The Cipher

6

No time to waste, Malcolm. Leather lab coat, stink of smoke, grinning at me from the salt-scarred pavement. Head wolf, come confident alone without the pack. Daylight was no good for Malcolm, total dark was his milieu. His sunglasses were crooked. “Where’re you goin’?” he said.

“Right now I’m going grocery shopping,” not stopping but slowing, a little, giving him the moment to join me if he was going to. “You can come with me if you want.”

“Grocery shopping,” with a lilt meant to show-amusement, or maybe merely shitty. He fell into step with me, or rather linked his ironic amble to my perpetual slouch. I bet he even shaved ironically. “I usually let my girlfriend handle all that.”

“You said you were always ready for new experiences, right?” Sliding into my car, letting him wait a minute before I unlocked the passenger door. “Have one on me.” Nyah nyah, I can do irony too.

Silence between us made me nervous, as nervous as the frigid planes of the day around me. Above the choking sound of my heater, I said, “Are you off work today, or what?”

“I’m an artist,” now definitely shitty, but willing not to chew me a new asshole for the sake of belittling my ignorance. Under other, less complex circumstances, I could have had a lot of laughs out of this guy. Tm always working.”

“Uh-huh.” Into the IGA parking lot, an acre of slush and abandoned carts, cars parked at strange angles. Inside was even brighter than outside. The cart I chose had a twisted front wheel; I kept helplessly hitting aisle displays, other carts, even Malcolm once or twice. “Beer,” I said, cart inventory, “mineral water. Crackers. Eggs.”

“Real domestic type, aren’t you?”

“Peanut butter.”

“How can you eat that stuff?” pointing at my no-brand peanut butter with genuine disdain. “Peter Pan’s the only good kind.”

I had to borrow two bucks from him at the checkout. Malcolm smoked all the way home, pretentious Gitanes, clenching one between his teeth when he talked. His sunglasses were still crooked. He criticized every song on the radio until in self-defense I put on the all-news station; then he mocked the news. As I parked, I thought about Randy’s plan to feed Malcolm to the Funhole. “Randy’s right,” I said, one bag in my right arm—newly bandaged hand throbbing in dull rhythm, shit I had forgotten to buy gauze—two in my left. Malcolm didn’t offer to help.

“Right about what?” he wanted to know, following me up the stairs.

“About you.”

“And what does Randy say about me?”

“That you’re unique.”

He laughed. “I bet he does. Hey, Nick, let me tell you something about Randy. Randy’s a grease monkey, he works for a goddamn gas station—”

“Towing service.”

“Whatever. Him and his twatty little steel pieces, I mean come on, they all look like car bumpers, stop bringing your work home with you.” He laughed and I didn’t. “He’s a failed sculptor, he’s a failure at life. He just hasn’t realized it yet.”

“How’s things at the clothes store?” I asked, pausing for my door key.

He didn’t like that at all. “Who—”

“Nakota told me. Says you work at a clothes store, selling T-shirts or something. Hey, don’t be embarrassed,” with my friendliest grin. “We all have to, eat sometime, right?”

“You know Nakota?” as if he was only waiting for my flimsy explanation so he could shoot it down. I told him she lived with me. Nasty, “She’s never said anything about you.”

“Shy,” I said, and the evidence stared at us as I pushed open the door: naked and smoking, blankets around her waist as she sat reading old Art Now magazines, her sneer for both of us in proportionate degrees of unworthiness.

“Oh boy,” she said at Malcolm. “I thought I smelled something.”

“Missed me,” walking to her, leaning over to cup one breast as if this would put my nuts in a permanent tweak. I started putting the groceries away.

“Get your hand off me,” Nakota said, “I don’t want to touch anything that’s been touching your dick.”

“Used to be I couldn’t get your hands off it.”

“Don’t remind me. I still get flashbacks.”

It was schoolyard bickering, stupid, but one thing was ominously apparent: Nakota did not like Malcolm. Not the usual halfass contempt she felt for almost everyone, but actual malice. Which made all this far more dangerous, gave rile the sensation of walking not on ice but on something much more volatile, walking on the backs of giants. And she behind me. Wearing stilettos.

“So.” Grinning at him. “Want to watch a movie?”

Oh boy. She never was one for wasting time. I opened up a beer, thought longingly of the mad quiet of the Funhole, lying there in my prayerful trance, why I was turning into a regular Nakota. Bedlam instead tonight, obvious in Malcolm’s reply: “I don’t watch films anymore.”

“‘Films,’” with one of her ugliest smiles. “I’ll show you a fucking film, you roach.” This endearment meant nothing to me, but Malcolm tightened up like someone had just shoved an icicle up his ass. “Nicholas, put the video on.”

“Wonderful,” Malcolm said, “home movies.”

“You’ll like this one,” I told him. Now that it was inevitable—and let’s not forget, kids, who put this whole doomed scenario into action—do I see a show of hands?—I was determined to have whatever weak fun I could. “Lots of action.”

I hadn’t seen it myself for a while, I was courting enough disaster as it was. I had no idea if Nakota was still watching regularly, but if so, it just didn’t seem to pack the same wallop, or maybe she was wallop-proof by now. Maybe it had never been intended to pack the same wallop. Maybe it was just a lure, why not.

Malcolm’s string of bitchy comments—he was one of the truly bitchiest guys I had ever seen— wound down shortly after the first minute. Silence was an uncomfortable mode for him but he was so busy trying to figure out how the hell we’d faked this that he wasn’t ready for the real, and at the part where, Nakota claimed, it all diverged for everybody (but me; and yes, I saw it again, the cool beckon of that same figure, and had the same reaction, a curling-up inside, a mortal shriveling) (but this time, what? something worse and I shrank from the naming, pulled back as if from some unfathomable contamination that had already gone fatally far), the climax, so to speak—then he froze, mouth literally open, and open it stayed long seconds after the tape was over, disappeared into buzzing gray silence.

I rubbed my eyes, drank a little of the beer. Nakota smirked. Still Malcolm said nothing.

Finally, in a tone stripped of all falsity, burned down to a nub of hungry essence, he turned not to Nakota but to me: “I have to do you,” he said.

“Do me?”

“Your face. Make a mask of your face, like that,” gesturing at the TV. “Like the one in the video. I don’t know how you did that, but I want to try to duplicate it if I can.”

Nakota, strolling naked for a glass of water, taking Malcolm’s matches from his shirt pocket. “Malcolm’s famous death masks,” she said. “Not sold in any stores. Not shown in any galleries, either.”

“Will you do it?”

I didn’t know what to say, fell clumsily back on the truth. “I don’t know. I don’t know if I want to.”

“Nicholas has his own work to do,” Nakota said. “He doesn’t have time for you.”

“Why does everybody in the world talk for you?” Malcolm said to me. “First Randy, now Queen Bitch here. Just tell me, will you do it or not?”

Nakota clearly wanted me to refuse, but I had no interest in pampering her spite. If it had been Randy asking, I would have said yes at once, but I didn’t like Malcolm, I didn’t trust him, it was like keeping half a snake in your pocket, a sicked-up vicious pet. Vanese’s advice or no, to me it seemed the best idea entirely to get him out of here with the least possible damage. Worse, any time spent dicking around with a mask, even to pacify him, would steal my Funhole time, so much of which already went to waste in the unavoidable things I had to do to live. And I simply didn’t want to do it, I mean who wants a death mask of their face? No. Bad idea, Malcolm.

“Will you do it?”

I shook my head, positively no, and said, “All right.”

And then—I can’t imagine what my face looked like, I couldn’t have been more surprised if an animal had crawled out of my mouth, those were in no possible scenario the words I had meant to say—I just sat there in mute asshole gloom while Nakota and Malcolm leaped headfirst into war.

They were pretty energetic about it too. It was easy to see what they saw in each other, although in modulated degree and for wildly different reasons; in fact it made me wonder what it was in Nakota I loved. Although that was a question whose answer I had never failed to find, and at this point it was almost comically moot, and anyway I had other, more simple problems to consider if not solve. Such as my inexplicable acquiescence to Malcolm’s death-mask wish. Which seemed to somehow fill the bill begun by my equally inexplicable boasting that had brought the whole circus into lurid life.

About the point where Malcolm was screaming, “Because I’m an artistV and Nakota was screaming back, “Yeah, you’re an artist all right, a bullshit artist!” I left, closing the door behind me, not even bothering to do it quietly. They wouldn’t have stopped for money.

The hallway was extra cold, but the odor of the storage room was ripe and welcoming as a womb, and with embarrassed pleasure I slipped inside, lay facedown beside the Funhole, my right hand resting lightly on its lip. I thought I heard from its deeps not music but the elegant drone of bodily organs, a sound so unimaginably soothing that I felt I could not only sleep there, I could sleep forever, till all of me was a death mask, a human catafalque turned to happy dust on the quiet floor. The last thing I did before I slept was remove my bandage, and let my hand dangle, a sweetly sordid treat in a smiling mouth.

Malcolm was, unfortunately, as good as his word. Next day and already bustling around the flat, apparently come to stay: dragging his stuff in, plaster and cheesecloth and tools in a fake leather case, talking all the time and me leaning up against the couchbed, hearing like an echo’s echo, a trickle of dream that Funhole music, not command but insinuation; it was hard to concentrate on anything else. Especially Malcolm.

“—longer than you think,” sketchpad too, expensive-looking charcoal pencils and sitting me down, bossy and rude and making me sorrier I had agreed to this, always assuming that were possible. My motives were unfathomable at best but this time it was all beyond me, I might have been predicting the movements of a stranger, and if I cared to try I would end with nothing more than a vaster confusion. Who deciphers the thoughts that come, windborne, from others’ heads? And who gives a shit, once thought becomes action? We all know who gets the blame.

And all this time Malcolm talking, directing, overruling, my God he was a windy fuck. Making fun of my magazine prints on the walls, saying Bosch was a poseur and Bacon a fag. Making fun of my photograph of Nakota and saying it looked like a B-movie outtake. Telling me all about himself, since I obviously did not want to hear. Call it punishment.

He was pretty good, though, sketching. He caught not only my features but what I did With them, and I saw in his sketch a kind of premature aging, the stroking finger of a dissolution coming on me like disease. I’m dissolving, I thought, seeing not so much the lines, the gradual leech of life, but the laying-on of a kind of hyperlife, like a sugar carving melting in blood. Look close now: what’s wrong with this picture?

He saw it too, but wasn’t smart enough to recognize in his head what his eyes already knew. “You won’t win any beauty contests,” he told me, “which probably explains that bitch of yours.”

“She was good enough for you once upon a time,” I said, but very mildly; I had no interest in defending Nakota’s honor, not that she had any.

He dismissed that, it was a long time ago. “Sit still,” he said. I did, still wondering why, was still sitting when Nakota came home, casual bang of the door, grinning at me.

“Tedious, isn’t he.” pouring a mineral water. “Malcolm, are you planning on moving in? Because if you are, I want your share of the rent up front.”

“I wouldn’t live here if you paid me,” he said, but it was abstract venom, he really was absorbed in what he was doing. Imagine. Nakota was more pissed that he wouldn’t fight than she would have been if he had—she was a person of simple wants—and in a sulk spoke to neither of us, punishing me, too, as a matter of course.

Which was all right with me, because I could still hear that music, and it was getting to be one hell-of a strain to try to listen over everything else. With their mouths shut it came clearer, it was almost pleasant to sit there in the cool silence, aching back and open mind, listening, listening—

To the quality of the silence as it changed and, irritated, reluctant to open my eyes, I did, and saw them both, she on the couchbed and he a few feet nearer, staring at the TV. Because the video was on. Of course.

She had done it to piss him off by distracting him, but then again it was her favorite show, too. They really did have a lot in common, much more so than she and I. Small mercies, right. I didn’t want to watch but oh yes, there was no avoiding, and so I did, seeing again the same figure, feeling again that overriding mutter of dry disquiet but growing, grown, into something more that I could not name.

I thought, I don’t need this. I don’t need any of this, I can have the real thing, and I stood up and walked out, no need for an exit line either since nobody noticed I was leaving.

In the storage room I sat on the blanket, my bear pad close by like a toy, breathing in and out the rich bubbling stink of the air, watching from the corner of my eye as Randy’s sculpture lifted one armlike stalk and began to move it back and forth, beckoning or warning but it was a little too late for both, wasn’t it, and either way I didn’t care. I lay with my cheek on the bear pad, staring sideways into the Funhole’s depths, thinking through the music of processes both irrevocable and remote; call it reverse entropy; call it the Little Bang.

I don’t know if they joined me, later, but when I woke up I was alone, so cold my skin hurt, the garbagey reek from the Funhole all over my hair and clothes, my blanket and pad. Olfactory spoor. A marked man. Upstairs Nakota’s sleeping face frowned in protest as I walked past the couchbed to the shower, the blue TV light made dimmer by encroaching dawn.

In the shower I let the water run hard, especially on my hand, pounding through the syrup to the lessening meat beneath; if I had cared I would have been plenty pissed at what was happening to my hand, the damned thing was almost all hole now, and what happens when there’s nothing left but bone, huh? Huh? I flexed it, forced myself to use it, to hold the soap, to wash. More syrup bubbled out, a twinkling gray like a bad special effect, refusing the water’s best efforts to wash it away. Last laugh. As usual. It’s hard being a conduit. No flowers, though, please.

Malcolm worked hard, I’ll give him that. Unfortunately he had seized upon the continuous play of the video as essential to his work, and when I complained told me I was chickenshit, I had to learn to let go of my petty fears. This was so funny I smiled beneath the tickling cheesecloth; step two already, we had gone beyond the preliminaries more quickly, he said, than usual, he was obviously inspired by the megaweirdness (his phrase).

“I got you,” indicating with nimble plastery fingers, “there.”

The sensation of plaster on the skin, even through cheesecloth, is like being buried alive in cheap cement, nose straws or no nose straws. Heightened of course by my petty paranoia, I did not like the video playing all the time, it was like leaving your front door open all night long and trusting to your own stupidity that nothing naughty would shamble in. All I could see was the inside of my eyelids, all I could hear was Malcolm’s voice, muttering to himself as he slopped plaster and stared at the TV. I didn’t like it, being there in such a stupidly helpless position while he worked on me, what if he decided the video was telling him to suffocate me? One nose straw was beginning to tickle with every breath. I tried breathing less often but that’s more difficult than it sounds and I had to stop. And still Malcolm’s atonal mumbles, and the faint sounds from the TV.

But it was definitely his medium, and never mind Nakota’s kneejerk spite: he wasn’t going to make anyone forget Rodin but he knew what he was doing, and in his sure and shaping hands the plaster became the vehicle for, if not the macabre transfiguration he seemed to hope for, then for me the seeds of simple change, if only by way, a subtle way, of observation: a new kind of seeing previously unconsidered and now in an instant become the norm. Or maybe all the, what, megaweirdness was inspiring him more than he knew, maybe the constant black mutter of the video was telling him more than his ears could hear, more than my own attenuated straining could decipher.

And when we, he, had finally done for the day, the night, as I washed my red and itching face, over and over, who should show up but the Malcolmettes. Three of them, anyway: Eenie, Meanie, and Shitty. Or something. I was never all that shit-hot with names anyway and these three were strictly interchangeable. The only way I could find to distinguish them was that one’s lab coat was a rusty-blood color and the other two were women. One of which, when she opened her mouth, revealed herself to be the one from the Incubus, the one who’d scoffed at my drunken promises of strange.

They didn’t bother sneering at my apartment, it was beneath them to even notice such boring squalor, but they couldn’t say enough about the death mask. Clustered close around it and nodding hack and forth: Technique, they said, it was pure technique, pronouncing it like it was the grail of words.

“This compares with a Caldwell,” red lab coat said, offensive thrust of nubby chin, please God, I thought, don’t let him stroke it knowingly. “Easily:’

“Or deVore,” said the other, non-Incubus woman, who stood so close to me I could smell the stain of her breath, without, of course, acknowledging me at all, though it was my plaster face she now examined so tenderly. The others nodded, Malcolm with a certain smug restraint, a Borscht Belt parody of Hamlet doing humble. “Midperiod deVore,” the woman added, hasty caret-dip of head.

“Who the hell,” I said, so pleasantly adrift, “is deVore?”

“You wouldn’t understand this,” she told me, simultaneously swiveling and stepping back so as not to accidentally touch me while she told me off, “but it’s an honor to become one of Malcolm’s masks.”

“That would be why he works in a clothes store,” I said, and just then saw Miss Incubus standing before the TV, head to one side like my dog used to do when she was hearing sounds no one else could. All I saw on the screen was static, but I shut it off anyway, brisk hard finger punch to OFF, too hard because I was scared. Of what she’d seen. Not for her, or not for her precisely, but wasn’t it bad enough that Malcolm had seen it? Did we need to get all the rest of his crew in on it too? What a sweet Pandora’s hell that would be.

And then of course, operating on the premise that anything, no matter how bad, can always get worse, here came Randy, and Vanese, who continued the evening’s merriment with a deadpan: “Oh my,” and Randy standing sidekick, hands on hips and mouth dour in a frown.

“Don’t tell me you let this cocksucker con you into something stupid,” no eyes for the other three, who returned the favor and, bored children, started playing with the stereo, trying to find something they liked, no doubt an impossibility.

“Hey Nick,” Malcolm’s over-shoulder grin, theatrical, did he think this was a movie or what. “Your watchdog’s here.”

I answered neither. What was there for me to say? I felt as if I were moving through water, a vast and calm preoccupation that in its way shielded me, protected me from the emotions of others, from the facts, and facets, of life. Such as now. The hell with them all. Except maybe Vanese. “He’s doing a death mask of my face.”

“Does Shrike know about this?” Randy’s face was turning red. Vanese gave him a look of secret-feminine scorn, walked past us all to make herself instant coffee. She wore a pair of strange delicate earrings, flat silver loops that seemed to drip and twist in some corrosive dance. I went to her, touched one gently.

“These are nice.”

“Randy made ’em.” She touched the same one I had, set it swinging. “Reminds him of the Funhole,” she said. “Nicholas,” lowering her voice, soft urgency, “you didn’t let Malcolm talk you into anything, did you? I mean I know Shrike, Nakota whatever, I know she was here, but she’s got her own agenda, you know what I’m saying?”

I most certainly knew what she was saying.

“So what happened, when he got here?”

“We showed him the video.”

She stared at me, past surprise, she even looked as if she might laugh, from sheer appreciation of our brazen idiocy, then shook her head, shrugged, and stirred her coffee. “It’s your ride,” she said. “Hang on.”

Glaring at each other, Randy and Malcolm traded bon mots, none of which I heard, instead hearing not so much below as through everything else the, what, the voice of the Funhole, the sound of its workings, as music permeating their voices, the room, like water soaks a fabric yet leaves the fabric itself intact. I stood, head bent, and it must have seemed as though it was their argument I heard, that I cared who did what, that in fact I had any say in the matter at all. Everyone else seemed to think so. What was next? Franchise rights? Funhole Inc.? Didn’t anybody understand what was going on here?

And of course stupid bastard Malcolm, “Is that right?” to Randy’s ever-reddening face and moving to turn on the video again, to prove his point, stupid point, and as if abruptly waking I moved too, faster than they could react, and pushed his hand away.

“Leave it,” I said.

My motion had momentarily surprised them into stillness, maybe they had all forgotten I was there, but Miss Incubus was first to bristle to de_; fense, turning on me with what she no doubt thought of as a streetgirl’s stare; Main Street, maybe. Anytown, USA. Brusque: “What’s your problem?”

Malcolm laughed. “Believe me, we don’t have time for that.”

“Look,” and back it came again, that underwater feel, but did you know, I thought, that I can swim? “Look, you don’t know what you’re fucking around with,” I said to her, ignoring the prepracticed stare, they had all of them seen far too many movies. “You really don’t.”

“You know,” she said, pushing right up into my face, “you’re nothing but promises, you know that? Bullshit promises, I think.”

“You, think? Jury’s still out,” and Vanese snickered as red lab coat turned on her and she gave him a look that was the real edition of what’s-her-name’s counterfeit glare, just as good as a pinch in the crotch and maybe better since it shut him up before he could speak, which is usually the best time, and under it all like a muttered secret that sound in my head, rushing like water but like no water I could finally navigate for long, swimmer or no.

“Listen,” I said, including them all in my gaze, even I could hear my desperation, “this is really turning out to be—”

The door clicked open, and in the hall’s cold-blown rectangle Nakota, one hand on hip: “Well well,” stepping in to take over, “looks like the gang’s all here.”

Oh boy. Waiting to see what she would do, and not alone, I stood in that forking rush of water, one half of me almost hurtfully aware of the temper of the room, the other half dreamy-drowned in the flow, the surge, it was in the end a mercy that they could not hear it too. Nakota poured herself some mineral water, walked through half conversations to turn on, of course, the TV.

“Nakota,” I said, “don’t.”

“Why not?” mild burlesque surprise.

“You know damn well why not,” said Vanese, with the deep and instant irritability that only Nakota seemed able to rouse in her, “you stupid rabble-rousing bitch, the only one you ever think of is yourself.”

“Shrike,” Randy’s hand, palm-up like some vexed saint’s, “really, Nicholas’s right. You shouldn’t really—”

“Screw you all,” she said, and tapped the tape to ON.

Well. I guess she told us, in fact her specialty, that pale poker face one large suppressed sneer. Rapt and stupid Malcolm, sitting fast beside her, his trio ringed behind him. Randy just as rapt and Vanese abstaining but then nobody could abstain for long, could they, with that witch light in the room? Of course not. Of course not. THey sat like kids, open mouths, apparently Malcolm’s all-day exposure had done nothing to dim the cold gee-whiz, they sat like rubes at a seance and one of the trio said, “God damn,” and as if that was my cue I got up, obeying my own wishes for once, that riverine voice a carpet as I walked out of the room and heard Malcolm behind me, tardy distracted petulance: “Hey, Nick, where’re you going?” and half of Randy’s shitty reply, and nothing else because here they came, all of them. Call me the Pied Piper.

I ignored them when they talked, nothing mystic, I just didn’t feel like answering. By the time we hit the door they had stopped entirely, all I heard was the churchly shuffle of their feet, basilica Funhole. We stood in the hall, our merry octet, three of them watching Malcolm who with the other three watched me.

I know what you want, I thought. But you’re not gonna get it.

“You,” to the Malcolmettes, “get the fuck out of here.” They stared at me as if I had just become miraculously stupider than I was, which I had to agree would have been some feat, but then I was smarter than they were, wasn’t I, I knew exactly what was behind door number one. “I mean it,” no such warning in my voice, as flat in fact as my determination that they must not, not, be allowed to see it, not in fact be allowed near it, I was no goddamned ringmaster after all, was I? The video was bad enough, wasn’t it?

“Go back upstairs,” I said, “and watch your movie. Go on,” and paradox Nakota turned on them and said, “Are you deaf?” with all the menace I lacked, backing them off a pace or two but that was obviously as far as we were going to get without a gun. I looked first at Randy, whose face was as blank as my voice, and then Vanese. Who shrugged.

’It’s their funeral,” she said.

Nakota laughed: “Hold the flowers,” and slipped past me into the storage room, the three left behind instantly craning, what had been a square room full of nothing was now the most, the only important place to be; strange the workings of denial, you can see it in a schoolyard clique, which this silly scene very much resembled. Malcolm next, fearless leader without so much as a glance behind, then Randy and Vanese and me last of all, one sweaty hand closing the door.

On the other side, “Watch this door,” I said to Randy, and Vanese nodded.

Kneeling, self-conscious now, before the lip, untied my badly made bandage with my teeth. I heard Malcolm’s stage whisper, the whip Vanese retort. Randy’s distant grumble. And strongest of all beside me, the astringent odor of Nakota’s devotion, the cold heat of her impatience, urging me on to her kind of action, let the games begin.

“Ah well,” I said, and heard the cobweb-echo of my voice, there in the hole. It was in no way a natural echo, but an entrancing sound, scary too

since I knew damned well it was some kind of— I almost said side effect, and maybe those are the right words after all. I tried it again, different words, my mouth very close to the lip so none of the others could hear. “Do you know me?” I said, do you know me want you

in a tone so shockingly intimate that my whole body flushed, I felt the warmth go through me like fever, like pain, as if your own mind could speak to you in a tongue you never knew you knew, but recognized at once; as if, foreign-born, came your first exposure to your native language, and those first words “I love you.” And below that I was simply scared shitless, a postcard from the devil, or more ominously a collect call from God himself, will you accept charges?

I could not move, there was no thought in me for motion; I could barely come closer but I did, surrounding the lip of the Funhole with my body, curling circular around it, face and hands dipping in the darkness and my right hand shook so terribly that droplets flew, danced beyond gravity in th£ new bloody light shivering around me, the drops gone circular too in a weird and crooked halo around my shameful head, and I think I cried, or cried out, because like fresh stigmata the pain in my hand became too strange to bear, and I yelled at them, “Get out” not because their safety was at stake (or because, in that moment, I would have cared if it was) but because I needed, I had to have, privacy. Aloneness. I heard like shadows talking Vanese’s voice, the deeper faraway mumble of Randy and Malcolm, nothing at all from Nakota, and my own voice entreating them all in jumbled curses, ending every sentence “Go away!”

Vanese got them out, the two of them—there would of course be no moving Nakota—I knew it was her and I wanted to tell her I was grateful, wanted to give her my thanks but there was no way I could because I needed all my concentration, every rubbery scrap, because something was eating at me, something stroking my bones from the inside out and there was no cure for that but to give in, give over, crawl headfirst and kill me, fuck me, I don’t care. Why are you so suddenly crazy, I asked myself, some tiny distant human part of me tight with terror and disapproval. I thought you could handle this, I thought this was a purely philosophical FACTFINDING MISSION, and all the rest of me could answer was Pain.

And desire.

Because it kept talking to me, that voice, seeming to say things I had no right to hear, and there in the dark I lay naked to listen, one hand in the hole and the other on my cock, sweating, blood thin in the corners of my mouth, my eyes wide open as they never were, my erection one hungry center, a focus for my want. And that voice, oh my God, it used no words but what it said, what it said. As if things lay displayed that my dry daily brain could not have fathomed, would have dismissed from disbelief or terror, or both. Or worse.

And Nakota beside me, as insubstantial as the morning memory of a dream, some familiar chimera, that was her all right. She stood over me, saying something about the door, the video, maybe that the video was a door, breathy hypnotic gibberish flowing over me like dirty water and “I watch it all the time,” she said. “It tells me things. I come here too,” and closer still, perhaps to watch my new and juicy ornament, there above my head. “It tells me a lot of things,” she said.

“Are you a hallucination?” I asked her.

“I want to be you,” she said, and she showed me her teeth, her eyes were enormous in the bloody dark, I saw her shaking as she stripped, wet shoes and crummy uniform and tiny scraps of underwear, and she said to me what I said to the Funhole, to that cruel and luminous voice: “Fuck me.”

By her hair, I grabbed her by her hair and dragged her down, not caring if we both fell into the Funhole, if we died there, oh Jesus I was worse than crazy and she egged me on, shrew hands locked to me like crampons in my flesh, climbing me, crawling me like an insect, a leech, all bones and teeth like fucking death, yeah, her mouth open on me and screaming something and my hips pounding down as if I meant to break her bones, shatter her pelvis for joyful spite, a smell around us as primal as sex but not from us, oh no, not from us at all. And her banshee voice, howling something and I was coming and I didn’t care, I didn’t care, I wouldn’t stop and pounding and pounding in the lessening drain of my corroding orgasm and still that voice that was no voice at all and I bent my head impossibly back and saw our orbit, our slow decaying gyration above the Funhole, looked and saw as if in a mirror that Nakota’s eyes had rolled back in her head and there was blood all over my mouth, all over her face, and the look on my face scared me so badly that I felt us fall, as if belief was all that held us; like Peter on the water I screamed, and Nakota in my arms unconscious, no help, a drag on my strength and perhaps it might be better, it might be easier for us all if I threw her down? Right, and I held her tighter, tighter, willing myself to block our fall with my body, stretched starfish-wide—measured in seconds, but it was that elongated time again, car-wreck time—and hit instead of darkness the floor beyond the Funhole, as if, disgusted with my weakness, my smallness, the Funhole had thrown us back.

Incredibly I was still inside her. It was hard to see, I was crying, -trying to pull away but so drained that I managed only to slip partway out, and then I heard them: knocking, knocking, hoarse urgent call, Vanese, and Randy fainter, behind her, saying in that pushed-to-the-limits voice, “Because it won’t open, that’s why,” and something indistinct from Malcolm, the tone— excitement, dismay—shared and amplified by his three stooges, his tinny Greek chorus.

“Help us,” I said, as loudly as I could. “We’re hurt”

“Nicholas,” Vanese’s voice, the way you talk to people trapped inside a burning car, “we can’t get the door open. Did you lock the door?”

“No,” I said. “The door doesn’t lock, it—”

“We can’t get it open,” Vanese said again, and I realized she was crying. “How bad are you hurt? Should we go and get a—shut up\” sudden sharp hysteric cry, someone else’s nervous startle and Malcolm’s curse.

Boom, boom. Randy’s thudding shoulder against the frame, boom, boom, and I pulled away from Nakota, unable to look too closely at her, crawled to the door, and with one hand turned the knob, Randy pratfall-tripping over me, falling to one knee in the smear of the floor.

Vanese’s voice, low: “Oh my sweet Jesus,” she could say nothing but that, oh my sweet Jesus over and over again, and Malcolm’s face, over her shoulder, greedy like a gawper at a public impaling, the three behind him wide-eyed human echoes and Randy bending to Nakota and saying, with the gentle voice of shock, “Nicholas, is she dead?”

“I don’t know.”

Randy said, after a moment, that her heart was still beating, she was breathing, yeah. “Put something on her,” I said, weak resentment at the gawk of those faces, their avid blinkless eyes; my own damp nakedness meant less than nothing, but somehow they must not gape at hers.

Randy wrapped her in his jacket, lifted her as Malcolm and Vanese helped me into my pants, steadied me for the interminable trip upstairs, and as we walked, our own little death march silent but for the whispered susurration from the three in the rear, Nakota all at once opened her eyes and said, slurred voice through a distinct and bloody grin, “Should’ve hadda camcorder.”

Vanese went still, all over, and then, “You are crazy, “pulling back, away from me, “you are all Crazy,” and suddenly she ran, almost stumbling down the stairs, she had no coat, she was out the door. I felt the new cold of the night rising around me, on my bare skin, and then we were at the flat, the trio simultaneously opening the door and obscuring our entrance, Malcolm helping me into a chair as Randy lay Nakota on the couch-bed.

“What happened?” he said. “What the fuck happened in there?”

Nakota again, nothing short of death could shut her mouth: “Nicholas… lost it.”

With admiration.

They left us, finally, Malcolm flanked by the stunned Malcolmettes—seeing was, apparently, believing—and Randy carrying Vanese’s coat. “You gonna be all right, man?” looking at us both, stupid survivors, tired maybe of patching us up, or watching us patch each other. Maybe just tired.

“We’re fine,” Nakota said authoritatively. “We’ll be fine.” Then, “Randy—did you see it?”

I thought she meant the spectacle, wondered how in hell even she could be so brutal, then saw his slow nod.

“It’s slag,” he said. “Fuckin’ slag.” And was gone.

Feral-bright eyes, poking me in the ribs. “We melted steel,” she said. “Both of us. We melted steel.”

I had never seen anyone look so smug. Torn lips—which accounted, thank God, for most of the blood, though her mouth was going to look pretty weird from now on—and loose teeth, raccoon bruises around both eyes, glittering eyes because she was one happy girl, our Nakota, our crazy Shrike, maybe Shrike was a better name for her after all.

“I think we should always have sex there,” she said.

“I think you’re a goddamned lunatic.” I rubbed my eyes, sore left-hand fingers, I hadn’t looked at my right hand—wrapped now in the last clean towel in the house—and I wasn’t about to. “Nakota, I hurt you. I could’ve hurt you more, maybe, God. I don’t even want to think about it, okay? I don’t even want to go—”

Instantly angry, “Don’t be such an asshole. This is what’s supposed to happen, don’t you know that? Don’t you understand anything,?”

“No,” I said, in simple truth. “No I don’t.”

“Then shut up.”

She fell asleep. I hurt too much in too many places, most internal, to join her, but could not make myself do more than lie there in the dark. Around me pure silence, no video, no voices, just the pale sporadic clatter of late traffic, Nakota’s snore-breathing, soft rattling whistle from her injured mouth. Enough light to my eyes to see her, she looked like someone had worked on her with a pipe, and I began to cry, for her, because she was hurt, because I had hurt her. Because to her it didn’t matter. Because it almost surely would happen again.

“Oh, God,” in my throat, almost unheard but she heard it, half opened her eyes, and on that ledge of sleep I saw a gravity, the faintest breath of a genuine sweetness in the slow tired blink of her eyes, of the sore smile she gave me.

“Shut up,” she said, and touched my elbow, meaning it for a squeeze. “Go to sleep.”

And I cried harder, so hard and long that, childlike, I cried myself to sleep. And dreamed for.once of a paradise that even I could reach, past darkness, a place where there was nothing left for my heart to carry. And I lay at rest there in paradise, and, looking up, saw distant and far above me a circle edged in black, and beyond that circle, like a living cloud, the quiet darkness of the empty storage room.