The Cipher

2

Gone as usual in the morning, and me left behind and naked, inner thighs lightly scaled with the dried spoor of our lovemaking: she liked to stay on top afterward and let the juice run down, and I liked whatever she liked. Imagining in the shower that I could smell her still, the angular scent of those secret bones, had she always smelled so fierce and so good? Recalling those gone times, old memories lit by the fire of the new, I did not this time wonder how long it would last; I was too smart for that now. Take what you get, and don’t think. Of course it could never be that easy, but there were moments, like now, that I could successfully pretend that it was, and I had no inclination to try to peer past those moments. I’m not one who wants to know the future: at the best it spoils the present, with longing or dismay, and at the worst, well. Who really wants to find out how tight the sling is, for your own very personal ass, who wants to know how deep the shit will really be? Not you. Not me either. Because it’s rarely bliss saved up, is it, when you finally get there. I’ll take my now, waking with a lover’s scent still on me, around me, take my hopes before they’re maybe tragedy; a good morning is still a good morning, even if it leads to apocalypse at night.

For once up early enough to have breakfast, so I did, an oily tuna sandwich wrapped in half a paper towel arid eaten in the solitude of the morning hall, second-floor hall but you probably knew that. Looking at the door. Thinking of the Funhole inside.

Other devotees it surely had, in its inexplicable history as weird-ass god-thing, and what sacrifices? No one had Nakota’s brute gift for imagination, but no doubt the process that was the Funhole would accept lesser treats; odd that we had never found evidence. I couldn’t believe that no one else in the building had stumbled over this particular piece of real estate. It would be— not “nice”, but good, in some fathomless way, to talk with someone else about this, particularly if they were even slightly more normal than Nakota. Or me.

Read your own poems, I told myself, and smiled, a thin scoff. I still wrote them, or rather found them written; I rarely remembered the act of writing since I was usually shitfaced when I did it. I couldn’t bear to try reading them, and was too ashamed to let anyone else see; my mus-cleless talents as a poet had peaked in my moody English Department years, declined still less poignantly as I pushed with the grim fatalism of the true asshole to make a living from my “work.” Nakota was right: I had no business mocking her weird sculptor friends.

Footsteps, aiming down the stairs, and I pushed off hurriedly from the wall, stuffed the last of my sandwich into my mouth, nonchalantly swinging around the chewed-looking newel post as the walker passed me by, a skinny black-haired white man just this side of boy, head down as if in communion with a daily tragedy too dense to share even by acknowledgment. Which was okay by me: I’ve never resented being ignored. I watched, waited for him to push his way out the big downstairs door, then hustled myself back up to get my name badge and my coat. Be on time today, I thought. Or even early.

Still I found myself dreamy, imagining the drivers beside me on the road as fellow participants in an odyssey the nature of which we were never meant to guess, tasting here and there of the surreal to a greater or lesser degree, depending on nature or circumstance or both. My, aren’t we the mystic this morning, but I did not exactly laugh as I normally would have, and at red lights I studied them, those drivers, with a compassion I never felt, looking past their morning stares or blunt car-phone smiles, past all I saw on the surface, the divination of an eye accustomed to much stranger sights. Nakota would have dismissed them with less than a sneer; I wondered what would happen if they came to the Funhole, unsuspected font of the bizarre. Would the pressure of its strangeness weigh them, as we two were weighed, would they run from it, pray to it, doom it in their minds to nonexistence by virtue of its relentless incredibility?

The mood stayed with me all day: things at work acquired a significance: a customer’s choice of video, sure, you could read runes in that any day of any week, but I saw, in this new state, deeper, encountered signs I had never before known: the slick sound of a Visa sliding across the counter, the feel of the counter itself, the way the endlessly playing monitors flickered in and out of blackness in the existential spaces between Streetgirls II and Dead Giveaway and Dog Gone Wild, the scent, even, of the money paid or the customer’s fingers or the very air in the heat beneath the fake marquee lights, all of it told me things, showed me things, and gifted somehow by the Funhole—was that the source?

—I saw, if not the meaning of patterns then patterns of meaning, and for me that was enough.

The mood holding, I drove not home but to Club 22, sat drinking a Pabst until scowling Nakota’s shift began. Her frown did not lessen for me but she came to me, not at once but that too had portent: she knew, didn’t she, that I was there for the duration, that I could wait.

Thin in dusty black, the leather of her work shoes cracking along the stress line where sole met upper, hair scooped into a deeply unflattering topknot: my love. Did I say that? Again?

“Hey,” I said.

“What’re you drinking that shit for?” knocking at my bottle with one sharp knuckle, tiddlywink-ing it so it rocked in place. “At least drink something human.”

“Are you coming over tonight?”

Interest in those opaque eyes, I had known her so long and in the end so poorly. “Why? You got an idea?”

I shook my head, mood pointing lower, picking at the dull gold foil, Miller High Life, right. I got some high life for you. “I just, I thought you might like to come over for a while.”

“I don’t think so. I have to check some things out,” and she turned, sloppy tray, heading for three solitary drunks lined at the bar like listing gravestones. Old-fashioned Christmas lights behind her as she served them, blinking on and off in a causeless rhythm more reminiscent of power spurts than festive design. I drank my beer and went home.

Pausing on the second-floor landing, listening to the woozy shrieks of what, anger or pleasure, it was just sound to me, somebody doing something in one of the flats. Close by the Funhole, would living next door to it cause an issuance, a distortion, in your daily rhythms, would you brush your teeth with mare’s milk, would you crawl around and dart your tongue like a rattler? Would you bite?

I wanted very much to go stand by the Funhole door, put my ear to it, listen with all my might, bring paper and pencil, yeah, write what you know. Instead I went up to my flat to eat stale shitlike peanut-butter-and-pita-bread sandwiches and contemplate, with my new and moody gaze, the warped fluttering Bosch triptych hung sorry in an unworthy light: The Garden of Earthly Delights with its incipient birds and copulations, none more beguiling than the standard of strange that was my daily life. Still I found I appreciated them, all of them, more fully than I ever had, demons and rabbits, butterflies and spikes, loved them more and felt bad that my copies weren’t even proper prints, just magazine pages, symbolic somehow I knew but not why.

I fell asleep with a headache beginning to eat away at my seamless wonderings, woke up to a ghost of the same headache and a couple pages of writing that began with the phrase, “The giant said you gotta give to get.” Truer words, etcetera, and with a cooler heart and growing headache I rolled them in a graceful ball and threw them out the open window.

Nakota’s day off, so to speak, had borne new fruit: she was over ten minutes after I got home from work, glittering with her news, not bothering-to sit, this was apparently too important. “Listen: I got a new idea.”

“Son of a bitch, “struggling with the bent edges of a microwave dinner, unable to separate foil from plate. “I’m sorry. I’m listening.”

“What if,” grinning, palms flat on canted hips, and certain of applause, “what if we put a camcorder down the Funhole?”

My fork was bending against the foil. I smiled, at a loss. “Sounds good.”

A chilly look, not entirely dimming her cool wattage but certainly a pall. “Think about it,” in a tone suggesting that though this might be beyond me, it was still my duty to try. “You’re the one who gave me the idea. An eye, you said, and I thought, right: a camcorder. Turned on, recording everything. Everything. It’d be like going down there yourself, almost. Almost as good.”

I shoved the dinner into the microwave, turned it on, sat across from where she stood. “Nakota, it’s a good, it’s a great idea, but we don’t have a camcorder, and we can’t—”

“Two words,” holding up two fingers, slim as candles.

I waited.

“Video,” bending one finger, “Hut.” The other.

For once, I argued. I mean really argued, which at first genuinely surprised her, then angered her to a high cold pitch I had rarely seen. We went through all the steps: I couldn’t do it, they’d find out, I was a worse thief than a liar and I was a lousy liar, she knew that. “They’re paranoid about their camcorders,” I told her. “There’s only two to rent, there’s no way one wouldn’t be missed. This isn’t some big chain store,” trying not to yell, again, “this is Video Hut for God’s sake, they bought those damned things with their own money, they take them home on weekends to take pictures of their kids!”

“Borrow one then,” but I had an answer to that, too, imagine me as the answer man: the upfront rule was No Borrowing.

“Then I’ll do it myself.”

“Nakota, no.”

“I can’t believe,” her voice low and slow and venomously cold, “that you’re not with me on this, that you can worry so much about getting caught, about that shitty two-bit job—”

“I have to eat,” I said. “Every day.”

“I’ll do it,” she said again, “myself..Or,” more coldly still, “I’ll do it without a camcorder.”

She said this like a duelist with the laughable advantage, but oh yeah, I am stupid, it took me a second or two to figure out what she didn’t mean —a camera—and then what she did. And that she did. Explicitly.

I said absolutely nothing, stood there with my mouth still open on my next brilliant point, looking into those eyes that looked into mine with the calm confidence of the winner, because either way, either way she had won. I still said nothing but she saw somewhere in the slump of my features my acquiescence, and as soon as she saw it she did not smile but gave nie a nod that was almost worse.

“Let me know,” she said, “if you need me to help.”

In the end it was almost stupidly easy, fitting I suppose for someone as clumsy at larceny as I am—I was never even a shoplifter, for God’s sake. The. late-night Saturday shift was universally despised; it was no trouble to volunteer, and best of all I could do it on paper, penciling in my guilty initials beside the perennial request.

When Saturday came it was no trouble, either, to volunteer to count out drawers: I was assistant manager after all. I counted each twice, nervous, irritating Nakota, who stood, camcorder in hand, hip-cocked and sport-coated in the fluorescent radiance of the back room. The rest of the store was near dark, small pockets of security light here and there, except where they really needed it, right?

“I’m not taking this,” over my shoulder for the hundredth time. “We’re gonna do this, and get it over with, and bring it right back.”

“Yes, Mommy,” but distracted, without any real heat, she was too excited. When the drawers were counted out and locked in the safe, I turned out the back-room lights, stood blinded in the sudden absence of dazzle, she beside me more blinded still.

“Ready?” impatiently, but she squeezed my arm, not even, I thought, a sop but genuine excitement, wanting to share it with me, coconspirator and part-time stooge. Locking up, her hand still on my arm, in her pocket—I saw this at a red light—three oversize Hershey bars, stolen from the fake concession-stand display. She saw me looking at them and smiled, big mock shrug.

“Want one?” It was good, too.

Back home she ran up the stairs, literally, soundlessly, as I trudged one floor past, leaving her to it. Your show, Nakota.

It seemed a very long while to me, ensconced in the bathroom, taking a much-deserved shit, and suddenly her pounding on the dpor and me yelling how it was open and there she was in the bathroom, holding the empty carton of a videotape.

“Rolling,” she said, and for a moment we said nothing, only looked at each other, imagining the red idiot eye staring down into all that dark, awaiting whatever sea change was inherent in the trip.

“Beer,” she said, a quick positive nod and for once it was an idea I could agree with, wholeheartedly, even while shitting. She stood there, leaning against the damp-bubbled wallpaper that depicted sick lavender seahorses at play in a sleazy gold-leaf sea, her eyes almost closed, lids minutely twitching as if she dreamed.

All at once a distraction, in the form of me standing, postwipe, pants around my ankles and with her eyes open she knelt right there on the bathroom floor and took me in her mouth.

Oh did she feel good. Bony hands cupping my balls as she worked me, hair swinging in hypnotic rhythm and I grabbed that hair, that head, pulled her tight to me, her nose, I felt it, softly bending against my body, my breath rising, groaning hard and quiet when I came. Slow, slow she pulled away, wiped her slick mouth like a fed cat. I leaned against the sink, puffing out a spent breath, and saw her lean elbows-over the toilet and expertly expel a milky stream of semen, gazing up at me as she did and daring me with that gaze to complain.

“I can’t stand that shit,” she said when she was done. An almost smug smile. “Nothing personal.”

Yet she was almost burlesque in her—nice-ness? Nakota? She went out as promised for beer, came back with a whole case, whuffing as she humped it inside. She wouldn’t let me help. Or pay.

“My treat,” she said firmly.

She even drank one, sitting next to me, cozy on the open couchbed, reading aloud from Flan-nery O’Connor and laughing in the least appropriate spots. I patted her skinny thigh, listening to that charmingly artificial reading voice, a schoolmarm voice I told her and she smiled, nodding, not displeased by my comparison.

We got almost all the way through “The Enduring Chill,” my head nodding like a baby’s, sweetly drunk and her voice a serenade and I woke up with a start, terribly thirsty, all alone. But I heard the toilet flush and saw her come out, wearing only panties, groping a little even in that familiar space to find her way back; she had dismal night vision. She climbed beside me, * under the blanket but sitting up, and I felt without thinking that she tolled the hours like a human alarm clock, waiting for her video to ripen.

“How long?” I said, guttural beery voice, and she said, “Pretty quick now,” and next I knew I was alone again, and she up and dressed and nervous, fiddling with my balky VCR, the camcorder safely propped against the couch-bed. “Here,” I said, muzzy in the midst of a hangover, my descending foot disturbing a small phalanx of empty cans, too many beers. “Let me.”

“Hurry up.”

She couldn’t even take the time to sit. Staring at the screen and me trudging back to the couch-bed, wanting water but wanting to wait, just a minute, see what was up; I get curious too.

A clocked minute of static—a long time to sit and watch nothing, I was all for fast-forwarding but Nakota glared me down—then a sip of absolute blackness, recorded blackness, rich and menacing as an X ray of a cancer. Nakota, lips parting to say something but the thought drowned in the flash of an image: something like bloody stalks, caressing the screen like hands behind the glass, so greedily intimate even Nakota gave a tiny backstepping whoop. Then as if a barrier shattered, ferocious fun, whatever provided the images warming to this game: a vast black grin like the Funhole itself become its namesake, black asshole-mouth studded with teeth or bones like broken glass and in that Pandora opening Nakota breathless and me with my mouth hanging wide open, village idiot at freak show, a vertiginous glide forward as upon the screen came things I didn’t want to know about, oh yes I’m quite sophisticated, quite the bent voyeur, I can laugh at stuff that would make you vomit but how would you like to see the ecstatic prance of self-evisceration, a figure carving itself, re-created in a harsh new form from what seemed to be its own hot guts, becoming no figure at all but the absence of one, a cookie-cutter shape and in but not contained by its outline a blackness, a vortex of nothing so final that beside it the Funhole was harmless, do you see what I’m saying, the Funhole was a goddamned carnival ride next to this nonfigure and all at once what I wanted least, least, far less than to be struck blind or any kind of petty death was to see the figure turn (as it did now) in slick almost pornographic slowness and show me, show me what there was to see

and I had to turn away, Nakota finally slack-lipped too beside me, had circumstances at last gotten too strange even for her? “God,” barely a word, in a self-protective spasm I covered my face with my hands and I heard her little shriek, shock-show denouement, and when I looked again the tape was buzzing blank, show’s over, folks, nothing to see here.

The whole thing had taken maybe five minutes.

Nakota: I could see her hand shaking as she pushed at her hair, see her visibly swallow, imagine the dry click of her throat for mine was the same, the same. “Do you think—” she said, and stopped. I thought she might say something else, but instead she ejected the tape, pocketed it with the same reverent care as one would a beloved relic, picked up purse and sport coat. Gone. She never turned to look at me, and for once I barely noticed, didn’t care, because I had some big fucking fish to fry, yeah, and the flat was too crowded with her in it, too crowded with me in it so I got up too, dressed and gone, picking up in almost absent passing the camcorder. I would return it, yeah, but to hell with work for today. Videos, I’ll give you a video. Not for the squeamish. Category, um. Let’s say Foreign Film. Or Comedy, depending, all depending on your personal true-blue bent and if you’re benter than most this’ll be a thigh slapper. Maybe more. I’d slap my own thigh if I could remember how to work my hand.

After Video Hut, my careless key: driving. Around and around, almost no gas so I had to stop somewhere. A greasy booth at White Castle, hamburger squares gone cold before me, my hand tight as a tourniquet around the coffee cup, size of a urine sample, tasted like hell but then I’d seen hell, hadn’t I, or hell’s heaven, not the same difference at all.

A kind of a bag lady stopped by my table to ask if I was done with my hamburgers. She smelled distinctly of gas-station washroom soap. She had on three T-shirts and a jacket that reminded me of Nakota. I shoved the burgers at her. “Help yourself,” I said.

“I can’t,” she told me. Which made a lot of sense to me. She took my hamburgers and sat two booths away to eat them. I wondered what she’d think if I showed her the Funhole. You think you’re on the fringe of society, huh lady? I’ll show you the edge of the fringe, it’s even out on video now.

I sat there until they told me to leave. Must have been close to two hours, I wasn’t wearing a watch. When I got home Nakota was there, playing it again. I wasn’t sure I wanted to see it, so I sat down and took her hand in mine, very firm, didn’t give a shit if she wanted me to or not. She didn’t seem to mind. Or notice.

“Why is it,” as the preliminary static went by, her almost whisper, “that it seems, you know, weirder on a tape?”

“Because it is.”

I don’t know what about it seemed weirder to her; certainly the reanimation of a dead man’s hand is pretty fucking weird, as weird as the spontaneous rearrangement of insect parts or the eclectic combustion of a mouse. To me it was the affirmation that the Funhole was not a thing or a place but an actual process, something that was happening, and that the process could be, was, actually transferrable to tape. On another level it was somewhat like an operation. Or a death. There’s this video at work, you probably heard of it, Faces of Death it’s called, the penultimate moment captured on VHS. Same principle: you know, everybody knows about death, but to actually see it, wow. Dickbrains are daily blown away by this, no pun intended. Maybe for me this was the same: the Funhole, bugs mouse hand holy shit and look, look, here’s how it really happens! Look!

For Nakota, who knows, no telling or even guessing with her, but she seemed truly stunned in a way I had rarely seen before. It was some kind of affirmation for her, too, but of what, again who knows and she wasn’t talking. Maybe, I thought, we were both hypnotized. Mesmerized, in the original sense. Or maybe we were just the particularly stupid brand of geek who doesn’t believe it till it’s on TV.

I sat still through it all. I watched the part I had not wanted, before, to see, and was sorry I had. She didn’t look sorry but she didn’t look good, either. From the pocket of the sport coat she took her cigarettes and two small yellow tablets.

“Want one?”

I shook my head. “What are they?”

“Kind of crank. I’ve been takin’ them all day.” She dry-swallowed them; I’ve never been able to get over how she was able to do that. It almost gags me just to watch.

“I’ll stick with beer/’ I said. There was still a lot left. I gave her a glass of water and she got up and stirred two packets of sugar into it, shaking the packets to ensure she got every last granule.

“Why’d you do that?”

“Why do you keep your sugar in packets?”

“If I buy it by the bag, the bugs get it.”

“So let ’em.” She drank the glass down, not even stopping for breath. Then she grinned, fox-head grin. “I feel like I’m underwater,” she said. “And that I’m burning.”

She put the tape back on. She played it over and over again, until I couldn’t watch anymore and sat quietly getting drunk. When I looked at the clock on the counter, I was surprised to see it was only four o’clock. I wouldn’t even be home from work yet. I’d forgotten to leave a note, but it seemed so worthless I didn’t care. Maybe the Funhole had finally gotten all the way inside my head and was driving me painlessly crazy.

I got so drunk I fell asleep on the kitchen floor. When I woke up the first thing I did was crawl to the refrigerator and get another beer. Nakota was still in her perched posture on the couchbed. The TV light was the only light in the room. Raining outside and that the only sound, it really was like being underwater. The world’s most piquant aquarium. And you are there.

“You’re watching that like porno,” I told her. It came out so garbled I wanted to laugh, but she was, a ritual masturbatory excess, maybe she even was jerking off. The perfect avant-garde stroke tape. Boy was I funny tonight. Too bad no one was laughing but me. Or even listening. Nakota sure wasn’t. I fell back to sleep with a mouthful of beer, woke again to the toll of a monstrous headache, beer soaked and clammy on my shirt and skin, TV buzzing and Nakota fast asleep, back curled like a question mark and hands, childlike and defenseless, loose-fingered against her cheek as a shadow grew on her face like a cancerous smile.

“Did they ever say anything?”

Nakota drinking Sweet ’n’ Low and mineral water, elbows resting on the slippery bar, trusty rag between us as my own elbow nudged my empty beer bottle. Near Monday midnight at Club 22, just Nakota and me and the lonely scattering of hard cores she served in her bitchy desultory way. Just now their particular glasses were full, mine too for she poured again, draft this time, cheap but what did I care, for me it was free.

She lit another cigarette. Black smoke, yeah. “Did they?”

“What, about the camcorder?” I shook my head. I didn’t apologize and she didn’t mock. Will wonders never cease. Not as long as there’s a Funhole, they won’t. “I don’t think they noticed, but if they did they’re not talking.”

“Every time I see it,” dragging on her cigarette, “I see something different.”

I didn’t. I nodded as if yes, I agree, but I was lying, surprising how easy it was to lie. I didn’t tell, then, or later at my flat, when she came drifting to the couchbed, me already on the troubled cusp of dream, the lines of her bare body sculpted by innocuous TV light, she’d left it on to find her way but not on the Funhole tape, just plain shit TV, commercials flashing like headlights. She pulled at the quilt, low enough to insert herself, place her coldness to my warmth but I was cold, too, cold all the way inside. I held her, her fast breath on my chest, felt myself harden but did not move and she didn’t touch me further, a shared delicacy so complete as if by agreement. When we woke, not morning but lightening, the cold air tinting pink, I was so hard it hurt and still I did not move, but her hands found me, in silence and cold, a few hot strokes and I came and as I did she rubbed herself, half on me, tight against my thighs and I heard her come, a tiny croaking cry, and she said without taking a breath, “Watch it with me.”

I didn’t say no. But I didn’t watch.

I was right the first time: to Nakota it was like a stroke tape. For a mindfuck.

Since the tape’s inception she was in my flat as much as even I could want: Zen and poker-backed, focused on the screen, day after day and no more disappearing acts, staying on till morning. Once in a while she would still be there when I left for work, lying prone and passive but nothing peaceful in those eyes, behind lids that shivered as if she dreamed an endless dream. The tape was always playing unless I shut it off. I was getting very good at ignoring the images onscreen, unless my gaze was caught at that critical point where the figure turned. Then I must watch it, whether I would or no, and in the end feel as I always did, hurt in some spot where I could not see to measure the depth and severity of the wound.

After work, the first few days of snow behind us and already I was sick of it, dirty piles at curbside and people driving as if they had never seen the fucking stuff before, the heat in my flat no real heat at all but a kind of half-assed damp warmth that warped my magazine prints and left the floors dry and cold: coming home, newspaper, half-eaten lunch in grease-spotted brown bag, see domestic me. What’s for dinner, honey, Funhole souffle?

Nakota, in front of the TV as always, but no glance at my entrance, no acknowledgment that anyone else was in the room; just a slow, slow turn, rising to her feet like deep-sea ballet, moving the few steps to the television as if it were miles she traveled, and there kneeling before it to press, gingerly and gentle, her cheek against the glass.

I almost expected—what? a sizzle of flesh? a blinding burst of light? her to get sucked right into the TV? Of course nothing happened, nothing visible I should say because that’s the tricky part, isn’t it, that’s where the rub comes in. The worst wounds are internal, I should have known that from my own experience, but I’m the type of guy who doesn’t learn.

She sat like that for a while; I let her; I saw no reason not to. I stopped staring, put my things away, although it didn’t seem right to start cooking dinner or anything; how does one behave at an ecstasy?

Finally, after I had read the paper, nervous twitch of newsprint every time I thought she moved, finally I went and shut off the tape, shut off the TV, helped her stand—she seemed to need it—and back to the couchbed. She sat down, docile enough, and I stood looking down at her, wondering what to do now. Suddenly she opened her eyes very wide, bugged them at me in a way that would have been comical any other time, and said through a big threatening grin, “That’s right, pamper the madwoman, you fucking idiot.”

“Yes, your craziness,” and to my wary smile she laughed, a normal sound or as normal as she ever got, lit up a cigarette and asked me if there was any mineral water or anything to drink.

“I’m not going to work tonight,” she said. “Tom asked me to but I told him no.”

So the evening, bed, no sex, her skinny body cool to the touch and dropping into sleep like iron into sand. I sat up to read awhile but could not wholly concentrate, the words jumbling into other words, sentences into diatribes and paragraphs into convoluted polemics on the pressure of instinct, and then the words changed again into symbols I could not read and I knew I was asleep and dreaming, and I was not disturbed even though the words changed again to writhe on the page as if they were pinned there and me some spiteful collector who would have them no matter what. They spelled out challenges, feeble defiance, and I laughed and slammed the book shut, over and over, enjoying my rhythmic cruelty to such a monstrous degree that I finally woke, scared, sat up to wipe at my eyes. And saw Nakota was gone.

The door was open.

It took me two seconds to grab on jeans, catching my pubes in the zipper and it hurt and I barely felt it, galloping like the cavalry down the stairs saying “Shit, oh shit” like magic words and even from the landing I could see: she hadn’t even bothered to -shut the storage-room door, hadn’t bothered with the ten-watt light. I turned it on, I wanted to be able to see. Whatever it was.

And a sight, oh, was it.

On her knees, oblivious and naked, braced arms on either side and hair dangling straight, about to stick her head down the Funhole.

“God damn,” too horrified to think what else to do, to worry that I might hurt her, I slammed into her like a truck and knocked her sideways so she crashed like the tethered hand had done, smack into a pile of junk and shit flying everywhere and back she came, crawling like a crab, teeth bare, brows arched and tiny tits jiggling and her eyes absolutely blank and I grabbed her and she bit me, I mean bit me like a dog and blood and worrying at the skin of my hand so I had to jerk it away and in that second boom, back to the hole. I yanked at the back of her neck, panic strength and she made a little sound, I’d hurt her that time for sure and a little, a tiny bit of life came back to her face and I squeezed where I’d hurt her, use the pain, use it.

“Nakota,” squeezing again, “stop it, stop it, you hear me?”

And everything came back, eyes and all but not* right, not quite, I saw it and my grip eased but just one wary notch. Blood on her teeth and almost crying, I had never in my life before seen tears in her eyes, “I have to, Nicholas, let me go.”

Muscles, humming in my arms, vibration passed from her body to mine, God she was strong. “I can’t.”

Tears and blood. “I have to, Nicholas. My head’s down there.”

“Oh, Nakota,” and I thought She’s crazy, this has driven her crazy. What do I do now. “Let’s go upstairs, okay? Let’s go upstairs and I’ll—”

“I need my head back!” and a lunge, God she was strong, fierce jerking elbows and kicking feet and snapping teeth as her mouth worked, long slippery thread of spit and trying to get at me and I held her, tight, tight, I wanted to drag her out and away but the way she fought, the force I had to use just to keep her from breaking loose, I was hurting her already even though she gave no sign she felt it. I would have to really hurt her, maybe even knock her out (though I had no confidence I could actually do it, I had never done anything like that before), and meanwhile she was wearing me out just fighting me, fighting me, fighting me, and finally I yelled, “Okay, okay! Just stop, okay? Just stop,” and I gave her an extra-hard shake, her head snapped like whiplash and she got quieter, still panting but quieter.

“I need my head back,” she said.

Oh God. I tried to talk to her, talk her away from the craziness but she kept straining past me, little whine in her throat like a sick animal, mumbling about her head and pushing with all her strength against my body as if I was a wall or door she must surmount to be free. This would go on all night, forever, until she wore me down and I had no doubt she would. Eventually. She was the queen of eventually.

“Stop it/’ was I going to have to really beat her up to stop her, oh God please don’t make me do that. “Stop it, Nakota, just—” Whine and panting, like wrestling a dog, snapping at me, so this is what it’s like when someone loses her mind, uh-huh, pushing and pushing against me and all her muscles alive and she kicked me, I should have expected it, the classic move, and as I jack-knifed, groping for my balls, she bounded past, a literal leap like ballet and the pain, yeah and the anger made me able to grab a part of her, some skinny part, and sling her with all my strength against the wall. She hit like a door slamming but the momentum was too much for me, balance gone and I was too close, too close to the Funhole, so black and calm below me as I pinwheeled in perfect silence, the moment as long and exquisite as a car wreck I’m going to fall right into it and nothing from Nakota, I had knocked her finally silent, no help there hold on I can’t I’m losing it God and with a plunge like a scream I fell full

length, body wrenching like a twisting fish and my right arm, thrust out for desperate balance, at last gone deep inside. She got her head back, all right.