The Cipher (11 page)

"Big night last night," she said.

Tears. Isn't that just what you would expect from a fucking self-destructive self-pitying derelict and she was getting them, I wept as I rose from floor to knees to standing slouch, she tried to lead me to the other room but I resisted. Hot water, rub the whole bar of soap on my face, hold it with your left hand if you please, please.

"Randy called me. He was here till about six, six-thirty, he would've stayed longer but he had to get to work. He said—"

Palm up, left palm: the universal gesture for "save it." She left me there to wash, and I scrubbed at my face.
God
how I hated myself. Look in the mirror, you dumbshit.

I looked at my hand.

Half-dollar hole. At least.

There are no words to tell how I felt at that particular moment. I used up the rest of the gauze, quick and clumsy, found Nakota making instant coffee. She stopped to watch as I dressed, goose bumps and my cold legs stepping like a nervous dance, and then she was beside me, motioning my clothing away and down, unbuttoning with sure fingers her own baggy dress.

Warm skin beneath the comforter and the heating motions of her flesh, Hps against my throat, teeth tugging at the hair on my chest, nipping a line down my belly and then taking me, still half-soft, into her ovaled mouth. I rubbed with one tender fingertip the skin around her lips, my eyes closing in pleasure and dumb-animal relief, and held her head against me gently, gently till I came. In silence then I lay beside her as she used my left hand, my thumb, to come herself, then lay in that silence with me, her head almost on my shoulder.

Finally into my near-placid near sleep, her in-sectile voice: "Randy said you melted his sculpture."

I didn't answer.

"It's steel, Nicholas. Do you know what the melting point of steel is?"

Wearily, I knew what was coming: "No, Mrs. Science, but I bet you do."

"Three thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Give or take a degree."

Well.

"He said you levitated again. With your arm in the Funhole."

I didn't speak. I had nothing to say. "Nicholas," urgent, sitting up, and I saw the cold wash stippling down her skin, she didn't notice, "there's something so
big
happening to you, why do you have to get fucked up to let it happen? I wish it was me," and that, of course, was the whole camp follower's crux. Which made everything she said suspect, not that it wasn't suspect enough, but then again at least she wasn't running screaming away from the freak I was becoming, at least she could still blow me for old time's sake or why ever the hell she did it. Not love. Probably wanted to suck off the hole in my hand but was too shy to ask.

"I'd
know what to do with it."

Ah, God. And I had almost gone in headfirst to save her. I put my right hand deliberately on her face, squeezed with my painful fingertips her bony cat's chin.

"I.don't want any of this to be happening," I said.

"It's a little late for that."

"I want it," as deliberately, "to go away."

"The Funhole's not going anywhere," and the way she said it, the calm gloat of her gaze, gave me an intense urge to smash her face straight through to the back of her skull and horrified, I almost jumped out of bed, somehow
feeling
the way her skin would split, her caving nose and lips blown back by the force of my fist, my right fist. "Leave it alone," I said. My voice was shaking.

"You can—"

"I said leave it alone!" and without wanting or meaning to I had her by the hair, pulling her face close to mine like a caricature of a bully, "Leave it alone!" and I watched her face go careful and blank and I cried out, wrapped both arms around her and held her tight,
tight,
saying over and over into her hair, "I don't want to go crazy, I don't
want
to go crazy, Nakota. I
don't."

"You're not," she said. "This is really happening."

Of course Randy had his own interpretation of the whole circus, none of which I was interested in hearing, but there he was at quitting time, tow truck idling as I counted out my drawer, his whole manner so eerily respectful that seeing him was worse than listening to Nakota's coldhearted rant. He stood, one arm on the counter, the other jingling his keys. Blink, blink, those pale gray eyes.

"Sorry I had to leave the other morning, man."

"No problem."

"I had to get to work, you know? Otherwise—"

"Randy, really, it's no problem." I lost my place and had to start counting again, out loud, keep your conversation to yourself. Patient, yeah, with my impatience, waiting me out.

"Hey listen," hulking diffidence, "you doin' anything tonight?"

"No, and I don't really feel like doing anything either, Randy, all right?" Suddenly I was angry, mad enough to show it. Sorry We're Closed, no sideshow tonight. "I feel like shit and my fucking hand hurts and all I want to do is go home and take a shit and go to bed, okay? Is that okay with you?"

In the following silence my anger shriveled. I looked away, out the window into the ten o'clock dark, shifting wind but not as black as it gets, no. He pulled you out of the Funhole, you dumb ungrateful piece of shit, remember? Sat by you and watched you puke. Talk about only a mother.

"Hey." I turned back, wanted to put out my hand but, embarrassed, couldn't decide which one—there's a unique dilemma for you—and settled for a stupid shrug. "I'm, I'm just—shook-up. If you want to stop by later, come on ahead."

"No big deal," he said. No smile, but not pissed either. "I wanted to check on
Dead End
mostly."

Oh yes, that's right, the art they said I melted. By my fiery touch.
Shit.
"Sure." I felt so incredibly tired all of a sudden. "Listen, I don't mean to be a prick. I just—"

"Don't worry about it," with a great and sudden gravity. "If all this shit was happening to me, I'd be plenty worried about it too."

Whatever else he said lost me, but those words went all the way home, in the flat and sitting in the dark and thinking, thinking. Worried, yeah. A simple idea but a good one. I thought of myself weeping to Nakota, loose-mouthed and sloppy and sick looking, and I was swept with a

feeling of self-disgust so intense that I had to leave ray chair, stand and pace it away, away. But it wouldn't go away. So I did.

She owed me a favor, this woman, I had almost forgotten her name but I still had her phone number. We had lived in the same building once, years ago, never lovers but fairly good friends; she liked to go to movies and drink beer and in those days I liked to do those things too, so we got along pretty well. I had once loaned her money to get her car out of a police pound; whether she had paid me back or not was a moot point. On the phone her voice was friendly but not too, which was exactly what I wanted.

"Can I stay at your place for a little while?" I said. I had the bottom of the phone balanced against my hip, at my feet half a ripped gym bag already packed, I was that sure.

"How long," Nora, her name was Nora, "did you want to stay?"

"Not long. Week, maybe."

"Still remember how to get here?"

"Better give me directions."

My car was making a fairly suspicious coughing sound—I don't know shit about cars, so every unknown sound it ever made had the power to spook me—but it was a clear night, extremely cold, and I was making pretty good time away from the city; maybe I could get to Nora's before it died.

She lived out past the 'burbs, not real country, or "rural" as Nakota always called it in her sneering way, but far enough so there was a kind of space around things; that was what I was hunting. Get far enough away from everything and maybe I could get away from myself, too. Maybe. Because otherwise there would have to be another kind of running, yeah; don't think about it now. Windshield wipers, monotonous back-and-forth, my radio the victim of random static. Driving through an immense quiet. Just don't think about it now.

I had left a note for Randy stuck in my door, advising him that Nakota, Shrike had a key, and at any rate the other door was always open, the Funhole was nothing if not twenty-four hours. "Good luck with your art," I had added at the bottom, then felt silly, but I didn't have time to write another note, so I left it there. I didn't add anything for Nakota.

The drive took a little over two hours, the last ten minutes puzzling out my way; Nora's directions were spotty and memory was worse, but I saw a place I did remember, kind of a makeshift rifle-and-archery range, the pale circles of the targets visible in my headlights as I slowly made the turn; this is the place, yeah. Great huge heaps of snow, skinny long driveway one car wide. Her house was-still that same babyshit-yel-low color. The porchlight was on; it was yellow too.

Nora opened the door for me before I knocked. She was a little, what, not fatter but rounder, her belly a soft small pouch, her long hair short now, little yellow fringe around her rounder face. We didn't hug hello, but her handshake was two-handed, warm fingers in my cold touch.

"Nicholas. How're you doing?" stepping back as I shed my coat, politely stamped my snowless feet. "You want anything? Coffee?"

The coffee was much too strong. The light in the kitchen was too bright. Apparently I would be dealing in absolutes here; the idea made me smile. "That's better," Nora said. "You look almost alive now."

That surprised me into a laugh, and she laughed, too, but not a real one; she would be wanting, of course, to know what the hell I was doing here, and once she found that out to her satisfaction, then maybe she could laugh. I had no intention of telling her the whole truth or even a major part of it, but I had to tell her something.

"I had a big fight with Nakota," I said.

The magic words. Her mouth pulled into a line that was absolutely flat, as flat as her voice saying, "Ah." She had known Nakota as long as I had and hated her, why I wasn't sure, with Nakota there were endless reasons. Nakota, so far as I knew, had no real idea that Nora existed. "Well."

"Yeah, well."

"You're still seeing her, then, aren't you."

"Not tonight."

Now: a real laugh. She had a weird almost silent way of laughing, it defined her again at once for me, brought all of her back. She pushed her spiny chair back from the table, almost soundless against the old red linoleum, put more coffee in our cups. "God, what a bitch she is," comfortably. "Her real name's Jane, you knew that, didn't you."

My hand awkward on the cup, saying almost nothing as she talked, caught me up with what she was doing: quit her job at the hospital, working the graveyard shift at a nursing home, Sunny Days, "Can you imagine?
what
a name," lots of work to do around the house when she had the time—she was putting in a vegetable garden next spring, big one—and skiing too, cross-country, there was always time for that.

"So you don't see many movies anymore, huh?"

"No, I sure don't." I'd seen her looking, and now she asked: "What happened to your hand?"

"Accident," I said, letting my gaze move sadly away from hers, which wasn't hard; she took it the way I'd wanted her to, wrong, and said no more about it. I have always depended upon the tact of others, uh-huh.

Turned out she would be leaving in the morning, early, to do some skiing with friends. I imagined her friends: blond, bluff looking, jeans and down vests in sensible colors, yelling to each other over swipes and passes of clean snow. It was like a cockroach dreaming of the smell of disinfectant. She kept talking but all at once I found I was waking from a doze, she was taking the coffee cup from my hand.

"Nicholas, hey, you fell asleep." Before I could say anything, "Don't worry about it, long day, long drive. My fault for keeping you up talking. I'm sorry I don't have a bed for you, but the couchbed isn't too bad. Probably," pulling down the blanket, bilious print and warm looking, "you won't be up when I leave, so help yourself to whatever you want, food, whatever; there's some stuff in the freezer too. There's a spare back-door key hanging right by the door, so you can get in and out." There may have been more but I heard none of it, slept instead in a circle of dreams, none of it restful, none of them kind.

The quiet of the morning woke me; at home there was always some kind of traffic, day and night background. No snow falling, but a kind of overcast that might linger all day, same dour gray into the night. Into the kitchen, the warmest room in the house. It must cost a shitload to heat a house this big, no wonder she kept it cold. My hand throbbed as I made coffee, pouring water and my motions slow, sliced an orange. The acid of the juice found a sore on my tongue.

As I ate, slowly, like a convalescent, like one of Nora's patients at Sunny Days, I thought of all the things I had avoided during my poet days at school and beyond, days of waking late and drinking early, wandering through life with my one constant a constant shrug: regular jobs and regular people and regular hours, all the commonplace pains and terrors that, by fleeing, I had somehow replaced with these others, this whole grotesquerie that was—yeah, c'mon, say it out loud, there's no one here to hear you—driving me out of my mind. Driving me crazy. Because I had no way to cope with it, no way to understand why what had begun as ignorant dabbling had evolved into all this.