The Convulsion Factory by Brian Hodge Read Free Book Online Page B

wreckage to his chest. He stares off into space, damp lines running down his cheeks.
    “What am I doing?” he whispers. “What am I doing?”
    He gathers what he can, whatever he hasn’t overlooked because it’s too little or too far-flung, and he carries the whole jumble back to the work table and lets it clatter into a heap. And there he sits, while Alex stares, Dad, looking sorrowfully at all the broken pieces.
    “I need more glue,” he says at last and gives a decisive nod of a chin that used to seem a lot firmer and a lot stronger to Alex’s eyes. “That’s it. I need more glue.”
    Without another word, he rises and walks past his son and a minute later comes the sound of the BMW starting up and then Dad is gone.
    Alex rises too, wanders over to the worktable and delicately fingers the broken plastic. Last remnants of a mismatched squadron, sleek on the outside and hollow on the inside.
    In the last few years, Alex has been astounded at how little he weighs. At least it seems that he should weigh more, that there should be more mass to him since he’s flesh and blood and bone. Now, though, he’s not so sure. And he wonders if maybe he’s hollow too, because now it feels that over all these years, these fifteen years, he was just another model. Dad’s big project from 1982.
    Is he real? Does he exist? He wonders like he’s never wondered about anything. Just one word from Dad would clarify matters. Just one word might work wonders. Just one word .
    Alex goes to the garage and brings in the ladder and sets it up in the rec room. He looks at all the tiny wires hanging down and frees up the few that still have bits of plastic attached. Dozen and dozens of tiny cables. And their hooks.
    Maybe it will hold and maybe it won’t. At least he knows he’s certain to get a good distribution of weight.
    He positions himself at the apex of the ladder and lies out flat, balancing precariously, and now he’s parallel to the ceiling and looking at all the eye-screws Dad has imbedded up there to hold his treasures.
    Alex takes each cable and meticulously hooks them into the safety pins.
    And when he pushes away the ladder he feels important at long last, and thinks that whenever Dad makes it back home, he’s bound to take notice this time.

Androgyny

    The afterglow fades, always.
    The quicker it happens, the more compulsively you’re left to wonder about the night’s beginnings. Even if the object of earlier affections is still lying beside you, cuddled in the crook of your arm, it doesn’t matter. The afterglow fades, and the questions turn cruel and demanding:
    How did this happen? What twist of fate and chemistry turned us from strangers into lovers in a few hours?
    Gary knew it would happen all over again the moment he saw her. Some bar on Basin Street, past the French Quarter’s upper boundary. Fewer than a dozen drinkers, most of them hardcore, beyond redemption. Lights were low, smoke was thick, exotically resilient bacteria grew on the floor.
    Look at her clothes and you wouldn’t think she belonged. Look in her eyes and you reconsidered. Slumming, like Gary, for the fun of whatever waited to be found.
    It took twenty minutes of flirtatious eye contact through the smokebank before she came his way, taking the stool next to him. This he took as a good omen: She was no hooker. No hooker with her looks would work this stretch, and even if she did, she wouldn’t have wasted twenty minutes. Gary may have been new to New Orleans, but knew that some games were universal.
    “What are you?” was the first thing she said.
    “Career? Astrologically? How do you mean?”
    She smiled, traced a lacquered fingernail around the rim of her glass, some fruity concoction, sweet contrast to his whiskey sour. “You’re not a tourist, I can tell that right off. No tourist ever comes around here unless it’s some conventioneer drunk out of his mind. But you’re not a native, either. Are you.”
    “Long-term transient,”