"Listen, if you're interested ... three or four people I know, they wanted to welcome me back tonight, at this place we go. If you want to come..."

Her immediate impulse was to decline. He was a patient; it was not a good idea to socialize with patients. Then she amended: He was far more than that, as her duties had for the first time been extended beyond therapy into field observation.

You're in my world now, he had told her. I'm not in yours.

"What kind of place are you talking about?"

Clay seemed to consider this for several moments, perplexed or at a loss, then asked, almost cheerfully, "Have you ever read Dante's Inferno?"

The Foundry, it was called. She had said she would try to make it by ten, after the others would have been there an hour or so, but decided it wasn't so bad to be fashionably late, however unwittingly.

She fought the urge to take a cab - better she learn to get around without a hired crutch. Circling the blocks in an area north of downtown to which Clay had directed her, where the buildings looked grained with decay, where storefronts and their roof lines defiantly stood despite advancing age, as if proud of fatigue and scars. Doorways and windows frequently wore faces of nailed plywood, never blank, bristling with bent-cornered flyers and thousands of staples, layers upon layers of each.

She parked, finally - perhaps the place she was looking for was invisible from a car - trying to walk these streets as if she belonged here, knew them by heart. At last she came upon a sigil: The Foundry, in black spray paint on raw brick, nearly invisible in the night, on the flank of a building just inside the mouth of an alley. An arrow pointed back. Not a place you would stumble upon by accident.

Descending to a doorway below street level, she paid the four-dollar cover to a boy with blond dreadlocks, greenish in a spill of light from within. Without checking her driver's license - how depressing, her youth must really be gone forever - he sealed a cheap vinyl bracelet around her wrist and she was on her way. The music was already rumbling out at her, louder with every step along a concrete corridor that felt thick underfoot, sticky, like an old theater's floor.

It took her into a low, cavernous asylum of a place - bedlam's bas.e.m.e.nt - where heavy-gauge pipes ran riot along walls and the ceiling. Here and there some fetish dangled; mutilated baby dolls were popular, charred with a blowtorch or skewered by spikes or garroted with frayed wires, shining sightless eyes, invariably blue, wide with naivete. A pair of projection screens unspooled a continual flood of imagery - one a horror film, the other what appeared to be a narrative-free video collage of everything from medical procedures to wartime-atrocity footage to factory machines disgorging glowing rivers of molten iron - but no soundtracks could be heard above the music. Much pandemonium on the dance floor, as heavy ba.s.s tones shuddered into bones and a caustic treble grinding rended equilibriums in a corrosive symphony of deconstruction.

Seating was confined along the walls, discarded cathedral pews and tables and chairs imprisoned in alcoves behind chain link fencing. It was in one of these that she found them, Clay her one and only clue. He stood when he saw her, laughed at the look on her face.

"Toto," he said, "I don't think we're in Kansas anymore."

"I'm more used to coffeehouses at home." An idiot confession. A college town, surely Tempe had someplace like this, but she had no idea where to find it.

Three others sat at the table, eyes neither welcoming nor rejecting her, more curious than anything. They would surely know what she was, if not every detail as to why she was here. She guessed that she was older than most by eight or ten years, maybe more in the case of the thin blonde to Clay's left, but it did nothing to alleviate the sense of intimidation. The world often aged people by pain rather than by years, and if their families had been anything like Clay's, she could well have walked in upon a conclave of ancients with deceptively young faces.

She sat, and Clay made cursory introductions. The thin blonde to his left was Erin. At the end of the table was Graham, another stick figure lost inside a T-shirt - didn't these people eat? - who met her eyes briefly, then averted as he took a draw from a cigarette pluming with some rank herbal smell.

"Clay's mentioned your paintings," Adrienne said. "I'd like to see your work sometime."

Graham nodded, and with one bony, large-knuckled hand waved out toward the dance floor, the ceiling.

"The dolls?" she guessed.

He nodded again. "They aren't supposed to be anything, I was just bored one night."

"But the material just happened to be sitting around," this from the chunky young woman across the table, with thick, red, wavy hair, an obvious dye job, gathered to one side in a kind of gypsy scarf. Clay introduced her as Nina.

"Look close now, she'll probably look completely different next week," he added as a caveat.

"p.i.s.s off," Nina told him, not unkindly.

"I'm just letting her know you keep a frequent metamorphosis schedule, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it." Turning to Adrienne, "Uncle Twitch works in the sound booth, maybe he'll be out later." Clay pointed across the dance floor, where brutal silhouettes collided under blue-purple lighting. A small structure appeared to cower in the far corner, behind another barricade of chain link fence, beneath lights and speakers.

"Would you tell me if you did think there was something wrong with it?" Nina asked.

"Yes," Clay said without hesitation.

She leaned forward to seize Adrienne's complete attention, as if it were suddenly very important to explain herself. She seemed to crave intimacy and there was no way intimacy could be achieved with the volume of the music, with the exaggerated gestures required to compete.

"I just don't think anyone should limit herself to only one incarnation, that's all," she said, nail-bitten hands flailing in tight circles. "What if I like myself even better another way? How can I know unless I try it?"

"I understand." Adrienne tried to nod with rea.s.surance. Poor thing, she knows what I am and she's afraid I'm going to pick her apart right here at this table. "I live with someone who's the same way about a lot of things. She has trouble making up her mind if it means excluding some other option."

Nina began to nod right along with her, wide pleasant face radiant with proxy kinship to a nameless stranger - yes, that's it, exactly.

"A few weeks ago she asked if it was her fault that everything looked so interesting. It stumped me."

"And by living with her, you mean..."

"We sleep in the same bed, if that's what you're getting at."

"That's cool," said Nina. "I tried sleeping with other women but it just didn't work for me. Hetero and hopeless, I guess."

Graham, his face high-cheekboned and oddly aristocratic, blew a dour gust of smoke. "I'm sure you can find a support group somewhere."

"p.i.s.s off," she told him.

Graham pushed black, tumbledown bangs from his eyes, flashed a look of impish mockery at Clay, then back to Nina. "I'm just letting her know you're a neurotic flake, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it."

Nina drew back in indignation. "Graham, I hate to tell you this, but you're an a.s.shole tonight."

Erin propped her chin on a fist, looking down at the table, and said, "A lot of that going around lately."

Nina had recovered quickly, leaning toward Graham with forces marshaled. "Some people think change is healthy. Some people" - a glance toward the sound booth - "find change s.e.xually arousing. Every few weeks or so, Twitch gets to ravage a new woman and we don't have to worry about disease entering the picture."

Erin looked up, interest renewed. "This is a good time to ask something I've always wondered. What if Twitch likes ravaging one of the earlier women better?"

"Well you can just p.i.s.s off too," said Nina, and now she really was beginning to get agitated.

"What, what did I say?" Erin cried. "It's a valid question."

"Well, it doesn't deserve an answer."

Graham nudged Erin's shoulder. "It's already happened," he declared, very sure of himself, and did not give Nina a chance to respond. "Which one was it, let me guess: the dominatrix? Or was it the post-Woodstock earth-mother with the Birkenstocks?" A shrewd smile, a carnivore's smile. "Which one moaned louder?"

"Graham - "

"And does he ever breathe a sigh of relief when one's gone?"

Nina drew back in her chair, seeming to shield herself behind the scattering of empty bottles, bleeding from unseen slices. Eyes that moments ago had shone brightly were now dismal and frantic, without grounding. She looked to Clay but got nothing. To Adrienne it was like watching someone being poked with a stick, seeking support from an older brother, and finding only a turned back.

Save for Clay, she did not know these people, but could she sit there and let this happen? Say nothing? Would they even listen to her? She had stiffened in her chair, and before she could say a word, it was as if Clay knew precisely when to nudge her arm.

"Come on," he said, "let's go introduce you to Twitch."

Staring, torn, I'm needed here - More insistent: "Come on," voice low and compelling even through the ratcheting music. She followed him out of the cage into greater light, denser sound, a disorienting a.s.sault. She pulled in closer to Clay, her mouth at his ear.

"You could have stopped that, couldn't you?"

"Probably," he shouted back.

"But you didn't."

"It'll stop anyway."

Why, you cold p.r.i.c.k - it crossed her mind before she was able to filter it out. Objectivity had died without a whimper. What a plunge this was, ripped from the four safe walls that comprised her zone of efficiency in Tempe, set down where she wasn't even sure which rules had flipped. The dynamics of exchange were completely different here.

I am a fraud and I'm totally unqualified to be doing this. The sudden need for Sarah swept over her. Sarah would lead by example. Sarah would thrive here, would have immersed herself upon arrival. Sarah would take to them naturally because that's what Sarah did, and in that moment the only thing that terrified her more than Sarah deciding she should stay home after all, was if she came, and the rest of them, Clay especially, decided they had no use for Adrienne at all.

Clay in the lead, they weaved through the throng of long hair and shaved heads, leather and flannel, T-shirts and dark wraiths, all of them like members of allied tribes who had come together for noisy ritual, drawn by a summons they may not even have comprehended. They were in here, they were not out there, and it was enough.

He first led her to the bar, where she got a gin, and he some red-orange concoction in a plastic gla.s.s. A smart drink, he told her: quantum punch.

"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 bulls.h.i.t."

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 pa.s.sion, 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 ca.s.sette. 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: G.o.dflesh, G.o.d's Girlfriend, the G.o.d 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 n.o.body 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 gla.s.s 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 c.o.c.ksuckers 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 rehea.r.s.ed 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; G.o.ds 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 d.o.g.g.i.ng 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 appeas.e.m.e.nt - 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 k.n.o.bs 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.

Clay nudged Adrienne's foot to get her attention.

"Told you, you're not in Kansas anymore," he said, and drew out a chair and sat heavily upon it, to wait ... until, she supposed, the night ended.

Fifteen.

Quincy Market was one of Boston's main melting pots, and that was why Patrick Valentine loved it so. It was more than just the food, although that was incentive enough. Here, all the cuisines of the world converged, small counter stands packed along a gray stone hall that looked more suited to housing a wing of government. You could walk from end to end, side to side, slowly, taking time to breathe, to savor, and conduct a global tour via aromas alone.

Or you could sit and watch the pa.s.sing humanity, and the world would come to you. He knew of no place else where he could see such diversity among those with whom he had to share the planet, and it always did him good to keep in touch this way, keep him mindful of why he was what he was.