The Cipher (4 page)

My disgust bred the same in others, increased as the day waned, as if it were a worsening virus and me Typhoid Nicholas and pretty damned glad about it too. Fat women in "Damn I'm Good" T-shirts and men with bald heads and tit videos and teenagers with shitty attitudes, all of them leaning across the counter, slapping their plastic cards and nails drumming, impatient with my lack of speed. I could have gone slower, was tempted to, realized it would just keep them there that much longer. So I rushed, pissed and uncaring, grabbing their money and slamming the register drawer with a rote fillip as patience-less as their stares, responding to their rudeness with my own point-blank fuck-you glare.

When my shift was over, without even counting out my drawer I left, into a growing rain, complement to my mood but making it worse. Rain leaked down the inside of my window; I tried to crank it all the way closed but the last sullen half inch defeated me. The whole car smelled like a wet dog.

So did my fiat: I'd left the night's window open a crack, or maybe Nakota had. Sure, blame it on her. I sat at the kitchen table, on the one chair' that didn't teeter, scooping salsa from the jar with saltines, reading the paper, trying to ignore my mail, trying to ignore the almost certain knowledge that the phone would ring, she would call with a bright new atrocity. And what would I say? Why ask when you know?

She didn't call.

Working, I told myself, but I knew Thursday wasn't one of her nights. Where then? Lots of places, the Incubus Gallery, maybe another shitty opening, maybe anything with her. Maybe sitting hunched up over her mouse head, trying to tease out its secrets, to decipher from its deformities the specifics of its journey, telling over the new abnormalities like a rosary for a special new religion; high priestess, she was made for it. The cult of the Funhole. Step right up, we can't offer you salvation or forgive your sins but we can give you one hell of a ride, just check out Mr. Mouse here, or his pioneering compatriots, the Flying Bug Brothers. Let me especially draw your attention to the one with two heads.

When I slept it was a surfacing, uneasy sleep, no question of rest. Dreams instead, plenty of them, dreams of frustration that rose, froze into fear, mild at first then so rich with terror that I woke, over and over again, my mouth dry enough to be painful, afraid to get up and get a drink of water. Worse yet, my dick was inexplicably hard. I refused to acknowledge it, I didn't want to begin to think why. It took forever to get back to sleep.

Leaving for work, running late and damn, the phone, her? It was. "How about tonight?" blunt, no niceness in her, my sweet Nakota, and me smiling, her tame asshole, yup uh-huh.

"Come over," I said, rubbing keys in random hand, wanting to ask where she was calling from and knowing better than to try. "You know what time I get home."

"I might get there a little early."

"Don't, Nakota," not knowing what she had in mind, sure she wouldn't spend the minutes in passive waiting at my bower door.

"Don't tell me what to do," and she hung up on me, oh good I told myself, heart running hard, now you've pissed her off. Nothing less predictable than a pissed-off Nakota, and you, dickhead, you had to load the gun, didn't you. I stood there in my own anger until, looking without seeing, the dull numerics of the clock on the counter turned over: 8:28,
shit

Down the stairs, halfway and I forgot my fucking badge, up the stairs again and down, looking once and furiously at the storage-room door, nondescript portal to all that was confu-*sion in my life, but then again without confusion—jamming ignition key, some jolly bastard on the radio—without
confusion,
why where would I be?

Imagination can be hell. I spent the whole day jittering, thinking what if this, what if that, mistakes all around that I could barely notice. I kept seeing Nakota's hand, cool and firm on the storage-room door, walking into some black Xanadu I could never fathom, much less cure. Vanishing like a rock in a gravel pit, a tar pit, sucked in and down and down, loving every second of course but then that did me no good at all, did it now? Did it?

"You charged me twice." Mean little mouth, skinny little Mediterranean mustache. Scent of Tabu, in all the world my least favorite perfume. "You charged me
twice,"
more feelingly, the pure injustice apparently tearing her a new asshole.

I didn't say I was sorry. Reringing the transaction I pondered, I wanted to stick her headfirst down the Funhole, I'll charge you twice all right. Legs twitching like a mantis, blue muu-muu pant suit going down, down, down, I'll show you taboo.

Slewing home, water spraying in the omnipresent rain, skirting red lights and I never noticed the side of my hair, the side of my face getting wet from the damned driver's-side window, broken crank and all but I had bigger fish: is she there, what's she doing, what
isn't
she doing. Is she
there
? "There" maybe meaning still reachable, and if not, then what? Drop her a line, right? You can laugh at the damnedest things, or I can anyway.

I went not to my door but the Funhole's. Wet footprints, a curl of mud on the scuffed wood of the hallway, look Ma, I'm a detective: it's Nakota, in the Funhole, with a wrench. Or a dagger. Or a fucking nuclear device. Or a baby's head floating limply in ajar, my hand all at once sorry on the doorknob, a deep cellular reluctance to see what might be there to be seen.

I went in.

Nakota, wet like a shower, mangy hair and mangy clothes, some ratty sport coat hung over her bony broken-hanger shoulders and swivel-ing from her squat to face the opening door with a face wary as an animal's; seeing me, she had the balls to smile. Not a nice one, either, but did I really need to tell you that?

"You're late," was all she said, turning at once in graceful dismissal back to her business. Her coat smelled disconcertingly like dog farts, in particular the juicy ones my dog Jenny used to cut, or maybe it was the Funhole. Or maybe I was going crazy, olfactory hallucinations one of the rarer signs, but what the hell, I lived no ordinary life, now did I? I realized my hands were shaking; touching one to the other, even my own skin could feel the depth of its cold.

"You're early," I said.

"I'm trying something new," she said, barely bothering to look at me. Not even the murk of the room could mar the thoughtful glimmer of her gaze, so pretty, Nakota, especially when contemplating things no one else can stand to think about. A memory, a parking lot of a bar called the Pelican, muggy Florida midnight and she, front and center in the dwindling circle, watching with eyes ashine the drunken chain-saw fighters, the frail scent of blood, the stink of gasoline. "They do it every other week," she told me, matter-of-fact hand on the hood of my blue Dodge Charger, watching me puke on my tires. "Not the same guys, of course." Of course.

"What are you trying?" I asked now, head canted back, just a little, a careful angle so I didn't actually have to see it until I heard what it entailed. "Why couldn't you wait for me?"

She ignored the second question. "I tried to get a cat," she said, "but I couldn't. Actually," an almost, what, embarrassed smile, "I think I probably could have, but, shit. I
like
cats," and she laughed a little, and I noticed how close she knelt to the darkness, how nonchalant. "Anyway this is better, in a way," and she hauled up, for an instant, her descending prize: in a plastic baggie, a human hand.

My throat closed up, dry thumping fist begun in my aching chest and I pushed backward with a horror so simple I could have described it in a word: No. No.

"No," I said, in an almost conversational voice, and she gave me a headshake of mild disgust: "Take it easy," she said, dropping the hand a little lower, "it's not like I cut it
off
anybody, or anything. I got it from Useless."

In my terror the name meant nothing, then all of a sudden it did and I laughed a little, breathless with relief. Useless was her name for Eustlce, a photographer friend of ours who lived with a postgrad pathologist who was pursuing her internship at "U of G morgue," fishing it lower, "it's not like they're gonna miss it or anything. I mean, what's one less hand? They get 'em off the streets all the time. Useless takes pictures of them."

"Hands?" I leaned over her shoulder, studying with pale interest the hand's Caucasian skin gone muddy yellow, its regulation wrinkles, the marks where it had been separated from its host body. It pressed against the bag in a way that made me glad I hadn't eaten.

"Vags. Vagrants," delicate eyebrows drawn in a studious slant, faint radiation of beginner's crow's-feet around those eyes, I gazed at them, now, as I leaned closer still. "They die, nobody cares, his stupid girlfriend cuts them up and studies them or something." She swung the bag gently, side to side, strange pendulum, and I caught at her coat, tugged it.

"Be careful," I said, "you're awful close."

She shifted, not actually changing position. "I wanted to take pictures, before and after, you know? But Useless wouldn't let me borrow his camera unless I told him what I wanted it for."

"But he gave you the hand okay."

"It's just a hand."

A dead hand, I thought, and had to smile, it was all so weird that it was actually funny. Relaxing back, or as relaxed as I could be around the Funhole, taking my weight on my haunches and looking at Nakota, the lines of concentration around her lips, her touch on the fishing line so sure, fingernails bitten past the skin line. For as long as I'd known her she'd bitten her nails, chewing them the way a child sucks a blanket, dull-eyed intensity. These days she must really be gnawing them, and I wondered if the hand had bitten nails too. I'd read that nails kept growing, after death, a little while. "Who bites the nails of the dead?" I said, silly sonorous voice, and was rewarded with one of Nakota's rarest smiles, a grin of genuine amusement.

"I do," she said, and went on fishing.

The hand was down far enough that it seemed small to me, tunnel-vision gaze into the black, Nakota paying out the line as smoothly as a reel. The hand's skin looked whiter against the dark, the plastic bag translucent, its one visible aspect the green closure line at the top. Down and down. Write when you get work.

Then Nakota started, smiled a very different smile: "Something's happening," she said, and I saw her fingers tighten around the line, saw its visible sway in her grasp. Her face was suddenly grim, a businesslike frown, she must have thought she was losing it; her knees braced more firmly against the floor, I straightened too, quick nervous anticipation of possible need; like a fire extinguisher, in case of emergency break glass. Emergency, that was certainly the right—

A smell like a giant's rot came like a train from the Funhole, so amazingly foul that even Nakota gasped, grip slackened on the fishing line, face folding like a fist in self-defense and I sank back, shirt fumbling-pressed to my nose and mouth, as the hand came crawling jauntily up the line, some fluid beading lightly on the stub of its wrist, and I screamed into my shirt and grabbed Nakota's arm; her control of the line wavered, the hand swung in drunken ovals over the abyss, then quickly corrected with the 61an of a circus acrobat and climbed higher, nearing the lip of the Funhole and I yelled, "Nakota, get rid of it!" and she swore at me, no words but a sound like an animal and refused to let go of the line.

"Let it go!" I shouted again and gave her forearm a stiff downward slap, causing the hand to grip more tightly to the line as if the motion had frightened it. I slapped her again and the hand jiggled in corresponding panic, I moved to slap her a third time and she backhanded me, hard and blunt, the hand swinging up and wide and free of the Funhole, slamming into a pile of empty Clorox jugs like a bowling ball down an alley, scattering the plastic jugs with a wet thump and me skittering to my feet, grabbing Nakota who hit me again, her whole face blotched with rage, dragging her to the door where we stood, me pinning her arms down, she kicking me backward in the shins.

Nothing happened.

She stopped kicking me.

Still nothing happened. I let her arms go and she immediately punched me in the face, very hard, darting at once to where the hand had landed. I touched my face, gripped the doorknob, waited.

"It's dead," she said.

I kept waiting.

"It's dead," she said again, insistently, holding it up by the line. Gentle swing and it
was
dead, unmistakably, limp and sorry and somewhat the worse for wear.

"Well," she said. "I'm gonna throw it back in," and before I could begin to move she did. Line and all.

She saw my face, God knows how it looked, God and Nakota, and she laughed. A little shakily. "Don't worry, it's not coming back out. Like a black iiole, remember?"

"I hope—"

"I
know
I'm right." A pause, her lips in wistful twist, an expression so not-her that I felt, for a frightened moment, that more than the hand had changed. "I wonder," still tilted, small hands on her shoulders, "what it looks like. Down there."

"Next time use an eyeball."

And her face began to crumple, a muscular change and she burst into an incredible hoo-hoo braying laugh, I had never heard her laugh so hard or so loud, it sounded like bottles breaking and I had to laugh too, she collapsed across me, arms hooked like crooks around my shoulders, her whole body shaking with the velocity of her mirth. We laughed our way out of the room, all the way back to my flat, laughed ourselves into the shower and screwed in the coolish spray, thready blood in the draining water, her skinny elbows protruding around me like the feather-less wings of a bird.