The Cipher

8

Though I played no razzle-dazzle, gave them nothing whatsoever to feed on, still they dogged me, my little groupies, my animate source of irritation: to Nakota, to whom their bumbling attempts to stick up for, and worse yet listen to, me were evidence of almost blasphemous defiance, earning them a high spot on her shit list when she bothered to notice them at all; to Malcolm, who also considered them traitors, this attitude of course strengthening his axis with Nakota; to Randy, who uncharacteristically refused to find any humor whatsoever in their duh-huh style, insisting instead that I should get rid of them (“How?” I said, and he, unable to recommend to weakling me his usual no-nonsense method of choice—the bum’s rush—ending frustrated and irritated, then, with me as well); only Vanese could stand them, and she only marginally— they were also a kind of collective symbol to our little band, their presence become to each the vindication of a particular theory, one to a customer please, no pushing. Nakota thought they were the walking indictment of my lame-ass methods in dealing with the Funhole, conclusively proving that anyone who swallowed my theories, which were of course practically nil, ought to be given a Drano chaser. Malcolm scorned them as cheap-thrill seekers when he had cherished for them a more exalted destiny, that of professional art fuck, although naturally he used a different term. Randy thought they were pretentious assholes, which they were, who should never have been trusted with such a mystery as the Funhole. Vanese thought they were assholes, too, in themselves basically harmless but also a harbinger of worse to come, the front row of a crowd whose control would not be possible.

She told me this the afternoon after Nakota’s video-slinging event, while the flat was pleasantly empty but for us, me with a plastic sandwich bag full of ice cubes pressed, at her insistence, to the swollen cut above my twitchy eye.

“That girl is some kind of hard-nosed bitch,” Vanese said, without admiration. “What she needs is somebody to take her down a peg or two. Or twenty-two.”

“Sorry, wrong number.”

“What’re you going to do, Nicholas?”

“About what?”

She sighed, a sad little sound that made more melancholy the backdrop of the sullen afternoon, dusty shadows lying in flat oblong planes, making of the whole room a complicated rebus of exhaustion and want. It even depressed me, and I was used to it. “Oh, Nicholas,” that older-sister face again. “You’re supposed to be in charge.”

That surprised a laugh from me; I shook my head. “No way. No way. If anyone’s in charge around here it’s the Funhole.”

“That’s just what I mean. The Funhole, shit, that’s no person, that’s not even hardly a thing.” Strong stirring motions in the sluggish goo of her convenience-store coffee. “Somebody has to be in charge, and it picked you, didn’t it?”

Again, “No way,” uneasy with the very idea, more uneasy still as she nodded to my newly rebandaged hand, courtesy herself, saying with that nod, Well isn’t that the proof? Isn’t it? “No,” I said. “I’m just the first asshole to stick his hand down there, that’s all.”

“You really think so?” A pause, what was she thinking that needed careful phrasing to speak aloud? “Shrike, Nakota, she says you’re the one who makes things happen. You think she could’ve melted that camera? Think any one of us could have—”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said, reaching balanceless from where I sat for the refrigerator door, hobbling in my seat, and I almost fell; could any clown such as me be in any kind of charge, strange groundskeeper for the gateways and the paths as Nakota kept insisting on calling her revelations, in charge of things I could barely comprehend, let alone understand? The sun slipped another notch, the shadows uglier in their depthless length. Bleakly, “There’s no more beer.”

“That’s all you need—put that ice back on your head.”

“Be my mother, Vanese?”

She smiled, a little. “You just better be a little careful, you hear me, Nicholas? Especially now, with your three new friends. I keep telling Randy, and I tell you, they’re the shape of things to come.”

“Then the shape must be a question mark.”

I wanted to make her laugh, wanted to hear it, but her smile was too small; pouring out the sludgy coffee, picking up her key chain: heavy fake-gold heart shape chunky with keys, beside it some kind of tiny dangling locket, Randy’s picture probably inside. “Is Randy coming tonight?” but she shook her head, he was tired, he had been snappish lately, neglecting his own work to come dally at this darker shrine.

“He needs some time off,” over her shoulder as I followed her down the hall. “You ask me, you could stand some, too. Little rest makes a lot of difference.”

“I bet it does.”

Pausing there a moment, long intake of breath to ask a careful question: “Do you know—what does ‘transcursion’ mean?”

I shrugged. “Never heard of it.”

“Me neither,” gentle unconscious gnaw of lip, “but they were talking about it, before. I heard Shrike, Nakota say it once or twice. I just wondered if you knew.”

“Never heard of it.”

Famous last words.

Still Malcolm’s tools lay unused, still he kept minimal contact with me; hadn’t even been oyer to watch the video—actually a moot occupation, I hadn’t seen it myself in weeks and in fact it wasn’t even there to be seen: Nakota presumably carrying it around with her, sleeping with it at night (but not with me); while still nominally in residence she too was unusually scarce, though she always managed to be around on the occasions when I found myself beside the Funhole, greedy for the revelations she was sure she could interpret, hungry to walk at least mentally the paths she kept insisting lay spread before us, before her, like some dark garden. Garden of evil. She read a lot of Ben Hecht. Malcolm did too, or said he did, privately I thought he never got further than the tabletalk equivalent of Cliffs notes but what did I know, maybe he was a closet scholar. Yeah, like Nakota was a closet nun.

Maybe they watched the video together; they’d done that before, hadn’t they. Maybe the video was, now, a tool for them, and more, perhaps the third component in a manage & trois, she and Malcolm twisting, sweaty and boneless, in the leering glow of its looped images. Of course that would bother me, but not for the usual reasons, Nakota’s idea of faithfulness was remembering my telephone number and anyway there was nothing, from her point of view, to be faithful to: I was the one who loved, not she. Worth worry, though, was the wonder of what she was really up to; there was no sense asking her, nor Malcolm, neither were likely to tell me if the flat was on fire.

Working on the theory that even a broken clock is right twice a day, I asked Doris et al if they knew what Malcolm was doing, if they thought he was coming back to finish the mask or at least get his crummy tools.

“Is he working on something new?” I asked, sitting before them, hands loose in my lap, faint sounds from the flat above us, somebody fighting, slow and dreary repetition of shopworn curses and sighs. “Some new project or something?”

Shrugs, blank looks, their natural habitat. Ashlee picked a hangnail with a surgeon’s precision. “I don’t know,” Dave said. “Last I heard, he was still working on the mask of your face.”

“We don’t see that much of Malcolm anymore,” said Doris.

“Why not?”

No one answered me. I asked again, more crossly, for God’s sake even they must have reasons for their actions: “Why not?”

Back and forth, a look passed like a dead fish, you tell him. No, you tell him. Finally Doris said, “We don’t share theories with him anymore.” -

Share theories. I’d’ve had more luck asking the Funhole. I opened my mouth to say I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, but Ashlee spoke up, a subdued tone, frown line between her eyebrows: “It’s those people, you know? Nakota’s friends. I don’t like them.”

Nakota’s friends. Is there a word for the feeling that trickled down my spine? “What friends?”

“You know,” reprovingly, but with a hint of unease, perhaps I did not know, perhaps she would have to actually tell me. Looking for help to Doris and Dave and my voice rising, I couldn’t help it, “What friends, for fuck’s sake? What’re you talking about?”

“Well,” Doris, nervous in a new way, swift looks between the three of them but never at me, “it’s some of the people who hang out at the Incubus. They’re not interested in Art, you know,” including without conscious thought that obligatory capital A, as I sat kneading my bad hand against my good one, a warm foreboding, Ashlee picking her hangnail a mile a minute. “They just want to, to—”

“They want to be on the fringe,” Dave said, from his useless stance at the refrigerator, searching for wine that wasn’t there. “They want stuff that’s, you know. That’s out there.”

“And Nakota told them about the Funhole?” Any other time I might have laughed at the squeak of my voice, a cartoon character confronting the inevitable mortality of the brick wall, the canyon floor, the OFF switch on the TV. “She told them?”

“I think,” Ashlee, very slowly, looking all around her for support, “she showed them the video.”

“It makes a very powerful statement,” said Doris, with a solemnity that roused in me the immediate urge to strangle, her, Nakota, myself. Everyone. A greasy tingling in the hole of my hand, crushing it hard against the sloped bone of my kneecap, over and over and thinking, thinking, staring at nothing until in sudden pause I looked up to see the three of them, staring at me with such childish woebegone anxiety that I felt a mingled rage and tired—what? Pity? Sympathy? They were just dingbats, after all, the minor-league version of what they decried, looking for the small thrill, the neatly boxed excitement. The Funhole Gift Set, prewrapped.

“Go home,” I said, “go away for a while. All right? I just want to be by myself for a little bit. All right?”

And their nods, more eager to be gone than they wanted me to see, jackets and smiles and they would call, yes, maybe they could come back later? Maybe we could all talk? Yes, yes, nodding at them, don’t let the door hit you in the back. Nearly sprinting for the phone.

Randy wasn’t home, but Vanese was, and in her silence, created by my anxious questions, I knew she knew what Doris and the others were talking about; I leaned my forehead against the wall, I closed my eyes to await the answer.

“Bunch of assholes from the gallery,” she said, “they’re always up for some weirdness, the bigger the better. They’d just eat that video up.” Stringent disgust, I could picture the look on her face and felt no reassurance, it was as bad as I feared. The floor, falling beneath me. Things are never so bad they can’t get worse. Especially when Nakota is around, especially when she’s mad.

“That fucking bitch,” she said. “Just doesn’t care, does she?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think she does.”

After I hung up, I stayed standing, trying harder and harder to think but finding a mournful fatalism every way I turned, there was no way out. I knew what she was doing, now, and no doubt Malcolm was in on it, both of them pissed at my groupies, as they called them, at the fact of my groupies, at anyone—what had Doris said, yeah, sharing theories with me. Treating me as more than a barely necessary appliance, the crank that makes the magic box run. No camcorder, I had ruined that for her, no new video for you, Nakota. No copying the old one either, she maybe blamed that on me, too. And Malcolm beside her, to nurture her spite with the spurts and gushings of his own, withholding his mask from me, from his traitorous disciples, why hadn’t I seen any of this coming? Was I always doomed to be the fucking dupe, the one who never knew what was going on? Stumbling around, waiting for the anvil to fall on my head. No wonder I had a hole in my hand.

The fight above my head was still going on, the kind of circular bitching that reaches a certain level and then goes nowhere in particular but round and round. I turned on no lights, got a beer in the dark and crept to bed, lay like a troubled fetus in the soiled swirl of blanket and sheet. No Funhole for me tonight, my hand at this decision racked with a sudden petulant throb, my own petulance rising with a brief but telling urge to cut the motherfucker off, how’s that for downing a lifeline, cutting off communication one might say. Call me Lefty. Maybe I could just—

Talking. Not above me. In the hall.

A questioning tone, some guy, something, and then Nakota unmistakable: “He’s not here.” Someone else, and her scornful answer: “Because it doesn’t work without him, dipshit.” More talk. As slowly as my breath was fast I set the beer down, careful, careful, pulled the covers up so there was only a dark half circle, breathing space, tried to look like a messy bed. They were still talking but I couldn’t hear, pulling up the covers had made it worse. What to do. Maybe I could play turtle, put my head out enough to hear and then if the door—

Which it did, and the light too at once and my clumsiness betrayed me, Nakota in instant triumph seeing the whorl of blanket for what it was and saying, “There he is,” and me raising my head, reluctant and half-blind, blinking at her groupies.

Whom I saw at once were more trouble than I felt up to handling: six or seven of them, hunching shoulders, big jackets, hands impatient in pockets and eyes like tracer gazes going all around the room, all of them stupider, meaner, wilder, more prone to that special brand of idiocy which most often turns into wreckage, spillage; blood. They smelled blood, all right, or maybe worse that more esoteric fluid that dribbled from me now, in a brightly vindictive stream that soaked the pillowcase and turned the sheet to clotted silver, a party color is it, well let’s start the party now. When in doubt, attack, right? And I was nothing if not always in doubt. About something.

But not Nakota, who, I saw and plainly, relished this role as field marshal, why not, it was the kind of situation she was born to not only milk but throttle till it was as juiceless as a skull in the desert. Head back and hips like rim shots as she walked over to the bed, sat chummily beside me and said, brisk elbow and dry grin, “So. What happened to your little friends?”

“They got a life,” I said, as shittily as I could muster, which Wasn’t much but it might fake out her buddies who now stood like half-domesticated slaves in the center of the room, waiting for her to say something, to tell them what to do. “What’s all this?” gesturing openly with my leaky hand. “Malcolm’s friends?”

It didn’t piss her off, as I had lamely hoped, or fool her for a minute. We both knew who they belonged to, and never mind that Malcolm’s charisma quotient had always been at least a quart low, that he couldn’t assemble an army at gunpoint. But let’s just remember, shall we, let’s make sure we don’t forget that he’ll be more than happy to hoard what Nakota collected, her cadre of dissatisfied jerks masquerading as the cheapest kind of mystics, fun junkies out gunning for the biggest fun of all; he’ll be more than ready to use whatever weapon, however blunt, they constitute, to serve whatever banal and horrible concept he—and worse, she—thought “best.” And of course we also know who it’s best for.

“We’re going to watch the video now,” Nakota said. “Join us.”

“I was sleeping,” I said, and she shook her head. “No you weren’t, you fucking liar. If you don’t want to watch with us, then get the hell out.”

You wish, I thought, that sudden concealed sparkle a clue as subtle as an ax. I know what you want me to do, I told her with my eyes. And I won’t. No, I won’t.

And I didn’t. Instead I lay tense, faking nonchalance as I observed Nakota’s sorry fucks sprawled slack-jawed before the TV, watching the video, the video, the video until I wanted to jump up and run out of the room, which was probably part of the point. Maybe all of it, though I wasn’t vain enough to think so, and anyway Nakota was famous for her crisscross motives, occasionally reaching heights so dizzy-ingly Byzantine that even she couldn’t say with certainty what the real reason was.

See her now, hair pulled into some weird new topknot, big fat coat that she no doubt had appropriated from one of her followers, knees bent and dirty shoes up on the edge of the couch. See the hinty smile that whispers of plot, see the glaze of her eyeballs as she watches a scene she’s seen a zillion times and more but she doesn’t care because it’s not really what she’s seeing, oh no, there’s quite a different movie playing in the cold zone between object and inner vision. And so absorbed myself I didn’t notice the new mimicking smirk till it was right in my face, build like a decadent soccer player and blue eyes lined thick like Cleopatra, a smell from the big jacket like cigarettes and too sweet after-shave. A chummy lean, like we were pals.

“She says,” said the face before me, indicating with a nod Nakota, “that you can start that hole up.”

That hole. “You believe everything she tells you?”

“Only when she’s right.” Smirk magnified by closeness, something gummy in the corners of the mouth. “She’s been right all along.”

“So far.”

“Yeah. So far.”

Sudden and startling, a yell from upstairs, the fight invigorated and louder now than the TV, not that there was much of a sound track but the mutters and grunts of the watchers, most of whom turned now to Nakota, interrogatory stares and she said, “It’s the people upstairs” like they were too stupid to figure this out for themselves but in fact they must have been if they needed her to interpret two people screaming “Fuck you” at each other.

“You know Malcolm?” said my new friend, reaching into his jacket to pull out a pack of Kools. I nodded, and he did too, as if this was just what he’d expected. “I saw the mask,” he added, and smirked again, seemed about to comment further when a truly banshee-quality groan from above and Nakota, looking at me, said, “Do something about that.”

I was about to suggest an alternative plan, involving a painfully novel sex act she might perform either alone or with her followers, when I saw one of them leave his comfy position on the floor, out the door and his purposeful feet in the hall, and I thought: Oh. I see, and even if I hadn’t Nakota’s gratuitous smile crystallized the notion: she was showing off. And a tiny chill as wet as a trickle of blood shivered through me, raising my skin to pebbles of gooseflesh, I pulled the dirty blankets closer and the guy beside me said, “You cold or something?”

“It’s just my leprosy,” I said, making the mistake of using my bad hand to adjust the blankets, that jumbled flood of silver leaking firm and shiny across my wrist, across the bedclothes. My earlier bravado evaporated, I tried to hide the mess but no, he was staring at it with a genuinely blank look, as if I had just farted out a cloud of ducklings, or began coughing up hundred-dollar bills.

With my other hand I swept the covers back up, now you see it now you don’t as victorious footsteps and Nakota’s errand boy back, smiling proudly: “I told them to shut the fuck up,” and the others grinning in return and Nakota not grinning at all, just the smallest fold of a smile, pointed at me like the casual tip of a knife. I nodded—touch6—maybe she would be satisfied with that particular hoop, maybe we wouldn’t need to see another proof of what she could make them do.

They were still there when I fell asleep, uneasy at sleeping in that company but unable finally to outwait them. The last thing I remember hearing was Nakota telling them about the jarful of bugs, so very long ago, strange den mother and her troop of devil scouts around the flickering cathode fire.

Even in sleep the cold pursued me, a bloodless feel to hps and fingers as if I lay drained, vampire’s snack, unremembered suicide attempt. In my dreams my hand was a key, a literal key to the storage-room door, and on my breathless chest like an animate gargoyle the guy who had sat on the bed, sawing with a grainy back-and-forth verve at my ramrod wrist and behind him, lips pursed in silent glee, Nakota was busily nodding him on, an empty pickle jar in hand to catch the jiggering spray.

“That’s right,” she was saying, “that’s right,” and I woke, loud startled “Huh!” of sound and the flat was full of drizzly day, it was morning, maybe even afternoon. The blankets were twisted, tight and uncomfortable, around my waist, my wet right hand lay clenched against my sweaty face, and two of them, one the bedsitter, were sitting at the kitchen table. Waiting for me.

Trying to ignore them, I stumbled up, across to the bathroom, washed with one ear wearily cocked, what were they doing? Back out to get a beer, it was going to be that kind of day, I resumed my cocoon as the bed-sitter said, “Those people upstairs are real assholes.”

No reply from me. It was not a statement I could legitimately argue with, but then again he was in no position to call names. They glanced together at me in my silence, and tried again.

“Nakota says you fucked up the video. Copying it.”

I shrugged, the sudden rapid polka of an eyelid tic starting up, idiotic flutter and I rubbed at

my eye, pressed the cold can against it to make it stop. The whole flat stunk like the inside of a bar, that dry generic reek of alcohol and smoke. Maybe they’d had a party, while I’d slept my nightmare sleep, maybe Nakota had been the entertainment. Maybe I had, for all I knew.

“She says you don’t know about the paths.”

“I don’t care, either.” The beer tasted very bad.

“She says,” said the other one, his voice a glottal mumble like he was talking through a tasty mouthful of snot, “you don’t believe about the paths.”

Oh, God. “I’ll tell you what I believe,” I said, with venom born of a restless night, a sorry ache in my head, a sorrier one in my hand that even now began to burble and spit, fat slow silver bubbles and I said it again, “I’ll tell you what I believe. That nobody knows anything about anything more complicated than breathing in and out, and especially not about that fucking Funhole down there, and that includes Nakota, that practically defines Nakota, am I going too fast-for you or what?” and I hurled the beer so it barely missed the TV, one of my rare displays of temper but it pissed me off, it truly did, to wake after such a night to find the palace guard, armed with stupidity and questions, it was worse than having Malcolm there. I had my mouth open to continue in this vein and deeper when knock-knock, who’s there, sudden anxious

fantasy of the irate neighbor from upstairs but no, almost worse: the Dingbats, all three, smiles turning to sudden worry as they saw the other two, the blurt of fresh beer stain on the wall, smelled the ozone of tension and tried to simultaneously discern and assess their effect on whatever was happening fast enough to stop if that was necessary.

All in all they were deeply confused and showed it, so openly that I felt a vast wave of irritable pity, and on that wave threw down the blankets saying “Wait a minute,” and dressed, fast sloppy toilette and grabbed up my jacket, herding them before me out the door. In the dull arctic slysh outside I stood, eye ticcing as I zipped the jacket, and told them I wanted to go out for breakfast.

“It’s almost dinner time,” said Ashlee timidly.

“Not for me.” Doris drove, the four of us squashed into her squatty little Honda, her stick-shift style particularly vigorous and unpleasant, my headache worsening with each slam from first to second, second to third. She cranked the heater till the windows fogged, till I could smell the distinct degree of each passenger’s state of cleanliness, most of all unfortunately my own. Of course at the restaurant we got stuck with a booth; once again I ended up next to Doris, the grit of her eyelashes, the fudgy smell of her perfume.

Blew on her tea, splashing it on my hand in its stained washcloth shroud, and chattering drone, long spiel about various methods that might be used to accurately document the Funhole, it was after all a paranormal site, there were ways: temperature readings maybe, in the storage room and the room below, maybe an interview of each of us (a nod almost painfully meaningful, meaningfully at me) describing our reactions to, and theories concerning, the mystery; perhaps a thorough medical investigation of my hand? Ignoring this for the absurdity it was, I stared at my chili corn dog with loathing, Dave had talked me into it against my will and for once better judgment; it looked like something the Funhole might have coughed up.

“Obviously it’s not a natural phenomenon,” said Doris, clearing her throat, Ashlee a moment later in identical nervous echo. “I mean, there’s this hole in the floor, but nothing’s underneath it, it doesn’t go anywhere. I mean that’s what they’d say. Researchers. But we could document the things we do know, we could investigate—

“Like tapes, you mean?” Tactless Ashlee, and Doris’s bright scowl of displeasure, no not tapes, but “You’d almost have to use some kind of video methodology that—Nicholas, what’s wrong?”

I shook my head. Dave said something about science and mysticism don’t mix and Doris said something back and it went round, predoomed attempt to classify the unspeakable, me turning my chili corn dog in small loathing circles to mimic, maybe, their talk.

After a while I noticed them noticing my glazed mourning, my lack of appetite, Doris in clumsy delicacy asking if “something” had happened; Twenty Questions, Oblique Edition with the three of them perched bright as birds until to shut them up I gave a clenched abridged history of the night before, just enough to give them the drift. And with luck the idea that perhaps for now my flat was not the place to be. By the time I finished they were done eating; I gave my plate one last resentful glance, pushed tardy out of the booth, no longer even nominally hungry but definitely sick. Sick around the edges.

The drive home, head leaning against the sticky passenger-side window, eyes closed. Would Mr. Bed & Friend still be there? Nakota? Complete with an army of blank-eyed vicious morons in big fat jackets with big fat notions force-fed them by that queen of misdirection, who was using them all as surely as she had once used the bugs in the jar, the terrified mouse at the end of a string? She would dangle them just as cold-bloodedly, and part of me said: So let her. Who gives a fuck.

I made them stop for beer. I even let them pay for it. What the hell. If I had to be a fucking guru, I should get some kind of privileges from it, shouldn’t I? And even if I shouldn’t, who cares? Who cares.

First up the stairs, slow breathless chug, hoo boy was I getting out of shape. As I passed the second floor, my entourage still unfortunately in tow (good job scaring them off, Nicholas old man) I was surprised by a wash of, what? Nostalgia? Oh God. Homesick for the Funhole. Maybe I deserved whatever I got, whatever that turned out to be. Still it was true, and never mind my posturing disgust, it was worse, and less, than a gesture. No matter what sort of place it was—dark stinks and dancing slag and undisguised a lure so monumental that it need only make its promises in fluids and in blinks—it was, beyond denial, the place for me. Oh, God.

The flat was silent, which cheered me momentarily, if I could just get rid of the Dingbats maybe I could get drunk and fall asleep, the day was shot anyway, wasn’t it? But no sooner had I turned the key than the footsteps of the three heard vaguely from behind turned out to include a fourth. An unwelcome fourth, judging from the silence and I turned to see, who else, scary shorn head and a smile even uglier than before but in a new way: Malcolm. With a box under his arm.

“Look who’s here,” he said, as if this were his apartment and we some vulgar interloping peddlers, maybe come to sell candy or magazine subscriptions. “I thought you’d’ve taken a swan dive by now.”

“Out the window,” I asked, pushing the open door, “or down the hole?” I took the beer from Dave’s arms, opened one right there. Malcolm stood to face me, cradling his damnable box and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what was inside. He saw me looking and smiled.

“I finished it without you,” he said. “I didn’t need you after all.”

“Congratulations.”

“I’m gonna put it up tonight, when Nakota gets home.”

“Who gives a fuck?” My trio fidgeted silently in place, Doris the first of the wedge, the other two slightly behind. The flat looked exactly as I had left it, cold and messy and unappetizing, my fading prints and magazine cutouts like some set designer’s idea of badly simulated bohemia, flophouse chic. All it really needed was Nakota and her bunch for it to be truly hell. “Quite frankly, Malcolm, I don’t care if you hang it around your neck,” and out came a satisfying belch, big and round, “as long as you leave me out of it.”

As if on cue, bang the door and Nakota, Mr. Bed, and three others, all but she smelling very much like Club 22, she was dressed in her barmaid black but I didn’t think she would be working tonight. Not serving drinks, anyway. She took one look at Malcolm’s proudly held box and said, “Done, I see,” with the utmost boredom, not even malicious, not really, just an obvious trigger and she pulled it, almost out of force of habit. ^N

“Wait till you see it,” he said, but she had already turned away, speaking to Mr. Bed in some incomprehensible private slang, again I heard the word “transcursion” and wondered if I ought to ask. One of Nakota’s geeks reached for one of my beers and I grabbed his wrist, hard, though he outweighed me by a good twenty pounds, and said, “Put it back, fuckface.”

Nakota laughed. “Bad mood?”

“Eat shit, you,” and instantly her trio turned on me, and with a sad and astonishing courage, mine on hers: Dave, nervous and too loud, “Just be a little easy, all right?” and Mr. Bed’s contemptuous smile and Malcolm’s snort of disgust at the whole circus, for once I agreed with him, a circumstance so bizarre that in pained confusion I set aside my beer and rubbed hard at my head, dislodging as I did so the clumsy bandage and now, for all to see, the silver leak, sick glossy shine on my skin like mother-of-pearl, like the flesh of the drowned and I snarled “What the fuck’s everybody looking at?” and took up my beer again, sulked my way back to bed, and Nakota’s breezy nod, agreeing: “Really, what’s the big deal? You’ve all seen freaks before.”

Dingbats glaring at idiots glaring back, Malcolm clutching his box, Nakota across the room giving me the look I hated most, and the phone rang: Vanese, asking, Is Randy there yet? Just the element I wanted added to this mix, just the man I wanted to see. Rub, rub, at my head, my brain swollen from thoughts too big, it had all gotten too big. What began as me and Nakota, me and my erstwhile beloved speculating on a bleak .tantalizing chimera, had become people (who of course in their turn became factions, with competing theories and competing wants), and masks, and Randy’s moving sculpture, become too big for me because I was after all just a small guy, just a little man, just big enough to fit morsellike down the Funhole. Nowhere to hide but the storage room, nowhere to go but up. Or down. Let the games begin? Not so much, I thought, no longer bothering to hide the gulping dribble from my hand, that I minded putting on a show. I just didn’t want to put it on for them.

Mr. Bed seemed now to be reading my sorry mind as, turning to Nakota with a backhand glance at me, asked sotto voce when the hell’s the action, you promised, remember?

And Ashlee, of all people, loud and tremulous in the center of the room, looking at me, to me, “Nothing happens without Nicholas. Nothing can happen without him, so you just better stay out of his shit, all right?” and the three of them, my dingbats (and when, a cold snide voice blossomed to ask inside that three-story brain of mine, just when did they become your dingbats, when did you become some cheapshit stand-in god?), turned to me with an identical look between them, three faces with one emotion, and the naked responsibility I saw there making me almost frantic for escape but when you put the key in the lock, when you crank up the magic box, why then what happens? And who, who, I ask you, is ultimately responsible?

Frozen in my private sick tableau, half-conscious of the merry fluid, brisk and faintly odoriferous, looking past its snail-trail glimmer to the twist of Malcolm’s face as he said, unnecessarily loud, “I’m going to do what I came here to do. You can come with me, or fuck off, or whatever you want.”

And he marched out like a marine, Nakota’s yahoos half-inclined to follow at once, as if, mindless as radkr, they must track any kind of movement, my—the others, Doris and Ashlee and Dave, looking to me. Me looking away, to meet the warm shock of Nakota’s gaze, very close, how had she managed to get so close? In her voice a thrumming sound, was it really her voice? The phone rang again.

“Coming?” she said, leaning even closer to brush her speaking lips against my skin and for me a grateful shiver, it had been such a long time since she had deliberately touched me. She kissed my cheek, an action at heart so brutally calculated that I should have been sickened by its falseness, but how could I be when it was so essentially Nakota?

Quietly, “It’s your show,” another calculation and I knew that, too.

“Go if you want to,” I said. “Just leave me alone/’

A venomous smile, I was balking her again. “You might be surprised,” she said, even more quietly. “You might be sorry, too.”

I closed my eyes. “I’m already sorry.”

“Tell me about it,” and gone, not even bothering to close the door behind her. The thrumming I had heard before, thought it the underpinning of her voice, some fault of my hearing, showed itself to be neither; Funhole music; of course. Of course. Lassie come home. I put my hands to my head, fingers in my ears like a stubborn child, looked up to see Doris bent, hand aborted in a gesture, peering into my face. I took my fingers away from my ears, the better to listen to what I didn’t want to hear.

“Are you going to let them do this?”

“I’m not letting anyone do anything,” I said, very very tired. “I’m just staying the hell out of the way,” and then cold air and Randy, through the open door.

“Funny customers,” he said at once, getting himself a beer and one for me, at least you could always trust Randy to do the right thing. Ignoring Doris, who joined the worried cluster of Ashlee and Dave, he sat beside me, saying again as he handed me the beer, “Funny customers. Shrike’s bunch, you know, they’re big-time fuck-ups, I don’t know if you want them anywhere near that room.”

“I don’t see any way of stopping them.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” abrupt and out the door, my trusty right-hand man. Good thing for him he wasn’t. I put my right hand to my head and sure enough, the thrum echoed there as well, remote speaker, broadcasting live. As live as it gets. Above that sound I could hear noises from downstairs, noises too from above, neighbors. Bitching. But not at each other. I caught the words “punker assholes” and thought, Uh-oh.

Doris asked, “Should we go, too?” and at a loss I shrugged, my usual cheap response to any situation. They took counsel together and with an over-the-shoulder glance, the three of them weirdly like swivel-necked dimestore toys, left. And left the door open.

Hallway cold and I pulled the blanket up around my neck, cementing the seal with the glue from my hand, and closed my eyes. A calmness I had not felt for days, weeks, drifted warmly over me; I felt almost good. Must be the solitude, certainly a rare commodity these days. The thrum became a lullaby, God knew I needed rest. Not just sleep but rest, a breathing space, a place in which to forget. From upstairs I heard a shout, again, but this time I felt no warning pinch, felt nothing too, at some garbled groan from below. They said it didn’t work without me? Very well, I was doing my part, I was doing nothing. The role I was born to play. More yells, and in the ringing echo of their wake I felt myself slipping off to sleep, what a lovely pleasant thing to happen, what a fine idea. Warm, under the covers, and my hand smelled so good. Good enough, in fact, to eat.

“Nicholas!”

Fuck. “What is it?” opening one cross eye, how had I gone so deep so fast? Exhausted, that’s what it was, and always somebody to wake me when I wanted it least. In this case Doris, bug-eyed, hands a mile a minute, “Hurry!”

“What?”

“They’re all yelling, Randy and Malcolm are pushing each other, Malcolm’s got that mask nailed up and everybody’s going weird, they—”

“I don’t care if they kill each other,” which at that moment was absolutely true, all I wanted was the benediction of unconsciousness through the good offices of sleep, it did not occur to me to wonder why I was so easily able to sleep at a moment when I should have been scared shitless. Yes, a small part of my brain said, professor-bright and pointer in hand, why is that? And that was what frightened me, finally, scared me awake and Doris taking instant advantage of my renewed consciousness grabbed my arm to haul me upright, it must have been like dragging a dead man, a big wobbly sack.

Out the door and from the stairwell I could hear it, Randy yelling, “Let go of me, motherfucker!” and Malcolm’s screech: “Don’t touch it! Don’t touch it!” and Doris in desperation at my inadequate speed pushed me, hands in the back and I stumbled, I wasn’t going fast enough, I almost fell.

Hands on the newel post, swinging around like a child does in play, an actor in a movie and I saw a babble of motion, heard a sonorous tone that seemed to be emanating from somewhere close by the storage-room door, where Randy tussled now with Mr. Bed, another of Nakota’s goons pushing Malcolm who was yelping like a pig and somebody’s head above the door. Hey, I thought, that’s my head.

Plaster white and blind-eyed, frozen face not in peace but in ice, the coldest place of all. The mask.

From which the sound issued. Twin to the sound of my hand. Twin to the sound of the Funhole, so loud it seemed from behind the door and a pull like gravity, I pushed without effort through the crowd, Malcolm’s yell directly in my ear, Nakota at my elbow, the others lost in swirling babble, the Brownian motion of a hopelessly unchoreographed fistfight, what the fuck were they fighting about anyway and someone, some guy I didn’t recognize, the upstairs neighbor presumably, wild-eyed and bellowing “What the hell is going on!” with such enraged and poignant confusion that at another time I might have felt sorry enough to explain.

But not now. Nakota hanging on me like the leech she was, I could feel the pant of her excited breath, and again without effort I pushed her away, shook her off, pushed in the door and a great vast scream of heat, like throwing open the door to a blast furnace, like Shadrach in the fire I advanced, careless, welcome, I could dance like Vulcan in a cindering flame, I could dance with Randy’s sculptures and one advanced upon me now, its metal limbs flung wide in fractured greeting, where had I been for so long? The leak of my hand gleamed, I understood the motif of silver now. Pressing my hand to the melting metal, a hissing sizzle like the boil of steam, but this steam was molten, this steam was iron. Fusing me to the metal. Pulling me like a magnet to the Funhole where the heat burned so delirious that I thought it would burn me alive, the ancient suns rising about me like a mantle, my arms reaching to embrace the fire as they embraced the sculpture’s living metal and through the burn an echo, the bubbling thrum, thrice loud: the mask. My hand. The Funhole.

Me, myself, and I.

And I giggled at the joke, so warm, my sweat like metal and my pupils scorched wide and at once the sculpture’s grasp fell from me, and sorry, I turned to see figures, bodies, walking toward me, weak silhouettes against the pallor of the hallway, and I said, “Who goes there?” and in the speaking saw at once the unmistakable scarecrow tilt: Nakota.

With three, four others, and maybe Randy back behind, it was hard to see. I thought I heard myself say, “Stay out!” though I didn’t feel the words in my throat, of course it was so hot in there it was hard to feel anything but. I waited until Nakota was very close indeed before I pushed my face to where it seemed hers was, through the shimmer, through the sweat, and said as loudly as I could, “Get the fuck out of here, and take them with you.”

Though of course she didn’t listen, maybe even couldn’t hear me through the howl of the heat; whatever, she pressed on, pushed forward, pushed in miscalculated impatience against me.

And for her trouble got a burn. Hissing back just like a cat, a snake, holding her forearm away from her body and as two backed from the fray another body passing hers, oh here’s a real brave dickhead, here’s a real toothsome treat. That one I saw with warm amazement was trying to get around me, was actually trying for the Funhole itself, and I said, “Oh no you don’t” and I grabbed, I burned, I didn’t really want to but truth be told I didn’t care, really, and really it was something to see my hand sink into his skin, into meat, like a brand, a mark forever, he screamed—I heard it clearly, even through the ever-building thrum, the sound of a monstrous engine running hot—and Nakota chose that moment for her end-around. Sneaky bitch. Backhand, didn’t think I had it in me, did you? Did you? And more, a bigger crowd crowding in the doorway, my vision snapping finally clear through the heat shimmer and I saw them all, too many, I could hear Randy yelling and I yelled back, he didn’t hear me so I did it again, “GET THEM OUT OF HERE!” and the neighbor guy and one of my, one of the Dingbats running presumably for cover, and in the room the marked man, Mr. Barbecue between the other two who had come in with Nakota but it seemed were more than ready to leave without her. Shitheels. “Take her with you,” I said, and it was somewhat comical to see them drop their buddy in her favor, I had to laugh. I had to. And them gone, and the door thankfully closed. And me all alone.

With the heat. And the burn.