The Cipher

4

She owed me a favor, this woman, I had almost forgotten her name but I still had her phone number. We had lived in the same building once, years ago, never lovers but fairly good friends; she liked to go to movies and drink beer and in those days I liked to do those things too, so we got along pretty well. I had once loaned her money to get her car out of a police pound; whether she had paid me back or not was a moot point. On the phone her voice was friendly but not too, which was exactly what I wanted.

“Can I stay at your place for a little while?” I said. I had the bottom of the phone balanced against my hip, at my feet half a ripped gym bag already packed, I was that sure.

“How long,” Nora, her name was Nora, “did you want to stay?”

“Not long. Week, maybe.”

“Still remember how to get here?”

“Better give me directions.”

My car was making a fairly suspicious coughing sound—I don’t know shit about cars, so every unknown sound it ever made had the power to spook me—but it was a clear night, extremely cold, and I was making pretty good time away from the city; maybe I could get to Nora’s before it died.

She lived out past the ’burbs, not real country, or “rural” as Nakota always called it in her sneering way, but far enough so there was a kind of space around things; that was what I was hunting. Get far enough away from everything and maybe I could get away from myself, too. Maybe. Because otherwise there would have to be another kind of running, yeah; don’t think about it now. Windshield wipers, monotonous back-and-forth, my radio the victim of random static. Driving through an immense quiet. Just don’t think about it now.

I had left a note for Randy stuck in my door, advising him that Nakota, Shrike had a key, and at any rate the other door was always open, the Funhole was nothing if not twenty-four hours. “Good luck with your art,” I had added at the bottom, then felt silly, but I didn’t have time to write another note, so I left it there. I didn’t add anything for Nakota.

The drive took a little over two hours, the last ten minutes puzzling out my way; Nora’s directions were spotty and memory was worse, but I saw a place I did remember, kind of a makeshift rifle-and-archery range, the pale circles of the targets visible in my headlights as I slowly made the turn; this is the place, yeah. Great huge heaps of snow, skinny long driveway one car wide. Her house was-still that same babyshit-yel-low color. The porchlight was on; it was yellow too.

Nora opened the door for me before I knocked. She was a little, what, not fatter but rounder, her belly a soft small pouch, her long hair short now, little yellow fringe around her rounder face. We didn’t hug hello, but her handshake was two-handed, warm fingers in my cold touch.

“Nicholas. How’re you doing?” stepping back as I shed my coat, politely stamped my snowless feet. “You want anything? Coffee?”

The coffee was much too strong. The light in the kitchen was too bright. Apparently I would be dealing in absolutes here; the idea made me smile. “That’s better,” Nora said. “You look almost alive now.”

That surprised me into a laugh, and she laughed, too, but not a real one; she would be wanting, of course, to know what the hell I was doing here, and once she found that out to her satisfaction, then maybe she could laugh. I had no intention of telling her the whole truth or even a major part of it, but I had to tell her something.

“I had a big fight with Nakota,” I said.

The magic words. Her mouth pulled into a line that was absolutely flat, as flat as her voice saying, “Ah.” She had known Nakota as long as I had and hated her, why I wasn’t sure, with Nakota there were endless reasons. Nakota, so far as I knew, had no real idea that Nora existed. “Well.”

“Yeah, well.”

“You’re still seeing her, then, aren’t you.”

“Not tonight.”

Now: a real laugh. She had a weird almost silent way of laughing, it defined her again at once for me, brought all of her back. She pushed her spiny chair back from the table, almost soundless against the old red linoleum, put more coffee in our cups. “God, what a bitch she is,” comfortably. “Her real name’s Jane, you knew that, didn’t you.”

My hand awkward on the cup, saying almost nothing as she talked, caught me up with what she was doing: quit her job at the hospital, working the graveyard shift at a nursing home, Sunny Days, “Can you imagine? what a name,” lots of work to do around the house when she had the time—she was putting in a vegetable garden next spring, big one—and skiing too, cross-country, there was always time for that.

“So you don’t see many movies anymore, huh?”

“No, I sure don’t.” I’d seen her looking, and now she asked: “What happened to your hand?”

“Accident,” I said, letting my gaze move sadly away from hers, which wasn’t hard; she took it the way I’d wanted her to, wrong, and said no more about it. I have always depended upon the tact of others, uh-huh.

Turned out she would be leaving in the morning, early, to do some skiing with friends. I imagined her friends: blond, bluff looking, jeans and down vests in sensible colors, yelling to each other over swipes and passes of clean snow. It was like a cockroach dreaming of the smell of disinfectant. She kept talking but all at once I found I was waking from a doze, she was taking the coffee cup from my hand.

“Nicholas, hey, you fell asleep.” Before I could say anything, “Don’t worry about it, long day, long drive. My fault for keeping you up talking. I’m sorry I don’t have a bed for you, but the couchbed isn’t too bad. Probably,” pulling down the blanket, bilious print and warm looking, “you won’t be up when I leave, so help yourself to whatever you want, food, whatever; there’s some stuff in the freezer too. There’s a spare back-door key hanging right by the door, so you can get in and out.” There may have been more but I heard none of it, slept instead in a circle of dreams, none of it restful, none of them kind.

The quiet of the morning woke me; at home there was always some kind of traffic, day and night background. No snow falling, but a kind of overcast that might linger all day, same dour gray into the night. Into the kitchen, the warmest room in the house. It must cost a shitload to heat a house this big, no wonder she kept it cold. My hand throbbed as I made coffee, pouring water and my motions slow, sliced an orange. The acid of the juice found a sore on my tongue.

As I ate, slowly, like a convalescent, like one of Nora’s patients at Sunny Days, I thought of all the things I had avoided during my poet days at school and beyond, days of waking late and drinking early, wandering through life with my one constant a constant shrug: regular jobs and regular people and regular hours, all the commonplace pains and terrors that, by fleeing, I had somehow replaced with these others, this whole grotesquerie that was—yeah, c’mon, say it out loud, there’s no one here to hear you—driving me out of my mind. Driving me crazy. Because I had no way to cope with it, no way to understand why what had begun as ignorant dabbling had evolved into all this.

What had I done wrong?

What had I wanted that made this happen?

Nakota’s taunts and Randy’s silent doggish respect, the bugs in the jar with runic wings, the video and its glimpsed emissary figure, the hole in my hand, the void in my head that led me into this, now there was a real Funhole, where the darkness came in. Was the darkness always there? Was all it needed to infiltrate a lack of determination to keep it out? and had I really done all this to myself, by myself, by being the little I was?

I was. so tired of hating myself. But I was so good at it, it was such a comfortable way to be, goddamn fucking flotsam on the high seas, the low tide, a little wad of nothing shrugging and saying Hey, sorry, I didn’t mean it, I didn’t know it was loaded, I didn’t think things would turn out this way. It’s so easy to be nothing. It requires very little thought or afterthought, you can always find people to drink with you, hang out with you, everybody needs a little nothing in their life, right? Call the specialist when you do. You don’t even have to call, chances are I’ll already be there, you’ve just overlooked me because I’m in a corner, crouched like a dustball, a cobweb, my busy little spaced-out grin and oops it seems I’ve stumbled on some sort of exalted hellhole, Funhole, do excuse me while I let it out, while I let it into my body, while I let it run my life because somebody has to, right? somebody has to take the goddamned brunt even if it’s a void.

Even if it’s chosen me.

Because how bad can it be, right, if it wants me, how dangerous? If it will settle for a tool this poor HOW BAD CAN IT BE.

“God,” thick mucus voice and tears running out of my eyes, “oh God,” and I wept into a paper towel, crying hard in the kitchen’s warmth, my body half-folded against the table, retching sobs like vomit. I cried a long time, past pain until I felt so empty nothing hurt, nothing anywhere, if I had died I could not have felt more husked. A walking depletion. “Aren’t you the poet,” I said out loud, my voice a hush in the larger silence, and I wiped at my eyes, then almost smiled, weary, when it hurt: orange juice in my eyes, burning like gasoline. You dickhead.

After eating I went slowly back to the couchbed, more comfortable than mine at home and larger, the blankets certainly cleaner. Nesting there with my right hand on my chest, its returning pain a pulse so metronomic that for whole moments I did not even feel it, instead only the sensation of great emptiness, as pleasant in its way as the bare cessation of pain after 5 protracted illness. Asleep again, till the place where I lay woke me with its warmth, the strong slant of the afternoon sun pointing straight at me, on me. I lay there, completely empty, in the sunlight. When the sun went down I got up to piss, drink water, back to the nest. I felt I could spend my life there, or die there, it made no difference really. Typical, I thought to myself, of myself, but even the hatred was gone, washed out maybe by the force of its own corrosion, replaced by the great nothing, a void far deeper than any Funhole could ever be.

I lay there for three days.

I got up once in a while to piss, the intervals lengthening as the hours passed, dark or light in the hallway and me trudging back to my nest, my chrysalis, that sense of emptiness filling, little by little, with a certainty, a necessary idea of what fulfillment, for me, might be. What to do. What do you need. I asked myself, and the answer came, filtering through my weakness, perhaps even enhanced by it. What do you want?

Dreams. Out of focus, surreal in their ferocity, blunt contrast to my daytimes of staring up at the ceiling, at my leaky hand, at the pale water stains and minute drifts of dust in the corners of the room. One dream in particular, its edges blurry-bright, one long stretched face like a frame around my terror, a frame from the video as if I lay behind its very eyes, the eyes of that animate nothingness, woke me weeping, left me so wet with sweat I thought for one half-conscious moment that I had either pissed the bed or died bleeding; night sweats, that was called.

Evidence of extreme weakness. As if I needed any.

The next morning I woke to see my right hand twitching slowly and violently, like a large and dying insect, floundering hard against the flat pillow without producing any sort of feeling in my flesh. It was like watching yourself in someone else’s dream, so incredibly bizarre that it was almost entertaining; I was very much past giving any kind of a shit so I watched it, wondering if some weird necrosis was taking place, my hand cut off, so to speak, from its fathering Funhole and dying as a result. “My hand and my dead hand,” I said out loud, and while it flopped and twisted I sat watching, smile turned to grin, found I even had a hard-on and grinned at that too.

My hand stopped, and I laughed, a little dying cough, the way you finish laughing, in stages, at one hell of a joke. I used that hand to dial the phone, ignoring the immediate and surprising pain this caused, forcing my finger into the retro rotary dial to call work and tell them I wouldn’t be coming in anymore. This was no secret; in fact they wanted very much to tell me first. My last check was in the mail, the manager said, sounding pleased.

“And you won’t come in my mouth, right?”

She didn’t get it. I hung up and went into the kitchen, sat in my underwear eating Cheerios out of the box; they were very stale, almost like Styrofoam or rice cakes, apparently Nora didn’t like Cheerios very much. Still in my underwear, my mouth full of half-chewed Cheerios, I began to search the house for the .22 I knew Nora had, she used it for target shooting, well I had a target in mind.

It wasn’t hard to find, either, just where you’d expect: under her bed, plastic box of bullets beside. A neat bedroom, tidy little piles of paperbacks and sweaters, above her bed a shitty-looking plaque, obviously handmade, its burned-in sentiment peculiarly appropriate to my mood and mission: “When Life Gives You Lemons, Make Lemonade.” Well, life had given me shit, and I was making a compost heap. Or more succinctly, life had given me a Funhole, and I was making a grave.

It took me a few minutes to figure out how to load it, I’d never loaded a gun in my life. Few more minutes to position myself at the end of her bed. Eyes open, or closed? Death’s etiquette. Let’s try not to screw this one up, shall we? And I felt not even happy or good but at least not bad and that was surely more than enough and certainly much better than I deserved.

Open your mouth, I said to myself.

The tip of the barrel lay on my tongue, holy metal. The light in the room was exceptionally bright, even on my closed lids. Maybe, I thought, this is what people say car wrecks are like, even to swallow seemed to take forever. My mouth was full of saliva, my heart all at once beating fast and light.

I remember thinking, Why, I’ve made a choice. I don’t want to be part of this anymore, and I’m, I’m opting out. Imagine. An actual decision, and I was very much enjoying my novel sense of resolve and picturing, in a self-indulgent way, the manner in which the bullet would come flying up the barrel, when something new came to me: shame.

Not disgust. I was intimate with that. Not self-hate either because I was, if not done with it, then so possessed by it that I could no longer feel it, as a perfect swimmer no longer consciously feels the sea as an element apart. But: instead a profound and simple shame, a sensation as immediate and irresistible as pain or heat. In my big, my unique moment of decision I was behaving as heedlessly, as stupidly, as typically as ever, because by this action I would bring trouble on Nora, big trouble, on a person who had actually tried to help me, who had given me what I asked for.

Typical.

I lowered the gun.

That’s just like you, you cheap piece of shit.

But not the shame.

And not the action prompted by the shame, either.

I put the gun away. I went downstairs and cleaned the kitchen, the cereal and yesterday’s dried orange rinds and slightly smelly cof-feemaker, thinking all the while. Another novelty. Not running from the bad feeling, not avoiding this new shame. Feeling it, as deeply as I felt the fresh pain in my hand, the victorious ache. In the glare of the shame I saw that if I must be myself, if there was no changing the aimless scramble that was me, if I must be in the end a victim, then: yes.

But not this way. Not at another’s expense, or at least not an innocent other. Because that was mutable.

But then why not jump off a bridge? An empty bridge, no one around for miles? Why not find a broken bottle and an alley, cut my wrists with one and bleed to death in the other? It’s not that simple, is it, all this selfless shit is just too much to swallow, come on now there’s no one here but me and my new insight, leaning against the kitchen counter, almost sick, now, with the ugly clarity, this breakthrough pocket of pus and deceit, no more of this shit that it’s Nora, don’t pull your shit on me.

What do I want. I thought. Transformation? Do I want, at all?

And knew that what I most wanted was not to know. Wanted instead to be ridden, not mindless but adrift, still, in the eddies of my helplessness, there is such peace in helplessness, it’s better than death any day, you’re still able to enjoy the ride. It had nothing to do with anyone else, not even Nakota, maybe, though as nothing as I was, I knew I loved her, that much was no sham. But. She said it didn’t work without me, and without wanting to I believed her, finally, without beginning to understand why this should be so. But. If I really loved her, if it really was quiescent without me, why not then stay away for good, let it shrivel or bloom as it would without my presence?

But you know the answer to that, I thought, don’t you.

Because in the end we are what we are, we want what we want, whether we know it or not. Whether we care to resist or not, or whether in the end it’s worth resistance after all.

And the bubble and shine of the air in the kitchen, as if a faint was in the offing, well why not then, why not? and a rich ache slicing up the path of my arm, to my throat, to my stupid head, a claiming pain that said, Why don’t fret, you’ve made the right choice, you’ve done the right deed. Ah, God, I thought, pushing by main force away from the counter, pain, sick stomach and all, Funhole imprimatur, sanctified by the weirdest thing in the world. St. Nicholas, but don’t expect any presents from me.

After the kitchen, the living room, spartan movements as my nest disappeared into a green plaid couch and a folded blanket. Shaving, my hands all one tremble, doing it slow. Showering, using Nora’s gooey shampoo. Dressing. I put all my things away in my gym bag. I wrote Nora a note, thanking her, saying I was sorry I had to leave before she returned, saying I would call her sometime soon and we would talk. This last I knew was-not true, but it was kindly so I said it anyway. I didn’t want her to think I had used her simply for a hidey-hole, even though I had, wringing the last dry drop of juice from an old, old favor, one she had repaid as a matter of course. Of course.

It was extremely cold outside, much colder than it looked, not brittle to the eye but lush, the slopes and gullies of slickly crusted snow. It took me a long time to scrape my windows, slow even back-and-forth motions, the frost and ice curling away from my cracked yellow scraper in neat little half circles. I stopped to get gas, using almost the last of my money to do so. A handful of change to make a phone call, standing shoulders hunched against the cold, my breath frosting the mouthpiece. Five rings. I counted each.

“Mhhh. Hello.”

“Hey.”

“Who’s this? Is, Nicholas, is that you?”

More wide-awake by the minute, Nakota’s voice sharpening, I could so easily hear her frown. “Where are you?” she said, and I said, “Be at my place in about three hours.”

And hung up.

And got there in two.

My usual space in the parking lot, feeling not light-headed but something kin to it, walking up the stairs and seeing the tiny clouds of breath, my place would probably be a freezer. And it was. A dirty freezer. I threw a lot of stuff away, sweeping my arm across surfaces in a motion that any other time would have felt embarrassingly theatrical, but now, oh, after a two-hour drive in cold and total silence, thinking all the while, all my thoughts were gone, used up, burned up by the cold and I knew what I was doing, yes, or at least acted as if I did. For once.

I felt the Funhole as soon as I walked in the building, as I moved around my flat, felt it moving in me as a reptile, a snake, maybe, feels the motion of its coils, and was no longer disturbed by it, no. No. I had made one sharp decision, gone consciously back on it, and now the other resolution, made in the shadow of the first’s decline, the mindless false Zen of to-know-and-not-to-know, was so strong in me it required no thinking, required very little in fact. Perhaps this was in keeping with my basic nature, somewhere in the neighborhood of a plant, say, or an animate napkin, yeah. I couldn’t even insult myself anymore. I didn’t care. It didn’t matter. I felt like I was breathing methane, as if the cold was a living fire in my eyes. All the way home I had watched my hand, my naked bandageless hand, quick glances to see it independently twitch and shudder on the cold seat beside me, my dark stigmata very visible in the clear, clear light; any other time it might have scared me, scared me bad. But .not today.

It was barely three hours when I heard her, cautious down the hall. Whom were you expecting, dear, Jekyll or Hyde but the joke’s on you this time. The joke’s on you because it’s neither, it’s someone different, it’s someone you don’t even know. I opened the door as Nora had, before she even knocked.

“Nicholas.” All in baggy black, extreme thrift-shop raggishness even for her. Wearing her windbreaker in this intense cold. She smiled, it was a real smile. Naturally. I had gone off with the keys to the toy box, and now I was back.

“I have to do something,” I said. “I need you to help me.”

“What kind of help?” Eagerly. Eagerly, picture that. Was I angry at her? No. Yes. You want me to be a fool, the Funhole’s conduit, clown prince? I can’t be anything, now, other than this one thing, and if you’ll hold on just a minute, I’ll show you what it is,

“I want you to move in here,” I said. She opened her mouth to speak but I cut her off. “I don’t care where you sleep,” which right now was true, maybe I never would care, I didn’t know; all I knew was now. “I don’t care about anything except having this flat paid for, which I can’t do because I lost my job.”

“You—”

“I want you to move in as soon as you can. If you can’t afford it, get Randy in here too.”

“He lives with Vanese.”

Vanese. Oh yeah, the girlfriend. “Fine. Get her too. Cheaper by the dozen.”

“Nicholas, are you sick or something? Did—•”

“Be in here by the end of the week at the latest. What is it, Tuesday? That gives you three days. You don’t have much stuff, you can do it.”

“Nicholas.” Insistent tone, her hand on my arm more tentative. “Is something wrong?”

“I tried to kill myself,” I said, and flicked off her touch; still, a tremor. “It worked.”

The Funhole. Roiling, and in the swallowed glimpse behind my eyes, a foreign smile in my personal darkness, a figure. Welcome home.

It took her less than two days to get her stuff in, and I was right, there wasn’t much. Cartons of books mostly, some crummy clothes, a plastic sack of toiletries. A twin bed with a mattress so fragmenting and decayed I took one look and refused to let her bring it in.

“What am I supposed to sleep on, then?”

“The springs. The floor. Out in the hall if you want.” I stood arms crossed, looking at her as she stared warily back at me. She was not the type to blossom under hard treatment, under any other circumstances she would have told me without preamble to go fuck myself, but there was something manifestly afoot and she definitely wanted all the way in. I knew she thought that my stark change in behavior meant I had finally gone straight over the edge; whether she believed me about the suicide attempt I didn’t know. I knew what I knew and I was done puzzling, I was done with a lot of things now.

An immobile day, that long cold Friday. No food, I didn’t feel like eating, as if my sense of purpose could only be nurtured and sustained by physical emptiness. I sat in my chair by the window, left hand cradling right, watching what went on down below, people driving and walking in the worsening weather, the spattering of snow now the first breath of a real storm, it was going to be bad, they kept talking about it on the radio. Six to eight inches, they said. Maybe more.

Nakota kept the radio on, kept prowling the flat, waiting for what? Directions? A sermon? A quickie fuck? I hadn’t touched her since I’d been back, hadn’t felt like it, though there was a part of me that would have been extremely pleased just to hold that skinny body, hummingbird heartbeat against my chest, faint whiff of cigarette breath in the air before my face. But I made no move toward her. Another appetite blunted. I didn’t talk much either. Every once in a while I’d look up and catch her looking at me, head faintly tilted, understanding nothing. There was no way she could know what I was thinking.

“Don’t look at me,” I said once.

She ignored me, but there was something, then, in her glance that I didn’t like. If she was going to start respecting me, she had picked one hell of a time. The idea was almost funny but I wasn’t in a real laughing mood.

About six-thirty, the flat dark, only the green radio light: “Is Randy coming?” I asked her. Outside white sky, a downpour of snow. When she answered, her voice startled me; she was much closer to me than I’d imagined, sitting close enough to touch.

“Him and Vanese,” she said.

“The more the merrier.” I had a weird urge to smoke. “You got a cigarette?” and she lit one for me, passed it to me, her fingers careful not to touch mine. I hadn’t smoked in so long I hit the cigarette like a joint: horrible sensation, that hot dry feeling in my chest. The nicotine made me dizzy. I blew smoke in the air and couldn’t see it because of the dark, tried to feel it with my fingers. I blew smoke on the hole in my hand and felt nothing.

“Nicholas?”

“What?”

“What’s going to happen? I mean, what’re you going to do?”

’Throw you headfirst down the fucking Funhole.. Shut up, Nakota.”

Although I didn’t feel particularly angry when I said it.

It was nearly seven-thirty when they knocked: I heard Randy’s voice, a lighter voice murmuring behind. Nakota leaped up as if the room was on fire. She’d been waiting, patience steadily withering, for them to come—she never could stand waiting for anything—convinced their arrival heralded the Main Event. Which was quite correct. She literally banged the door open.

“Took your sweet time about it, asshole,” she said, very bitchily, she’d been saving it up for days. Had to unload it on somebody since I was temporarily off limits.

“Hey, it’s a fucking blizzard out there, okay?” Randy in the doorway, tentative: “Can you put a light on or something, man? It’s darker than shit in here.” And behind him, the source of that lighter voice, standing silent; and her silhouette as thin and insubstantial as paper, a cutout doll.

“Do what you want,” I said.

They came in, hooded eyes blinking in the changing light, Nakota refusing to move for the woman, they pushed shoulders, the kind of juvenile territory shit I thought only men fell for. Apparently not.

“You the guru?” the woman said to me, Vanese, coming closer, wary highstep, the moves of a person who can cut out in a hurry. Hands in cheap leather slash pockets. Big carved cheekbones, big red plastic earrings. Biggest of all were her eyes, deeper brown than her skin, that same wariness clear in their darkness. “If this’s as weird as Randy says, I don’t know.”

“It is,” I said. “And I don’t know either. You staying?”

“Yeah,” from Randy. Her shrug. “I guess.”

“I got your note,” Randy said. “Shrike said something, you quit your job?”

“Yeah.” I looked at him, at Vanese, fingers moving in her pockets, picking at something, a cuticle, a sore. Longest at Nakota, scarecrow, my heart’s desire still; Leeched by the force of the days past and to come, pilloried, walled up but still: desire. Who can fathom that, deeper than change, deeper than the Funhole maybe. “Come on,” I said, looking only at her. “You wanna see something, you’re gonna see it.”

Down the hall, our little band of pilgrims, refugees before the fact. Vanese tried to ask me something but Nakota shushed her so violently that she subsided, though not without a glare. I could feel something, not pain, in my hand, a sensation like pins and needles but less distinct, a buzzing in the flesh. It was that hand I put to the door, and when my careful palm touched the knob I felt not a jolt, as I’d somehow halfass expected—too many horror movies. But the buzzing—now a flicker, like fire in my skin, as if you could feel a burn without the pain, as if your flesh could melt on the bones. Like wax. Like steel.

The room was cold. Why not: everything else was, the hall was ridiculous, but it was still somehow a surprise, I hadn’t been in there since that night with Randy. Days. Randy’s sculpture, to which he scurried as soon as I got out of his way, was unchanged, or at least I saw no difference. Vanese took a place by the door; still careful, but her gaze went back and forth, the Funhole and me and Randy and Nakota and back to the Funhole again. Nakota ignored everything, knelt beside me where I stood, at the lip of the void. Her hands lay palms-up on her thighs. Maybe she wanted a hole, too, just like mine.

I felt so good.

It was not a sensation I associated with the spot where I stood. Empty, all of me, even of breath for I let it dribble out as I got to my knees beside Nakota, worshipful posture but I didn’t feel worshipful, no, that wasn’t the point at all. Never had been. Emptiness. Yes. Because that’s what the Funhole was, wasn’t it, that was the key and clue: a negativity, an absence, a lack. A depression, that’s what a hole was, no matter how dark and lively, no matter how ultimately full. Even an empty road leads somewhere, right?

But this time, feel it.

“Watch me,” I said, aloud but only, really, to Nakota, and in a motion that had, to me, that same kind of half-speed car-wreck intensity, I thrust my arm in full length.

Feel it.

I did.

Not what you would think, no, not suction or even a true sensation, but if you could touch an insubstantiality, a fever dream, rub hallucinations on your skin, if you could cradle your own mind when you dream, trace the hills and gutters of the brain’s landscape—there really is no explaining it, I’m sorry but it’s so. Even they, who were there, even Nakota who was in all senses closest to me, well. They didn’t really get it either. / didn’t get it all, but what I got, going into it* with empty eyes open and empty hands at the ready, was horrifyingly intense, not so much empowering but the sensation of such, I heard my own voice howling as if I was in pain but I wasn’t, you see, I really didn’t feel anything bad at all even when I looked down between my open orbiting knees and saw the steel of Randy’s sculpture running over the skin of my knuckles, dripping down to fall not into the Funhole as one would think (and one would think) but flying off in a strange arc as if repelled, dropping somewhere to the right but my vision didn’t go, didn’t really go that far. Nakota was trying to touch me, I could see that much, but she wasn’t making contact or if she was I wasn’t feeling it. I had my other hand, my right hand, out of the hole now, some other part of me was inside, or maybe not because I was falling, losing altitude we call that, God damn sometimes this was funny. Sometimes / was funny. But apparently not now because I heard voices, they sounded scared or screaming or something and I was trying to stick my right hand, my palm, my hole into my mouth, trying to suck the blackness there, it had a greasy bad smell like the Funhole itself but would it taste sweet, so sweet, would it lie on my tongue like honey, drip from my lips like blood?

“I wish you would all be quiet,” I said. No one heard me. Maybe I didn’t really say it at all.

I was on my back on the floor. I could taste the iron of blood, I was having a great deal of trouble seeing. “Uh-oh,” I said. “Randy, did you beat me up?”

To my great surprise I found they could hear me, and I saw Randy’s face, astonishingly red for that white skin, I didn’t know albinos could get that red. “I’m sorry,” he said, “Nicholas, man, I’m sorry but—”

“He thought you were going down,” Nakota said, not looking at Randy; without another word I saw, I knew she thought it perhaps the premier idea of all time, certainly my greatest hit, and was inevitably angry beyond telling that Randy had arrested my descent and yet maybe a little glad too. Why dear, I didn’t know you cared. Although of course she didn’t; all she cared about was being the first one down.

“Was I?” My mouth felt very loose, a bad feeling. I tried to spit and gagged on blood. “Let me up,” I said. The back of my head hurt, too.

“Nicholas, I—”

“Shut up,” Nakota said, with such viciousness that startled even me, but she made no motion to help as Randy and Vanese lifted me to my feet, walked me down the hail and up the stairs to the flat. Randy began a halting monologue that lasted until I was sitting on the couchbed, a wet dirty washcloth pressed like a membrane against my mouth, which refused to stop bleeding, saying essentially the same thing: that he had not meant to hurt me, that things got so weird so fast, that trying to eat my own hand was one thing but when it looked like I was going headfirst into the Funhole, well.

“I’m sorry, man.” He looked sorry too.

“Don’t,” shaking my head, wanting him simply to stop saying it. He was a good one for repeating himself, Randy. I leaned back on the couchbed, closing my eyes for a moment as Vanese, nail clippers in hand, worked to cut the tape for my ragged new bandage; I was all out of surgical tape and had to settle for electrical tape, which was so very old, I told her, that all the glue was probably dried and therefore worthless. I definitely did not want to have to look at my hand. The idea—not the memory, for at that moment I couldn’t accurately remember anything—that I had tried to suck on my wound was making me so retroactively sick that I felt I might have to vomit if I thought about it too hard.

“Why’d you do that for?” Vanese asked me, in the unconscious scolding tone of an older sister, rip rip rip at the tape. “No telling what’s down there.”

Nakota, arms tightly crossed as if that was the only way to keep from slapping the shit out of someone: “That’s pretty much the point, isn’t it?”

Rip rip. “I don’t see you volunteering to go down there.”

“I tried.”

“Uh-huh.”

“She did,” I said. I felt consummately shitty. I felt like 1 might cry. I wished I could get better very fast so I could run downstairs and do it again. There is no rational way to explain that, because it was no rational wish, but it was intense as a bodily need, demanding as hunger or desire. “A hard-on of the soul,” I mumbled, and laughed into my washcloth, sticky and damp with blood.

Randy was miserable, there in his neutral corner; he probably felt worse than I did, which would have taken some doing, but his was a malady of action, mine obviously a cruder sort of melancholy, the weltschmerz of a man who has just had his clock cleaned. “Hey Randy,” I said, through my baggy lips. “Get us some beer.”

For no reason, or rather, her reason, Nakota laughed. And it wasn’t for me asking for beer, either.

Randy found four beers in the refrigerator, opened them all. Nakota looked at hers as if he had just offered her bottled spit. Warm spit. “No thanks,” she said.-Vanese took hers with an absent nod. She must have been an older sister, or a mother or nurse, her whole attention was so absorbed by the task at hand. So to speak. Either that or she was just very conscientious. Or anal-retentive.

“Does that hurt?” she asked me.

“Very much,” I told her, although it was by no means the most painful part of me. She shook her head, to herself, set down the nail clippers and picked up her beer. A long swallow. She had a pretty throat, Vanese.

It hurt to drink, but the beer tasted good. I wiped my mouth and face one last time and put aside the washcloth. “Still snowing?” I asked Randy.

He looked out the window. “Yeah, pretty bad. Blowing around some.” Vanese joined him at the window, said something, quietly, to which he shrugged*

“If you don’t think you’re going to make it home,” I said, “you can stay here.”

Randy looked at Vanese, questioningly, and with her own shrug she nodded. “All right,” he said. “Thanks, man.” More diffidently, “You feeling any better now?”

“I feel fine. I feel like more beer.” Nakota looked at me, nodded contemptuously toward her untouched beer. Randy immediately got his coat on.

“You going home?” I asked, surprised, and he said, “The least I can do is get you some beer, man.”

“It’s too bad to drive,” Vanese said, but Randy shook his head, irritated at her objection; she returned to her seat beside me on the couchbed. For some reason, again her own and having nothing to do with jealousy, this pissed Nakota off.

“Why don’t you go with him?” she said pointedly to Vanese.

“Why don’t you go to hell?”

“Ladies, ladies, please,” I said, possessed all at once of a weird good humor, “come on now. If you must fight, at least use your fists.”

Randy laughed, big loud resonant horse laugh and I smiled, as much at the sound as my joke, my mood, twisted lips and Vanese smiled back at me, an astonishingly sweet smile that took all the wariness from her big eyes. Even Nakota smiled. And then we were all laughing, the whooping laugh of relief, the way you laugh when they show you the X rays and it’s nonma-lignant, for now anyway, and the doctor has a small but distinct booger hanging out of his nostril and you and everybody else in the room can see it and as soon as he leaves you laugh your ass off; like that.

Randy took a while coming back with the beer. Nakota turned the music back on. Vanese, still beside me, tapped her knee in time, her nails were chewed past the quick. I drank all of my beer and Nakota’s too. Nobody said much but there was still, like smoke in the air, a feeling of fragile camaraderie; foxhole love. Funhole love.

Not only beer, but a couple bags of chips, some candy bars. Randy stood shaking off like a dog in the doorway as Vanese took the wet-spotted bags from him. I wiped at my mouth; it was still bleeding.

“It’s fuckin’ nuts out there,” Randy said. “I didn’t even take the truck, you can’t get down the streets.” His pale hair was mottled dark with melted snow. He ripped open one of the chip bags. Vanese took a bottle out of the smaller paper bag, offered it silently to Nakota: mineral water.

We all got drunk, except Nakota. Vanese turned out to have a talent for caricature mimicry; as she enacted the scene in the storage room, our parts—Randy horrified bully, Nakota (“Shrike”) exaggerated bitch, me entirely out of it, and she, Vanese, scared shitless—became horror-movie funny; we laughed again, less hysterically, with more real humor, told what we each remembered and laughed about that too. Survivor’s humor, maybe. I thought it was funny.

It was very late, there was still beer but Vanese had fallen asleep, mouth open in a little O, Randy was close to it. Nakota, in an atypical gesture, offered them her spring bed. Randy shook Vanese awake enough to transport her there, they both crawled atop it, shoes and all. Vanese’s mouth never closed once.

Nakota stripped in the middle of the room, she had to be freezing but she never showed it, walked over to my bed and got in. If I had waited for an invitation to join her I would be waiting there still, but that was her: take what’s not yours and don’t share. Especially with the owner. Weaving a little, a lot-, I flopped down— my anesthetized body twingeing—and pulled the covers up.

“Sleeping with your clothes on,” she said. “Typical derelict.”

“Of course I’m a derelict. Derelict laureate of the Funhole and don’t forget it,” as her hands found me, purposeful stroke of my small flabby cock, “and don’t fuck me either, it hurts too much.”

“If it doesn’t hurt,” she said, death’s-head above me in the dark, “you’re not doing it right.”