The Cipher (16 page)

I cried, from pain, from relief that I had not been harmed, or not more than was bearable, and the fluid from my hand turned as luminously black as the rainbow and my tears too dripped down black and I cried harder, scared, scared, I still couldn't move my hand.

And Randy's voice, obscured but still audible: "Nicholas? You in there, man?"

"Yeah," weakly, trying to get my voice back. "Yeah."

He came in, slowly, bringing with him a definite smell of the cold outside, a different odor, lushly astringent, a better world. He carried another piece of sculpture, steel baby swaddled in newspaper. "Nicholas?" tentatively; I realized with dull surprise that the light was either off or burned completely out, I had grown so used to the dark.

"Here," I said. "I'm over here. I can't get up."

"Are you all right?"

"I can't get
up."

His first look was, naturally, for his sculpture; he noticed its new placement, of course, it was hard not to; noticed too the new configuration: I saw him shake his head. Crouching over me, his own smell was of beer, more faintly grease and gasoline. "Shrike said you were doin' it," he said, a nervous, reverent smile. "How's it going anyway?"

"Pretty damn bad." Nodding at my hand, twitching it to show it couldn't move, but, surprise again, the pressure seemed to melt as I twitched it, dissolving altogether to allow me to sit slowly up, muscles burning. Wiping black tears from my face, their trail as tangible as sweat, as blood. "I feel sort of shitty, to tell you the truth."

"I bet you do, man." Somewhat embarrassed, but eager, yes definitely that, he took the wrappings from his new sculpture, showed me its sharp diagonals and high-boned dull silver skull. Lovely. Just what I wanted, a death's-head to keep me company. Almost as bad as having Nakota there, and I only realized I had said that last aloud when he laughed.

"Yeah, right. She's pretty pumped up about this, you know?"

"I know."

"Vanese is
pissed."

I nodded, my head felt suddenly so very heavy, as if my own skull had turned to steel, ominous loll in the flimsy carton of my flesh.

"You want me to stay here awhile?" He shrugged himself deeper into his jacket. "It's pretty cold in here, you know?"

It was not the kind of thing that, once immersed in, you kept on feeling; as if possessed by cold you overcame it. I shrugged. "At least • come out and get something to drink," Randy said, but unsure in the offer; the Funhole was a taskmaster of some kind, he knew enough to know that, but whether it required regular hours was still beyond him.

Silence. Diffidently, but with raised-eyebrow inspiration, "You could come out for a while, you know, come with me to the Incubus. There's an opening, free beer, you know? Maybe some food. You want to?"

Oh Randy, this is so sudden. And when I smiled, his face withdrew, a little, not frozen but closed, the quick way you close a closet door in the dark: what's really behind there? And I realized, with a larger incredulous smile, that he was afraid of me.

"Sure," I said. "Sure, I'll go."

* A *

Hair still shower-damp, ice cold against my bare neck, following Randy into the crowded heat of the gallery, my step not so much unsteady as inherently fragile. Even though the lighting was sporadic at best, smoke-dense, it seemed incredibly bright; I kept blinking, almost as much as Randy. The Mole Men, out to take the air.

He grabbed two cups of piss-flat beer, directed me with one elbow to the hors d'oeuvres: withered tortilla chips piled around a bowl of mean-looking salsa. I took a chance. The salsa tasted like chunky kerosene.

"Almost as bad as the art," Randy said. His beer was already gone. "Can you believe anybody has the balls to show this shit?"

It
was
pretty bad. I mean, my name may not be Art, etcetera, but this stuff—huge cockeyed depictions of women with tits bulbous enough for a scotch ad holding big cigarettes like guns with smoke coming out of their pussies, with ti-. ties like
The Tobacco Industry Wants You,
or— my favorite—
Fat Kills
—I mean, come
on.

I said to Randy, "Why can't you do stuff like this?"

"I didn't know it was gonna be this bad," and when I laughed, he did, too. "Let's get some more beer."

In our blue-collar dishabille, Randy's gas-station jacket and me in my usual junkwear, we stuck out; all the rest was fake leather lab coats and baggy white pants, heavy red lipstick and combat boots, clustered in a bunch mouthing the same party line, laughter choreographed and thin. "Art fucks," Randy said, with intense disdain.

We took folding chairs, plunked them square by the keg, and passed a pleasant hour making fun of everything we saw. Smoke made my eyes dry. The beer tasted so good I was grateful. Randy laughed a lot, mostly at things I said, but from time to time I caught him looking at me, sideways and shy.

"These people, man," waving his cup in a careless drunken circle, a blurt of beer slopping free, "these
people,
man, would have no fuckin'
idea
what you're doing, you know?" My shrug made him more insistent. "No, man, I'm serious, I mean they would have no clue."

"Why?" from behind both of us. "What's he doing?"

Tall, was my first blurred impression, tall and skinny and wrapped like a sandwich in one of those dumb-looking lab coats. He had a kind of mouth that looked as if it were constantly sneering, but it was just the subtle effect of a particularly weird overbite. He came around our chairs, stood in front of us, in front of me.

"What're you doing?" he said.

"None of your business/' Randy said.

"Who're you, Randy, his agent? I mean the man can talk for himself, can't he?" He stuck out his hand, a little too fast to be friendly. His fingers were damp. "Malcolm," he said.

"Nicholas Reid." I resisted the urge to add, King of the Funhole. A stupid giggle escaped me anyway.

"So," cocked-hip stance, half smile, "what
are
you working on, Nick, that the rest of us wouldn't get?"

Nick- "Performance art," I said. Randy was shaking his head, I thought at Malcolm, but then I realized it was aimed at me.
"Wild
shit."

"Wild shit." Malcolm said it with an air of irony so heavy it reminded me of Randy's steel skull. "Where do you show your stuff, or perform, or whatever?"

"I don't know," I said, slow drunken grin, "if you're ready for this."

"I'm always ready for a new experience."

"Nicholas," Randy's earnest gaze, one hand out as if to ward my words, "don't even bother with this guy, okay? You don't want—"

"Okay," I said to Malcolm. "Gimme a pen or something." I ignored Randy, or at least his growing dismay. My scribbling was just legible, green ink smearing on somebody's badly done, flyer. "Just come by one day, and I'll show you something you have
never
seen before."

Some woman, behind and beside Malcolm, on first glance a cut-down twin, on second just another lab coat, no overbite but a smile like a guard dog's. "I wouldn't bet on that," she said, and gave a snarky little chuckle. "I mean we have seen it all."

"Oh, I doubt that," I said, my own smile downright beatific, grinning at a joke she could not possibly get or Malcolm either. Randy either, for that matter, Randy who sat unhappy and grim, sucking down the last of the beer. "I doubt that very very much."

"If Randy's into it," someone else's sneer, I didn't accurately see the speaker, being now occupied by the sudden slant of my traitorous eyelids; "how weird can it be?"

"Fuck you," said Randy, but without his usual verve. J made a little honking sound, disguised laughter very undisguised, mocking their slit-eyed knowing ignorance, the arrogance of slim experience that truly believes when you've seen one, you really have seen them all.

Well. I can name
that
tune. "See for yourself," I said. "Come one, come all."

Empty-stomach drunk, yes, and the isolation, yes yes, but still there was no excuse, I should have listened to Randy, now driving home, glum weave through sparse and icy traffic, I should have seen for myself that Malcolm was exactly the kind of fuck who would take me up on it. I could have made something up, I told myself, I could have said I was a mime. My stomach ached from the beer, from nervousness and hunger.

"That was stupid," I said for the tenth time. "I'll say I lied. I'll say I was drunk. I
am
drunk."

"Won't work, man." Randy's blinking was so incessant that I was afraid he couldn't see to drive. "He'll just start sniffin' around on his own, him and those smartass art-school pricks he runs with." We shot past a big rattling truck; Randy was passing everybody. "Goddamned posers. They believe anything he tells them. If we have to, we'll stuff the fucker down the Funhole,"

I shook my head, smiled to show I knew it was a joke, which of course it wasn't, but there were some things I just couldn't do, even me, even now.

"He'll probably be waiting on the fucking doorstep," and sure enough, a car I didn't know, dumpy blue Toyota parked in my Dumpster spot: but it was Vanese, pinched mouth, shivering behind the wheel.

She was out of the car and into Randy's shit in two seconds, and I saw, from her posture and her hands, the way her body kept reaching for him though she was obviously pissed off out of her mind, that she was terrified; she thought he had come here just to drop off a piece, but the hours passed and she thought, yeah, something bad, had to be, sitting there with a crazy man and she came to check and the lights were out and nobody, nobody was home.

"What'd you think?" Randy, yelling back in the dark. "I went down the fucking
hole?"

Which was exactly what she had been thinking, even a drunken piece of shit like me could see that, but apparently Randy couldn't, he just kept yelling even though I tried to calm him down; which naturally made things worse. "Don't you start, man, you fucked up enough for one night already," and Vanese, instantly apprehensive, "What's
that
supposed to mean?" and Randy bellowing, in the voice of a man pushed past frustration into some unbearable new state, "Fuck this shit, man!" and slam, bam, gone in a weaving trajectory, he would have squealed his tires if he had thought of it but he was beyond thinking now.

Vanese was crying, upright and brittle with tension, one hand pressed against her face not to hide the tears but it seemed to catch them, as if each was bitterly precious, as if each, like a hologram, held the whole sad moment entirei She cried almost without sound, deep sobs that occasionally ended in a soft glottal cough.

"Vanese," I said. "He'll be okay."

She shook her head, the pessimism of a woman who knows.

"Really. He'll be okay, okay?" I didn't know what to do, I couldn't leave her there but I was freezing, I had to piss so bad my kidneys ached. I made her come inside, insisted her through the door and up the stairs, but she didn't fight me as hard as she could have; she was too tired.

On the couchbed, shaking. She in fact
was
freezing, I saw it in those long jerky shudders. I put the blankets around her, coat and all, tucked her in with clumsy drunken care. "I'll make some cojffee," I said.

"You can't even make sense," through teeth that abruptly began an almost comical chattering, but she was trying to smile, it was a joke. "Let me," and she moved to get up.

"Sit down," I said. Forceful. What a man. When the coffee was done I sat next to her, helped her hold the cup. "Another few minutes and you would have had frostbite," I said. "Why didn't you just wait inside?"

"I did, for a long time. But that hall's so cold," feelingly. "In the car I had heat."

"Why'd you turn it off then?"

"I didn't. I ran out of gas."

I shook my head, lectured her on her stupidity, a lecture that veered somehow into a confession of my own: me and Randy at the gallery, and my incomprehensible boasting, something you've never seen before. "Vanese," sagging back, "I am so dumb."

"You are," shaking her head, amazed. "Malcolm. And the Malcolmettes.
Shit."

"I know," trying to shrug, "I know I know."

I didn't, though. I spent the next few hours trying out various scenarios on Vanese, things I could tell Malcolm, and with sorrowful expertise she shot them all down. Malcolm was a wily boy, she kept saying, Malcolm was smart. Malcolm would see through my bullshit, I wasn't much of a liar anyway, and if for some reason he didn't, one of his cadre would, and anyway I couldn't dodge forever. It might be better to just break down and tough it out.

"You mean just show him?"

"Why not?"

"Why
not?'
Because it's the real black hole, Vanese, because it's unpredictable and uncontrollable, because anything could happen. Because I don't want to be responsible. Because it's a pathway, and I wanted to go alone. Because it's mine. "Because it's not a good idea," I said; firm, but ultimately lame. She said so, and then there was really nothing else to say.