The Cipher (13 page)

It was barely three hours when I heard her, cautious down the hall. Whom were you expecting, dear, Jekyll or Hyde but the joke's on you this time. The joke's on you because it's neither, it's someone different, it's someone you don't even know. I opened the door as Nora had, before she even knocked.

"Nicholas." All in baggy black, extreme thrift-shop raggishness even for her. Wearing her windbreaker in this intense cold. She smiled, it was a real smile. Naturally. I had gone off with the keys to the toy box, and now I was back.

"I have to do something," I said. "I need you to help me."

"What kind of help?" Eagerly.
Eagerly,
picture that. Was I angry at her? No. Yes. You want me to be a fool, the Funhole's conduit, clown prince? I can't be anything, now, other than this one thing, and if you'll hold on just a minute, I'll show you what it is,

"I want you to move in here," I said. She opened her mouth to speak but I cut her off. "I don't care where you sleep," which right now was true, maybe I never would care, I didn't know; all I knew was now. "I don't care about anything except having this flat paid for, which I can't do because I lost my job."

"You—"

"I want you to move in as soon as you can. If you can't afford it, get Randy in here too."

"He lives with Vanese."

Vanese. Oh yeah, the girlfriend. "Fine. Get her too. Cheaper by the dozen."

"Nicholas, are you sick or something? Did—•"

"Be in here by the end of the week at the latest. What is it, Tuesday? That gives you three days. You don't have much stuff, you can do it."

"Nicholas."
Insistent tone, her hand on my arm more tentative. "Is something wrong?"

"I tried to kill myself," I said, and flicked off her touch; still, a tremor. "It worked."

The Funhole. Roiling, and in the swallowed glimpse behind my eyes, a foreign smile in my personal darkness, a figure. Welcome home.

It took her less than two days to get her stuff in, and I was right, there wasn't much. Cartons of books mostly, some crummy clothes, a plastic sack of toiletries. A twin bed with a mattress so fragmenting and decayed I took one look and refused to let her bring it in.

"What am I supposed to sleep on, then?"

"The springs. The floor. Out in the hall if you want." I stood arms crossed, looking at her as she stared warily back at me. She was not the type to blossom under hard treatment, under any other circumstances she would have told me without preamble to go fuck myself, but there was something manifestly afoot and she definitely wanted all the way in. I knew she thought that my stark change in behavior meant I had finally gone straight over the edge; whether she believed me about the suicide attempt I didn't know. I knew what I knew and I was done puzzling, I was done with a lot of things now.

An immobile day, that long cold Friday. No food, I didn't feel like eating, as if my sense of purpose could only be nurtured and sustained by physical emptiness. I sat in my chair by the window, left hand cradling right, watching what went on down below, people driving and walking in the worsening weather, the spattering of snow now the first breath of a real storm, it was going to be bad, they kept talking about it on the radio. Six to eight inches, they said. Maybe more.

Nakota kept the radio on, kept prowling the flat, waiting for what? Directions? A sermon? A quickie fuck? I hadn't touched her since I'd been back, hadn't felt like it, though there was a part of me that would have been extremely pleased just to hold that skinny body, hummingbird heartbeat against my chest, faint whiff of cigarette breath in the air before my face. But I made no move toward her. Another appetite blunted. I didn't talk much either. Every once in a while I'd look up and catch her looking at me, head faintly tilted, understanding nothing. There was no way she could know what I was thinking.

"Don't look at me," I said once.

She ignored me, but there was something, then, in her glance that I didn't like. If she was going to start respecting me, she had picked one hell of a time. The idea was almost funny but I wasn't in a real laughing mood.

About six-thirty, the flat dark, only the green radio light: "Is Randy coming?" I asked her. Outside white sky, a downpour of snow. When she answered, her voice startled me; she was much closer to me than I'd imagined, sitting close enough to touch.

"Him and Vanese," she said.

"The more the merrier." I had a weird urge to smoke. "You got a cigarette?" and she lit one for me, passed it to me, her fingers careful not to touch mine. I hadn't smoked in so long I hit the cigarette like a joint: horrible sensation, that hot dry feeling in my chest. The nicotine made me dizzy. I blew smoke in the air and couldn't see it because of the dark, tried to feel it with my fingers. I blew smoke on the hole in my hand and felt nothing.

"Nicholas?"

"What?"

"What's going to happen? I mean, what're you going to do?"

'Throw you headfirst down the fucking Funhole.. Shut up, Nakota."

Although I didn't feel particularly angry when I said it.

It was nearly seven-thirty when they knocked: I heard Randy's voice, a lighter voice murmuring behind. Nakota leaped up as if the room was on fire. She'd been waiting, patience steadily withering, for them to come—she never could stand waiting for anything—convinced their arrival heralded the Main Event. Which was quite correct. She literally banged the door open.

"Took your sweet time about it, asshole," she said, very bitchily, she'd been saving it up for days. Had to unload it on somebody since I was temporarily off limits.

"Hey, it's a fucking blizzard out there, okay?" Randy in the doorway, tentative: "Can you put a light on or something, man? It's darker than shit in here." And behind him, the source of that lighter voice, standing silent; and her silhouette as thin and insubstantial as paper, a cutout doll.

"Do what you want," I said.

They came in, hooded eyes blinking in the changing light, Nakota refusing to move for the woman, they pushed shoulders, the kind of juvenile territory shit I thought only men fell for. Apparently not.

"You the guru?" the woman said to me, Vanese, coming closer, wary highstep, the moves of a person who can cut out in a hurry. Hands in cheap leather slash pockets. Big carved cheekbones, big red plastic earrings. Biggest of all were her eyes, deeper brown than her skin, that same wariness clear in their darkness. "If this's as weird as Randy says, I don't know."

"It is," I said. "And I don't know either. You staying?"

"Yeah," from Randy. Her shrug. "I guess."

"I got your note," Randy said. "Shrike said something, you quit your job?"

"Yeah." I looked at him, at Vanese, fingers moving in her pockets, picking at something, a cuticle, a sore. Longest at Nakota, scarecrow, my heart's desire still; Leeched by the force of the days past and to come, pilloried, walled up but still: desire. Who can fathom that, deeper than change, deeper than the Funhole maybe. "Come on," I said, looking only at her. "You wanna see something, you're gonna see it."

Down the hall, our little band of pilgrims, refugees before the fact. Vanese tried to ask me something but Nakota shushed her so violently that she subsided, though not without a glare. I could feel something, not pain, in my hand, a sensation like pins and needles but less distinct, a buzzing in the flesh. It was that hand I put to the door, and when my careful palm touched the knob I felt not a jolt, as I'd somehow halfass expected—too many horror movies. But the buzzing—now a flicker, like fire in my skin, as if you could feel a burn without the pain, as if your flesh could melt on the bones. Like wax. Like steel.

The room was cold. Why not: everything else was, the hall was ridiculous, but it was still somehow a surprise, I hadn't been in there since that night with Randy. Days. Randy's sculpture, to which he scurried as soon as I got out of his way, was unchanged, or at least I saw no difference. Vanese took a place by the door; still careful, but her gaze went back and forth, the Funhole and me and Randy and Nakota and back to the Funhole again. Nakota ignored everything, knelt beside me where I stood, at the lip of the void. Her hands lay palms-up on her thighs. Maybe she wanted a hole, too, just like mine.

I felt so good.

It was not a sensation I associated with the spot where I stood. Empty, all of me, even of breath for I let it dribble out as I got to my knees beside Nakota, worshipful posture but I didn't feel worshipful, no, that wasn't the point at all. Never had been. Emptiness. Yes. Because that's what the Funhole was, wasn't it, that was the key and clue: a negativity, an absence, a
lack.
A depression, that's what a hole was, no matter how dark and lively, no matter how ultimately full. Even an empty road leads somewhere, right?

But this time, feel it.

"Watch me," I said, aloud but only, really, to Nakota, and in a motion that had, to me, that same kind of half-speed car-wreck intensity, I thrust my arm in full length.

Feel it.

I did.

Not what you would think, no, not suction or even a true sensation, but if you could touch an insubstantiality, a fever dream, rub hallucinations on your skin, if you could cradle your own mind when you dream, trace the hills and gutters of the brain's landscape—there really is no explaining it, I'm sorry but it's so. Even they, who were there, even Nakota who was in all senses closest to me, well. They didn't really get it either. / didn't get it all, but what I got, going into it* with empty eyes open and empty hands at the ready, was horrifyingly intense, not so much empowering but the sensation of such, I heard my own voice howling as if I was in pain but I wasn't, you see, I really didn't feel anything bad at all even when I looked down between my open orbiting knees and saw the steel of Randy's sculpture running over the skin of my knuckles, dripping down to fall not into the Funhole as one would think (and one
would
think) but flying off in a strange arc as if repelled, dropping somewhere to the right but my vision didn't go, didn't really go that far. Nakota was trying to touch me, I could see that much, but she wasn't making contact or if she was I wasn't feeling it. I had my other hand, my right hand, out of the hole now, some other part of me was inside, or maybe not because I was falling, losing altitude we call that, God
damn
sometimes this was funny. Sometimes / was funny. But apparently not now because I heard voices, they sounded scared or screaming or something and I was trying to stick my right hand, my palm, my hole into my mouth, trying to suck the blackness there, it had a greasy bad smell like the Funhole itself but would it taste sweet, so sweet, would it lie on my tongue like honey, drip from my lips like blood?

"I wish you would all be quiet," I said. No one heard me. Maybe I didn't really say it at all.

I was on my back on the floor. I could taste the iron of blood, I was having a great deal of trouble seeing. "Uh-oh," I said. "Randy, did you beat me up?"

To my great surprise I found they could hear me, and I saw Randy's face, astonishingly red for that white skin, I didn't know albinos could get that red. "I'm sorry," he said, "Nicholas, man, I'm sorry but—"

"He thought you were going down," Nakota said, not looking at Randy; without another word I saw, I knew she thought it perhaps the premier idea of all time, certainly my greatest hit, and was inevitably angry beyond telling that Randy had arrested my descent and yet maybe a little glad too. Why dear, I didn't know you cared. Although of course she didn't; all she cared about was being the first one down.

"Was I?" My mouth felt very loose, a bad feeling. I tried to spit and gagged on blood. "Let me up," I said. The back of my head hurt, too.

"Nicholas, I—"

"Shut up," Nakota said, with such viciousness that startled even me, but she made no motion to help as Randy and Vanese lifted me to my feet, walked me down the hail and up the stairs to the flat. Randy began a halting monologue that lasted until I was sitting on the couchbed, a wet dirty washcloth pressed like a membrane against my mouth, which refused to stop bleeding, saying essentially the same thing: that he had not meant to hurt me, that things got so weird so fast, that trying to eat my own hand was one thing but when it looked like I was going headfirst into the Funhole, well.

"I'm sorry, man." He looked sorry too.

"Don't," shaking my head, wanting him simply to stop saying it. He was a good one for repeating himself, Randy. I leaned back on the couchbed, closing my eyes for a moment as Vanese, nail clippers in hand, worked to cut the tape for my ragged new bandage; I was all out of surgical tape and had to settle for electrical tape, which was so very old, I told her, that all the glue was probably dried and therefore worthless. I definitely did not want to have to look at my hand. The idea—not the memory, for at that moment I couldn't accurately remember anything—that I had tried to suck on my wound was making me so retroactively sick that I felt I might have to vomit if I thought about it too hard.

"Why'd you do that for?" Vanese asked me, in the unconscious scolding tone of an older sister, rip rip rip at the tape. "No telling
what's
down there."

Nakota, arms tightly crossed as if that was the only way to keep from slapping the shit out of someone: "That's pretty much the
point,
isn't it?"