The Cipher

5

When Nakota found I planned on ac-tually staying, as much as possible, in the storage room, to watch beside the Funhole, I saw for once her complete and enthusiastic approval; it was a disconcerting thing. Vanese thought it was a terrible idea, tempting fate on a daily basis. Randy was horrified.

“That’s suicide, man!”

“Shut up,” Nakota said. She was smiling. “He knows what he’s doing.”

Actually I didn’t, not entirely, but I knew what I had to do and this was it. I didn’t think of it as suicide or even particularly dangerous, although that was arguably a dumbshit thing to think in view of past occurrences. I just knew that I was going to do it.

Around the living room, morning-after faces on Randy and Vanese; Nakota of course like the cat that just ate shit. Randy in particular looked utterly bleached, like a dried-up chicken bone, Vanese had looked better in last night’s dark but she still looked pretty good, even scared, even mad as when she turned on Nakota and said, “Why don’t you stop badgering him and go stick your own head down there?”

“Why don’t you mind your own business?” loftily, cream-fed queen too cool to bicker with the rabble.

“He’s not your business. Nobody’s your business, you’re too worried about your own ass. What you want.” Vanese was really pissed. I thought she was going to start swinging or something.

“It’s nobody’s business,” I said, quietly, it was hard to talk this morning. My instant coffee tasted like the devil’s asshole. I drank it anyway. All that blood and beer, and half a pound bag of Raisinets, little hamster turds bubbling in my stomach like animate shit. “Nobody has to watch out for me.”

“Well she sure won’t.”

“Nurse Nancy,” Nakota’s grin. “Little Miss Pop-up Book. Vanese, don’t you have somewhere to be?”

“I gotta get to work.” Randy, shaking his head, suddenly as miserable as he was last night, surveying me on his way to the bathroom. “You don’t look real good, man,” he said, but sadly, a long sad piss without closing the door. Vanese got up, joined him, closed it for him.

“What a pushy bitch,” Nakota said, but still coolly.

“Oh come on.” At once I felt irritated with her. “You know she’s right. Why be pissed about it?”

“I’m not pissed,” dismissively, getting up to hunt for matches. She blew smoke at me, smiled with her blue-white teeth. “I’d like to get the camcorder, if I can. I think this needs to be recorded, I—”

“What’re you, Wild Kingdom?” Vanese again. Randy was slicking his wet hair back with long nervous strokes. He nudged her and she stopped.

“Take care, man,” he said to me, and then in passing, “Mind if I bring another sculpture?”

Vanese stopped like slammed-on brakes. “You too,” she said to him, with a disgust so palpable I felt obscurely flattered. “Some friends.” She walked out without him.

“Bring one if you want,” I said.

Embarrassed now a little. “Maybe tomorrow.”

As they left, Nakota smirked. “Short leash,” she said, lighting up another of her shitty cigarettes.

“Just shut up for once,” I said. All of me, the beaten parts, ached with a slow bruisy throb. Vanese had made my bandage too large and too tight, unwieldy, it chafed the skin of my wrist so

I pulled it off, lay my hand palm-up on the table, sat with eyes shut and breathing quietly until Nakota said, “Look.”

I looked. Fluid was seeping slowly from my hand and wiggling like sperm across the table.

“Shit,” Nakota said admiringly.

I closed my eyes again.

My preparations for this one-floor pilgrimage were pretty slipshod, but again, that was sort of typical and, untypically, I knew I wouldn’t be needing much. The proverbial pot to piss in, or on, depending on my aim; a pillow and blanket; pen and paper, unlined drawing paper, a big pad of it bought at the drugstore, it was meant for kids. It had a bear on it Nakota started to make fun of the bear and I told her to go fuck herself, right out loud in the store, I said if she lived to be a thousand she would never begin to approach the unconscious purity of that bear.

“Well, that’s your department, isn’t it?” It took me a while to figure out that she meant unconsciousness, not purity, but it should have been obvious.

Dressing in decent black for work, brushing her hair, she asked what I was going to do with the paper. Don’t know, I told her. I just feel like I need it. She put on her sneakers. They sagged at the sides. “You must walk funny,” I told her.

“Funny, right.” She was working more hours now, had to, to pay for the flat. She always bitched about how crummy Club 22 was and how the only people who ever came there were career alcoholics, which I maintained was a redundancy, and besides she was far too temperamental to ever work at a decent place. She was unimpressed with my reasoning. As usual.

“You going in there tonight?” she wanted to know. Pulling on her crusty sport coat, a castoff, I later found, of Randy’s. Pushing hair out of her eyes. Her hair was getting longer; I liked it. I didn’t mention it because if I did she would cut it at once. “Will you be in there when I get home?” She hated to miss a minute.

“No. I’m going to watch the door tonight, see who goes by there or what.” We’d discussed it, she and I, not a few times; seeing the cleaning stuff so dirty, so completely undisturbed, had convinced us that no one used that room anymore. Used it for storage, anyway. If there were other devotees, well. It’s a fact-finding mission, I had told her, with grave humor. If there are cults operating here, I should know about it. Maybe they’ll worship you as a god, she said, with one of her little sneers. Maybe they will, I said; it was a joke but I didn’t laugh.

After she left I carried my stuff downstairs and inside, careful not to look too long at the dark serenity beyond, careful not to linger. But: what are you scared of? I thought, why so cautious when that’s the very thing you’ll be doing for the next week, weeks, whatever, for who knows how long. For however long it takes. Whatever it is.

Still I hurried. Shut the door. Then sat, ragged towel discreetly folded beneath my soon-to-be-numb ass, on the freezer-cold landing, eyes half-closed, typical empty slouch like most of the people who lived there; we used to joke that in my building, the tenants were the vacancies, and lucky for me it wasn’t hard to play at being nothing.

I figured no one would notice me and I was right. I sat there for most of the day, leaving once or twice to piss, get a cup of coffee, run some hot water over my hands just for the painful pleasure of flexing them for a minute or two. Then back to my station, observing the people who stepped past and around me as if I were a thoughtlessly discarded bag of thankfully odorless trash. Which was okay by me. As people passed I watched them, my covert gaze and wondering, Do you know about it? Have you ever opened that particular door, have you ever even noticed that it’s there? Skinny girl in too big dress, old man with Brillo sideburns, how about you? How about you, guy with firestorm zits and black leather, looking like you’d like to step on my hand, there, as it lies so close to your bootheels? Are you going to? You won’t like the stain, believe me.

By ten o’clock I was satisfied that our original conclusions were correct, but I had one more test to try, one I couldn’t make till morning so, unbending joints and tendons as unwieldy as rusted hangers, I lurched gently upstairs to sprawl on the couchbed, massaging my numb feet and watching the tail end of a documentary about wasps. It was actually pretty interesting. I liked the male wasps, the sunning stud wasps on sycamore leaves, tiny terrorists taking the air. Best of all though was the wasp beetle, whose yellow and black coloration mimics that of the wasp, no real terrorist at all but merely masquerading. The kinship of the image made me smile; it reminded me of myself.

Nakota announced her arrival by some five-star bitching, everybody was assholes, her boss was an asshole, the customers were the biggest assholes on earth. Apparently the big ordeal was some guy puked on the bar and she had to clean it up. I laughed, which only made things worse but I didn’t especially care.

“Go ahead and laugh, you stupid shithead,” she said, blowing smoke at me. Bitterly, “It was all green.”

“Listen,” nudging her, “you know what? I sat out there ail day and I didn’t see anybody pay the slightest bit of attention to the door.”

“Good,” but still pissed, wanting to find something to complain about even in that, not ready to be glad about anything yet. “When’re you moving in?”

“I have one more thing to try, tomorrow morning. We’ll see how that comes out.” Actually it was pretty mundane, but a good idea, I thought, a commonsense thing to do, the thinking of which pleased me. Early the next morning I called the building manager, a guy I had seen exactly once, left a message I was having some trouble with the pipes in my kitchen and would he please send somebody around to look at them; I gave the number of the apartment nearest the storage-room door. It was the building’s only storage room, we had early on made certain of that. Not that it truly mattered: nothing in the Jbuilding had ever been repaired or replaced within living memory, there was certainly no live-in maintenance man, and the clientele being what they were, no one was going to bitch too much about anything in return for the simple security of being left completely alone.

I sat in my accustomed spot and waited to see if anyone would come looking, for tools, whatever: the quintessential fool’s errand maybe but maybe I was quintessential suited for it. And then again, what else did I have to do? Watch the video?

All day, nothing, or nothing but Nakota’s escalating impatience, like sitting next to a jiggling container of acid; unstable. When she left for work we weren’t speaking, which was restful, and we weren’t speaking much anyway considering I was on the landing most of the day. Evening, I went in, not satisfied but resigned to my results: there was nothing in my upcoming vigil to fear but the Funhole itself.

I drank so much hot coffee, cup after cup, wanting to pour it directly on my aching stone-cold ass to speed the thaw, that I knew I wouldn’t sleep for hours, maybe till morning, which was okay because a day of sitting, two days really, is not exactly exhausting. I watched the news with the sound off. It was more frightening that way but more obscurely comical: Was this flat-faced white man, sweating in his suit, perturbed about a big matter or small, time or money, life or death? Was this tight-assed anchorwoman’s oblique frown in response to a football score or a natural disaster, was it the passing of a tyrant or a kidney stone that caused her smile?

Halfway through the phone rang; I. expected Randy but got Vanese. Long pauses in her speech, she was diffident, asked how I was doing; I had to smile, I hardly remembered my bruises. Being hurt was no big thing and I wanted to say so, but it sounded so he-man I couldn’t. Instead I told her about my new system for watching the news. It made her laugh, a little, but she wasn’t really calling to talk.

Finally, after a longer pause: “You didn’t do it yet, did you?”

“No.” I felt like a doctor, trying to soften the report of an incipient malignancy. “Maybe tomorrow.”

“You ought to think this through, Nicholas. I mean I know it’s not my business, but I saw, well you know what I saw.”

I was what you saw that scared you, I was the thing you don’t want to mention. “Vanese,” as kindly as I could, “don’t worry about it. Really. Nothing’s going to happen, okay?” It was a stupid lie and we both knew it, and it killed the conversation. After I hung up I sat in the dark wondering how I could inspire worry, why she would bother to call. Older-sister syndrome, yeah. She probably sat around worrying about stray dogs running loose on the freeway, too. And then I was ashamed, to think something so cynically dismissive of her kindness, was I that big a shit that I couldn’t even appreciate simple human concern?

It helps, I told myself, to be human in the first place, and then of course in walked Nakota to further prove my lack of humanity. “Well?” she said, and, “Nothing,” I said. “I start tomorrow.”

It sounded like I just got a job or something. Kiss me, honey, I’m off to the Funhole.

She smiled, blue teeth, sparkling eyes and all. A celebratory blowjob, perhaps, or at least a surcease from bitching? Yes. And no, but as I lay there, her mouth upon me, my eyes almost closed and skating on the verge, I thought of how I might feel that same time tomorrow, or next week, or whenever whatever epiphany I sought finally overtook me, and to my distress this idea, this disintegration, triggered my orgasm and I cried out as I came, then closed my eyes tight, tight, if I can’t see the monster then it can’t see me. But after all I was my own monster, wasn’t I.

“Shut up,” I said aloud and to myself. Nakota did not speak, ignoring me, intent on her own orgasm; she probably wouldn’t have answered me anyway. I felt a passionate impulse to cry, hard tears that would hurt like splinters, coming down. I didn’t. But the want stayed with me, hour after hour as Nakota lay asleep beside me, skinny jigsaw form blanketless in the cold and that burning, burning in my throat.

And woke in the night to find myself, crouched, lips , open like some mindless nursling, hot face close upon the cool glass of the shining screen as Nakota had done before me, but in—and I knew with a certainty past instinct —much more intimate union. And the figure upon it, dissolving, transforming, crooning in soundless glee as it moved to press, perhaps, its empty cheek upon my own.

“Huh,” no word, just barely sound, a huffing groan of shock as if, waking, I found myself thoughtfully tilting an acid beaker, about to drink a vial of virus. Jerking backward and away, a clumsy stutter of movement and I sat back, hard, fresh and smelly sweat on the shiver of my skin, and behind me something, a beer can, fell with a soft metallic crash; Nakota heard nothing, slept on, skin and bones in slumber.

And the image a glimmer, the pure malignancy of its darkness suddenly abloom in comic flickerings, but hey! that’s not all, folks. Left-handed, I shut off the TV, hurried back to bed to lie helpless and awake, watching the screen with one sideways eye, the way a dog watches the foot that kicks it, the way the insect watches the huge avenging hand.

Supplies, yes, my pot and blanket and pad of paper, creeping off in the dark dawn—I hadn’t slept and finally didn’t want to, what better way to approach the Funhole than with aching eyes and preternatural insomniac nervousness. Wrapped in my blanket, the pad to my chest (bear side in), I sat with my back to the door and thought, too embarrassed to say it aloud: Well, here I am.

Here I am.

Dusty floor. Randy’s sculpture. A smell like, God help us, baking bread, a robust yeasty stink, good enough to eat. A very thin bug, all minute feathery legs, ran a wide path around the Funhole. I watched it go, wondered suddenly why I had so rarely seen insects, mouse droppings, any indication of life that should surely have flourished in a room so undisturbed, why wasn’t there a shitload of cobwebs here? Ever? And of course I knew why, stupid questions to pass the time until, what. Until you’re assumed in a pillar of cloud, until all the blood in your body turns to gold, until you go crazy from your own dumb solitude and throw yourself in a grand suicidal gesture not down the hole but out a friendly window?

What a melodramatic asshole I was turning out to be.

I took out the bear pad and started doodling, and the next thing I knew Nakota was kneeling before me, bright eyes and shaking my shoulder, hunting no doubt some kind of transformation. “Well?” she kept saying. “Well?”

“Well nothing.” I was exhausted and pissed, all I wanted to do was sleep. “Let me sleep,” I said, and pushed at her, it was like pushing away a nosy determined dog. “Just get the fuck out of here and let me sleep,” and I pushed her again, harder, and she slewed sideways, making no motion at all to arrest her slide, ended splayed before the hp of the Funhole with a nasty smile on her face.

“Good move,” she said. “That was a close one, wasn’t it?”

“Who gives a shit,” I said, and meant it, meant it too when I said, consciously cruel, “It doesn’t want you anyway, Nakota. Shrike. Jane. It wants me.”

And it was so. And it was said to hurt her. Which it did.

And I didn’t feel bad. Which scared me, as much as the sudden rich throb of my wound, an approving twinge, gladhand so to speak and remorsefully, I reached out for her, saying something, I don’t remember, and she took my proffered right hand and squeezed, hard and vicious, driving her fingers into the most painful circle of my flesh, squeezed till I literally gasped and in blind reaction hit out at her, hit her in the face. I looked at my hand, horrified to see my fingers spotted with her blood.

“Congratulations,” she said, and I saw she was laughing.

“Please,” I said. “Please just go away.”

She did, but not for minutes, long minutes with her bright eyes watching me as I assumed my sorrowful crouch, sat with head finally averted so I did not have to see. When she left I checked the door, could it be locked from the inside? No, or the outside either. I would have to fix that.

When I slept again my dreams were painless, oddly dry for such a literal position, there on the lip, the rim, yeah, of a bottomless drink of dreams. Dumb stuff: about my car, a movie I’d watched with Nora, a beach I’d once slept on, wrapped in some woman’s worn-out rain poncho. That last dream was more vivid, when I woke it was to the scent of the plastic poncho, the cold gritty rasp of the sand against the back of my hand, I.had used it for a pillow. How cold it had been that morning, gray unspectacular dawn and me standing, weaving, still half-high and pissing into the calm waters of the lake. Up the hill to the all-night party, which by that time had degenerated into three drunk women talking about TV shows and a guy passed out on the front porch. I had found a bed and slept in it, and in four hours woke much as I felt on this Funhole floor, cramped and more exhausted than when I had lain down. The bear pad pressed, now, into my cheekbone, and I cuddled it like a toy as I fell back to sleep.

Hunger woke me the third time, my body clock saying it was probably afternoon. Nakota had gone to work. In the empty flat I made a shitty meal of burned eggs and half a bowl of vegetable soup, there was hardly anything to eat but I could hardly complain since I hadn’t been to the store in, what? Days definitely, probably longer, who knew what Nakota was eating. The flesh of others. After spending all that time in the dark, it was hard to think of going out, of venturing into the frigid day. Maybe tomorrow.

Cautiously, who knew what I expected, I turned on the TV. Nothing not normal. If I stayed in the storage room at least I’d never have to see the video again, unless of course it started projecting itself on the walls, my own personal drive-in, stop it, just stop it. On the news they told about a man who had had a stroke at the wheel of his car and as a result flattened two kids on bikes. Three people dead and nobody to blame.

Lying on my back on the couchbed, one hand behind my head, feeling grubby and too listless to actually do anything about it, and thinking I could hear music, somebody’s radio, a tune with a bass so subliminal that I could not hear it, could barely feel it as a whisper in my bones. Maddeningly beautiful, and faint as an insect choir, like standing in the dark and glimpsing— the barest peripheral, an image behind your eyelids—the passing of your one desire, close enough to nuzzle if you could only fix its motion, see it all the way.

Fainter. And nobody’s radio.

Funhole music.

I hear you.

Back then to the dark, boneless slump before the hole, the gloryhole, lying beside it like a lover too timid to reach for what is offered. God it was cold in there. Gray light coming in under the door. And that sound, no more distinct for proximity, same sweet ghost howl not so much siren song as the song that charms sirens. Pillowed again with the bear pad, all my body sore still from the vigil. Aching in my hand like the beat of my heart.

And if I slept, it was a sleep like fugue, and in that sleep Randy’s sculpture began to twist, elegant stance before my eyes, I never touched it but it moved. Moving, nothing so clear as in time to the music but connected nonetheless, its strut like the dance of stalking bone, the weak directionless illumination a shine down its elegant lengths. And me witness through my closed eyes, my dreaming gaze transfixed and then abruptly waking to a pain so outrageous that tears dribbled down my cheekbones, I tried to sit up and found I could not move my arm, my hand, it was like being staked down, crucified to the floor. From my hand a fluid clear as water snaked its living way to the Funhole, and instead of running into its depths formed a transparent black rainbow above it, gaining in radiance as more fluid left me and the pain trebled. I writhed against what held me, I moved my head back and forth as if that would somehow help, rainbow and wall and rainbow again, and Randy’s sculpture suddenly bounded straight and horrifying up in the air as if it would fall, impaling arc, directly into my chest. A coughing scream, no I won’t look and I felt a little echoing thud and looked again to see the sculpture sitting chummily next to me, its metal dripping only slightly, mingling with my hand’s extrusion to form a silvery mix that did not alter the rainbow’s color but gave the bow a jaunty flex that it demonstrated by moving in definite time to the music, which instead of swelling grew dimmer still, maddening as the knowing shine of the sculpture beside me.

I cried, from pain, from relief that I had not been harmed, or not more than was bearable, and the fluid from my hand turned as luminously black as the rainbow and my tears too dripped down black and I cried harder, scared, scared, I still couldn’t move my hand.

And Randy’s voice, obscured but still audible: “Nicholas? You in there, man?”

“Yeah,” weakly, trying to get my voice back. “Yeah.”

He came in, slowly, bringing with him a definite smell of the cold outside, a different odor, lushly astringent, a better world. He carried another piece of sculpture, steel baby swaddled in newspaper. “Nicholas?” tentatively; I realized with dull surprise that the light was either off or burned completely out, I had grown so used to the dark.

“Here,” I said. “I’m over here. I can’t get up.”

“Are you all right?”

“I can’t get up.”

His first look was, naturally, for his sculpture; he noticed its new placement, of course, it was hard not to; noticed too the new configuration: I saw him shake his head. Crouching over me, his own smell was of beer, more faintly grease and gasoline. “Shrike said you were doin’ it,” he said, a nervous, reverent smile. “How’s it going anyway?”

“Pretty damn bad.” Nodding at my hand, twitching it to show it couldn’t move, but, surprise again, the pressure seemed to melt as I twitched it, dissolving altogether to allow me to sit slowly up, muscles burning. Wiping black tears from my face, their trail as tangible as sweat, as blood. “I feel sort of shitty, to tell you the truth.”

“I bet you do, man.” Somewhat embarrassed, but eager, yes definitely that, he took the wrappings from his new sculpture, showed me its sharp diagonals and high-boned dull silver skull. Lovely. Just what I wanted, a death’s-head to keep me company. Almost as bad as having Nakota there, and I only realized I had said that last aloud when he laughed.

“Yeah, right. She’s pretty pumped up about this, you know?”

“I know.”

“Vanese is pissed.”

I nodded, my head felt suddenly so very heavy, as if my own skull had turned to steel, ominous loll in the flimsy carton of my flesh.

“You want me to stay here awhile?” He shrugged himself deeper into his jacket. “It’s pretty cold in here, you know?”

It was not the kind of thing that, once immersed in, you kept on feeling; as if possessed by cold you overcame it. I shrugged. “At least • come out and get something to drink,” Randy said, but unsure in the offer; the Funhole was a taskmaster of some kind, he knew enough to know that, but whether it required regular hours was still beyond him.

Silence. Diffidently, but with raised-eyebrow inspiration, “You could come out for a while, you know, come with me to the Incubus. There’s an opening, free beer, you know? Maybe some food. You want to?”

Oh Randy, this is so sudden. And when I smiled, his face withdrew, a little, not frozen but closed, the quick way you close a closet door in the dark: what’s really behind there? And I realized, with a larger incredulous smile, that he was afraid of me.

“Sure,” I said. “Sure, I’ll go.”

Hair still shower-damp, ice cold against my bare neck, following Randy into the crowded heat of the gallery, my step not so much unsteady as inherently fragile. Even though the lighting was sporadic at best, smoke-dense, it seemed incredibly bright; I kept blinking, almost as much as Randy. The Mole Men, out to take the air.

He grabbed two cups of piss-flat beer, directed me with one elbow to the hors d’oeuvres: withered tortilla chips piled around a bowl of mean-looking salsa. I took a chance. The salsa tasted like chunky kerosene.

“Almost as bad as the art,” Randy said. His beer was already gone. “Can you believe anybody has the balls to show this shit?”

It was pretty bad. I mean, my name may not be Art, etcetera, but this stuff—huge cockeyed depictions of women with tits bulbous enough for a scotch ad holding big cigarettes like guns with smoke coming out of their pussies, with ti-. ties like The Tobacco Industry Wants You, or— my favorite—Fat Kills—I mean, come on.

I said to Randy, “Why can’t you do stuff like this?”

“I didn’t know it was gonna be this bad,” and when I laughed, he did, too. “Let’s get some more beer.”

In our blue-collar dishabille, Randy’s gas-station jacket and me in my usual junkwear, we stuck out; all the rest was fake leather lab coats and baggy white pants, heavy red lipstick and combat boots, clustered in a bunch mouthing the same party line, laughter choreographed and thin. “Art fucks,” Randy said, with intense disdain.

We took folding chairs, plunked them square by the keg, and passed a pleasant hour making fun of everything we saw. Smoke made my eyes dry. The beer tasted so good I was grateful. Randy laughed a lot, mostly at things I said, but from time to time I caught him looking at me, sideways and shy.

“These people, man,” waving his cup in a careless drunken circle, a blurt of beer slopping free, “these people, man, would have no fuckin’ idea what you’re doing, you know?” My shrug made him more insistent. “No, man, I’m serious, I mean they would have no clue.”

“Why?” from behind both of us. “What’s he doing?”

Tall, was my first blurred impression, tall and skinny and wrapped like a sandwich in one of those dumb-looking lab coats. He had a kind of mouth that looked as if it were constantly sneering, but it was just the subtle effect of a particularly weird overbite. He came around our chairs, stood in front of us, in front of me.

“What’re you doing?” he said.

“None of your business/’ Randy said.

“Who’re you, Randy, his agent? I mean the man can talk for himself, can’t he?” He stuck out his hand, a little too fast to be friendly. His fingers were damp. “Malcolm,” he said.

“Nicholas Reid.” I resisted the urge to add, King of the Funhole. A stupid giggle escaped me anyway.

“So,” cocked-hip stance, half smile, “what are you working on, Nick, that the rest of us wouldn’t get?”

Nick- “Performance art,” I said. Randy was shaking his head, I thought at Malcolm, but then I realized it was aimed at me. “Wild shit.”

“Wild shit.” Malcolm said it with an air of irony so heavy it reminded me of Randy’s steel skull. “Where do you show your stuff, or perform, or whatever?”

“I don’t know,” I said, slow drunken grin, “if you’re ready for this.”

“I’m always ready for a new experience.”

“Nicholas,” Randy’s earnest gaze, one hand out as if to ward my words, “don’t even bother with this guy, okay? You don’t want—”

“Okay,” I said to Malcolm. “Gimme a pen or something.” I ignored Randy, or at least his growing dismay. My scribbling was just legible, green ink smearing on somebody’s badly done, flyer. “Just come by one day, and I’ll show you something you have never seen before.”

Some woman, behind and beside Malcolm, on first glance a cut-down twin, on second just another lab coat, no overbite but a smile like a guard dog’s. “I wouldn’t bet on that,” she said, and gave a snarky little chuckle. “I mean we have seen it all.”

“Oh, I doubt that,” I said, my own smile downright beatific, grinning at a joke she could not possibly get or Malcolm either. Randy either, for that matter, Randy who sat unhappy and grim, sucking down the last of the beer. “I doubt that very very much.”

“If Randy’s into it,” someone else’s sneer, I didn’t accurately see the speaker, being now occupied by the sudden slant of my traitorous eyelids; “how weird can it be?”

“Fuck you,” said Randy, but without his usual verve. J made a little honking sound, disguised laughter very undisguised, mocking their slit-eyed knowing ignorance, the arrogance of slim experience that truly believes when you’ve seen one, you really have seen them all.

Well. I can name that tune. “See for yourself,” I said. “Come one, come all.”

Empty-stomach drunk, yes, and the isolation, yes yes, but still there was no excuse, I should have listened to Randy, now driving home, glum weave through sparse and icy traffic, I should have seen for myself that Malcolm was exactly the kind of fuck who would take me up on it. I could have made something up, I told myself, I could have said I was a mime. My stomach ached from the beer, from nervousness and hunger.

“That was stupid,” I said for the tenth time. “I’ll say I lied. I’ll say I was drunk. I am drunk.”

“Won’t work, man.” Randy’s blinking was so incessant that I was afraid he couldn’t see to drive. “He’ll just start sniffin’ around on his own, him and those smartass art-school pricks he runs with.” We shot past a big rattling truck; Randy was passing everybody. “Goddamned posers. They believe anything he tells them. If we have to, we’ll stuff the fucker down the Funhole,”

I shook my head, smiled to show I knew it was a joke, which of course it wasn’t, but there were some things I just couldn’t do, even me, even now.

“He’ll probably be waiting on the fucking doorstep,” and sure enough, a car I didn’t know, dumpy blue Toyota parked in my Dumpster spot: but it was Vanese, pinched mouth, shivering behind the wheel.

She was out of the car and into Randy’s shit in two seconds, and I saw, from her posture and her hands, the way her body kept reaching for him though she was obviously pissed off out of her mind, that she was terrified; she thought he had come here just to drop off a piece, but the hours passed and she thought, yeah, something bad, had to be, sitting there with a crazy man and she came to check and the lights were out and nobody, nobody was home.

“What’d you think?” Randy, yelling back in the dark. “I went down the fucking hole?”

Which was exactly what she had been thinking, even a drunken piece of shit like me could see that, but apparently Randy couldn’t, he just kept yelling even though I tried to calm him down; which naturally made things worse. “Don’t you start, man, you fucked up enough for one night already,” and Vanese, instantly apprehensive, “What’s that supposed to mean?” and Randy bellowing, in the voice of a man pushed past frustration into some unbearable new state, “Fuck this shit, man!” and slam, bam, gone in a weaving trajectory, he would have squealed his tires if he had thought of it but he was beyond thinking now.

Vanese was crying, upright and brittle with tension, one hand pressed against her face not to hide the tears but it seemed to catch them, as if each was bitterly precious, as if each, like a hologram, held the whole sad moment entirely. She cried almost without sound, deep sobs that occasionally ended in a soft glottal cough.

“Vanese,” I said. “He’ll be okay.”

She shook her head, the pessimism of a woman who knows.

“Really. He’ll be okay, okay?” I didn’t know what to do, I couldn’t leave her there but I was freezing, I had to piss so bad my kidneys ached. I made her come inside, insisted her through the door and up the stairs, but she didn’t fight me as hard as she could have; she was too tired.

On the couchbed, shaking. She in fact was freezing, I saw it in those long jerky shudders. I put the blankets around her, coat and all, tucked her in with clumsy drunken care. “I’ll make some coffee,” I said.

“You can’t even make sense,” through teeth that abruptly began an almost comical chattering, but she was trying to smile, it was a joke. “Let me,” and she moved to get up.

“Sit down,” I said. Forceful. What a man. When the coffee was done I sat next to her, helped her hold the cup. “Another few minutes and you would have had frostbite,” I said. “Why didn’t you just wait inside?”

“I did, for a long time. But that hall’s so cold,” feelingly. “In the car I had heat.”

“Why’d you turn it off then?”

“I didn’t. I ran out of gas.”

I shook my head, lectured her on her stupidity, a lecture that veered somehow into a confession of my own: me and Randy at the gallery, and my incomprehensible boasting, something you’ve never seen before. “Vanese,” sagging back, “I am so dumb.”

“You are,” shaking her head, amazed. “Malcolm. And the Malcolmettes. Shit.”

“I know,” trying to shrug, “I know I know.”

I didn’t, though. I spent the next few hours trying out various scenarios on Vanese, things I could tell Malcolm, and with sorrowful expertise she shot them all down. Malcolm was a wily boy, she kept saying, Malcolm was smart. Malcolm would see through my bullshit, I wasn’t much of a liar anyway, and if for some reason he didn’t, one of his cadre would, and anyway I couldn’t dodge forever. It might be better to just break down and tough it out.

“You mean just show him?”

“Why not?”

“Why not?’ Because it’s the real black hole, Vanese, because it’s unpredictable and uncontrollable, because anything could happen. Because I don’t want to be responsible. Because it’s a pathway, and I wanted to go alone. Because it’s mine. “Because it’s not a good idea,” I said; firm, but ultimately lame. She said so, and then there was really nothing else to say.

When Nakota heard about it, the next bleary morning when she woke me coming in, all she did was laugh. One hand poised in the act of shedding a shoe, the other against the couchbed to hold herself steady, and those strange teeth wet and bare in a long sustained crow, she finally had to sit down she was laughing so hard. At last “Oh, Nicholas,” wheezy with mirth, patting my blanketed thigh in mock congratulation, “nobody can fuck things up the way you can. Malcolm is—”

“You know him?”

“We used to be lovers.” There was something unsettling in her use of that term, I had never thought of her as actually having a lover. Screwing people, yes, absolutely, and the weirder the better. But a lover? No.

“He’s an artist,” she said. “When he isn’t selling clothes. He makes these kitschy plaster death masks,” pulling off her other shoe, settling down beside me. One pointy hipbone gouging softly as she moved. “He thinks he’s God, and all these little assholes, his groupies, they’re all a bunch of goddamned yes-men and all they do is follow him around. Like puppies looking for their mother’s tit.” A dry sniff, careless toss of the other shoe. “Fact is he’s a pretty shitty artist, but nobody can tell him that, or at least not till recently. Richard—you know Richard, down at the Incubus? no?—anyway Richard says Malcolm can’t show there anymore, his stuffs too cute. Malcolm was extremely pissed off,” smiling as at a droll memory. Guess you had to be there.

“So what’s all this got to do with me?” I didn’t really want to know, I’d heard enough on the subject already, but it was one of those questions you have to ask.

She was going to answer, her mouth opened a little, and then closed in a different kind of smile. “You’ll find out, won’t you?” And nothing else, fell asleep beside me skinny and superior, her chin digging into my left forearm, the idea of my discomfiture and eventual self-induced downfall no doubt sweet as a lullaby, drifting her into whatever black excesses passed for her dreams.

Slowly I raised my right arm, palm downward, let my unbandaged wound drip and bubble as it would, onto the bare skin of her shoulder; what fell was syrupy and gleamed in the seeping dawn, like the droplets of poison that fall forever in the face of chained Loki; and what fell, clung. My arm tired and carefully I lowered it to my side, fell asleep watching the fluid not so much dry as coagulate on her skin; when taints collide. If I coated her in it, head to toe, would it serve as her chrysalis, would it make a new woman of her? She could stand to be a new woman. She could stand to be a new anything. But maybe in the grand tradition of mad science I should try it on myself first. And maybe not.

Noon when I woke. She was still asleep. The fluid lay undisturbed on her shoulder, a shiny clot, much prettier than when it came out of me.

Cautious not to wake her, I slipped from couchbed to shower, from shower and hasty dress to Funhole, nauseated with hunger, still barefoot, my clothes clinging to my half-dry body. Wet hair and cold, so cold, lying beside it, I still hadn’t remembered to buy a lock for the damned door. The air, the Funhole’s private atmosphere, almost porous with odor, rich and faintly bad like spoiling food. Internal incense, the smoke of constant praise.

“Tell me,” I murmured, my lips almost touching the dusty floor. “Tell me before he gets here.”