The Cipher (14 page)

Rip rip. "I don't see you volunteering to go down there."

"I tried."

"Uh-huh."

"She did," I said. I felt consummately shitty. I felt like 1 might cry. I wished I could get better very fast so I could run downstairs and do it again. There is no rational way to explain that, because it was no rational wish, but it was intense as a bodily need, demanding as hunger or desire. "A hard-on of the soul," I mumbled, and laughed into my washcloth, sticky and damp with blood.

Randy was miserable, there in his neutral corner; he probably felt worse than I did, which would have taken some doing, but his was a malady of action, mine obviously a cruder sort of melancholy, the weltschmerz of a man who has just had his clock cleaned. "Hey Randy," I said, through my baggy lips. "Get us some beer."

For no reason, or rather, her reason, Nakota laughed. And it wasn't for me asking for beer, either.

Randy found four beers in the refrigerator, opened them all. Nakota looked at hers as if he had just offered her bottled spit.
Warm
spit. "No thanks," she said.-Vanese took hers with an absent nod. She must have been an older sister, or a mother or nurse, her whole attention was so absorbed by the task at hand. So to speak. Either that or she was just very conscientious. Or anal-retentive.

"Does that hurt?" she asked me.

"Very much," I told her, although it was by no means the most painful part of me. She shook her head, to herself, set down the nail clippers and picked up her beer. A long swallow. She had a pretty throat, Vanese.

It hurt to drink, but the beer tasted good. I wiped my mouth and face one last time and put aside the washcloth. "Still snowing?" I asked Randy.

He looked out the window. "Yeah, pretty bad. Blowing around some." Vanese joined him at the window, said something, quietly, to which he shrugged*

"If you don't think you're going to make it home," I said, "you can stay here."

Randy looked at Vanese, questioningly, and with her own shrug she nodded. "All right," he said. "Thanks, man." More diffidently, "You feeling any better now?"

"I feel fine. I feel like more beer." Nakota looked at me, nodded contemptuously toward her untouched beer. Randy immediately got his coat on.

"You going home?" I asked, surprised, and he said, "The least I can do is get you some beer, man."

"It's too bad to drive," Vanese said, but Randy shook his head, irritated at her objection; she returned to her seat beside me on the couchbed. For some reason, again her own and having nothing to do with jealousy, this pissed Nakota off.

"Why don't you go with him?" she said pointedly to Vanese.

"Why don't you go to hell?"

"Ladies, ladies, please," I said, possessed all at once of a weird good humor, "come on now. If you must fight, at least use your fists."

Randy laughed, big loud resonant horse laugh and I smiled, as much at the sound as my joke, my mood, twisted lips and Vanese smiled back at me, an astonishingly sweet smile that took all the wariness from her big eyes. Even Nakota smiled. And then we were all laughing, the whooping laugh of relief, the way you laugh when they show you the X rays and it's nonma-lignant, for now anyway, and the doctor has a small but distinct booger hanging out of his nostril and you and everybody else in the room can see it and as soon as he leaves you laugh your ass off; like that.

Randy took a while coming back with the beer. Nakota turned the music back on. Vanese, still beside me, tapped her knee in time, her nails were chewed past the quick. I drank all of my beer and Nakota's too. Nobody said much but there was still, like smoke in the air, a feeling of fragile camaraderie; foxhole love. Funhole love.

Not only beer, but a couple bags of chips, some candy bars. Randy stood shaking off like a dog in the doorway as Vanese took the wet-spotted bags from him. I wiped at my mouth; it was still bleeding.

"It's fuckin' nuts out there," Randy said. "I didn't even take the truck, you can't get down the streets." His pale hair was mottled dark with melted snow. He ripped open one of the chip bags. Vanese took a bottle out of the smaller paper bag, offered it silently to Nakota: mineral water.

We all got drunk, except Nakota. Vanese turned out to have a talent for caricature mimicry; as she enacted the scene in the storage room, our parts—Randy horrified bully, Nakota ("Shrike") exaggerated bitch, me entirely out of it, and she, Vanese, scared shitless—became horror-movie funny; we laughed again, less hysterically, with more real humor, told what we each remembered and laughed about that too. Survivor's humor, maybe. I thought it was funny.

It was very late, there was still beer but Vanese had fallen asleep, mouth open in a little O, Randy was close to it. Nakota, in an atypical gesture, offered them her spring bed. Randy shook Vanese awake enough to transport her there, they both crawled atop it, shoes and all. Vanese's mouth never closed once.

Nakota stripped in the middle of the room, she had to be freezing but she never showed it, walked over to my bed and got in. If I had waited for an invitation to join her I would be waiting there still, but that was her: take what's not yours and don't share. Especially with the owner. Weaving a little, a lot-, I flopped down— my anesthetized body twingeing—and pulled the covers up.

"Sleeping with your clothes on," she said. "Typical derelict."

"Of course I'm a derelict. Derelict laureate of the Funhole and don't forget it," as her hands found me, purposeful stroke of my small flabby cock, "and don't fuck me either, it hurts too much."

"If it doesn't hurt," she said, death's-head above me in the dark, "you're not doing it right."

When Nakota found I planned on ac-tually staying, as much as possible, in the storage room, to watch beside the Funhole, I saw for once her complete and enthusiastic approval; it was a disconcerting thing. Vanese thought it was a terrible idea, tempting fate on a daily basis. Randy was horrified.

"That's suicide, man!"

"Shut up," Nakota said. She was smiling. "He knows what he's doing."

Actually I didn't, not entirely, but I knew what I had to do and this was it. I didn't think of it as suicide or even particularly dangerous, although that was arguably a dumbshit thing to think in view of past occurrences. I just knew that I was going to do it.

Around the living room, morning-after faces on Randy and Vanese; Nakota of course like the cat that just ate shit. Randy in particular looked utterly bleached, like a dried-up chicken bone, Vanese had looked better in last night's dark but she still looked pretty good, even scared, even mad as when she turned on Nakota and said, "Why don't you stop badgering him and go stick your own head down there?"

"Why don't you mind your own business?" loftily, cream-fed queen too cool to bicker with the rabble.

"He's not your business. Nobody's your business, you're too worried about your own ass. What you want." Vanese was really pissed. I thought she was going to start swinging or something.

"It's nobody's business," I said, quietly, it was hard to talk this morning. My instant coffee tasted like the devil's asshole. I drank it anyway. All that blood and beer, and half a pound bag of Raisinets, little hamster turds bubbling in my stomach like animate shit. "Nobody has to watch out for me."

"Well
she
sure won't."

"Nurse Nancy," Nakota's grin. "Little Miss Pop-up Book. Vanese, don't you have somewhere to be?"

"I gotta get to work." Randy, shaking his head, suddenly as miserable as he was last night, surveying me on his way to the bathroom. "You don't look real good, man," he said, but sadly, a long sad piss without closing the door. Vanese got up, joined him, closed it for him.

"What a pushy bitch," Nakota said, but still coolly.

"Oh come on." At once I felt irritated with her. "You know she's right. Why be pissed about it?"

"I'm not pissed," dismissively, getting up to hunt for matches. She blew smoke at me, smiled with her blue-white teeth. "I'd like to get the camcorder, if I can. I think this needs to be recorded, I—"

"What're you,
Wild Kingdom
?" Vanese again. Randy was slicking his wet hair back with long nervous strokes. He nudged her and she stopped.

"Take care, man," he said to me, and then in passing, "Mind if I bring another sculpture?"

Vanese stopped like slammed-on brakes. "You too," she said to him, with a disgust so palpable I felt obscurely flattered. "Some friends." She walked out without him.

"Bring one if you want," I said.

Embarrassed now a little. "Maybe tomorrow."

As they left, Nakota smirked. "Short leash," she said, lighting up another of her shitty cigarettes.

"Just shut up for once," I said. All of me, the beaten parts, ached with a slow bruisy throb. Vanese had made my bandage too large and too tight, unwieldy, it chafed the skin of my wrist so

I pulled it off, lay my hand palm-up on the table, sat with eyes shut and breathing quietly until Nakota said, "Look."

I looked. Fluid was seeping slowly from my hand and wiggling like sperm across the table.

"Shit," Nakota said admiringly.

I closed my eyes again.

My preparations for this one-floor pilgrimage were pretty slipshod, but again, that was sort of typical and, untypically, I knew I wouldn't be needing much. The proverbial pot to piss in, or on, depending on my aim; a pillow and blanket; pen and paper, unlined drawing paper, a big pad of it bought at the drugstore, it was meant for kids. It had a bear on it Nakota started to make fun of the bear and I told her to go fuck herself, right out loud in the store, I said if she lived to be a thousand she would never begin to approach the unconscious purity of that bear.

"Well, that's your department, isn't it?" It took me a while to figure out that she meant unconsciousness, not purity, but it should have been obvious.

Dressing in decent black for work, brushing her hair, she asked what I was going to do with the paper. Don't know, I told her. I just feel like I need it. She put on her sneakers. They sagged at the sides. "You must walk funny," I told her.

"Funny, right." She was working more hours now, had to, to pay for the flat. She always bitched about how crummy Club 22 was and how the only people who ever came there were career alcoholics, which I maintained was a redundancy, and besides she was far too temperamental to ever work at a decent place. She was unimpressed with my reasoning. As usual.

"You going in there tonight?" she wanted to know. Pulling on her crusty sport coat, a castoff, I later found, of Randy's. Pushing hair out of her eyes. Her hair was getting longer; I liked it. I didn't mention it because if I did she would cut it at once. "Will you be in there when I get home?" She hated to miss a minute.

"No. I'm going to watch the door tonight, see who goes by there or what." We'd discussed it, she and I, not a few times; seeing the cleaning stuff so dirty, so completely undisturbed, had convinced us that no one used that room anymore. Used it for storage, anyway. If there were other devotees, well. It's a fact-finding mission, I had told her, with grave humor. If there are cults operating here, I should know about it. Maybe they'll worship you as a god, she said, with one of her little sneers. Maybe they will, I said; it was a joke but I didn't laugh.

After she left I carried my stuff downstairs and inside, careful not to look too long at the dark serenity beyond, careful not to linger. But: what are you scared of? I thought, why so cautious when that's the very thing you'll be doing for the next week, weeks, whatever, for who knows how long. For however long it takes. Whatever it is.

Still I hurried. Shut the door. Then sat, ragged towel discreetly folded beneath my soon-to-be-numb ass, on the freezer-cold landing, eyes half-closed, typical empty slouch like most of the people who lived there; we used to joke that in my building, the tenants
were
the vacancies, and lucky for me it wasn't hard to play at being nothing.

I figured no one would notice me and I was right. I sat there for most of the day, leaving once or twice to piss, get a cup of coffee, run some hot water over my hands just for the painful pleasure of flexing them for a minute or two. Then back to my station, observing the people who stepped past and around me as if I were a thoughtlessly discarded bag of thankfully odorless trash. Which was okay by me. As people passed I watched them, my covert gaze and wondering, Do you know about it? Have you ever opened that particular door, have you ever even noticed that it's there? Skinny girl in too big dress, old man with Brillo sideburns, how about you? How about you, guy with firestorm zits and black leather, looking like you'd like to step on my hand, there, as it lies so close to your bootheels? Are you going to? You won't like the stain, believe me.

By ten o'clock I was satisfied that our original conclusions were correct, but I had one more test to try, one I couldn't make till morning so, unbending joints and tendons as unwieldy as rusted hangers, I lurched gently upstairs to sprawl on the couchbed, massaging my numb feet and watching the tail end of a documentary about wasps. It was actually pretty interesting. I liked the male wasps, the sunning stud wasps on sycamore leaves, tiny terrorists taking the air. Best of all though was the wasp beetle, whose yellow and black coloration mimics that of the wasp, no real terrorist at all but merely masquerading. The kinship of the image made me smile; it reminded me of myself.