failed to qualify it so succinctly. And fathers and mothers are never so honest as to prepare their malignant offspring for the social abortion the world is sure to perform on them.
    But, inquisitive Adrienne, doesn't everybody wake up one day to realize his childhood was never the norm? Statistically speaking, neither mean, median, nor mode.
    Doesn't everybody blame himself for failure to fit in, by deed if not conscious admission, and self-inflict the punishment due? A razor blade makes fine slices on arms and legs and torso, but a penknife is even better, thicker of blade and duller by increments; the skin resists its pressure before giving way, and the sensation is so much more real. And blood makes splendid ink with which to write indictments against oneself.
    Doesn't everybody get together to compare scars for severity, frequency, aesthetics?
    Doesn't everybody?
    Of course not. Only the survivors.
    He learned early in adolescence that life was nothing if not full of dichotomies. High school stank of contradictions, and what is high school but a model of the greater world? Even in rebellion there is conformity, while even among outcasts one can find refuge.
    He and his friends of that era banded together mostly by default. The despised and the rejected, the hated and the brutalized, they auditioned one another with bravado or indifference or threats, almost by instinct, and found kindred souls in their solitude. Athletes and scholars, socialites and thespians … they were none of these, looking upon those who were with scorn. In time Clay realized they did so mainly because, as deviants who felt too much or too little or looked wrong, they had no choice. They resented what they could never be, what they would never be allowed to be. I rejected you first, they seemed to scream inside, and most fooled themselves into believing it was