The Cipher (5 page)

Gone as usual in the morning, and me left behind and naked, inner thighs lightly scaled with the dried spoor of our lovemaking: she liked to stay on top afterward and let the juice run down, and I liked whatever she liked. Imagining in the shower that I could smell her still, the angular scent of those secret bones, had she always smelled so fierce and so good? Recalling those gone times, old memories lit by the fire of the new, I did not this time wonder how long it would last; I was too smart for that now. Take what you get, and don't think. Of course it could never be that easy, but there were moments, like now, that I could successfully pretend that it was, and I had no inclination to try to peer past those moments. I'm not one who wants to know the future: at the best it spoils the present, with longing or dismay, and at the worst, well. Who really wants to find out how tight the sling is, for your own very personal ass, who wants to know how deep the shit will really be? Not you. Not me either. Because it's rarely bliss saved up, is it, when you finally get there. I'll take my now, waking with a lover's scent still on me, around me, take my hopes before they're maybe tragedy; a good morning is still a good morning, even if it leads to apocalypse at night.

For once up early enough to have breakfast, so I did, an oily tuna sandwich wrapped in half a paper towel arid eaten in the solitude of the morning hall, second-floor hall but you probably knew that. Looking at the door. Thinking of the Funhole inside.

Other devotees it surely had, in its inexplicable history as weird-ass god-thing, and what sacrifices? No one had Nakota's brute gift for imagination, but no doubt the process that was the Funhole would accept lesser treats; odd that we had never found evidence. I couldn't believe that no one else in the building had stumbled over this particular piece of real estate. It would be— not "nice", but good, in some fathomless way, to talk with someone else about this, particularly if they were even slightly more normal than Nakota. Or me.

Read your own poems, I told myself, and smiled, a thin scoff. I still wrote them, or rather found them written; I rarely remembered the act of writing since I was usually shitfaced when I did it. I couldn't bear to try reading them, and was too ashamed to let anyone else see; my mus-cleless talents as a poet had peaked in my moody English Department years, declined still less poignantly as I pushed with the grim fatalism of the true asshole to make a living from my "work." Nakota was right: I had no business mocking her weird sculptor friends.

Footsteps, aiming down the stairs, and I pushed off hurriedly from the wall, stuffed the last of my sandwich into my mouth, nonchalantly swinging around the chewed-looking newel post as the walker passed me by, a skinny black-haired white man just this side of boy, head down as if in communion with a daily tragedy too dense to share even by acknowledgment. Which was okay by me: I've never resented being ignored. I watched, waited for him to push his way out the big downstairs door, then hustled myself back up to get my name badge and my coat. Be on time today, I thought. Or even early.

Still I found myself dreamy, imagining the drivers beside me on the road as fellow participants in an odyssey the nature of which we were never meant to guess, tasting here and there of the surreal to a greater or lesser degree, depending on nature or circumstance or both. My, aren't we the mystic this morning, but I did not exactly laugh as I normally would have, and at red lights I studied them, those drivers, with a compassion I never felt, looking past their morning stares or blunt car-phone smiles, past all I saw on the surface, the divination of an eye accustomed to much stranger sights. Nakota would have dismissed them with less than a sneer; I wondered what would happen if they came to the Funhole, unsuspected font of the bizarre. Would the pressure of its strangeness weigh them, as we two were weighed, would they run from it, pray to it, doom it in their minds to nonexistence by virtue of its relentless incredibility?

The mood stayed with me all day: things at work acquired a significance: a customer's choice of video, sure, you could read runes in that any day of any week, but I saw, in this new state, deeper, encountered signs I had never before known: the slick sound of a Visa sliding across the counter, the feel of the counter itself, the way the endlessly playing monitors flickered in and out of blackness in the existential spaces between
Streetgirls II
and
Dead Giveaway
and
Dog Gone Wild,
the scent, even, of the money paid or the customer's fingers or the very air in the heat beneath the fake marquee lights, all of it told me things, showed me things, and gifted somehow by the Funhole—
was
that the source?

—I saw, if not the meaning of patterns then patterns of meaning, and for me that was enough.

The mood holding, I drove not home but to Club 22, sat drinking a Pabst until scowling Nakota's shift began. Her frown did not lessen for me but she came to me, not at once but that too had portent: she knew, didn't she, that I was there for the duration, that I could wait.

Thin in dusty black, the leather of her work shoes cracking along the stress line where sole met upper, hair scooped into a deeply unflattering topknot: my love. Did I say that? Again?

"Hey," I said.

"What're you drinking that shit for?" knocking at my bottle with one sharp knuckle, tiddlywink-ing it so it rocked in place. "At least drink something human."

"Are you coming over tonight?"

Interest in those opaque eyes, I had known her so long and in the end so poorly. "Why? You got an idea?"

I shook my head, mood pointing lower, picking at the dull gold foil, Miller High Life, right. I got some high life for you. "I just, I thought you might like to come over for a while."

"I don't think so. I have to check some things out," and she turned, sloppy tray, heading for three solitary drunks lined at the bar like listing gravestones. Old-fashioned Christmas lights behind her as she served them, blinking on and off in a causeless rhythm more reminiscent of power spurts than festive design. I drank my beer and went home.

Pausing on the second-floor landing, listening to the woozy shrieks of what, anger or pleasure, it was just sound to me, somebody doing something in one of the flats. Close by the Funhole, would living next door to it cause an issuance, a distortion, in your daily rhythms, would you brush your teeth with mare's milk, would you crawl around and dart your tongue like a rattler? Would you bite?

I wanted very much to go stand by the Funhole door, put my ear to it, listen with all my might, bring paper and pencil, yeah, write what you know. Instead I went up to my flat to eat stale shitlike peanut-butter-and-pita-bread sandwiches and contemplate, with my new and moody gaze, the warped fluttering Bosch triptych hung sorry in an unworthy light:
The Garden of Earthly Delights
with its incipient birds and copulations, none more beguiling than the standard of strange that was my daily life. Still I found I appreciated them, all of them, more fully than I ever had, demons and rabbits, butterflies and spikes, loved them more and felt bad that my copies weren't even proper prints, just magazine pages, symbolic somehow I knew but not why.

I fell asleep with a headache beginning to eat away at my seamless wonderings, woke up to a ghost of the same headache and a couple pages of writing that began with the phrase, "The giant said you gotta give to get." Truer words, etcetera, and with a cooler heart and growing headache I rolled them in a graceful ball and threw them out the open window.

Nakota's day off, so to speak, had borne new fruit: she was over ten minutes after I got home from work, glittering with her news, not bothering-to sit, this was apparently too important. "Listen: I got a new idea."

"Son of a
bitch,
"struggling with the bent edges of a microwave dinner, unable to separate foil from plate. "I'm sorry. I'm listening."

"What if," grinning, palms flat on canted hips, and certain of applause, "what if we put a camcorder down the Funhole?"

My fork was bending against the foil. I smiled, at a loss. "Sounds good."

A chilly look, not entirely dimming her cool wattage but certainly a pall. "Think about it," in a tone suggesting that though this might be beyond me, it was still my duty to try. "You're the one who gave me the idea. An eye, you said, and I thought, right: a
camcorder.
Turned on, recording everything.
Everything.
It'd be like going down there yourself, almost. Almost as good."

I shoved the dinner into the microwave, turned it on, sat across from where she stood. "Nakota, it's a good, it's a great idea, but we don't have a camcorder, and we can't—"

"Two words," holding up two fingers, slim as candles.

I waited.

"Video," bending one finger, "Hut." The other.

For once, I argued. I mean really argued, which at first genuinely surprised her, then angered her to a high cold pitch I had rarely seen. We went through all the steps: I couldn't do it, they'd find out, I was a worse thief than a liar and I was a lousy liar, she knew that. "They're paranoid about their camcorders," I told her. "There's only two to rent, there's no way one wouldn't be missed. This isn't some big chain store," trying not to yell, again, "this is
Video Hut
for God's sake, they bought those damned things with their own money, they take them home on weekends to take pictures of their kids!"

"Borrow one then," but I had an answer to that, too, imagine me as the answer man: the upfront rule was No Borrowing.

"Then I'll do it myself."

"Nakota, no."

"I can't believe," her voice low and slow and venomously cold, "that you're not with me on this, that you can worry so much about getting caught, about that shitty two-bit job—"

"I have to eat," I said. "Every day."

"I'll do it," she said again, "myself..Or," more coldly still, "I'll do it without a camcorder."

She said this like a duelist with the laughable advantage, but oh yeah, I am stupid, it took me a second or two to figure out what she didn't mean —a camera—and then what she did. And
that
she did. Explicitly.

I said absolutely nothing, stood there with my mouth still open on my next brilliant point, looking into those eyes that looked into mine with the calm confidence of the winner, because either way, either way she had won. I still said nothing but she saw somewhere in the slump of my features my acquiescence, and as soon as she saw it she did not smile but gave nie a nod that was almost worse.

"Let me know," she said, "if you need me to help."

In the end it was almost stupidly easy, fitting I suppose for someone as clumsy at larceny as I am—I was never even a shoplifter, for God's sake. The. late-night Saturday shift was universally despised; it was no trouble to volunteer, and best of all I could do it on paper, penciling in my guilty initials beside the perennial request.

When Saturday came it was no trouble, either, to volunteer to count out drawers: I was assistant manager after all. I counted each twice, nervous, irritating Nakota, who stood, camcorder in hand, hip-cocked and sport-coated in the fluorescent radiance of the back room. The rest of the store was near dark, small pockets of security light here and there, except where they really needed it, right?

"I'm not
taking
this," over my shoulder for the hundredth time. "We're gonna do this, and get it over with, and bring it right back."

"Yes, Mommy," but distracted, without any real heat, she was too excited. When the drawers were counted out and locked in the safe, I turned out the back-room lights, stood blinded in the sudden absence of dazzle, she beside me more blinded still.

"Ready?" impatiently, but she squeezed my arm, not even, I thought, a sop but genuine excitement, wanting to share it with me, coconspirator and part-time stooge. Locking up, her hand still on my arm, in her pocket—I saw this at a red light—three oversize Hershey bars, stolen from the fake concession-stand display. She saw me looking at them and smiled, big mock shrug.

"Want one?" It was good, too.

Back home she ran up the stairs, literally, soundlessly, as I trudged one floor past, leaving her to it. Your show, Nakota.

It seemed a very long while to me, ensconced in the bathroom, taking a much-deserved shit, and suddenly her pounding on the dpor and me yelling how it was open and there she was in the bathroom, holding the empty carton of a videotape.

"Rolling," she said, and for a moment we said nothing, only looked at each other, imagining the red idiot eye staring down into all that dark, awaiting whatever sea change was inherent in the trip.

"Beer," she said, a quick positive nod and for once it was an idea I could agree with, wholeheartedly, even while shitting. She stood there, leaning against the damp-bubbled wallpaper that depicted sick lavender seahorses at play in a sleazy gold-leaf sea, her eyes almost closed, lids minutely twitching as if she dreamed.

All at once a distraction, in the form of me standing, postwipe, pants around my ankles and with her eyes open she knelt right there on the bathroom floor and took me in her mouth.

Oh did she feel good. Bony hands cupping my balls as she worked me, hair swinging in hypnotic rhythm and I grabbed that hair, that head, pulled her tight to me, her nose, I felt it, softly bending against my body, my breath rising, groaning hard and quiet when I came. Slow, slow she pulled away, wiped her slick mouth like a fed cat. I leaned against the sink, puffing out a spent breath, and saw her lean elbows-over the toilet and expertly expel a milky stream of semen, gazing up at me as she did and daring me with that gaze to complain.