The Cipher

10

Later, through the murmur of her goons clustered around the door like cancerous cells: “Not funny, Nicholas.”

“Shut up, Nakota. Okay? Just shut up.” Sometimes, I thought, it would be worth it to die, just to stop hearing that voice. Like an ache in the ear, like a bad tooth audibly rotting. Like a cancer that talks. My one and only.

Malcolm, a cheap indignance that somehow sat well on him: “That bitch could’ve broken her jaw.”

The mask spoke before I could: “You shut up too. I wouldn’t mind killing you.”

Nakota’s sudden cackle, it was her kind of joke, mostly because it wasn’t. Then, but seriously folks, her eternal one-note tune, “Nicholas, you have got to realize we’re going to get in. At least one of us,” crude transparent threat, I covered my closed eyes with my fingertips, gently patted the tiny cuts left there by the skull-splitting glass. The mask kept talking, its comments directed to none of us, the principals, ha-ha, instead to the widening circle of usual geeks; it used my voice but I couldn’t understand the words. Big deal. Bad enough I could still understand Nakota. “It would be so much easier if you—”

“You never used to be boring,” I said.

“We’re taking the door off,” Malcolm said. “Today.”

“I don’t give a shit what you do.” So tired, inside, that it was almost true. “I don’t care what happens, I don’t care if you chew your way in, if you use yourself as a battering ram, whatever. Do what you want. But I’m not helping.” They kept talking, arguing with me (when had it ever mattered if I was listening or not?) and each other, and the muttering others who milled close and far, the tempo of their voices drifting like scum on an incoming tide.

I did my best to ignore them all, sat finishing my meal: a warm ginger ale, chewy antique sal-tines, and raisins, a little red box of raisins and my eyes filled with quick and stupid tears: I remembered eating them in my lunch at school, saving the box to prop on my desk and pretend the Sun Maid was winking at me. As I thought this the little face on the box came alive, melted like living wax to become Nakota’s, complete with her customary impatient sneer, the basket she held filled not with grapes but tiny skulls. Sickened by this cheap cruel grotesquerie—was it really necessary to fuck with everything, did it all have to twist into the same gleefully ugly shape?—I flung the box away, heard the minute dusty sound of its landing, the immediate and larger sound of its retrieval, fetched back to me with the box turned so I could see the face again, the Sun Maid again, her little eyes rolled backward. in terror as the crooked teeth of the skull bisected her.

“Oh you motherfucker,” I said, and a calm, the stilling sensation of absolute rage descended on me like the slowly settling mantle of a saint and I grabbed the skull, ignoring its snapping mouth, moved not toward the Funhole—my first impulse, but none of that Brer Rabbit shit today, nice try but I’m not buying—but toward the door to open it, who gives a shit, who really cares anymore because I am TIRED, I am TIRED to DEATH and I yelled something, yelled as I pushed the skull at the door

and my hands went right through it, skull and all.

Malcolm shrieked. I heard the skull hit the floor of the hallway, felt something, Nakota’s slippery clutch most likely, as I pulled my own hands back through the seamless door. To stare at them, rocked back on heels and haunches, gaping like a monkey with a nuclear device. To stare particularly at the hole of my right hand and note, with a kind of dreamy detached nausea, the living leakage crawling up my fingers, painlessly chewing the flesh as it went.

Eating me alive.

And the more I watched, the less I feared. Because it really couldn’t get any weirder, now could it? Weirder or any worse, no. Just more of the same, world without end, Funhole forever.

Skin and bone, dissolving. Matter over mind.

Nakota pounding on the door, Malcolm yelling something about the skull. Other voices. I hoped Randy was there, it might make him happy to see his skull-thing capering around, baby’s first step and in front of company, too. I heard my own voice once removed, the mask issuing some kind of proclamation, hear ye hear ye, that guy in there just lost it for good.

Which was for once the truth.

Close by the Funhole, back curled C-shape and aching, red eyes so sleepless they rubbed against my lids like dry rubber, I sat watching the relentless creep of the fluid on my body, as if given free run it was going for broke: up, now, past the mountains of my knuckles, leaving a transparent reddish coating that was somehow not strictly devouring but dissolving the flesh beneath to form something—new.

All of which for some reason made me remember Nakota, the clot I had once caused to form on her sleeping shoulder; childish pique, the way you might deliberately spill some coffee in the house of someone you don’t like; just a little meanness. Maybe I had done a greater wrong than I knew. Not from her point of view —she would love it, probably had and just hadn’t bothered to tell me—but from my own. but it was kind of late in the day to worry about morals, or fairness, especially as regards Nakota, who considered the concept of fair play as quaint as that of true love.

Outside, the mask’s jabbering sermon droned on and on, swill unworthy of a TV preacher, twice as insulting because it was using my voice. Stabbed in the back by a broadcasting mask giving off bullshit the way garbage gives off a stink, attracting the same kind of shiteaters, all of whom were ten times scarier than me. On a good day. I wanted to tell them all to go home, that unwashed gaggle of the crouching faithful, imagining them slack-jawed in their bulky coats, grinning as they bit their nails, but they were too busy listening to Radio Free Funhole and besides, I had my own concerns. Selfish? Yeah, but then again I hadn’t been myself for some time. Ho-ho.

Up the hand. Watch it crawl. Blinking my burning eyes and I thought, Do you really want to do this? Do you even have a choice? Of course I had, we always do, isn’t that what free will is all about? Freedom of choice. Just like a beer commercial.

And all the while behind me the holy smoke rose, pervasive and praline-sweet, approval’s incense because apparently, finally, I was doing it right. Whatever the plan was, I was falling in with it. Maybe literally, someday? No, that’s too big a leap, too much faith for me because I had none, only the certainty, dry as my eyes, that things would continue just the way they were.

You would think, I thought, it would hurt more, feel more, something. But no. Just the march of fluid and the trickle of smoke, the drone outside and the mumble of the worshipers, stupider bastards there never were unless you count me, lying like a fetus beside the mother of all holes, watching myself be painlessly eaten alive, a living chrysalis. And proud of it, too, which was maybe the funniest part of all. Or the sickest. But it’s so nice to feel wanted, isn’t it.

I fell asleep, I must have, numb and dumb in the darkness with my tickled nose drunk on smoke and woke to Randy’s voice, saying my name with the insistence of a ringing phone. I still had no real sense of the passage of time, day or night: it was just lighter or darker or variations thereof. Now it was darker, definitely, and there were definitely more people outside. Lots more people, some of them loud, most of them clustered around the door; shit around an asshole, one might say if one were Nakota. They were talking to me, or more accurately the mask, which of course to them was the same thing, Nicholas Nicholas blah blah blah, mumble blurt and giggle and still Randy’s voice, harsher now: “Nicholas, man, are you okay? Nicholas!”

“Yeah,” and raising my hand I saw it coated to the wrist now, the congealing fluid a salmon color that was very beautiful if you could ignore its amazing textural mimicry of tinted chicken fat. It didn’t gross me out but then again by this point I was no man for the niceties anyway.

Wondering if he’d heard me, I said it again and louder, into a quiet, so quick it seemed artificial, was the joke on me again? Embarrassed, “I’m fine,” I said. “What’s going on out there?”

Commotion, sudden and vast for such a small space, war of voices saying my name and Randy’s bellow and somebody’s cry, elbow work, yeah, Randy’s fuse was getting shorter as the days went by, and so was mine. Manifesting in my case as extreme passivity. It really does take all kinds.

“Shut the fuck up\”

“Randy,” my mouth right by the door, “Randy?” and Randy’s shouted answer, “Tell them to shut up, man!” and so I said it, in my own voice.

And they listened. And obeyed.

Which made me feel nothing. I should have felt frightened, shouldn’t I? But I didn’t. Not nervous at the implications of control, not guilty, not even sneaky-pleased; the usual rules did not seem to apply. Maybe when you give yourself over to an anomaly it automatically negates all the rules? Certainly Nakota thought so, that was why she was so hot to be where I was now. One of the reasons anyway. Besides the fact that she had always considered herself the uncrowned queen of the bizarre.

But what she failed to notice, or maybe had and didn’t care, was that no rules also translates into, and past, no safety, to the chilly land where no one’s in charge and that most specifically means you. Or in this case, me. Maybe she’d thought about that, too, and just didn’t give a queenly shit. I did; not enough to stop, obviously, but enough to wonder, what would it be like to pass at once and finally into that daunting atmosphere, that place where the rug stays permanently pulled out from under you, where the murderous tilt is the lay of the land? How would it feel?

Still silent outside, except for Randy’s tired breathing, even a horse gets tired. I opened my mouth to talk to him and realized I was shaking.

Little fatty drops of fluid trembled pff my arm, dropped onto my knee and lay atop the rank material of my jeans like fastidious oil on water. The sense of people listening.

Randy spoke again, something about did I have enough to eat and drink and what was goin’ on in there anyway, man, what’s happening with you? Are you all right? “Been hearing some noises,” he said.

“Me too,” though I had no idea what he was talking about. “What’s going on out there?”

“Well for starts we got the usual shitload of assholes out here, Shrike’s friends, and they’re hanging on every word this fuckin’ mask has to say—”

“It’s not the mask talking!” A girl’s voice, nasally indignant, a seconding chorus and this time I said it louder: “Shut up!”

“Like I said, it’s a real crew out here,” and in each word I read Randy’s lessening control, scaring me because Randy was the one, now that Vanese was gone, the only one I could trust or depend on, “and plus which they keep watchin’ the fucking video when they’re not out here listening to this stupid-ass mask.”

The video, wonderful. “Randy, where’s the skull? Your steel skull?”

“Around the doorknob. I mean its mouth is. Kind of clamped around the knob.” A ghost of creator’s pride, I didn’t mention how glad I was to have it gone, or at least away from me.

Randy kept talking, I was glad he couldn’t see my yawn. Just so tired. Of talking, of listening. Tired of this smelly room, my smelly self, of the father of stinks there on the floor. Call me Nakota: What would it be like to go down there? Charnel house? Garden of unearthly delights? And why don’t you find out, you chickenshit? And tired, of course, of that, too. Speculation becomes meaningless when it never blossoms.

What will happen?

Because anything could happen. I could wake up and my hands could be alligators, I could roll over and find my internal organs turned to shrill and individual mouths, find myself turned to livid garbage, corroding on the bone like the slick pulp of rotten fruit, something that decency if not kindness commends to instant burial in a Hefty bag. Or worse. It was like falling in a bottomless pit, literally endless, exponential dissolution in as many ways. No end in sight. You might say.

As I lay, sunk and drifting, past hearing (if there was anything left to hear; the hall had gone silent some time ago), the odor of the Funhole changed, blending to a warmer reek, harsher, iron, stink like pain and what you do to get there. Hot smell.

And in the heated silence: giggling, slow and sly glissando, deliberate as the sensual strop of the knife, and I smiled too, scared smile, lips like rictus and the heels of my cold hands pressing into my eyes so hard I saw the familiar miniature constellation that upped my fear because it meant that some of my responses would, still, be normal, that even I wasn’t fucked up enough for what might happen, what this new malicious giggling might portend. What exactly would a process find funny, anyway? And no one could help me. And I couldn’t get away.

love you

And the cold rising burn of my erection.

And the sink of bile in the back of my throat.

It was hard to tell, then, if I was asleep or awake. Mostly awake, I think, because parts of me hurt, in various stages, feet, back, legs, neck. The hole that was my hand kept up an incessant mocking throb, just to remind me of the bad old days, you thought things were twisted then, huh? Huh.

From the hallway I heard nothing: not Nakota, not Randy or Malcolm, the Church of the Transcursing Dumbshits or the mask they worshiped, of course I was in a very poor position to call anyone dumb. All alone. In the dark. Serves me right, but would it have served me righter if I was smarter, or is this the real price you pay for not thinking things through? Driftwood, punished by a whirlpool.

As I lay adrift in that continuous night, I heard sounds that kept my eyes sealed, flutter and burn behind the thin shield of my lids, consciously abetting the lash crust of mucus.

Just in case.

“—cops, man! He could be dead in there for all we know!”

Nakota, calm and superior: “He’s not dead.”

“How the hell do you know?”

“How do you know he is?” Malcolm, the closest voice to the door. “It hasn’t been that—”

“It’s been three—”

A voice I didn’t recognize, it sounded drunk. “Guy been in there three days and counting.”

“Who’re you,” a sneer from Malcolm, “Mission Control?” and just to shut him up I spoke.

“I’m not dead,” I said, my eyes gently struggling to open, the lashes gluey with dried crumbly mucus. “Just blind.”

Not true: vision sharp but somehow still distorted, as if looking through heat shimmer or faintly bubbling water, the dirt and angles of the room newly crooked and vast; and with dry reluctance turning my sight to myself. And saw at once beneath the surface of my coated skin— and oh shit so much was coated now, both arms covered, shoulders, chest and back, so much had happened while I’d been away, While You Were Out—and what I saw was not my physiology, the humdrum process of blood and bones but what those blood and bones were becoming.

Had already become, in some spots.

Motes swarmed, slow dazzle, great glittering gouts of surges tiny as electric sparks, and where their waves touched became no shore at all, no blood and bone but part of the new, the latticing of some vast personal underpinning, I had been right to speculate on the worst.

I was becoming a process.

All bodies are, in some sense; engines driven by the health or disease of their owners, jackets of flesh that are the physical sum of their wearers. But to become your disease? To become the consumption itself?

You’re really fucked now, I told myself, too shocked to be frightened (but was I really? Tell the truth for once in your life), looking at all of me: see there, at the tips of my fingers, see those whorling specks? And there, in the bend of my elbows—flexing, staring—some bright new pockets as neat as the holes a gardener digs, ready and waiting to be filled; with what?

What am I, I thought, right now?

They were talking to me: “Nicholas.” Randy, too exhausted to be relieved, maybe he would rather I was dead, I imagined a lot of people might feel that way, and now let’s hear from their spokesperson: Nakota, peremptory, instructing me to say something, talk to them Nicholas, right, talk to the nice people as they talked at me, asked questions, but I held my hands up to the weak skittering light and watched their creature motions, especially around what had been the palm of my right hand, nexus for the change: see what happens when you let the devil in?

I started to cry.

Randy, yelling something but not to me. Nakota’s harsh answer, all her answers were. Turning onto my back, tiny hardened clumps on my lashes and my tears rolled, shiny little balls, across the floor to the Funhole, jumped in like cartoon swimmers into heaven’s Olympic-sized pool. I felt a cool convulsive movement in my bowels and I shit, once, a handful of little hard cubes against the seat of my crusty jeans, rolling as I moved, cute and painless down my pant legs, mute zircon shine on the dusty floor, tender by-products from the recently human.

Nakota. Her voice.

“Nicholas? Will you talk to me?”

No I won’t. Even though you’re the only one who wouldn’t back away screaming. The only one who’d like me better this way.

The mask spoke.

Like a tape jammed to ON, instant loud oration about flux, change, capital C, we must surrender to the Change, like telling Nazis we must corner the market in six-pointed stars, telling them—it seemed to me, though at this point I would win no points for accuracy—that what they least imagined, the points too far to see, they would reach, they would become. Not all, of course—what good is a religion, even a backdoor one like this one, if just anybody can go to heaven? What good’s a club if you can’t keep some people out? But most, all of whom greeted this screed with fervent revival moans, hungry bullshit eaters and their daily bread and I was on my knees, fists clenched and mouth wide, Get out of here get the fuck out of here but nobody heard me because I wasn’t making a whole lot of sound, I tried to scream but only hoarseness, maybe my vocal cords had spontaneously mutated to rubber bands or angry eels or something even less imaginable, and still I wept and still the mask talked and through it, the only one, Nakota:

“Nicholas,” with all the precious tenderness I could not believe, a depth of the love she had never felt or cared to, feelings like organs undeveloped, unmissed by her and unsuited, too warm for the cold world through which she moved, “Nicholas, let me in. Please. You need me now.”

And I wanted to.

I wanted to so bad I almost did. Because I was tired, you see, tired of being alone, of rolling through the darkness of my own change, of standing between herself and a consummation she had maybe been born for, far more so than me because I was just Joe Nothing, just Mr. Ordinary Asshole who by tripping had fallen in much too far, grappling in endless sloppy circles until I was so tired I almost went for the door and maybe even tried but tripped again, isn’t that just like me, fell on my face and my forehead hit the floor, it hurt, just like a regular person I had hurt myself. And I recalled, triggered sting of memory, an ice-pitted sidewalk outside somebody’s party and Nakota, fierce pratfall onto her ass, on her back, I heard the bony smack as she fell to lie mouth open, making a silent sound, and me, anxious scramble over to her, are you okay? And she reached up to my succoring hand and yanked me down, hard, I fell onto my knees and then I saw the silent noise was laughter.

And that was just like this.

But things were different, now; things had Changed.

No way. No fucking way.

Hands and knees and on my feet, braced as I rose, I was shaking from the inside out and I put my mouth against the door, lips mashed and moving against the wood, and I said, with the clear diction of absolute truth, “If you all don’t get your asses away from this door and out of this hallway I’m going to come out there and do things and I’m going to start with you, Malcolm,” and without thinking I reached out my hands

through the door

and grabbed hold of someone, I felt a headful of hair in my grip and I banged that head, boom, against the door, once again for good measure because I knew just by-the feel that it was Malcolm’s, knew it before his squeal and bucking jerk to escape and I released him, grinning to myself and glad to have hurt him, heard Nakota’s happy gasp and felt, yeah, her touch on mine, felt the strong greasy heat of her greed and “I’ll break your fucking hands,” I said, and squeezed, brutally hard, kept squeezing, increasing the pressure until she finally screamed, till I felt her body, independent of her will, try to get away. And I let her go. With regret. Because no matter what it still felt good to touch her.

“Everybody but Randy,” I said, “get the fuck away from this door.”

A pause, then a timid voice saying, “Randy ain’t here.”

“Then go get him, asshole.”

A longer pause, unsteady shuffling, they wanted to stay but they were scared. The head cleared its throat and I reached up, pounded as high as I could, where I thought the chin might be.

“You shut up too,” I said, and it did.

“Nicholas?” Randy’s voice, shaking. He hadn’t gone far. Maybe he’d been hanging around to watch me rip off Malcolm’s head, a pleasant thought but more effort, etcetera. Had to save my strength, after all. Because it wasn’t after all, not yet, stay tuned.

I was shaking too, I had to sit down, I was sitting down without trying, slipping bonelessly to the floor. I tried to peek under the door since I was down there anyway, but all I could see was the toes of some oily biker boots.

“Nicholas? It’s me. Randy.” A pause. “Shrike said you broke her finger.”

“Good. Next time it’ll be her neck. Are all those assholes gone?”

“Pretty much.” Cautious. Like talking to a. tiger. “What happened?”

“I’m tired,” I said. “I lost my temper.” My hands lay clasped like prayer, dovetailed by my tired face and I looked at them, the maggoty dance of the shine inside and with a snarl of exhausted disgust ripped them apart, one from the other and a gluey sucking sound and one of the fingers of my right hand appeared to adhere to my left and Randy was saying something, I didn’t hear him, I started to laugh from the perfect depths of my revulsion as the motes beneath my skin roiled and dribbled into a living tattoo: NAKOTA.

“Eat shit,” I said.

“What?”

“Nothing. Randy, can you board up the door or something?”

“I’ll be doing good if I can keep the fucking cops away, man. You don’t know what it’s like out here, people are just acting crazy, you know? Just crazy. The neighbors, Shrike’s fucking friends, everybody. I can’t do anything about it, I can only kick so many asses.” His voice still trembled, the vibration of depleted anger, weariness, even tears. The idea of Randy crying was strangely pitiful, maybe because tears were nothing I thought of in conjunction with Randy.

“It’s that goddamned Malcolm,” he said. “He’s worse than she is, you know? Shrike, she’s just out there, you know, like a cat or something, you know how a cat will do when it wants out? Just keeps hanging around the door and scratching and crying till you get tired of its bullshit and just let it out.”

Or in.

“But him, he keeps stirring them up, you know, showing them the fucking video and talking about how the head’s some kind of hotline to the Funhole and he’s the man with the clue. And then he was getting into this shit that you’re dead, you know, since you’re in the picture now, and-”

“What?”

“The video—I saw it too. You’re in it now.”

Dull fear, what was left to be afraid of, now? Faint embarrassment. “What am I doing?”

“Changing, kind of. Getting—lighter. Like you can see through you, you know? What’s the word, transparent, yeah. You’re transparent.”

“Do I say anything?”

“No. You really don’t see much of you,” oh boy, a joke? No. “Just enough to know it’s really you. Shrike freaked, at first. Malcolm was pissed, but now he’s got it all turned around that only he knows what the hell’s going on.” He took a deep, deep breath, like trying to put out a fire from within.

I didn’t want to talk about the video; instead I asked him, “What does Vanese say about all this?”

“Vanese.” Another breath. “She won’t talk to me. I call, she hangs up, or her mother says, Don’t call her no more, she’s upset. I know she’s upset, man! Last time I saw her, she said, Don’t come by me anymore until all that shit’s over with. She said, I don’t need that shit.”

I sat back, silent, at my usual loss, no advice from me, the perpetual fuck-up and wasn’t most of it my fault, anyway? Wasn’t it? Self-pity is a potent luxury but I didn’t have time, maybe I didn’t have enough self left to feel sorry for. Maybe I never had.

I said, “I’m sorry about that,” and I meant it. And the selfish part of me muttered, If only the positions were reversed, if only it was Nakota who would have nothing to do with all of this. Which was of course ludicrous, if she had wanted that she wouldn’t have been Nakota. My love, insatiably drawn to all that was lowest, cruelest, most dreadfully inverted. Like me.

Randy was still talking.

“—outside, right? And Malcolm, you think he’d go along with it just for the crowd control, right? But he won’t. Like he’s a fucking priest or something.”

“Malcolm,” I said, “tempts me.”

“Yeah, I saw the tail end of that, what you did. Wish you’d’ve pulled him all the way in_T man.” And then what I had known was coming: “I don’t know how much longer I can put up with him. Or any of this. It’s not, I just want to have some kind of—it’s just too weird, Nicholas. I mean I thought I wanted things to be weird, but not like this.” Half a laugh, so tired. “I mean, it’s been like three days since I even went to work. I’m gonna get fired, if I’m not already.”

“And Vanese,” I said.

“Yeah. Vanese.”

Flexing my palmless hand, head bent and contemplating the fresh jelly of my bush-league stigmata. My roving finger appeared to have reattached itself when I wasn’t looking. Fingers do the darnedest things.

“Randy, maybe it’s—”

“I know,” cutting me off, “I know what you’re gonna say. But you don’t understand, you don’t know what it’s like out here. I mean, Shrike’s pretty weird now, I don’t even know if she’s been paying the rent or what. Maybe the manager’ll try to evict her. The neighbors are getting pretty fucking tense, maybe somebody’ll call the cops. You don’t want the cops, Nicholas, you don’t know what they’ll do to you. They’ll, maybe they’ll, put you somewhere, you know?”

“Somewhere like a hospital ward?”

“Maybe somewhere worse.”

Like a body bag? If I had enough body left to bag, ho-ho and who gives a shit, you’re probably talking to the only one left who does. Except Nakota. Who would cheerfully and in an instant climb over my struggling body to get to the Funhole, or if that was denied her, then vivisect me if they’d only let her make the first cut.

“Randy, who cares about all that shit. Just go.”

7 care!”

Think Malcolm, I thought, think shitty. Better yet, think Nakota. “You can’t do anything about anything anymore,” in my coldest tone. “I’m in charge now.”

“Oh nice try,” I could almost see him shaking his head. “But I’m not that stupid.”

“Then don’t be stupid. Go home.”

“How do I even know if it’s you talking anymore? How do I know anything?”

And he cried, I could hear it in his voice, and something in me wriggled and cracked, bleeding like broken skin, tears leeched from me and falling to lie in minute and glossy circles on the floor by my face. “Randy,” I said when I could talk, “go and get a mirror. A little mirror. Okay? Okay, Randy?”

No answer but I heard him walk away. In the silence, wondering if he would come back, the miserable wriggle of my billboard skin spelling things I refused to read, words or bullshit runes or whatever nasty jokes could scrawl and spin in glyphs I could not help but understand if I looked. If I looked.

So I didn’t, sat instead eyes closed and waiting, and finally Randy’s voice. Maybe it really was as long as it seemed.

“I got the mirror,” he said.

“Okay. Lay it down, under the door—right, like that, a little more. Now,” positioning myself, careful now, “look at me.”

Silence, then, with hesitation: “’S too dark, man. I can’t see anything. Turn the light on, if it still works.”

It did.

Randy’s wordless sound. And it hurt, oh it hurt to hear that sound and know what I really looked like, what I was like now, so far beyond any kind of fringe that even someone like Randy, neck-deep from nearly the beginning, could still flinch, could still turn away like a gawker who’d suddenly seen more than he’d bargained for: I mean I don’t mind a good wreck but did you see that guy with half a head, I mean shit

Did you see that guy who’d turned into a walking hole?

“Nicholas,” shakily, a little farther back from the door now and I doubted he knew he’d done that, stepped away, it was a visceral move. “Are you okay?”

“No.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Does what hurt?”

“That—stuff. All over you.”

“No.”

He was quiet. My skin prickled, itched as more fluid gurgled down my legs, I could feel its jaunty ooze. I waited, riding the silence between us, the pause before good-bye, thinking of so many things to say.

Finally, “Well,” I said. “Tell Vanese I said hi.”

“I will.”

“Don’t tell them you’re taking off, okay?”

“No, hell no.”

And no more farewell than that—what exactly did you expect, I asked myself, mocking my own letdown: a manly exchange of fluids, a glorious speech at death’s door? “I will always remember you, brave Nicholas”? Shit Gone. Back to Vanese, and work, his art and his beer and watching TV at night and driving his tow truck too fast. Back to the real world, the one place I wanted, now and belatedly, most to go, the norm and the safe thing denied me and as I mourned in silent envy I was glad he had. In any good disaster there are always at least a few survivors, and now the both of them could tell that story, back and forth in all its gaudy bleakness, and be certain of at least one other’s sure belief.

And me, alone now. With Nakota, her ruthless single-mindedriess, idiot Malcolm and their hair-trigger delusionist cadre. And the talking mask, one face for them and its secret one for me. And the skull on the doorknob and the bubbling fluid eating me more than alive, turning me into the world’s ugliest ambulatory chrysalis, far less than human but still feeling like one.

And the Funhole, never forget it, wellspring of all situations and the pivoting center around which this dark circus revolved, drunken orbit of ferocity, fear and hunger, simple stupidity and desire.

But I’m so tired, I thought.

Time, going by, and sounds. In the hall. And I closed my eyes and thought I smelled meat, roasting. Burning.

And as if on cue, Malcolm’s triumphant voice, so loud that I twitched, weak nervous startle: “We’re takin’ the door off now, Nick,” excited, grinning no doubt that special dipshit Malcolm grin, staying prudently out of reach. And Nakota, cold in the background and directing somebody, a bunch of somebodies, the brains behind the motion which was no big surprise, crazy or not she was still the only one out there who had any brains at all.

Talking, mumbling, voices as confused and bumbling as their owners, Nakota’s commands and Malcolm’s dumb forever override, do this do this no don’t do that. Get another board. Put that thing down. Everybody listen to me!

“Nakota,” I said, from the depths of my exhaustion. “Leave it alone, okay?”

Malcolm, yelling back: “Shut up, asshole! We’re comin’ in!”

And I was tired of Malcolm, you know? That excuses nothing, I realize that, but I was just so tired of the endless yammer that was Malcolm, a voice with legs, and I put one arm, right arm, through the door and caught at something, sohieone, wriggling and squeaking and I turned it loose again, hunting, the way you feel around without looking into a bag or a drawer, you’ll know when you have what you’re after.

And I did.

And I squeezed.

Screaming.

“Let him go, Nicholas!” Nakota’s voice above the yelling, babble and confusion and something sweet between my fingers, “Nicholas! Let him go!” but I didn’t. No. Scaling up more octaves than you’d think the human voice could handle. Jerking and bumping up against the door, less screaming now, just a kind of low-pitched gagging sound that went on and on, annoying as a running toilet in the middle of the night, gurgle and burble and finally it stopped.

Silence. My head hurt, and I felt awake, suddenly, and as suddenly ashamed, another stupid temper tantrum. And then Nakota, enraged: “Oh good work, dickhead, I think you just broke the asshole’s neck.”

Oh, God.

Deep fundamental nausea as I snatched back my hand, heard through the door the hurricane sibilance of her curses, the thump and stutter of her drag-away disposal, letting my own body droop in closed-eyes shock as behind me not a sound but a blossom as fragrant as a good solid belch.

And on the wall above the door, a confusing swivel of light and the mask turned inward now, purpose served perhaps and free now to follow another agenda: looking down, facing me with the face from the video, full-blown and absolute, all nothing, all mine.

Well, his neck wasn’t broken. But he was plenty pissed off, and scared, which made him more pissed off, and it didn’t help when Nakota laughed through the door to me, “Hey Nicholas, you know what? He shit his pants! His expensive leather pants,” giggling her dry endless giggle, even I felt sorry for him. Though I snickered too, which didn’t help and so on.

But shaken or not, pissed or not, he still had theories, he still had words; even death couldn’t take words from Malcolm, I was convinced of that. Not that I had a second engagement in mind, oh no, I had promised myself I would never touch Malcolm again. Or anyone else if there was any way, any way, I could help it. The way I had felt, the terrible sick shame, was deterrent enough; I never wanted to feel that way again. Even though, as Nakota said later/even if I had killed him it was “just Malcolm.”

Just Malcolm had, during an accelerated daylong nurse of his throttled windpipe, developed a new theory concerning me and my walk-on role in the video. “It’s a portent,” he told me through the door; as he spoke I had the impression that he stood on the balls of his feet, poised and fleetly nervous; maybe our brief choke festival was just what the doctor ordered; still I was out of the doctoring business for good. Let someone else improve his character.

“A portent,” again, and portentously, just to make sure I got it. “You’re fading, Nick, no pun intended.”

“I really don’t want to talk about this, Malcolm,” I said, in my new, polite way, distractedly eyeing the monochromatic fireworks going off in my left knee as the mask sneered down at me like a mocking mirror. “I really don’t have anything to say.”

“I wish you would both shut the fuck up,” said Nakota, not even brusque, “especially you, Malcolm. Nicholas, I’m only going to say this once.” Silence from the gathering of idiots, ringing her like scum. “We all know it’s me who should be in there. You even say it yourself, in the video. I’m a perfect candidate for a change. A becoming.”

“This,” I said, suddenly aware of my own anger, not hot but warm and chafing, an itch in my mind, “is like every stupid philosophy book I ever read in college, only worse. Next you’ll be saying it’s a big existential garbage can,” and I turned my back on the door, on the mask. “Why don’t you people go home?” I said. “And speaking of home, Nakota, when’s the last time you paid the fucking rent?”

“The rent?” Honestly perplexed. “Who cares about the rent?”

“I do.”

“If you care so much, why don’t you come out of there and do something about it?”

Not by the hair on my chinny-chin-chin, and you’re not as smart as you think you are, either. “You can sleep in the streets if you want, but won’t that impede your access, a little? Cramp your style?”

She ignored that, ignored me, began to talk again, rapid-fire histrionics and an offhand direction to somebody else, not Malcolm, do this or get this, just another in her unlimited supply of demands and I just stopped listening, I turned my face away and shut her off in my head. I’d rather remember you the way you were, Nakota, back when I could still stand you.

Leaning back, my changing body so much weaker now, bumping gently into an empty Ritz cracker box, the filmy plastic skin of a package of cheese, had I eaten those things? When? Was I still eating? Maybe the Funhole was feeding me, like a raven in the desert, maybe I was eating myself. Consuming myself, to feed the change? That would make sense, wouldn’t it.

So much sense, in fact, that the whole idea made me feel like puking, I didn’t want to think about it anymore. Lying flatter, in the dirt and sticky dust, my ear nudged by something pointy and soft and I saw the bear pad, and I smiled.

Empty pages. Better that way. I had had some ideas, hadn’t I, of writing more poems, sharp and deliberate prod to the reanimate corpse of my zombie talent, had I imagined a topical application of the bizarre might succeed where sheer bent-browed struggle had failed, who was I kidding? Not even me. So why deface the simplicity of a little bear pad with my bargain-basement angst, why try to describe the indescribable when I had completely failed to explicate even the known? Known, shit, even the boring.

I reached for the cover, to close it decently and for good, but my right hand stuck to the page, tugging at it and “Shit,” and instead of ripping it came away whole, and wet, big juicy Rorschach of red and on an impulse (oh really?) I pushed the torn page underneath the door.

“Here,” I said. “Make a speech about this.”

The quality of the silence that followed told me that this was an extremely bad move. Nakota’s “Hey,” and gleeful? Oh yeah. You bet it was a bad idea, you asshole, why do you persist in giving her ammunition when she can already blow your ass to hell with the stuff she’s got?

“Hey,” again, to them, “look at this,” and their delight in hers, probably none of them had brains enough to understand whatever it was she thought she saw there, the only symbolism they recognized was the meaning of the golden arches. But they chattered back and forth, one to the other and all to Nakota, who seemed to be ignoring everyone or at least spoke to no one,

not even Malcolm, whom 1 heard struggling for airspace: “But I think what it means—wait a minute, you guys, listen to me—I think—listen—”

And Nakota, feverish, implacable, all of her one tense tremble that I could feel, earthquake weather, in the surface of my skin, in the violin quiver of my loosening bones: “It’s the insects. Nicholas! It’s the insects, the same stuff that was on their wings. Runes, remember?”

Runes my ass, that’s what I’d said, and now when I did believe I had even less inclination to believe, more reason to, but in the end it was—it was—just more shit I didn’t want to know about, because why shouldn’t it be true? Exact minute replication, transmitted from my rotting hand, of the phantom scribbles on the backs of ruined bugs’ wings, surely that was a tiny piece of strangeness in this huge sprawl, I can do the White Queen one better, I can believe ten impossible things before breakfast and nine before my hand falls off completely. Trump that, Queenie.

“And Nicholas—” her fist on the door, here’s another queen. “I know how. “Queen of heat and brutal desire, of everything crooked and twisted and wrong, something very wrong about her voice, now, something ominous and ominously exultant. “It’s like a key,” as intimate as if she spoke into my heart, and I thought, She’s been right ail along. She’s the one who should be in here.

Then why not let her in?

Oh no, maybe I said it out loud, “Oh no,” laughing the way you do when you refuse completely. I moved, slow because it was difficult, as far away from the door as my exhausted muscles would take me—was it harder to move today than it had been yesterday, was that some kind of portent or just faulty memory and when was yesterday, anyway?

Back against the door, looking up once to see the nothing face above looking down at me, and I closed my eyes and started walking, not backward, but through my memory as if it were a house with many rooms, some small, some locked, some doorless, some with tenants so aggressive and powerful I crept past them in silence and hoped for their clemency. So many rooms, and Nakota in most of them, or all the ones that mattered, anyway.

Especially, of course, the rooms in the Funhole wing. Watch your step, please.

Her passion had always exceeded mine, her impatience; all the ideas hers, really, all the way back to the bugs in the pickle jar, through the video, and Randy, even Malcolm (though in the final analysis he was my mistake), all the plans and notions hers and me the straight man, stumbling after, and how not to fathom her ridden, enraged, by her own jealous want and that want turned foul as an old infection, as crusty as a sour boil as she watched me, always ahead of her, the chosen one who kept saying, “Who, me?” Me, the empty vessel; not you, dear, cold caldron of desire. Was that why it was me, after all? The perfect stooge and puppet, incapable at last not only of guiding but even holding the reins that had inexplicably been placed in my hand—but when had any of this shit been explicable? The real question wasn’t who but why me? But how do you get an answer from a process? And how delude yourself to trust it, if you got one?

I remembered her refrain, not plaintive but as wistful as she ever got, “What would it be like to go down there?” What would it look like? Alice’s rabbithole, we had called it in the very beginning, before we knew better, before she started to hate me. Still with all her poisonous excess, I could never have had a better, a more suitable companion, never someone else.

Another memory, did this really happen or did I only want it to: fucking her against the walls of the Funhole, telling the beads of her sweat like some strange rosary, her head hunched down and eyes closed like fists, her hips hard against me like a beating heart. Hair flying in my face, I always loved her hair, I always loved her. I always will. I always will.

So much of our time—not wasted, but spent, transformed, transfigured, what was her new word? Transcursion. Yes. A long transcursion, and maybe it was a waste, after all, but if it wasn’t for the Funhole, for all the grand compelling horror of its presence in our lives, would we have had any time together at all, would she have continued to bother with me, be my lover —however brief and ugly—again?

Let her in.

No. She’s mine.

“She-loves you,” the mask said, sweet duplici-tous reproach, but even I was too smart to fall for that bullshit. Love me, never, and we could never have been normal, greeting-card lovers, no walks in the park for us, she was definitely the midnight-shamble-through-the-graveyard type and very likely would not have permitted me to shamble with her unless it was at a decent two paces behind. I couldn’t mourn what would never in all the world have happened, but I felt the sadness, as if I could.

So much, missed, the time instead spent sitting in the dark and waiting for something to happen.

Something’s going to happen here.

Yelling outside and Nakota’s howl, nothing I wanted to hear so I put my hands, my slick and dripping hands against my ears, stuck them closed, stubborn and prim, gluey like blood and kept thinking, remembering, the times spent staring down into this blackness that had finally not only run my life but run it over, killed in effect not only the things that were my pleasures but the body that hosted those pleasures. And in return, gave me what? Fear.

The most potent of the gifts. And exhaustion, the grayest. “Nicholas,” her cold insinuating voice, but vibrating, prickling with a triumph that instead of frightening me confirmed in sorrow my blank new visions, my scary old thoughts, “Nicholas, I can read these runes. And I was right” Maybe she was.

Now there’s no one left, out there, to impede her with arguments or threats; now there’s only her tools and flunkies surrounding her. Irresistible force and immovable object, yes sir, that is my baby. In the end I never could, never had been able to stop her; I could barely slow her down. So why stick around for the main show? Why not just get it over with, once and for all and for good? love you better

Rising, my legs weak, all of me all a-twitter because I was (was I?) really going to do it this time, no more bullshit fuck-around, headfirst into the maelstrom. I couldn’t finally, stand— irony is everywhere—leg muscles in open rebellion, crawled instead past my old shiny pile of shit, crawling to the darkness, white as a maggot creeping onto the lip of a fabulous wound.

“Look out,” I said to no one.

Shaking, yeah, my arms unable to hold my weight, moving now on sheer willpower, humping boneless as a worm through the dust on the floor, the faint barefoot marks obliterated now by the labored smear of my passage. See, I can be determined too, I can work for what I want. Sweat on my nose, running slow and exquisite, cool and itchy and into my mouth and it didn’t taste salty, no, it didn’t taste like sweat at all.

Empty bottle of something rolling gently into my leg and my head so close, almost dangling over the open blackness, shivering, shivering, feeling a metallic cold against my skin and in my open mouth, impossible to breathe in that negative air.

But I don’t need to breathe, I thought, where I’m going.

And Nakota’s yell and her banshee laugh, too loud, much too loud and again that echo from the Funhole, twin to her voice, and I turned to see the door bowing inward, bending, like hot rubber and steam in my eyes, scrabbling to make the last few feet push that body, push that motherfucker to the limit, come on, and the mask crying out, “Come in! Come in!” and she there, coming at me, bending with a diver’s grace to insert herself, finally, into that big black hole, fuck it with her thin arrow of a body and her greedy smile and her dissatisfied grinning soul Prey and predator, all in one; eat, and be eaten.

“Look out,” she said, my last words but with an inflection I could never match, wide ferocious rapture and stepping onto me, it was deliberate, I know it was because it was her, all of her defined in that gesture and I grabbed her ankles right above her sneakers, sunk my hands, my strong new rotten hands into her flesh and squeezed, crying out as she did not, squeezing all the way to the bone. Feeling the pivot and gash of her tendons, the slippery juice of her blood, crippling her backward as the bones warped and splintered and, finally, her shriek, as wet a cry as I had ever feared hearing, and I saw the bright betrayal in her eyes, more monstrous even than the pain, the certain hatred that I was as she was and always had been, had been hiding my evil under the thinnest, strongest veil: of weakness. Nicholas Wiener. Cutting her off, literally, at the ankles.

“You cocksucking son of a bitch,” in the cold dull voice of profound shock but there wasn’t room in her, now, for much more talk, sodden fall onto her back, whack like that night on the sidewalk and I lay panting and sluglike beside

her, I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry and I realized that whiny wrong-speed voice was me, I’m sorry about that too and “If you’re so sorry, “from her mouth but not her voice, oh no, not at all, “then why did you do it?”

“Why didn’t you just wait.” I whispered. My voice made tiny puffs of grayish pink in the air above the Funhole. “You wouldn’t have had to wait long.”

Which was true. Which was why there was no answer.

She was bleeding to death, I knew that, lying beside her in her blood and I tried to touch her, my red hands on her stumps, and with difficulty she opened her eyes, drunk voice (but her own), raised brows and all, “It said you were the key. It said you were what made it work.”

“I’m sorry.” I’m sorry, dear, that I cut your feet off, there really wasn’t a better way. “I never . ever wanted to hurt you.”

“Then you fucked up.”

Her feet were still there, strange in shoes on the lip of the Funhole and I saw something, dark, not so much arm or tendril as suggestion of both come slipping out, quick and steady

oh no you don’t oh no you don’t you greedy fuck, you don’t get any of her and I grabbed those feet, how fast I moved for someone recently paralyzed; you should have held on to me longer, asshole, it was you slowed me down to

give her time to get in, time to use the key you finally gave her. Some tricks can backfire can’t they, can’t they? “Can V they!” hugging the feet to me, cooling relics and she groaned, a sound almost theatrical in its volume, and I heard, from the hallway, the noise of someone throwing up, big irregular bursts of sloppy sound.

I put her feet down (a safe distance, I may add) and took her, held her, like a cold baby against my oozing chest, rocking her, back and forth and her eyes closing, go to sleep baby, go to sleep honey, her mouth opening, pulling down in a grotesque arc like a stroke victim’s, pulse wild and arrhythmic, eyes opening so so slowly and in a cracking voice she said, “You hurt me, Nicholas,” as if in the end she could believe every evil but that, and I cried onto her face and saw my tears, little and last brutality, become as they fell small Funholes, dark and tiny pits in the landscape of her skin.

Crying, and I kept rocking her, rocked her until I realized that she was dead. Her mouth stayed ugly, but when I closed her eyes, the lids obeyed, stayed shut. I kissed her face. It was so cold.

For a long time I held her. I knew it wasn’t really Nakota, not anymore, but even just her empty body gave me the last comfort I would ever have, and while I held her I could still make believe I didn’t know what to do next.

“Do you remember?” I asked her. Close to me, finally, whispering into her ear, I always held closer than she did, I always needed her more. “The rat, no, the mouse? I was pretty mad that day. And that hand, shit. You sure like to scare me, don’t you.”

Dead head lolling as I shifted position. Her tongue tried to get out of her mouth but I poked it gently back in.

“I wish we’d never made that video,” I said, stroking lightly at her hair, brushing through it with slow fingers: it was dirty, I realized with sad surprise, greasy. She was dirty, too. Some kind of crust in the corners of her mouth, dirt under her nails. It made me angry, thinking of her, so consumed by the Funhole that she forgot, or didn’t bother, to wash, to take care of herself in even the most rudimentary ways; who knows when she’d eaten, or slept. Little bag of bones, crazybones, she felt very light there in my arms. I kissed the hollow socket beneath her throat, cool pebbled skin under my mouth, pressed her head to my chest again.

“I wish we were somewhere else,” I told her.

Her flesh began to smoke, very gently, an odor like burned cotton candy, smoldered, but was not consumed. Cold burn, and from the Funhole my name, repeated sweetly, the refrain of an old, old jingle, a ditty, a dance.

I’ll take my time, thanks, I thought. I’ll come when I’m ready or not at all.

When I looked up I saw the rectangle of pale light, the open doorway, it seemed strange to see it after so long. And in it, dark in its light, Malcolm’s face, peering in at us.

Very yellow face, sick face. Maybe it was him I heard puking. Staring as if his eyes were pails scooping sights, water in the dry land of his life. He was a tedious son of a bitch and I was tired of him. I wasn’t going to hurt him, but I felt he deserved a little something.

“Come here, Malcolm,” I said.

He didn’t want to, of course. But he did. He was stupid, Malcolm, stupid like me but in a different way, more selfish, meaner. He would never have tried to stop Nakota, never understood that for her there would be no transformations, no ultimate transcursion to fulfillment: she was just another insect, just another fucking bug, there were no signs and wonders to be given to her. I knew those things. I loved her.

“Here,” I said. “I want to show you something.”

The mask smiled, showing teeth so crooked and bloody that even he should have been warned. But he didn’t look up, he didn’t see, instead stopped, stooping, to stare at Nakota, at me, the pestilential gallop of the fluid across my body. He stood awhile, looking, then, “You killed her,” he told me, as if I didn’t realize that.

“Yeah, I killed her…. I said come here,” and I grabbed him, he never expected me to be so fast, I grabbed his ankle and pulled him flat as a tablecloth, flat like a magic trick and dragged him, one slewing swoop, to the lip of the Funhole and I said, “Take a good look,” and shoved his head in, held it down like drowning, but I knew he wasn’t drowning. I knew he wasn’t going to die.

Finally I let him up.

Noises, coming from him, dry and gagging. Flailing his arms, reaching up to touch his face. His face—well, part of it was still normal, the eyes, but no transcursion for Malcolm. No nose either. He had a new mouth, though, something like a viperfish. You know what a viperfish looks like? Lots of teeth.

“You got your wish,” I said. “Now get the fuck out of here.”

He tried to say something back but it was going to take a long, long time for him to learn to talk with a mouth like that. I think he was crying. I didn’t see when he left.

Later, lots of noises in the hall. The door had shut itself, world’s fastest scar tissue, but I could still hear them, screams, arguing. Apparently Malcolm’s appearance had caused quite a stir. Some guy kept insisting on the police. “They can break down the door,” he said, over and over. “They can just break down the fucking door.”

So can you, I thought, but I didn’t say it. I was done talking to people.

Maybe the police are coming, or the manager, or whoever owns this building. I don’t know for sure, I think they are, but then again I haven’t exactly been paying attention. I’ve been busy.

After I got Nakota arranged the way I wanted her, safe there in the corner with hands at her sides, I just stopped thinking about anything. Or worrying. Things for me are very simple now, reduced to two ideas, or maybe the double sides of one.

I can never come out.

So I guess I’m going in.

Not right away, though. This fluid is moving so fast, now, my own personal tidal wave and I want to wait until I’m covered, till I’m coated like a bloody blade of glass, before I go. I’m not absolutely sure, of course I have my theories even if I’m not Malcolm, but I don’t think it can hurt, anyway. And if somebody, police or whatever, gets here before then, so what. By the time they figure out how to handle me, the icky-sticky man, I’ll be gone.

Don’t wish me luck. All I want is a smooth ride.

There’s still one thing I don’t know, though, and with Nakota gone there’s no one left to help me speculate: all along she called me the catalyst, said it wouldn’t work without me; she said I was the key. But what happens when you put that key in the door? Does it lock, safe and snug? Does it close like water, rushing absolute and smooth to heal the gap, sealing over as if the empty spot had never been? What pretensions I have are something less than grand; I’m not much and I know it, so there’s no question of hubris-when I say that I’m what it wants, even what it, maybe, came for—the why, of course, is beyond me, always will be and I don’t care. All that’s left for me to do is put the key in the lock, and close this door for good.

Although Nakota, if she were here enough to talk, might propose something different, might suggest that the same key that locks a door can open it, finally and wide.

But worst of all, the darkest part of me suspects a truth so black it turns my nebulous fears of a Funhole somehow empowered and unleashed by my addition to the laughable specter of an underbed bogeyman: what if it is me? What if somehow I’m crawling blind and headfirst into my own sick heart, the void made manifest and disguised as hellhole, to roil in the aching stink of my own emptiness forever? Oh Jesus. Oh God that can’t be true.