The Cipher (10 page)

"Should I just put it in there?"

"Yeah. Go ahead."

* By the time he came back, I had had time to wash my face, drink some water. He stood in the doorway, shook his head to my offer of coffee. "Gotta get back to work." He was wearing the "Randy" shirt and a pair of jeans that I saw at second glance were not actually black but black with grease. "I got my truck outside." My all-purpose duh look; "Tow truck, man. All-Star Towing. My day job," and he smiled, shrugged. "Gotta eat, you know."

"Me too. Every day."

"Well. I'll see you, man. Maybe later on tonight? Shrike said something about it."

Maybe in hell, Randy, you and Shrike both. "Sure."

When he had gone I sat at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and trying again to convince myself that all Nakota had said was worse than bullshit, just her own weird little way of fucking with my brain, and Randy, why Randy was obviously suggestible. By the time I was through with my coffee, I felt much better, and after a shower I felt almost good. Out, I said to myself. Climb out of this rathole and go do something.

Very cold but no wind, that kind of winter calm where every step is magnified, my friends the crows in bleak formation and me crunch, crunch, through the bitter crust beneath; it felt good to walk, hands in pockets, head down and breath leaking in thready white through my reddening nose, walking in a winter wonderland. Very few other people out. I stopped and got a newspaper, took it to a Burger King where I sat with a large coffee and read, feeling the peculiar unhappy serenity induced only by the steady perusal of disasters too remote to do anything about but feel wretched; it put all my stupid petty worries to rest. No, I am not Funhole Messiah, I just know too many weird people.

So of course I went to see Nakota.

She didn't smile when I came in, artificial dark of Club 22, some weepy fake country tune on the jukebox. But she nodded, a grave almost formal gesture, and raised an empty beer glass with another nod.

"No thanks. Just a Coke," and that was free, too.

"Randy come over yet?"

"First thing this morning."

She smiled, little snarl of amusement. "He was hot to get that piece to you,
Dead End,
right?" I nodded. "He sure was impressed with you last night. What'd he do, ask you to lay hands on it?"

"No." It
was
ludicrous, I had to smile, and her smile, her real one, joined mine, Nakota-Shrike, is there nothing you can do that I won't forgive? Please, stop trying. "I don't know about you," I said. "I just do not know."

"Know what?" Too much syrup in the Coke. Too rriuch, suddenly, in her smile.

*"I don't know why you bothered giving Randy that bullshit story. And all that about me levitating, I mean come on," but I wasn't smiling anymore and she wasn't either, her whole face so careful that I felt the fear again, rich as vomit, the flicker behind her eyes all at once the birthing flicker of the figure, the video-thing; I pushed the Coke aside. "What is it with you?" I said, leaning not forward but back, away, gibbering in me that same feeling as when I must turn away from the screen. "Why does everybody have to be as crazy as you are?"

"I'm not the crazy one, Nicholas. Or would you rather use the word 'possessed'?" I didn't answer. Tilted head, and the smile she gave when she -was particularly delighted by something gone badly wrong: "You really did it, you know. Whether you believe it or not."

"You," ,my shaken whisper, "are out of your fucking mind. Leave me alone, all right? Just leave me alone," sliding off the stool, pushing out into the ice and dazzle of the afternoon, skittering on the sidewalk but not falling, no, maybe I could just fly home. Stop it, are you going to go to her for sanity, she's crazy as a shithouse rat and always has been. Stop it. I leaned against a newspaper box, a pain in my chest, the cold air too cold in my lungs. I was three blocks east before I remembered my car.

Barely working the key, the engine whispered several times before finally starting, maybe I could call my good buddy Randy for a tow. My right hand, my "bad" hand, curled in my lap like a dying pet, all at once an ache unbearable, like a burn, a fresh and agonizing burn and I ripped the bandage away, to do what, don't know; staring, I sat there, watched as a structure of crystals as fine as beach sand grew of its own accord from the wound, minute ziggurat that filled up like a beaker with blood, my blood, and suddenly I began to scream, a soundless and infinite howl as I beat my hand, whipped it over and over against the steering wheel, again and again until the muscles of my arm tightened with exhaustion's heat and I let my arm, my hand fall limp to the seat; it had absolutely no feeling at all, not least in the wound, and I was glad. Crying and glad and I drove home one-handed, went upstairs, wrapped the whole thing in a towel and sat to watch the news, drinking a crusty glass of ancient Tang scrapings. By the time the weather came on I had stopped crying.

Why, though, didn't it hurt?

I had hit it hard enough to break bones, certainly I had tried my best. But there was no pain.

Look at it.

No.

Go on. Look at it.

No,

Conscience, arguing for or against? Curiosity is a horrible thing. I pulled off the towel all at once, one big scared conjurer's whoosh, and there, ladies and gentlemen, is the rabbit in the hat, is

a hand, perfectly normal and uninjured, with a hole in the palm the size of a quarter and black as its big-daddy namesake, for God's sake say it out loud you've got a goddamn Funhole of your own growing right out of your body yes you do oh yes you do and that's
why

and in my panic I found myself walking, back and forth, holding my arm at a ridiculous stiff angle, keep that thing away from me and back and forth before the windows, I must have been going for quite a while because the news was long over and a sitcom was on. Laughter. A commercial for an airline. Pet food. At least put a bandage on the fucking thing, that way you won't have to look at it. if I can't see you, Mr. Hole, you're not really there.

But at least it was constructive action, at least it wasn't pacing like a psychotic rat, and at least I didn't have to look at it anymore. It was hard to do, I was shaking pretty much all over, and when I heard knocking for a minute I thought, auditory hallucinations. Then: no, stupid, it's just your new disciple. And that made me laugh, and got me to the door.

He had beer, good beer for a change, and he was alone. No grinning bitch in tow to mock my festering disintegration, to remind me by her crooked shine of everything I wanted most not to know, and that in itself was worth the price of admission. Plus now I didn't have to sit alone thinking crazy thoughts.

"Sit down," I said.

"Cold fuckin' weather," he said.

The weather. We talked about it, he told me what a bitch of a day he'd had, every car battery in town must have gone dead overnight, one call after another. He wasn't Aristotle but he was a live human being and he could tell a decent story and pretty soon we had the stereo on and he was telling me about his art.

"Seems weird, you know, I always hated art class in school, bunch of shit. But I love working on my sculpture. I've shown 'em, some of them, at the Incubus. You been there, right?"

Killer clowns, and a pocketful of bugs, those were the days. "Couple times."

"Yeah, well, it's not much of a place but it's a start, right? It's not like I'm actually makin' any money," and he smiled, a surprisingly shy smile. Drank more beer. "I wouldn't be driving a tow truck, you know, if I was."

"Well, I don't work at Video Hut for the intellectual stimulation either."

Dead End
was one of a series, he told me, some of the pieces incorporating more than metal— "One's got a skull,"
Dead Set
and a hairless headful of curlers, of course—and
Dead Reckoning,
that was a metal eyeball attached to a telescope; I didn't have the heart, or the balls, to bring up the fact that dead reckoning meant navigation precisely without the use of a telescope or any other device. Call it artistic license.

"Dead Dipping,
that's got an acid beaker, it's a kind of process, right, and this new one,
Dead End,
it's like a ladder, it's like all the way to the bottom—"

"I noticed that." My voice was pleasantly slurred from Randy's good beer. I liked Randy and his good beer too, I liked the way they both distracted me from things I would rather not have.to think about. I liked the way I was getting empty-stomach gutfuck drunk on Randy's good beer, as far as I was concerned he could talk about his art all night long if he had a mind to and even if he didn't I did.

All the sitcoms were gone and so was the news and so was everything else, some kind of cut-up movie buzzing on the TV and Randy's beer was also gone and he was standing up, in fact two of him were standing, saying something about going out to get more. And I was agreeing that this was a fine idea, and there we were, on the stairway.

And there we were going the wrong way, going down the hall instead of down the stairs, and a very small part of me was banging its head in frustration and terror against the furry walls of my great and perfect drunkenness, and we were shushing each other like giggling idiots, which in fact we were and wasn't it
fine,
though, wasn't it
fun}
And my unsore hand, my good bad hand, on the doorknob, and inside the sweetest smell in the world, a siren smell like heaven and beer and open pussy and summer all the time and Randy beside me, did he smell it too, saying something and" I nodded at him, yes, yes, working at my bandages and I couldn't quite get them off, the tape snarling on the gauze and it was pissing me
off
so I ripped and worried them with my teeth, spit them down and off, oh what a kind relief and I stuck my hand down the Funhole just as far as it could go, as deep as it could get, down that sweet-smelling friendly hole and did it feel
good
? Oh God you know it did. And I wiggled it around, yeah, and I didn't really feel anything because
it
was feeling
me
and it was a wonderful thing, I couldn't imagine why I'd been so scared before, it was just what was meant to happen, what wanted to be.

"—please—"

Not my voice, no. Was there someone here with me?

"-—on,
man, listen to me, you got—"

Oh my yes, Randy, my good friend Randy, and we'd come here for him, hadn't we? Yes. Yes, don't be selfish, at least listen to what the poor son of a bitch is saying and boy is he sweating, is it hot in here or something?

"—Dead End."
Yes indeed this boy was
sweating.
"Look at it, man!"

He sure likes to call me man, doesn't he, and the idea made me smile, a lazy smile and I turned my head but it was sort of hard to see so instead I turned my body, slow one-eighty rotation and my arm was the axle, the dear hole the fixed point around which I spun, feet in the air and graceful as a swimmer and sure enough, Randy's sculpture was doing something
very strange.
No wonder he looked so scared.

."Is it melting?" I asked.

"Don't touch it anymore, okay, Nicholas?"

"I'm sorry," I said, and I was. "Did I break it or something?"

"No." Everything about him was shaking. Even his voice. "But every time you touch it, part of it—melts, okay? So don't touch it anymore."

He was right, I saw that he was right: where my hand had presumably been, on the crooked metal rungs, were somehow indentations, melted to resemble the footsteps of something very strange indeed. And down its length, he must see it too, that greasy nacreous shine, that signature video light. What next, the figure itself? Climbing?

"Nicholas?"

"All right," I said—I was nothing if not agreeable—but all at once I started to feel very weird and I realized it was the beer, it was being so drunk, I was going to throw up and for some reason this struck me as hilarious. Pukin' down the Funhole. Even Nakota couldn't match that. But if I did then I would have to throw up on my own arm and I didn't really want to do that, so I reached out my free hand to Randy and asked in my agreeable voice, "Would you please pull me the fuck out of here? Because I think I'm gonna barf."

I did, too. It was
amazing.

Alone.

Cold.

On the bathroom floor, my head very near the toilet bolt, its rusty crusted sharpness pressing with a kiss's delicacy against my left ear. All of me aching but in particular my right arm, my nose full of snot and all the light in the room wrong, somehow, too bright and too pale.

Why was I lying on the bathroom floor?

The memory did not come in pieces but all at once, and when it did I retched, sorry little sound, there was nothing left in me to void. More than anything I did not want to look at my hand, no, I don't think I can do that. No.

"Nicholas."

She scared me so much I whacked my head against the toilet, she was the last person I wanted to see, I was so glad she was there. She

squatted, tilting her head, and reached to gently turn my face toward her.