The Cipher (32 page)

I reached for the cover, to close it decently and for good, but my right hand stuck to the page, tugging at it and "Shit," and instead of ripping it came away whole, and wet, big juicy Rorschach of red and on an impulse
(oh really?)
I pushed the torn page underneath the door.

"Here," I said. "Make a speech about this."

The quality of the silence that followed told me that this was an extremely bad move. Nakota's "Hey," and gleeful? Oh yeah. You bet it was a bad idea, you asshole, why do you persist in giving her ammunition when she can already blow your ass to hell with the stuff she's got?

"Hey," again, to them, "look at
this,
"and their delight in hers, probably none of them had brains enough to understand whatever it was she thought she saw there, the only symbolism they recognized was the meaning of the golden arches. But they chattered back and forth, one to the other and all to Nakota, who seemed to be ignoring everyone or at least spoke to no one,

*

not even Malcolm, whom 1 heard struggling for airspace: "But I think what it means—wait a minute, you guys, listen to me—I think—
listen—"

And Nakota, feverish, implacable, all of her one tense tremble that I could feel, earthquake weather, in the surface of my skin, in the violin quiver of my loosening bones: "It's the insects. Nicholas! It's the
insects,
the same stuff that was on their wings. Runes, remember?"

Runes my ass, that's what I'd said, and now when I did believe I had even less inclination to believe, more reason to, but in the end it was—it
was
—just more shit I didn't want to know about, because why shouldn't it be true? Exact minute replication, transmitted from my rotting hand, of the phantom scribbles on the backs of ruined bugs' wings, surely that was a tiny piece of strangeness in this huge sprawl, I can do the White Queen one better, I can believe ten impossible things before breakfast and nine before my hand falls off completely. Trump
that,
Queenie.

"And Nicholas—" her fist on the door, here's another queen. "I
know how.
"Queen of heat and brutal desire, of everything crooked and twisted and wrong, something very wrong about her voice, now, something ominous and ominously exultant. "It's like a key," as intimate as if she spoke into my heart, and I thought, She's been right ail along. She's the one who should be in here.

Then why not let her in?

Oh no, maybe I said it out loud, "Oh no," laughing the way you do when you refuse completely. I moved, slow because it was difficult, as far away from the door as my exhausted muscles would take me—was it harder to move today than it had been yesterday, was that some kind of portent or just faulty memory and when was yesterday, anyway?

Back against the door, looking up once to see the nothing face above looking down at me, and I closed my eyes and started walking, not backward, but through my memory as if it were a house with many rooms, some small, some locked, some doorless, some with tenants so aggressive and powerful I crept past them in silence and hoped for their clemency. So many rooms, and Nakota in most of them, or all the ones that mattered, anyway.

Especially, of course, the rooms in the Funhole wing. Watch your step, please.

Her passion had always exceeded mine, her impatience; all the ideas hers, really, all the way back to the bugs in the pickle jar, through the video, and Randy, even Malcolm (though in the final analysis he was my mistake), all the plans and notions hers and me the straight man, stumbling after, and how not to fathom her ridden, enraged, by her own jealous want and that want turned foul as an old infection, as crusty as a sour boil as she watched me, always ahead of her, the chosen one who kept saying, "Who, me?" Me, the empty vessel; not you, dear, cold caldron of desire. Was that why it
was
me, after all? The perfect stooge and puppet, incapable at last not only of guiding but even holding the reins that had inexplicably been placed in my hand—but when had any of this shit been explicable? The real question wasn't who but why me? But how do you get an answer from a process? And how delude yourself to trust it, if you got one?

I remembered her refrain, not plaintive but as wistful as she ever got, "What would it be like to go down there?" What would it look like? Alice's rabbithole, we had called it in the very beginning, before we knew better, before she started to hate me. Still with all her poisonous excess, I could never have had a better, a more suitable companion, never someone else.

Another memory, did this really happen or did I only want it to: fucking her against the walls of the Funhole, telling the beads of her sweat like some strange rosary, her head hunched down and eyes closed like fists, her hips hard against me like a beating heart. Hair flying in my face, I always loved her hair, I always loved her. I always will. I always will.

So much of our time—not
wasted,
but spent, transformed, transfigured, what was her new word? Transcursion. Yes. A long transcursion, and maybe it was a waste, after all, but if it wasn't for the Funhole, for all the grand compelling horror of its presence in our lives, would we have had any time together at all, would she have continued to bother with me, be my lover —however brief and ugly—again?

Let her in.

No. She's mine.

"She-loves you," the mask said, sweet duplici-tous reproach, but even I was too smart to fall for that bullshit. Love me, never, and we could never have been normal, greeting-card lovers, no walks in the park for us, she was definitely the midnight-shamble-through-the-graveyard type and very likely would not have permitted me to shamble with her unless it was at a decent two paces behind. I couldn't mourn what would never in all the world have happened, but I felt the sadness, as if I could.

So much, missed, the time instead spent sitting in the dark and waiting for something to happen.

Something's going to happen here.

Yelling outside and Nakota's howl, nothing I wanted to hear so I put my hands, my slick and dripping hands against my ears, stuck them closed, stubborn and prim, gluey like blood and kept thinking, remembering, the times spent staring down into this blackness that had finally not only run my life but run it over, killed in effect not only the things that were my pleasures but the body that hosted those pleasures. And in return, gave me what? Fear.

The most potent of the gifts. And exhaustion, the grayest. "Nicholas," her cold insinuating voice, but vibrating, prickling with a triumph that instead of frightening me confirmed in sorrow my blank new visions, my scary old thoughts, "Nicholas, I can
read
these runes. And I was
right"
Maybe she was.

Now there's no one left, out there, to impede her with arguments or threats; now there's only her tools and flunkies surrounding her. Irresistible force
and
immovable object, yes sir, that
is
my baby. In the end I never could, never had been able to stop her; I could barely slow her down. So why stick around for the main show? Why not just get it over with, once and for all and for good?
love you better

Rising, my legs weak, all of me all a-twitter because I was (was I?) really going to do it this time, no more bullshit fuck-around, headfirst into the maelstrom. I couldn't finally, stand— irony is everywhere—leg muscles in open rebellion, crawled instead past my old shiny pile of shit, crawling to the darkness, white as a maggot creeping onto the lip of a fabulous wound.

"Look out," I said to no one.

Shaking, yeah, my arms unable to hold my weight, moving now on sheer willpower, humping boneless as a worm through the dust on the floor, the faint barefoot marks obliterated now by the labored smear of my passage. See, I can be determined too, I can work for what I want. Sweat on my nose, running slow and exquisite, cool and itchy and into my mouth and it didn't taste salty, no, it didn't taste like sweat at all.

Empty bottle of something rolling gently into my leg and my head so close, almost dangling over the open blackness, shivering, shivering, feeling a metallic cold against my skin and in my open mouth, impossible to breathe in that negative air.

But I don't need to breathe, I thought, where I'm going.

And Nakota's yell and her banshee laugh, too loud,
much
too loud and again that echo from the Funhole, twin to her voice, and I turned to see the door bowing inward,
bending,
like hot rubber and steam in my eyes, scrabbling to make the last few feet push that body, push that motherfucker to the limit, come
on,
and the mask crying out, "Come in! Come in!" and she there, coming at me, bending with a diver's grace to insert herself, finally, into that big black hole, fuck it with her thin arrow of a body and her greedy smile and her dissatisfied grinning soul Prey and predator, all in one; eat, and be eaten.

"Look out," she said, my last words but with an inflection I could never match, wide ferocious rapture and stepping onto me, it was deliberate, I know it was because it was
her,
all of her defined in that gesture and I grabbed her ankles right above her sneakers, sunk my hands, my strong new rotten hands into her flesh and squeezed, crying out as she did not, squeezing all the way to the bone. Feeling the pivot and gash of her tendons, the slippery juice of her blood, crippling her backward as the bones warped and splintered and, finally, her shriek, as wet a cry as I had ever feared hearing, and I saw the bright betrayal in her eyes, more monstrous even than the pain, the certain hatred that I was as she was and always had been, had been hiding my evil under the thinnest, strongest veil: of weakness. Nicholas Wiener. Cutting her off, literally, at the ankles.

"You cocksucking son of a bitch," in the cold dull voice of profound shock but there wasn't room in her, now, for much more talk, sodden fall onto her back, whack like that night on the sidewalk and I lay panting and sluglike beside

her, I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry and I realized that whiny wrong-speed voice was me, I'm sorry about that too and "If you're so
sorry,
"from her mouth but not her voice, oh no, not at all, "then
why
did you
do
it?"

"Why didn't you just wait." I whispered. My voice made tiny puffs of grayish pink in the air above the Funhole. "You wouldn't have had to wait long."

Which was true. Which was why there was no answer.

She was bleeding to death, I knew that, lying beside her in her blood and I tried to touch her, my red hands on her stumps, and with difficulty she opened her eyes, drunk voice (but her own), raised brows and all, "It said you were the key. It said you were what made it work."

"I'm sorry." I'm sorry, dear, that I cut your feet off, there really wasn't a better way. "I never . ever wanted to hurt you."

"Then you fucked up."

Her feet were still there, strange in shoes on the lip of the Funhole and I saw something, dark, not so much arm or tendril as suggestion of both come slipping out, quick and steady

oh no you don't oh no you
don't
you greedy fuck, you don't get any of her and I
grabbed
those feet, how fast I moved for someone recently paralyzed; you should have held on to me longer, asshole, it was you slowed me down to

give her time to get in, time to use the key you finally gave her. Some tricks can backfire can't they, can't they?
"Can
V they!" hugging the feet to me, cooling relics and she groaned, a sound almost theatrical in its volume, and I heard, from the hallway, the noise of someone throwing up, big irregular bursts of sloppy sound.

I put her feet down (a safe distance, I may add) and took her, held her, like a cold baby against my oozing chest, rocking her, back and forth and her eyes closing, go to sleep baby, go to sleep honey, her mouth opening, pulling down in a grotesque arc like a stroke victim's, pulse wild and arrhythmic, eyes opening so so slowly and in a cracking voice she said, "You
hurt
me, Nicholas," as if in the end she could believe every evil but that, and I cried onto her face and saw my tears, little and last brutality, become as they fell small Funholes, dark and tiny pits in the landscape of her skin.

Crying, and I kept rocking her, rocked her until I realized that she was dead. Her mouth stayed ugly, but when I closed her eyes, the lids obeyed, stayed shut. I kissed her face. It was so cold.

For a long time I held her. I knew it wasn't really Nakota, not anymore, but even just her empty body gave me the last comfort I would ever have, and while I held her I could still make believe I didn't know what to do next.

"Do you remember?" I asked her. Close to me, finally, whispering into her ear, I always held closer than she did, I always needed her more. "The rat, no, the mouse? I was pretty mad that day. And that
hand,
shit. You sure like to scare me, don't you."

Dead head lolling as I shifted position. Her tongue tried to get out of her mouth but I poked it gently back in.

"I wish we'd never made that video," I said, stroking lightly at her hair, brushing through it with slow fingers: it was dirty, I realized with sad surprise, greasy. She was dirty, too. Some kind of crust in the corners of her mouth, dirt under her nails. It made me angry, thinking of her, so consumed by the Funhole that she forgot, or didn't bother, to wash, to take care of herself in even the most rudimentary ways; who knows when she'd eaten, or slept. Little bag of bones, crazybones, she felt very light there in my arms. I kissed the hollow socket beneath her throat, cool pebbled skin under my mouth, pressed her head to my chest again.