The Cipher

7

Well, Imagine for yourself the excitement, the speculation, the breathless phone calls that smelled strangely of a bent respect and constantly threaten to become drop-in marathons, even quiz festivals—they were such a curious bunch, the trio that Nakota, bright eyes and sagging lip, had maliciously christened the Three Dingbats. The only way I could keep them away from me was to threatened to bar them forever from Funhole proximity, taking shameless advantage of rights I did not have. But they didn’t know that, which was good enough for me, though I also knew it wouldn’t work for long.

Malcolm was a more difficult matter. I had promised to do the mask, and now was certainly the time to continue since I had rarely looked more like death. And I got him to stop playing the video, though only just. But. what was almost worse, he insisted on going over and over the scene in the storage room, blood and sex and revelation, a puddle positive of melted steel; cold fingers patting my aching face through the chalky slap of plaster, he was doing the mask over, he had had new insights, he would share them all with me whether I liked it or not. Nakota could at least find periodic escape in the musty comatose serenity of Club 22, but for me it was nothing but Malcolm, and his theories, and the nervous blurt of the ringing phone bringing questions and questions, the endless loop of speculation that if not meant so seriously would have been hilarious. In a pitiful way.

“They’re your friends,” I said to Malcolm. “You talk to them.”

He shrugged. “They want to talk to you, Nick.” Offhand smile of petty malice, scraping tool tapping lightly against the table’s crooked lip, crooked as his own, as warped as his enjoyment of the whole scenario: his pet puppies surrounding someone who doesn’t like dogs.

Exhausted by their idiocy, their stupid unending phone calls, by the specter of our little merry band grown insidiously larger, the exponential creep of a process whose end I not only could not predict but did not want to understand, I took the predictable way out. I told them they could visit but that was all, if they took even one step toward the storage room that was it, they were gone. They agreed with a haste that was suspicious even to me, and I fool easy.

Throughout the day’s work I speculated on that call.

“What the fuck,” I said to Malcolm.

“Don’t move your lips! For God’s sake, how many times do I have to tell you not to move while the plaster’s drying,” fussing like a nurse in the violent ward, so obsessively close in his inspection that if I looked, and I could hardly help it, I could see the miniature veins in his eyes, red as a dingbat’s lab coat. When I was again successfully immobilized, he slouched back across the room, to sit smoking a succession of his horrible cigarettes while I sat straight-backed as a mummy, the usual unbearable itch begun in the small of my back, waiting for the plaster to dry.

“The whole thing blew them away,” he said.

Too bad not for real, huh? Although this was not true, or not entirely; I had nothing personal against the Dingbats, I just wanted them to go away. Taking Malcolm with them. Neither of which was even remotely probable anymore.

“I mean it really blew them away.” Long expansive puff; how, I thought, can he smoke those things without puking? Even Nakota couldn’t take the smell, which lay all over the flat now like a base coat of cancer. “They can’t stop talking about it.”

Yes, I noticed, but to say it wasn’t worth his inevitable squawk about the plaster, so I didn’t. Now my hand was throbbing, too, in a more-than-usual way, and I rubbed it, slow, against my thigh in an empty search for comfort, wishing it wasn’t so cold in the flat, wishing Nakota was there, wishing I was alone. By the time he freed me from the plaster I was so jittery with irritation the very swish of his hair was enough to make me want to stuff him headfirst down the Funhole without so much as a cheery farewell, and of course it was just then that the door opened to reveal the grinning triumvirate of Dingbats, all of them, God help us, wearing sunglasses. In the snow.

First of all they wanted to watch the video, and when, yelling from the bathroom where I sloppily scrubbed my face (the only pleasure I was likely to have all day), I told them no, they said they wanted to “interview” me about my “feelings.”

Oh right. Even for them this was going too far, what next, a documentary? “The only feelings I have right now,” I said, slamming out of the b&throom, my stiff jaw still outlined in a sticky ribbon of mingled Vaseline and plaster residue, “you don’t want to know about. And what the hell do you mean, interview me? Interview me for what? Your personal archives? Your diaries? What?” Nobody answered. I could feel in my chest a pleasant bubble of rage, freely mingled with self-pity and an overriding regret that Nakota was not home to chew them the new assholes they deserved, side by side with the drier knowledge that she would far more likely egg them on.

“Either you weren’t paying attention, the other day,” I said, “or you’re stupid, and I would hate to think anybody could be that stupid. Even friends of yours,” to Malcolm, who froze in the act of lighting another cigarette to give me a look less piqued than surprised, as if one of the drying floor-bound blobs of plaster had spitefully bitten his toe, and he their benign creator; fathom for yourself the sheer ingratitude.

’This is not a game,” I said. My hand on the refrigerator door, so angry I could barely remember what the hell I was doing there. When in doubt, get a beer. It can’t help, but what can? “This is not some fucking art-school field trip, this is the weirdest motherfucking thing you will ever see and if you tell so much as one single person about it, if you even tell them where this building is,” and, voice risen, I had absolutely no idea how to follow that one up, I had had no prior experience in making threats that were meant to be taken seriously, so I slammed the refrigerator door as hard as I could, sending a

cracked and empty juice jar and a flutter of outdated coupons to the dust-gummed floor below.

Silence. “Don’t make me tell you again,” I said, and marched back to the bathroom before my traitor face could display the lunatic bray of laughter fighting to blow free. As I closed the door and jammed both faucets to on, a pure continuation of silence, I thought: So of course the first thing they do is run downstairs, right? Which made me want to laugh even harder.

But they were still there when I reappeared, talking quietly among themselves, only Malcolm aloof as he sat cross-legged on the floor, trying to scrape the plaster dust from under his nails; he had nails like a goat’s. No one looked at me. In the face of such excessive casualness I became, true to form, more nervous, tripped on my way to the stereo, almost mashing Malcolm’s black-booted foot.

“Watch it,” and I shrugged, turning on something, loud. My beer was almost gone. Fancy that. To say something I asked the Incubus woman about music, who did she like to listen to. The answer was, as I expected, neatly suffocated by a crash course in modern music theory, which is to say heavy on the bullshit, but I did * find out her name. Doris. She was Doris, and the other one was Ashlee, and the guy was Dave.

None of them drank beer, which figured, but they were at least willing to sit and watch me do

it. As my slump grew more pronounced Doris’s eyes brightened, the gestures of her chapped hands became more animated—she was one of those people who love to be told they can’t talk without their hands—and Ashlee laughed and Dave was even moved to crack a joke, something about the superrealists who froze to death when they went to the drive-in to see closed for winter. Imagine! Levity. Malcolm’s silent sulk blossomed at last into open disgust as the hours passed and no one asked his opinion, studied the mask, or even commented on the new direction it was taking, a sharp spiral downward if anyone was interested in my opinion which they doubtless were not. Unless of course I wanted to talk about the Funhole.

Which I didn’t. Nor would I allow them to, giving them the brick wall stare when they tried (and they did try, especially Doris, she was a regular Nakota when it came to taking no for an answer). I caught them peeking, swift and blind and sneaky, at my bandaged hand, and wondered if they guessed what painful shiny rot lay beneath, wondered if they caught, as I did, its mushy scent on the smoke-dry air, and if they did what images it planted, what dark romantic horseshit they conjured from parched imagination’s empty soil. Because no matter what they thought they knew, I knew they had never seen anything like it. And never would, if I could at all prevent it.

From floor to chair, to bathroom, to refrigerator, letting the door bang with a cold moue of distaste: finally Malcolm’s aggravation overcame him. “I’m taking off,” he said, and with a stare long enough only to show his consuming displeasure with us all took his premature leave, pointedly not slamming the door. His cigarettes lay forgotten on the floor where he had first been sitting, and it took me just a moment to toss them gleefully overhand into the trash.

“I hope they were expensive,” I said, stopping on my way back to get another beer, reflecting as I did how truly bad my hand smelled tonight, was it getting worse or was I growing more sensitive. Ashlee said something to Doris, who shook her head, brisk positive motion, shimmy of ragged hair.

“How come,” sitting back down, my unsteady gaze rolling from one to another, “you didn’t go with him?”

Dave shrugged.

Ashlee shrugged too and looked away, and Doris, the eternal spokesperson, for once had little to say. It was about then when my drunken boredom overtook me, even being persecuted by the Funhole in one of its less indulgent modes was more entertaining than this. I flopped to my feet and told them it was time to go. At first they didn’t believe me, but I was insistent.

“If you hurry,” I said, “you can still catch up with Malcolm,” oh they were a fickle bunch of fucks, I thought, showing them the door, just drunk enough to find it funny. Which Nakota, when she came home, emphatically did not.

“Oh great,” fast and vicious stripdown, tearing at her uniform where it stalled at wrists and neckline, whipping the empty clothes at me. A button struck me softly in the eye. “That’s just what .we need: a fucking bunch of yahoo dingbats coming to sit at your feet. Are you that desperate for company? Isn’t Malcolm enough for you?”

“Get off my ass,” I said, but mildly, still anesthetized and anxious to stay that way. The stink of my hand had metamorphosed into a warm aching smell inexplicably like dirt, soil, the ground outside, an unexpectedly homespun odor that was adding to my idiot sense of well-being, perhaps even a contributing factor in my small but proud erection, which I waggled now at Nakota in an attempt to turn her attention.

“Put that stupid thing away,” she said, lighting a cigarette, mean and naked on the edge of the bed. Why was it that no matter how cold it became in the flat, she never shivered, never showed any visible sign of discomfort? “The thing to do,” dismissing for the moment both my words and her anger, “is get the camcorder again, and make another video so—”

“I am not making another video,” I said, alarmed. “I’d like to trash the one we have.”

“I wouldn’t,” she said, eyes bright with warning, two meanings for the price of one. “If you weren’t so chickenshit,” blowing smoke, “and drunk, you would realize that—”

“Drunk’s got nothing to do with it,” I said, pushing up on my elbows, soft wince as my sick hand brushed the bed. “You don’t—”

“—another one, so we can compare them,” louder than she needed to, angry at my uncharacteristic interruptions, I was getting out of my place again, clown prince of the Funhole and forget that I had my own agenda, forget that I was, according even to her own theory, in some bad way an engine to keep the drive. I was supposed to be bait, and catalyst and straight man, to dispose if necessary of worshipful stray lunatics, and oh yeah, empty the ashtrays, too.

She was still talking. “—if any changes have taken place, then we’ll have documentation.” Crushing out the cigarette. Swift swallow of mineral water, as flat and unappetizing as the smell of her body as she leaned across me to set down the glass. “Even you should see the sense in that.”

“You sound like them,” settling back to cradle my hand beside me, silent dirty drip of fluid onto the already-soiled sheets, what did I care. “They wanted to interview me today.”

“Interview you?” and she laughed, reaching for the blanket to wrap herself in, cold cocoon for the insect queen, the reader of buggy runes. What had she done with them, those twisted little bodies? And the mouse, whatever had become of it? “What’re they going to do, start a fan club?”

“Funhole Fan Club,” I said, made faintly nauseated by the change in odor from my hand, from the color of the sheets where the fluid lay discreetly pooled; I moved away, a bare small inch. Outside traffic was exceptionally loud. I lay listening to it as Nakota fell to her own brand of rest, to dreams gashed with smelly wonders, peopled with the strengths of her delusions, what were her new ones going to lead us to? Another camcorder my ass, though in morning’s reality there would most likely be very little I could do about it, there never was, was there? Never had one been so neck-deep in shit and so helpless to reach the flusher. If only I could believe that none of any of this was my business. Or my fault.

Doris had a camcorder.

Of course. And of course Nakota found that out the next day, Day Two, my happy trio over early with McDonald’s coffee and dry muffins, and immediately the pair of them perched knees to knees, chummily on the couch while Dave and Ashlee sat sketching on napkins with Malcolm’s expensive drawing pencils, pictures of what they thought might be in the Funhole. And giggling over it, God. Romper Room for demonics. I was all out of bandages so in dull desperation I sat trying to wind half a T-shirt around my hand after stuffing toilet paper in the hole itself, a process as uselessly messy as the hole itself, too, if you wanted to get philosophical about it, if you wanted to think at all.

“Let me help,” Ashlee said to me.

“Not a chance,” through my teeth as I strained to hear what Nakota was saying to Doris, what was giving her that bright-eyed grin.

“—back around noon,” Doris said. “He said he had some stuff to pick up, you know,” hands shaping a face in the air, “for the mask.”

“We could go there right now then,” Nakota standing with quick energetic grace, pocketing my keys since her car wasn’t running. “At least start on it today, before I have to go to work.”

“Start what?” although I knew, it was the fucking video, she just couldn’t wait to mix whatever brew she’d been scheming on last night, her documentation, a travelogue of the indescribable maybe but maybe just a bigger fucking mess for us all and in particular me, why had I ever left that storage room, why had I even bothered to come out? My clearheaded plan had been just another self-deception.

“Start what,” I said, and stood, still and shaking, to block her exit: an unheard-of defiance, so surprising that she laughed, as the others sat watchful, avid as birds, Doris arrested in the act of standing, human tableau of indecision.

“Get out of my way, Nicholas,” with no more than usual malice, but when I refused, a feral smile as she pushed at me, sharp fist in my shoulder, hard enough to show she meant business, and I pushed back, hard enough to say that I did too. She stared at me the way you stare at Fido when he growls at you over the table scraps, and then without preamble hit me, a brisk and painful punch. Ducking into the blow I reached for her, grabbed hair and shoulders and shoved her hard against the door, held her there and said so only she could hear, “Don’t do this, you hear me? Don’t do this.”

“You are so—” she began, then shook her head, shook off the notion of actually explaining to me my own stupidity, her gesture indicating the inherent waste of time in such an occupation. “You’re willing to go on the same way forever, aren’t you? Just going in there and taking whatever you get, hands out, gimme gimme gimme like a fucking two-bit beggar. That’s your whole style,” glancing around as if to indict me by my own squalid helplessness, so virulently displayed in the sorry way I lived. “That’s you. But it’s not me, and I’m not going to waste my time trying to convince you of what an asshole you are, what a cowardly piece of shit not to take what’s being offered, what’s being practically thrown in your face. So if you really want to stop me,” blue-white incredible smile, daring me, daring me, “then I suggest you kick my ass. Otherwise, get the fuck out of my way.”

Who blinked? Who do you think, head down, stepping back, my hands dropping reluctant from her shoulders, trembling up and down my arms with anger unused, the dash of adrenaline useless in my blood. “Well come on,” impatiently to Doris, who leaped up, passed me without a look, maybe Nakota would be her new mentor now. They didn’t close the door so I did, not embarrassed but oh, ashamed, for my weakness, my capacity for defeat, my endless versatility in displaying both. When I got around to looking at them, Ashlee and Dave were pointedly not looking at me. One of the few things, perhaps, they were good for, but now I was in no mood.

“Go on,” I said, “why don’t you go with them?” and with no more invitation they stood, leaving Styrofoam cups, a crumpled bag, their silly scrawled drawings, and Malcolm, his voice as he passed Nakota and Doris in the hall, his miffed surprise as Dave and Ashlee hurried past with artificial smiles. “What the hell,” he said to me, over-shoulder glare and bag in hand, his hair in some new complicated braid, “was all that about?”

I shook my head, shrugged, my two most convincing motions. For once I looked forward to the ritual of the plaster, the cold sealing of my mouth. Malcolm was especially rude, especially when he saw the wasted drawing paper, but even that I welcomed, just deserts, proper punishing scorn for the weakling I was: about that Nakota was essentially right, but about everything else so wrong, immutably mistaken in profound and ominous ways that only I, it seemed, could predict: perhaps it takes a coward to see where the danger really is.

By the time they got back Malcolm’s irritability had trebled, due to some malfunction of material and an unfortunate incident involving half a cup of coffee, and I awash in my own jittering dread making matters worse by twitching every time I heard a sound in the hall. The four of them walked in together, Nakota of course in the lead, the camcorder bag jaunty in her hand, expert sneer of one-upmanship as she breezed past Malcolm to light up one of his cigarettes.

“You look like the cat that just ate shit,” he said, and she laughed.

“Looks like you’re making a mess,” glancing around at the spillage, crusts of plaster, the broken faces of the two discarded masks. “I’m making a movie. Want to watch?”

“What the fuck is she talking about?” looking not at me, naturally, but at Doris, and in the same tone, “And where the fuck were you? I could’ve used some help here.”

Doris shrugged. “We needed to get the camcorder. Nakota’s going to—”

“What’re you, her maid?”

“It’s better than being yours,” Nakota said, and winked at Doris.

“The camcorder was at my house,” said Doris, somewhat aggrieved at his tone but too excited to care much, puppy-bright around the eyes, gestures going a mile a minute. “And we had to stop for tapes, too, we got a three-pack ’cause we’re going to—”

Abruptly Malcolm pushed away the kitchen chair he leaned on, shoved it so it skittered, a motion that (as we all knew from the movies) signified a man at the end of his patience. “I don’t know what stupid games you’re playing, what kind of shit,” sparing a glare for Nakota, who ignored him as she continued to smoke his cigarette, “she talked you into, but I am working on an important piece here, I am trying to create something here that is a little more enduring than some fucking two-bit home movie and I—”

“Oh roach,” Nakota said, “shut up.”

It was a gift with her, the ability to throw just the wrong switches at just the wrong times. Malcolm’s face swept red, his overbite fairly bristled with rage as, Doris in the lead, the other three took prudent steps to put themselves at the periphery of the action, while Nakota stood smirking as usual, the center of the blossoming storm, tapping one slim-handled sculpting tool against her skinny thigh as Malcolm, braid swinging, launched into his eruption.

Still faintly plaster-dappled, I rose unnoticed in the general tension, slowly circling back around the kitchen table and quietly out the door, closing click soft behind me and I ran like a bastard, hurry hurry hurry on the stairs and into the storage room, shut the door with a slam and my back to it, saying to myself, Think, think, she’ll be up here any minute, what can you do? What

and whack, whack, her insistent fist already at the door, oh God is there to be no time of grace at all? No. No. “Nakota,” I said, positioning myself in as braced a stance as possible, why wasn’t there a lock on this fucking door, “go away.”

Even I could hear how lame I sounded; she didn’t even bother to laugh, just used Dave to slam open the door, sending me into a balance-less spin across the floor, clumsy polka that left me sprawled on one knee as the four of them trooped in, Malcolm apparently too proud to join the fun. Nakota grinning, the camcorder poised in her arms like a favored pet, the others rubbernecking, awed no doubt by the sheer dusty normalcy of it all, all until you got to the hole in the floor of course, you’re not from around here, are you?

“Go away,” I said again, my hand begun a threatening throb, the Funhole behind me as ominously still, like the calm surface of a midnight lake just before the heralding ripples of the monster. “This is wrong, and worse than that, it’s stupid, look how much trouble we had the last time we—”

and a thought like a sledgehammer: You should have stayed upstairs, asshole, she says it doesn’t work without you why the hell did you tear ass to get in here oh you stupid fuck

and Nakota’s snarl, “Get out of my fucking way!” as the record light went on, idiot glow of the LED, and she advanced on me like an army, her own small cadre of troops almost too excited now as she backed me to the hole itself, an almost inaudibly deep grumble begun that tremored the floor beneath me, oh Nakota am I going to have to hurt you to stop you? Again? I can’t I

and without thinking I grabbed her, left hand a fist in her hair, clenching right hand, hole hand, over the maw of the camera, you want to take a picture of a hole well I got a hole for you take a picture of this, coating the lens with the drift and glitter of my slime, the juicy scum that incredibly began to bubble as it touched the surface of the lens, devoured the hood in swift corrosion, a mobile cancer and still my hand in her hair, grinding, twisting, it had to hurt and at that moment I didn’t give a shit, it was her own fucking fault her fault not mine. Not mine. And still the creeping burn, destroying the body of the camcorder itself, eating away as far as the strap and the useless box dropping now, falling to the floor, a hollow sound as it struck and with one swift thoughtless motion I kicked it down the Funhole, and only then pushed Nakota down, and away.

“There,” I said. Wet all over. Sweat. Maybe piss, too, for all I knew, and shivering in the chill aftermath of anger, Nakota rising furious before me, toxic genie from some unimaginable lamp, snake from a basket: “Oh you stupid motherfucking piece of shit—”

And she hit me, very hard, I was expecting it and it didn’t hurt, really, very much at all, although the force of it jerked my head back, silly drunken wobble on my aching neck, and the ooze of my hand, no longer napalm, down to a timid trickle. Arm drawn back to do it again, perhaps many times, and Doris, incredibly, catching hold of that arm, saying, “Don’t. Don’t, Nakota.”

Looking, as she said it, at me, the same gaze from Dave and Ashlee, a look far worse than any tantrum of Nakota’s could ever be: it was bubbling awe, it was nervousness; it was fear. I turned my head away, Nakota, ugly, saying “I’ll just get another one, Nicholas,” and Doris mumbling something, words that had the effect of an eyedropper on a greasefire, nothing but pops and sizzles and still beneath my feet that earthquake jiggle, like something coming from far, far away.

“Just get out of here, okay?” over my shoulder and I turned back enough to see them staring at me, see Doris and Dave taking Nakota’s arms and walking her out of the room, Ashlee the last to go, wide eyes gleaming like roadkill’s in the instant before the car. And a subterranean undulation as the door swung gently to, I lay beside the Funhole and felt that murmur in the flesh of the floor, felt the shadowless weight of Randy’s twisted ladder lying close beside in an attitude of commiseration as inescapable as my thoughts. I always made it worse, in all my simple strategies, my convoluted acts, invariably I always made it worse.

Why was that?

Why do birds fly?

Why does metal conduct electricity?

Why does wet stinky smelly shit come splattering out of my hand?

Why, it’s nature, isn’t it; isn’t it just.

I didn’t come out of the storage room for a day, almost two, lying guiltily slack, fallow if you will. On reemergence the hall was empty, cold with a damp chill that passed the skin to settle leechlike in the bones. Upstairs, gripping the banister like a ninety-year-old arthritic, creeping into the flat like a burglar, the door closed but unlocked, good thing I had nothing anyone wanted. No: not right: half-slumped at the kitchen table, open beer and chewing bread smeared with ancient salsa, Randy. Smiling a little when I entered, gesturing with the bread.

“Sorry, man, didn’t mean to help myself, it’s just I been waiting so long.”

“Don’t worry about it.” One-handed palm of cold beer can, doubling my shivers going down but I drank, two swallows, four, half the can gone into the grind of my empty stomach and the pleasing small luxury of a solid belch. Looking around I saw full ashtrays, a rectangle of newspaper, Malcolm’s tidied tools, the mask itself nowhere to be seen. “Where is everybody?” I said, false nonchalance, fingers as cold as the can they held.

“Well. That takes some telling,” but he smiled as he said it and some of the stick went out of my spine. “I wasn’t here for part one, but I guess Shrike blew some kind of gasket when you wouldn’t let her make her video—”

“It’s Doris who should be pissed,” I said. Got another beer. “It was her camcorder.”

“Yeah. Anyway Shrike was busy throwing her fit when I got here and Doris says, Doris’s the one who kind of looks like Malcolm, right? Right. So Doris says, Cool off, Nicholas is really onto something important here and it won’t do any good to piss him off, he’s the only one who knows, he has the answers blah blah blah, all this shit like you’re some kind of guru, you know?”

That roadkill look; “I know.”

“So Shrike says, everybody fuck off, I’ll do it myself. And Doris and those other two assholes—”

“Dingbats.”

“Dingbats, right,” emphatic nod, “They all start arguing and Malcolm just blows up and says, You’re all crazy and I’m out of here. And he takes his mask and goes home. Or somewhere. And nobody goes with him, everybody just sits around waiting for you to come back—”

“Nakota too?”

Headshake. “She took the video, though.”

Ah, God. The fucking video, I had forgotten. My carelessness, how vengefully would it come home to roost? Stop it, I thought. Stop making things worse than they are. “What about everybody else?”

“Out to eat. Out to lunch,” shaking his head, “they’re out to lunch all right. Is there any more of those beers?”

We drank them all up, but, drunk, my worry undimmed, I spun my silent fantasies of what Nakota might be doing with that video, The Funhole Part One, what remorseless mischief she might be making and me unable to fathom, much less put a stop to it. And Randy putting on some extremely loud thrash music. And the beer going down. And the dingbats, coming back. Whooping in the hall, some weird Chilean wine, two.bottles apiece, apparently we were all going to have a party.

They approved the music, as boisterously approved Randy, who did not return the favor or even comments directed at him, saying once to me, under cover of their chatter back and forth, their theories too silly to remember past the second spoken, “Guess you’re their Malcolm now/’

Dull negating headshake, but we both knew he was right. It showed in their eager deference: my choice of music, my choice of chair, my choice opinions, at this point unexpressed beyond a few dispirited grunts; respectful their offers, even, to get me another beer. It was not so much ridiculous as scary, it got to me after only a very little while, and Randy too: he left and left me there, stranded in my growing island of pained drunken silence and beer-can armor, and still the gnaw, Nakota, where are you? Destructive force with a chip on her shoulder. You left her with the video before, I argued, nothing happened, nothing will happen now. Nothing bad will—

And the door, when had it opened, who could hear in that caldron of noise, and she, in night-damp Club 22-wear, my relief at her presence completely evaporated by the look in her eyes. The others, Medusa-like she scared them silent. Ignoring them, her gaze on me, one hand closing the door, the other holding the black plastic of the video.

“You win again, fuckface,” and she skimmed the video at me, hard square Frisbee with amazing force and it struck me so near the eye, my warding hand useless and the sudden bright plop of fluid onto my skin, circular jelly mixed with the dimmer color of my blood. Someone turned the music down; Ashlee offered, small voice, to get me something to wipe off with.

“Get out,” Nakota snarled, at her, at all of them, not bothering to look as she lit a cigarette and threw the lighter at me too. It missed. They stood, I felt their stares, and wearily I said, “Go on, go home,” like a cop at the scene of some exceptionally lurid crime, nothing to see anymore, folks, move along. “Go on,” louder, and as if shaken from their shock they moved, herding out the door, careful to keep their distance from Nakota as they might skirt a living fire.

“Quite the fans you have there,” advancing on me, newly furious that my suggestion had worked where her order had not, “quite the little groupies. Did you know it wouldn’t take?”

Already exhausted by her anger, the beer roiling flat and gassy in my timid gut, “Take what?”

“The video, you asshole. Did you know it wouldn’t take?” and without so much as a breath, “You don’t even know what I’m talking about, do you? I tried to copy it,” and a hissy little laugh, enjoying despite herself the expression on my face, I’m sure it was unique.

“I don’t know,” blowing smoke at the blood on my skin, “why I never thought of it before. What if you played it ten times, at the same time, ten tapes going at once. Would it be clearer? The paths, I mean, the arrangement of the—” and suddenly swerving that train of thought, remembering whom she was talking to: “But it didn’t work.”

I tried, stupid backbrain reflex, to help. “Maybe the tape was no good, the one you used. Maybe the—”

“Maybe it won’t work even if I tried it on a million tapes, maybe it can’t work,” cigarette up and down in her mouth, little black arrow now indicating eyes so venomous with knowledge denied that I helplessly turned my gaze away. “I think there’s something in it that resists being copied. And if I really thought you knew what that was, I’d put this out”—pointing the cigarette at me—“in that,” nodding at my right hand which still bled its own brand of plasma, slimy on the tabletop, “until you told me.”

“I don’t know shit about what works and what doesn’t, or why, and I don’t give a shit either,” and it was true. I was just so tired. I was going back in there tomorrow, going into storage if you will (and even if you won’t I will, I almost have to at this stage of the game) and as for her paths, I was less uninterested than blessedly unaware and determined to stay that way, I wanted nothing of her theories to cumber me as I lay like a snake on my shivering belly, staring into the dark of a negativity that stood for nothing, nothing we could know. Her most trenchant speculations were less than the guesses of a fool, as cogent as Malcolm’s for that matter and as meaningless. I knew that this was so as I knew the Funhole was a process, as I was convinced that my heart beat and my body used air, having no personal explanation for any of those processes beyond the cool fact of their existence, beyond saying This is the way things are. Which is almost certainly why she hated me, then more than usual: for the utter depth of my acceptance, ray, to her, lackadaisical acquiescence to conditions she was convinced could and must be altered: as if a prehistoric Nakota crouched rubbing wet sticks together, furious with

Neanderthal me for not helping her discover why she couldn’t make fire.

“I think,” I said, very slowly, my mouth rubbery, now, as the rest of me, from the beer, the two-day lack of food, the churning of worry like liquid salt in my stomach, “I think I’m just gonna go to bed.”

She said nothing at first, a circumstance so remarkable that I almost remarked on it, feeling her watch my shuffle to the bathroom and even back without a word. Sitting on the edge of the bed to peel down my socks, my cruddy jeans, and she a cold tableau, finally saying as she turned away, “I never expected any help from you, anyway; you’re incapable. Just keep your little groupies out of my way.”

“They’re not my groupies,” I muttered, slumping back to a sleep as restless and impure as any I had ever suffered, waking time and again to her poker-backed priestess stance, there in the glow of the TV. In the light of the uncopied video. And I turned my head away, into the minor crevice of the pillow, and tried to think nothing at all.