The Cipher (6 page)

"I can't stand that shit," she said when she was done. An almost smug smile. "Nothing personal."

Yet she was almost burlesque in her—nice-ness? Nakota? She went out as promised for beer, came back with a whole case, whuffing as she humped it inside. She wouldn't let me help. Or pay.

"My treat," she said firmly.

She even drank one, sitting next to me, cozy on the open couchbed, reading aloud from Flan-nery O'Connor and laughing in the least appropriate spots. I patted her skinny thigh, listening to that charmingly artificial reading voice, a schoolmarm voice I told her and she smiled, nodding, not displeased by my comparison.

We got almost all the way through "The Enduring Chill," my head nodding like a baby's, sweetly drunk and her voice a serenade and I woke up with a start, terribly thirsty, all alone. But I heard the toilet flush and saw her come out, wearing only panties, groping a little even in that familiar space to find her way back; she had dismal night vision. She climbed beside me, * under the blanket but sitting up, and I felt without thinking that she tolled the hours like a human alarm clock, waiting for her video to ripen.

"How long?" I said, guttural beery voice, and she said, "Pretty quick now," and next I knew I was alone again, and she up and dressed and nervous, fiddling with my balky VCR, the camcorder safely propped against the couch-bed. "Here," I said, muzzy in the midst of a hangover, my descending foot disturbing a small phalanx of empty cans, too many beers. "Let me."

"Hurry up."

She couldn't even take the time to sit. Staring at the screen and me trudging back to the couch-bed, wanting water but wanting to wait, just a minute, see what was up; I get curious too.

A clocked minute of static—a long time to sit and watch nothing, I was all for fast-forwarding but Nakota glared me down—then a sip of absolute blackness,
recorded
blackness, rich and menacing as an X ray of a cancer. Nakota, lips parting to say something but the thought drowned in the flash of an image: something like bloody stalks, caressing the screen like hands behind the glass, so greedily intimate even Nakota gave a tiny backstepping whoop. Then as if a barrier shattered, ferocious fun, whatever provided the images warming to this game: a vast black grin like the Funhole itself become its namesake, black asshole-mouth studded with teeth or bones like broken glass and in that Pandora opening Nakota breathless and me with my mouth hanging wide open, village idiot at freak show, a vertiginous glide forward as upon the screen came things I didn't want to know about, oh yes I'm quite sophisticated, quite the bent voyeur, I can laugh at stuff that would make you vomit but how would you like to see the ecstatic prance of self-evisceration, a figure carving itself, re-created in a harsh new form from what seemed to be its own hot guts, becoming no figure at all but the absence of one, a cookie-cutter shape and in but not contained by its outline a blackness, a vortex of nothing so final that beside it the Funhole was harmless, do you see what I'm saying, the Funhole was a goddamned carnival ride next to this nonfigure and all at once what I wanted least, least, far less than to be struck blind or any kind of petty death was to see the figure turn (as it did now) in slick almost pornographic slowness and show me,
show me what there was to see

and I had to turn away, Nakota finally slack-lipped too beside me, had circumstances at last gotten too strange even for her? "God," barely a word, in a self-protective spasm I covered my face with my hands and I heard her little shriek, shock-show denouement, and when I looked again the tape was buzzing blank, show's over, folks, nothing to see here.

The whole thing had taken maybe five minutes.

Nakota: I could see her hand shaking as she pushed at her hair, see her visibly swallow, imagine the dry click of her throat for mine was the same, the same. "Do you think—" she said, and stopped. I thought she might say something else, but instead she ejected the tape, pocketed it with the same reverent care as one would a beloved relic, picked up purse and sport coat. Gone. She never turned to look at me, and for once I barely noticed, didn't care, because I had some big fucking fish to fry, yeah, and the flat was too crowded with her in it, too crowded with me in it so I got up too, dressed and gone, picking up in almost absent passing the camcorder. I would return it, yeah, but to hell with work for today. Videos, I'll give you a video. Not for the squeamish. Category, um. Let's say Foreign Film. Or Comedy, depending, all depending on your personal true-blue bent and if you're benter than most this'll be a thigh slapper. Maybe more. I'd slap my own thigh if I could remember how to work my hand.

After Video Hut, my careless key: driving. Around and around, almost no gas so I had to stop somewhere. A greasy booth at White Castle, hamburger squares gone cold before me, my hand tight as a tourniquet around the coffee cup, size of a urine sample, tasted like hell but then I'd seen hell, hadn't I, or hell's heaven, not the same difference at all.

A kind of a bag lady stopped by my table to ask if I was done with my hamburgers. She smelled distinctly of gas-station washroom soap. She had on three T-shirts and a jacket that reminded me of Nakota. I shoved the burgers at her. "Help yourself," I said.

"I can't," she told me. Which made a lot of sense to me. She took my hamburgers and sat two booths away to eat them. I wondered what she'd think if I showed her the Funhole. You think you're on the fringe of society, huh lady? I'll show you the edge of the fringe, it's even out on video now.

I sat there until they told me to leave. Must have been close to two hours, I wasn't wearing a watch. When I got home Nakota was there, playing it again. I wasn't sure I wanted to see it, so I sat down and took her hand in mine, very firm, didn't give a shit if she wanted me to or not. She didn't seem to mind. Or notice.

"Why is it," as the preliminary static went by, her almost whisper, "that it seems, you know,
weirder
on a tape?"

"Because it is."

I don't know what about it seemed weirder to her; certainly the reanimation of a dead man's hand is pretty fucking weird, as weird as the spontaneous rearrangement of insect parts or the eclectic combustion of a mouse. To me it was the affirmation that the Funhole was not a thing or a place but an actual process,
something that was happening,
and that the process could be, was, actually transferrable to tape. On another level it was somewhat like an operation. Or a death. There's this video at work, you probably heard of it,
Faces of Death
it's called, the penultimate moment captured on VHS. Same principle: you know, everybody knows about death, but to actually see it, wow. Dickbrains are daily blown away by this, no pun intended. Maybe for me this was the same: the Funhole, bugs mouse hand holy shit and look,
look,
here's how it really happens! Look!

For Nakota, who knows, no telling or even guessing with her, but she seemed truly stunned in a way I had rarely seen before. It was some kind of affirmation for her, too, but of what, again who knows and she wasn't talking. Maybe, I thought, we were both hypnotized. Mesmerized, in the original sense. Or maybe we were just the particularly stupid brand of geek who doesn't believe it till it's on TV.

I sat still through it all. I watched the part I had not wanted, before, to see, and was sorry I had. She didn't look sorry but she didn't look good, either. From the pocket of the sport coat she took her cigarettes and two small yellow tablets.

"Want one?"

I shook my head. "What are they?"

"Kind of crank. I've been takin' them all day." She dry-swallowed them; I've never been able to get over how she was able to do that. It almost gags me just to watch.

"I'll stick with beer/' I said. There was still a lot left. I gave her a glass of water and she got up and stirred two packets of sugar into it, shaking the packets to ensure she got every last granule.

"Why'd you do that?"

"Why do you keep your sugar in packets?"

"If I buy it by the bag, the bugs get it."

"So let 'em." She drank the glass down, not even stopping for breath. Then she grinned, fox-head grin. "I feel like I'm underwater," she said. "And that I'm burning."

She put the tape back on. She played it over and over again, until I couldn't watch anymore and sat quietly getting drunk. When I looked at the clock on the counter, I was surprised to see it was only four o'clock. I wouldn't even be home from work yet. I'd forgotten to leave a note, but it jseemed so worthless I didn't care. Maybe the Funhole had finally gotten all the way inside my head and was driving me painlessly crazy.

I got so drunk I fell asleep on the kitchen floor. When I woke up the first thing I did was crawl to the refrigerator and get another beer. Nakota was still in her perched posture on the couchbed. The TV light was the only light in the room. Raining outside and thatjhe only sound, it really was like being underwater. The world's most piquant aquarium. And you are there.

"You're watching that like porno," I told her. It came out so garbled I wanted to laugh, but she was, a ritual masturbatory excess, maybe she even was jerking off. The perfect avant-garde stroke tape. Boy was I funny tonight. Too bad no one was laughing but me. Or even listening. Nakota sure wasn't. I fell back to sleep with a mouthful of beer, woke again to the toll of a monstrous headache, beer soaked and clammy on my shirt and skin, TV buzzing and Nakota fast asleep, back curled like a question mark and hands, childlike and defenseless, loose-fingered against her cheek as a shadow grew on her face like a cancerous smile.

"Did they ever say anything?"

Nakota drinking Sweet'nLow and mineral water, elbows resting on the slippery bar, trusty rag between us as my own elbow nudged my empty beer bottle. Near Monday midnight at Club 22, just Nakota and me and the lonely scattering of hard cores she served in her bitchy desultory way. Just now their particular glasses were full, mine too for she poured again, draft this time, cheap but what did I care, for me it was free.

She lit another cigarette. Black smoke, yeah. "Did they?"

"What, about the camcorder?" I shook my head. I didn't apologize and she didn't mock. Will wonders never cease. Not as long as there's a Funhole, they won't. "I don't think they noticed, but if they did they're not talking."

"Every time I see it," dragging on her cigarette, "I see something different."

I didn't. I nodded as if yes, I agree, but I was lying, surprising how easy it was to lie. I didn't tell, then, or later at my flat, when she came drifting to the couchbed, me already on the troubled cusp of dream, the lines of her bare body sculpted by innocuous TV light, she'd left it on to find her way but not on the Funhole tape, just plain shit TV, commercials flashing like headlights. She pulled at the quilt, low enough to insert herself, place her coldness to my warmth but I was cold, too, cold all the way inside. I held her, her fast breath on my chest, felt myself harden but did not move and she didn't touch me further, a shared delicacy so complete as if by agreement. When we woke, not morning but lightening, the cold air tinting pink, I was so hard it hurt and still I did not move, but her hands found me, in silence and cold, a few hot strokes and I came and as I did she rubbed herself, half on me, tight against my thighs and I heard her come, a tiny croaking cry, and she said without taking a breath, "Watch it with me."

I didn't say no. But I didn't watch.

I was right the first time: to Nakota it was like a stroke tape. For a mindfuck.

Since the tape's inception she was in my flat as much as even I could want: Zen and poker-backed, focused on the screen, day after day and no more disappearing acts, staying on till morning. Once in a while she would still be there when I left for work, lying prone and passive but nothing peaceful in those eyes, behind lids that shivered as if she dreamed an endless dream. The tape was always playing unless I shut it off. I was getting very good at ignoring the images onscreen, unless my gaze was caught at that critical point where the figure turned. Then I must watch it, whether I would or no, and in the end feel as I always did, hurt in some spot where I could not see to measure the depth and severity of the wound.

After work, the first few days of snow behind us and already I was sick of it, dirty piles at curbside and people driving as if they had never seen the fucking stuff before, the heat in my flat no real heat at all but a kind of half-assed damp warmth that warped my magazine prints and left the floors dry and cold: coming home, newspaper, half-eaten lunch in grease-spotted brown bag, see domestic me. What's for dinner, honey, Funhole souffle?

Nakota, in front of the TV as always, but no glance at my entrance, no acknowledgment that anyone else was in the room; just a slow, slow turn, rising to her feet like deep-sea ballet, moving the few steps to the television as if it were miles she traveled, and there kneeling before it to press, gingerly and gentle, her cheek against the glass.

I almost expected—what? a sizzle of flesh? a blinding burst of light? her to get sucked right into the TV? Of course nothing happened, nothing visible I should say because that's the tricky part, isn't it, that's where the rub comes in. The worst wounds are internal, I should have known that from my own experience, but I'm the type of guy who doesn't learn.

She sat like that for a while; I let her; I saw no reason not to. I stopped staring, put my things away, although it didn't seem right to start cooking dinner or anything; how
does
one behave at an ecstasy?