The Cipher (12 page)

What had I done wrong?

What had I wanted that made this happen?

Nakota's taunts and Randy's silent doggish respect, the bugs in the jar with runic wings, the video and its glimpsed emissary figure, the hole in my hand, the void in my head that led me into this, now there was a real Funhole, where the darkness came in. Was the darkness always there? Was all it needed to infiltrate a lack of determination to keep it out? and had I really done all this to myself, by myself, by being the little I was?

I was. so
tired
of hating myself. But I was so good at it, it was such a comfortable way to be, goddamn fucking flotsam on the high seas, the low tide, a little wad of nothing shrugging and saying Hey, sorry, I didn't mean it, I didn't know it was loaded, I didn't think things would turn out this way. It's so easy to be nothing. It requires very little thought or afterthought, you can always find people to drink with you, hang out with you, everybody needs a little nothing in their life, right? Call the specialist when you do. You don't even have to call, chances are I'll already be there, you've just overlooked me because I'm in a corner, crouched like a dustball, a cobweb, my busy little spaced-out grin and oops it seems I've stumbled on some sort of exalted hellhole, Funhole, do excuse me while I let it out, while I let it into my body, while I let it run my life because
somebody
has to, right? somebody has to take the goddamned brunt even if it's a void.

Even if it's chosen me.

Because how bad can it be, right, if it wants
me,
how dangerous? If it will settle for a tool this poor HOW BAD CAN IT BE.

"God," thick mucus voice and tears running out of my eyes, "oh God," and I wept into a paper towel, crying hard in the kitchen's warmth, my body half-folded against the table, retching sobs like vomit. I cried a long time, past pain until I felt so empty nothing hurt, nothing anywhere, if I had died I could not have felt more husked. A walking depletion. "Aren't you the poet," I said out loud, my voice a hush in the larger silence, and I wiped at my eyes, then almost smiled, weary, when it hurt: orange juice in my eyes, burning like gasoline. You dickhead.

After eating I went slowly back to the couchbed, more comfortable than mine at home and larger, the blankets certainly cleaner. Nesting there with my right hand on my chest, its returning pain a pulse so metronomic that for whole moments I did not even feel it, instead only the sensation of great emptiness, as pleasant in its way as the bare cessation of pain after 5 protracted illness. Asleep again, till the place where I lay woke me with its warmth, the strong slant of the afternoon sun pointing straight at me, on me. I lay there, completely empty, in the sunlight. When the sun went down I got up to piss, drink water, back to the nest. I felt I could spend my life there, or die there, it made no difference really. Typical, I thought to myself, of myself, but even the hatred was gone, washed out maybe by the force of its own corrosion, replaced by the great nothing, a void far deeper than any Funhole could ever be.

I lay there for three days.

I got up once in a while to piss, the intervals lengthening as the hours passed, dark or light in the hallway and me trudging back to my nest, my chrysalis, that sense of emptiness filling, little by little, with a certainty, a necessary idea of what fulfillment, for me, might be. What to do. What do you need. I asked myself, and the answer came, filtering through my weakness, perhaps even enhanced by it. What do you want?

Dreams. Out of focus, surreal in their ferocity, blunt contrast to my daytimes of staring up at the ceiling, at my leaky hand, at the pale water stains and minute drifts of dust in the corners of the room. One dream in particular, its edges blurry-bright, one long stretched face like a frame around my terror, a frame from the video as if I lay behind its very eyes, the eyes of that animate nothingness, woke me weeping, left me so wet with sweat I thought for one half-conscious moment that I had either pissed the bed or died bleeding; night sweats, that was called.

Evidence of extreme weakness. As if I needed any.

The next morning I woke to see my right hand twitching slowly and violently, like a large and dying insect, floundering hard against the flat pillow without producing any sort of feeling in my flesh. It was like watching yourself in someone else's dream, so incredibly bizarre that it was almost entertaining; I was very much past giving any kind of a shit so I watched it, wondering if some weird necrosis was taking place, my hand cut off, so to speak, from its fathering Funhole and dying as a result. "My hand and my dead hand," I said out loud, and while it flopped and twisted I sat watching, smile turned to grin, found I even had a hard-on and grinned at that too.

My hand stopped, and I laughed, a little dying cough, the way you finish laughing, in stages, at one hell of a joke. I used that hand to dial the phone, ignoring the immediate and surprising pain this caused, forcing my finger into the retro rotary dial to call work and tell them I wouldn't be coming in anymore. This was no secret; in fact they wanted very much to tell me first. My last check was in the mail, the manager said, sounding pleased.

"And you won't come in my mouth, right?"

She didn't get it. I hung up and went into the kitchen, sat in my underwear eating Cheerios out of the box; they were very stale, almost like Styrofoam or rice cakes, apparently Nora didn't like Cheerios very much. Still in my underwear, my mouth full of half-chewed Cheerios, I began to search the house for the .22 I knew Nora had, she used it for target shooting, well I had a target in mind.

It wasn't hard to find, either, just where you'd expect: under her bed, plastic box of bullets beside. A neat bedroom, tidy little piles of paperbacks and sweaters, above her bed a shitty-looking plaque, obviously handmade, its burned-in sentiment peculiarly appropriate to my mood and mission: "When Life Gives You Lemons, Make Lemonade." Well, life had given me shit, and I was making a compost heap. Or more succinctly, life had given me a Funhole, and I was making a grave.

It took me a few minutes to figure out how to load it, I'd never loaded a gun in my life. Few more minutes to position myself at the end of her bed. Eyes open, or closed? Death's etiquette. Let's try not to screw this one up, shall we? And I felt not even happy or good but at least not bad and that was surely more than enough and certainly much better than I deserved.

Open your mouth, I said to myself.

The tip of the barrel lay on my tongue, holy metal. The light in the room was exceptionally bright, even on my closed lids. Maybe, I thought, this is what people say car wrecks are like, even to swallow seemed to take forever. My mouth was full of saliva, my heart all at once beating fast and light.

I remember thinking, Why, I've made a choice. I don't want to be part of this anymore, and I'm, I'm opting out. Imagine. An actual decision, and I was very much enjoying my novel sense of resolve and picturing, in a self-indulgent way, the manner in which the bullet would come flying up the barrel, when something new came to me: shame.

Not disgust. I was intimate with that. Not self-hate either because I was, if not done with it, then so possessed by it that I could no longer feel it, as a perfect swimmer no longer consciously feels the sea as an element apart. But: instead a profound and simple shame, a sensation as immediate and irresistible as pain or heat. In my big, my unique moment of decision I was behaving as heedlessly, as stupidly, as
typically
as ever, because by this action I would bring trouble on Nora, big trouble, on a person who had actually tried to help me, who had given me what I asked for.

Typical.

I lowered the gun.

That's just like you, you cheap piece of shit.

But not the shame.

And not the action prompted by the shame, either.

I put the gun away. I went downstairs and cleaned the kitchen, the cereal and yesterday's dried orange rinds and slightly smelly cof-feemaker, thinking all the while. Another novelty. Not running from the bad feeling, not avoiding this new shame. Feeling it, as deeply as I felt the fresh pain in my hand, the victorious ache. In the glare of the shame I saw that if I must be myself, if there was no changing the aimless scramble that was me, if I must be in the end a victim, then: yes.

But not this way. Not at another's expense, or at least not an innocent other. Because that
was
mutable.

But then why not jump off a bridge? An empty bridge, no one around for miles? Why not find a broken bottle and an alley, cut my wrists with one and bleed to death in the other? It's not that simple, is it, all this selfless shit is just too much to swallow, come on now there's no one here but me and my new insight, leaning against the kitchen counter, almost sick, now, with the ugly clarity, this breakthrough pocket of pus and deceit, no more of this shit that it's Nora, don't pull your shit on me.

What do I want. I thought. Transformation?
Do
I want, at all?

And knew that what I most wanted was not to know. Wanted instead to be ridden, not mindless but adrift, still, in the eddies of my helplessness, there is such
peace
in helplessness, it's better than death any day, you're still able to enjoy the ride. It had nothing to do with anyone else, not even Nakota, maybe, though as nothing as I was, I knew I loved her, that much was no sham. But. She said it didn't work without me, and without wanting to I believed her, finally, without beginning to understand why this should be so. But. If I really loved her, if it really was quiescent without me, why not then stay away for good, let it shrivel or bloom as it would without my presence?

But you know the answer to that, I thought, don't you.

Because in the end we are what we are, we want what we want, whether we know it or not. Whether we care to resist or not, or whether in the end it's worth resistance after all.

And the bubble and shine of the air in the kitchen, as if a faint was in the offing, well why not then, why not? and a rich ache slicing up the path of my arm, to my throat, to my stupid head, a claiming pain that said, Why don't fret, you've made the
right
choice, you've done the
right
deed. Ah, God, I thought, pushing by main force away from the counter, pain, sick stomach and all, Funhole imprimatur, sanctified by the weirdest thing in the world. St. Nicholas, but don't expect any presents from me.

After the kitchen, the living room, spartan movements as my nest disappeared into a green plaid couch and a folded blanket. Shaving, my hands all one tremble, doing it slow. Showering, using Nora's gooey shampoo. Dressing. I put all my things away in my gym bag. I wrote Nora a note, thanking her, saying I was sorry I had to leave before she returned, saying I would call her sometime soon and we would talk. This last I knew was-not true, but it was kindly so I said it anyway. I didn't want her to think I had used her simply for a hidey-hole, even though I had, wringing the last dry drop of juice from an old, old favor, one she had repaid as a matter of course. Of course.

It was extremely cold outside, much colder than it looked, not brittle to the eye but lush, the slopes and gullies of slickly crusted snow. It took me a long time to scrape my windows, slow even back-and-forth motions, the frost and ice curling away from my cracked yellow scraper in neat little half circles. I stopped to get gas, using almost the last of my money to do so. A handful of change to make a phone call, standing shoulders hunched against the cold, my breath frosting the mouthpiece. Five rings. I counted each.

"Mhhh. Hello."

"Hey."

"Who's this? Is, Nicholas, is that you?"

More wide-awake by the minute, Nakota's voice sharpening, I could so easily hear her frown. "Where are you?" she said, and I said, "Be at my place in about three hours."

And hung up.

And got there in two.

My usual space in the parking lot, feeling not light-headed but something kin to it, walking up the stairs and seeing the tiny clouds of breath, my place would probably be a freezer. And it was. A dirty freezer. I threw a lot of stuff away, sweeping my arm across surfaces in a motion that any other time would have felt embarrassingly theatrical, but now, oh, after a two-hour drive in cold and total silence, thinking all the while, all my thoughts were gone, used up, burned up by the cold and I knew what I was doing, yes, or at least acted as if I did. For once.

I felt the Funhole as soon as I walked in the building, as I moved around my flat, felt it moving in me as a reptile, a snake, maybe, feels the motion of its coils, and was no longer disturbed by it, no. No. I had made one sharp decision, gone consciously back on it, and now the other resolution, made in the shadow of the first's decline, the mindless false Zen of to-know-and-not-to-know, was so strong in me it required no thinking, required very little in fact. Perhaps this was in keeping with my basic nature, somewhere in the neighborhood of a plant, say, or an animate napkin, yeah. I couldn't even insult myself anymore. I didn't care. It didn't matter. I felt like I was breathing methane, as if the cold was a living fire in my eyes. All the way home I had watched my hand, my naked bandageless hand, quick glances to see it independently twitch and shudder on the cold seat beside me, my dark stigmata very visible in the clear, clear light; any other time it might have scared me, scared me bad. But .not today.