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Since childhood, Quinn had known there was something wrong with his father. He’d noticed it in the way he spoke and how his eyes didn’t change from the blank, unappreciative stare he gave everyone, even when his lips curled in a smile or when his chest rumbled with laughter. Even then, when he smiled, it was tight and forced. He rarely ever showed his teeth. When he did, it wasn’t charming; it only made the face he’d put on for other people’s benefit stretch to try and accommodate more expression than he was used to. When he laughed—oh, when he laughed—it was not a warm chuckle deep from his belly. It was something low and rocky, like an avalanche falling down atop tourists on a trail.
Since childhood, Quinn had known he was the exception to these rules. Harley’s eyes had the ability to melt from the ice-cold bricks he held in his skull into something that could pass as human, only if he were looking at Quinn. His smile was genuine, it didn’t look wrong on his face. When he smiled with his teeth, it wasn’t by a stretch of the skin. In fact, his jaw fit just right in his face. He didn’t look out of place at all. When Quinn was small, he remembered sitting against Harley’s chest and feeling him chuckle. He found that to be a pleasant noise and feeling. It was real, not forced up to fit in with whatever conversation was taking place around them.
Since childhood, Quinn had known there was something wrong with his father. Since childhood, Quinn had known that some of it rubbed off on him. There was a certain cadence in how he spoke to others that, sometimes, if he wanted to disturb himself, reminded him of his father. His tone was dead, uninterested, and robotic. Occasionally, his face fell flat of any emotion, even if he was feeling it tenfold. Excitement never showed itself in him through smiles, jumping. He rarely cried anymore; instead, he got sick to his stomach.
Mostly, though, it was how the two of them assessed situations. The rights and wrongs that plagued the society they lived in. Since childhood, if Quinn asked why something was wrong, he’d get the same answer from Harley: “Because you will get arrested.” It didn’t matter if he’d asked about stealing, speeding, vandalism, or murder. It was all the same. He would get arrested. It was wrong because there were consequences that could inconvenience Father or himself. Harley’s way of looking at things had stuck.
Logically, Quinn knew it was because Harley raised him. No matter how hard a child may try to prevent it, the people it is raised around will have certain morals and values that rub off on them like glitter: They may think they’ve gotten rid of it all, but when tested under light, they still shimmer. They linger, sticking to flesh like leeches.
Even if the child grew up under horrible conditions, they still learn how to not properly operate as a human in society. They take that information and twist it on its head so they understand how to properly operate. Their values reflect their upbringing. Quinn never took a philosophy class in school. He’d avoided subjects of moral dilemmas in English class like the plague, and only ever stated facts. He could listen to people discuss it and understand both sides. That was the issue: He understood both sides. He could never pick one. He simply could not bring himself to care, no matter how hard he tried.
Father couldn’t either. He watched the news all the time, a different channel each night. “It’s horrible. All of it is horrible, and in the end, we all die anyway. We’re all horrible to each other in our own ways, and then we all die. No point in picking a bias to have, you’re awful without one.” Father said that during a debate on TV over some political issue.
“If you had to pick one,” Quinn remembered pressing. He must have been about thirteen, small for his age, under a blue blanket on the brown leather couch. “Gun to your head, which are you picking?”
“The trigger.”
“Gun to my head, which are you picking?”
Quinn recalled a low hum sounding through Harley’s chest. “Quinn, I could not care less if the new mayor is going to introduce stricter leash laws. We don’t own a dog. But, I suppose, if I had absolutely no other option but to pick a side…make them stricter. Sure.”
For a while, Quinn assumed Harley didn’t care about things he assumed to be below him. Father was a self-centered man. He’d held himself on a pedestal as far as Quinn could think back. Now, he wasn’t sure if that held up. Thinking about his adoption, all the work Harley put into saving him from Playtime Co and giving him as much of a “normal” childhood as he could (given their circumstances)...it made no sense.
Quinn didn’t think about it when he was little, he was just happy to have a father. Someone who would admit that he was theirs. It was every little orphan boy’s dream, and for once, he’d gotten what he wanted. Who cared if Harley truly loved him? Who cared why he was an exception to the disdain Harley felt for the rest of humanity? Certainly not him. Now he wondered. He was old enough now to wonder what pushed Harley to take him away from that place and leave everyone else like lambs to slaughter.
“Do you love me?”
The TV was droning from the living room, but they were in the kitchen. A single light was on above the sink. Harley was taking a crystal cup from the cabinet, his hand stilled on the handle when Quinn spoke. “I do.” He replied, closing the cabinet and setting the cup down onto the counter with a clink. He opened the cabinet next to the first and took out a bottle of brandy. “Why do you ask?”
Quinn was leaning in the door frame. He had his hair down, as he commonly did in the evenings. Harley was still wearing a white button-up shirt and his fancy work slacks. His leather shoes were still on, and he’d yet to even loosen his tie. Quinn was wearing sweatpants and an old shirt. “You hate everyone else,” Quinn said. “Your friends, your colleagues, the neighbors, the news anchors. Actors, singers, bands. Fellow scientists, other people my age, teachers. You hate everyone. Not me. Why? Why do the rules bend for me?” Why do you love me? The final question was left unsaid, but Quinn knew Harley could feel it.
Father opened the cabinet again and pulled out an identical crystal cup. He filled that one about half the way full of the same Brandy and slid it across the countertop. Quinn raised an eyebrow; he was given a nod. He grabbed it and took a sip, only for his face to screw up at the unsufferable taste. It was stabbing, bitter, and medicine-like. “God.” Father laughed.
“It gets better the more you drink.” He assured. Harley walked over to the small table near the big arch window in their kitchen. Quinn followed and sat across from him. “Of course, I love you, Quinn. You’re my son. I chose you. A calculated, precise choice. I didn’t want to despise you as you grew older.”
“And you don’t?”
“I don’t,” Harley confirmed, taking a sip. Quinn took another, only to wish for water. He pushed the drink far in front of him. Harley took the cup from him and poured what remained of the Brandy into his own. Quinn was thankful. “In fact, just as I expected, I enjoy you just as much as I did when you were younger.”
“Younger and ripping the heads off toys?”
“Exactly.” Harley rubbed his eyes behind his glasses. “You’re creative. Morbid, without a doubt, but creative. I’d hate to have a dull child.” He took a long breath through his nose and leaned back in the chair. The tired wooden back groaned. “When I saw you there, in Play Care, wrapped up in your corner with your mutilated toys, you interested me. Originally, it was because…”
“You wanted to turn me into a monster.”
The vein in Harley’s forehead popped out. It only did that when he was very, very stressed. This conversation was stressing him out. Part of Quinn was happy about that. Stressing his Father out was one of his favorite pastimes. It wasn’t exclusive to him. Quinn liked watching people squirm. It made him smile, knowing he had the means to bring even the most stoic people—like his father, the cruel and brilliant Harley Sawyer—down to a level of nothing but anxiety, brought sheer joy to his chest. That was part of Harley’s glitter that stuck to him.
“I saw your potential. In all honesty, Quinn, you became my every waking thought. Which was odd for me. It’d always been my projects or myself invading my mind, never another person. I was confused for a long time.” The cup of Brandy never left Father’s hand. He held onto it with white knuckles as his jaw got tighter and tighter. “As the day you were supposed to go into the… Initiative drew nearer, the more sleep I lost. Our conversations stuck in my head, and I found myself looking forward to the next. Your view on the world… the justification you put behind ripping apart your toys, I was fascinated.”
Quinn tapped with one finger on the table between them. He stared down at the designs in the wood and hummed shortly. Fascinated. Quinn was fascinating. “Why did you adopt me?” He asked, quietly. The words were sharp, he directed his gaze up from his bitten fingernail to his Father’s dead, blue eyes. They were a dark, dark blue that fit with his dark, dark brown hair. If only they had any light in them. Maybe then he’d look like something human. Harley hesitated. Quinn had never known Harley Sawyer to hesitate.
“You left your big project, your Magnum Opus, to adopt me and disappear from that company. Why did you do it?”
“You are picking at scabs yet to heal over.”
“I don’t care.”
Harley took the thin-wired glasses from his face and put them on the table, rubbing his eyes with a hand, then took a gulp from his cup. “Get the bottle, please.” Quinn scoffed, but obeyed. He set the sloshing bottle of Brandy onto the table between the two of them. Harley pulled the cork and poured more into his cup. “I understand. You’re eighteen. An adult. You’re curious, and you have every right to be, but if I may be frank, I don’t want to hurt you, Quinn. And this will hurt you.”
Harley seemed to shed. With the admission he didn’t want to hurt Quinn, any ounce of performance fell away. His face fell flat, his eyes got blanker than they were seconds ago.
Quinn did the same. He sat back in his seat, arms folded over his chest, and allowed himself to take his suit off. Harley acted almost like he noticed. Then that awful smile curled across his face. It wasn’t even wolfish; it was something worse. His face wasn’t used to smiling, so it never reached his eyes. His gums were too visible, and with those eyes of his—how dead and dark they were—he smiled like a child attempting to mimic a clown.
“You became my next project, Quinn. You had the potential to be a Bigger Body, of course. Anyone can be a Bigger Body. You, though… I saw myself in you. I dismembered my toys when I was that age, I pretended they were my parents. I made up intricate stories with any action figures—GI Joes I was given, and made them torture and maim, and kill each other. That was my fantasy world. I liked to think about people hurting each other and being hurt under my hand.” Quinn’s lip twitched. He took apart his toys and sewed them together to make them prettier, to bend and shape them to what he wanted them to be, not for the sole purpose of “hurting” them. But he swallowed and nodded nonetheless.
“I never had any friends. None of the other children wanted to play with me because I always wanted to perform operations on their stuffed animals that went wrong or make my GI Joes shoot their Barbies. So, when I saw you with your toys, and we had our conversations—and I started to care for you—an idea popped into my head. I cared for you, of course, I care for you, but in addition to that, I wondered how similar to me you really were. The answer was… bare minimum, which was perfect. How old were you when we met? Five? I wondered if I could take you, raise you as my own, and mold your mind into something resembling my own more. And I succeeded.”
Quinn swallowed hard. He could feel his nostrils flaring the more he thought about it. He really was just another experiment under the belt of Dr. Harley Sawyer. His entire childhood was probably documented in color-coded three-ring binders somewhere on the endless shelves in this Godforsaken house. Quinn thought about it. He didn’t like hurting his toys for the sake of it. His toys were his friends. They had personalities, and he was just making them prettier. However, there was a reason he’d had few friends once out of Play Care, besides that, he just didn’t want them.
Quinn enjoyed hurting animals. Harley knew this. He’d taken a rabbit and nailed it to a board, then cut it open to see what was inside. It had died quickly while screaming. He enjoyed catching squirrels and breaking their little legs. Baby chicks were easy to crush in his hands if he wanted to. Stray cats hanged from chicken wire wrapped around tree branches in their backyard at one point. Harley saw. Harley approved and asked why he wanted to do it. Quinn, at the time, answered, “I just like to.” Even though he knew there was just something wrong with him. Just like there was something wrong with his Father.
Quinn reached across the table, snatched Harley’s cup from him, and downed the rest of the Brandy. It burned his throat, but he sucked it up and set it back down, empty. Harley watched, unmoving and silent. “But you love me, right?”
That wasn’t the response Father was expecting from him, clearly because he stammered. “Yes, Quinn.” He answered. “I love you more than I’ve ever loved anything else.”
Then Quinn didn’t care. He didn’t care that, however, Harley loved him was twisted and disturbing and unethical. He didn’t care that he was probably an experiment number in a logbook. Father chose him over Playtime Co. Father chose him over his Magnum Opus. He was Father’s Magnum Opus. “I love you, too.” He whispered lazily, laying his head on his arm that he stretched across the table.
Harley smiled. It wasn’t the awful, cruel smile, it was the one he used when he looked at Quinn regularly. Father stood and walked to the other side of the table. His nimble fingers ran through Quinn’s hair, down the knobs in his spine. “You’re crazy,” Quinn whispered into his sleeve, turning his head to look up at Harley. “You do know that, don’t you?”
“I do.” He whispered back whilst continuing his gentle strokes of Quinn’s back. “That’s alright, I’m not alone. I’ve got a son.” Quinn got a sick feeling in his stomach. “I love you, Quinn,” Harley said, for a third time that night.
“I love you too.” He replied, mumbled. Harley walked away with his Brandy and his cup. He heard him go down the hall into his study and lock the door. Quinn stayed at the kitchen table and felt that sick feeling churn and churn until it appeared in his head.
Tears slipped free from his eyes and down his cheeks silently. He wasn’t sure why he was crying. Nothing Harley said hurt him. Father loved him. That was enough for him, it didn’t matter how. Maybe it was the notion he was crazy, just like Father. That must be it. He wasn’t just like Father. He loved his father with his entire heart, but there was nothing on Earth that could make him want to be him.
Since childhood, Quinn knew there was something wrong with his father. Since childhood, Quinn knew that he didn’t care. Now, Quinn knew there was something wrong with him. Now, he knew it was exactly what his father wanted.