The Cipher (19 page)

"Nakota," I said, "don't."

"Why not?" mild burlesque surprise.

"You know damn well why not," said Vanese, with the deep and instant irritability that only Nakota seemed able to rouse in her, "you stupid rabble-rousing bitch, the only one you ever think of is yourself."

"Shrike," Randy's hand, palm-up like some vexed saint's, "really, Nicholas's right. You shouldn't really—"

"Screw you all," she said, and tapped the tape to ON.

Well. I guess she told us, in fact her specialty, that pale poker face one large suppressed sneer. Rapt and stupid Malcolm, sitting fast beside her, his trio ringed behind him. Randy just as rapt and Vanese abstaining but then nobody could abstain for long, could they, with that witch light in the room? Of course not. Of course not. THey sat like kids, open mouths, apparently Malcolm's all-day exposure had done nothing to dim the cold gee-whiz, they sat like rubes at a seance and one of the trio said, "God
damn,"
and as if that was my cue I got up, obeying my own wishes for once, that riverine voice a carpet as I walked out of the room and heard Malcolm behind me, tardy distracted petulance: "Hey, Nick, where're you going?" and half of Randy's shitty reply, and nothing else because here they came, all of them. Call me the Pied Piper.

I ignored them when they talked, nothing mystic, I just didn't feel like answering. By the time we hit the door they had stopped entirely, all I heard was the churchly shuffle of their feet, basilica Funhole. We stood in the hall, our merry octet, three of them watching Malcolm who with the other three watched me.

I know what you want, I thought. But you're not gonna get it.

"You," to the Malcolmettes, "get the fuck out of here." They stared at me as if I had just become miraculously stupider than I was, which I had to agree would have been some feat, but then I was smarter than they were, wasn't I, I knew exactly what was behind door number one. "I mean it," no such warning in my voice, as flat in fact as my determination that they must not,
not,
be allowed to see it, not in fact be allowed near it, I was no goddamned ringmaster after all, was I? The video was bad enough, wasn't it?

"Go back upstairs," I said, "and watch your movie. Go on," and paradox Nakota turned on them and said, "Are you deaf?" with all the menace I lacked, backing them off a pace or two but that was obviously as far as we were going to get without a gun. I looked first at Randy, whose face was as blank as my voice, and then Vanese. Who shrugged.

'It's their funeral," she said.

Nakota laughed: "Hold the flowers," and slipped past me into the storage room, the three left behind instantly craning, what had been a square room full of nothing was now the most, the only important place to be; strange the workings of denial, you can see it in a schoolyard clique, which this silly scene very much resembled. Malcolm next, fearless leader without so much as a glance behind, then Randy and Vanese and me last of all, one sweaty hand closing the door.

On the other side, "Watch this door," I said to Randy, and Vanese nodded.

Kneeling, self-conscious now, before the lip, untied my badly made bandage with my teeth. I heard Malcolm's stage whisper, the whip Vanese retort. Randy's distant grumble. And strongest of all beside me, the astringent odor of Nakota's devotion, the cold heat of her impatience, urging me on to her kind of action, let the games begin.

"Ah well," I said, and heard the cobweb-echo of my voice, there in the hole. It was in no way a natural echo, but an entrancing sound, scary too

since I knew damned well it was some kind of— I almost said side effect, and maybe those are the right words after all. I tried it again, different words, my mouth very close to the lip so none of the others could hear. "Do you know me?" I said, do you know me
want you

in a tone so shockingly intimate that my whole body flushed, I felt the warmth go through me like fever, like pain, as if your own mind could speak to you in a tongue you never knew you knew, but recognized at once; as if, foreign-born, came your first exposure to your native language, and those first words "I love you." And below that I was simply scared shitless, a postcard from the devil, or more ominously a collect call from God himself, will you accept charges?

I could not move, there was no thought in me for motion; I could barely come closer but I did, surrounding the lip of the Funhole with my body, curling circular around it, face and hands dipping in the darkness and my right hand shook so terribly that droplets flew, danced beyond gravity in th£ new bloody light shivering around me, the drops gone circular too in a weird and crooked halo around my shameful head, and I think I cried, or cried out, because like fresh stigmata the pain in my hand became too strange to bear, and I yelled at them, "Get out" not because their safety was at stake (or because, in that moment, I would have cared if it was) but because I needed, I
had to have,
privacy. Aloneness. I heard like shadows talking Vanese's voice, the deeper faraway mumble of Randy and Malcolm, nothing at all from Nakota, and my own voice entreating them all in jumbled curses, ending every sentence "Go away!"

Vanese got them out, the two of them—there would of course be no moving Nakota—I knew it was her and I wanted to tell her I was grateful, wanted to give her my thanks but there was no way I could because I needed all my concentration, every rubbery scrap, because something was eating at me, something stroking my bones from the inside out and there was no cure for that but to give in, give over, crawl headfirst and kill me, fuck me, I don't care. Why are you so suddenly crazy, I asked myself, some tiny distant human part of me tight with terror and disapproval. I thought you could handle this, I thought this was a purely philosophical FACTFINDING MISSION, and all the rest of me could answer was Pain.

And desire.

Because it kept
talking
to me, that voice, seeming to say things I had no right to hear, and there in the dark I lay naked to listen, one hand in the hole and the other on my cock, sweating, blood thin in the corners of my mouth, my eyes wide open as they never were, my erection one hungry center, a focus for my want. And that voice, oh my God, it used no words but what it said, what it said. As if things lay displayed that my dry daily brain could not have fathomed, would have dismissed from disbelief or terror, or both. Or worse.

And Nakota beside me, as insubstantial as the morning memory of a dream, some familiar chimera, that was her all right. She stood over me, saying something about the door, the video, maybe that the video
was
a door, breathy hypnotic gibberish flowing over me like dirty water and "I watch it all the time," she said. "It tells me things. I come here too," and closer still, perhaps to watch my new and juicy ornament, there above my head. "It tells me a
lot
of things," she said.

"Are you a hallucination?" I asked her.

"I want to be you," she said, and she showed me her teeth, her eyes were enormous in the bloody dark, I saw her shaking as she stripped, wet shoes and crummy uniform and tiny scraps of underwear, and she said to me what I said to the Funhole, to that cruel and luminous voice: "Fuck me."

By her hair, I grabbed her by her hair and dragged her down, not caring if we both fell into the Funhole, if we died there, oh Jesus I was worse than crazy and she egged me on, shrew hands locked to me like crampons in my flesh, climbing me, crawling me like an insect, a leech, all bones and teeth like fucking death, yeah, her mouth open on me and screaming something and my hips pounding down as if I meant to break her bones, shatter her pelvis for joyful spite, a smell around us as primal as sex but not from us, oh no, not from us at all. And her banshee voice, howling something and I was coming and I didn't care, I didn't care, I wouldn't stop and pounding and pounding in the lessening drain of my corroding orgasm and still that voice that was no voice at all and I bent my head impossibly back and saw our orbit, our slow decaying gyration above the Funhole, looked and saw as if in a mirror that Nakota's eyes had rolled back in her head and there was blood all over my mouth, all over her face, and the look on my face scared me so badly that I felt us fall, as if belief was all that held us; like Peter on the water I screamed, and Nakota in my arms unconscious, no help, a drag on my strength and perhaps it might be better, it might be easier for us all if I threw her down? Right, and I held her tighter, tighter, willing myself to block our fall with my body, stretched starfish-wide—measured in seconds, but it was that elongated time again, car-wreck time—and hit instead of darkness the floor beyond the Funhole, as if, disgusted with my weakness, my smallness, the Funhole had thrown us back.

Incredibly I was still inside her. It was hard to see, I was crying, -trying to pull away but so drained that I managed only to slip partway out, and then I heard them: knocking, knocking, hoarse urgent call, Vanese, and Randy fainter, behind her, saying in that pushed-to-the-limits voice, "Because it
won't open,
that's why," and something indistinct from Malcolm, the tone— excitement, dismay—shared and amplified by his three stooges, his tinny Greek chorus.

"Help us," I said, as loudly as I could. "We're hurt"

"Nicholas," Vanese's voice, the way you talk to people trapped inside a burning car, "we can't get the door open. Did you lock the door?"

"No," I said. "The door doesn't lock, it—"

"We can't get it open," Vanese said again, and I realized she was crying. "How bad are you hurt? Should we go and get a—shut
up\"
sudden sharp hysteric cry, someone else's nervous startle and Malcolm's curse.

Boom, boom. Randy's thudding shoulder against the frame, boom, boom, and I pulled away from Nakota, unable to look too closely at her, crawled to the door, and with one hand turned the knob, Randy pratfall-tripping over me, falling to one knee in the smear of the floor.

Vanese's voice, low: "Oh my sweet Jesus," she could say nothing but that, oh my sweet Jesus over and over again, and Malcolm's face, over her shoulder, greedy like a gawper at a public impaling, the three behind him wide-eyed human echoes and Randy bending to Nakota and saying, with the gentle voice of shock, "Nicholas, is she dead?"

"I don't know."

Randy said, after a moment, that her heart was still beating, she was breathing, yeah. "Put something on her," I said, weak resentment at the gawk of those faces, their avid blinkless eyes; my own damp nakedness meant less than nothing, but somehow they must not gape at hers.

Randy wrapped her in his jacket, lifted her as Malcolm and Vanese helped me into my pants, steadied me for the interminable trip upstairs, and as we walked, our own little death march silent but for the whispered susurration from the three in the rear, Nakota all at once opened her eyes and said, slurred voice through a distinct and bloody grin, "Should've hadda camcorder."

Vanese went still, all over, and then, "You are
crazy,
"pulling back, away from me, "you are all
Crazy,"
and suddenly she ran, almost stumbling down the stairs, she had no coat, she was out the door. I felt the new cold of the night rising around me, on my bare skin, and then we were at the flat, the trio simultaneously opening the door and obscuring our entrance, Malcolm helping me into a chair as Randy lay Nakota on the couch-bed.

"What happened?" he said. "What the fuck
happened
in there?"

Nakota again, nothing short of death could shut her mouth: "Nicholas . . . lost it."

With admiration.

They left us, finally, Malcolm flanked by the stunned Malcolmettes—seeing was, apparently, believing—and Randy carrying Vanese's coat. "You gonna be all right, man?" looking at us both, stupid survivors, tired maybe of patching us up, or watching us patch each other. Maybe just tired.

"We're fine," Nakota said authoritatively. "We'll be fine." Then, "Randy—did you see it?"

I thought she meant the spectacle, wondered how in hell even she could be so brutal, then saw his slow nod.

"It's slag," he said. "Fuckin' slag." And was gone.

Feral-bright eyes, poking me in the ribs. "We melted steel," she said. "Both of us. We melted steel."

I had never seen anyone look so smug. Torn lips—which accounted, thank God, for most of the blood, though her mouth was going to look pretty weird from now on—and loose teeth, raccoon bruises around both eyes, glittering eyes because she was one happy girl, our Nakota, our crazy Shrike, maybe Shrike was a better name for her after all.

"I think we should always have sex there," she said.

"I think you're a goddamned lunatic." I rubbed my eyes, sore left-hand fingers, I hadn't looked at my right hand—wrapped now in the last clean towel in the house—and I wasn't about to. "Nakota, I
hurt
you. I could've hurt you more, maybe, God. I don't even want to think about it, okay? I don't even want to go—"

Instantly angry, "Don't be such an asshole. This is what's supposed to happen, don't you know that? Don't you understand
anything,?"

"No," I said, in simple truth. "No I don't."

"Then shut up."

She fell asleep. I hurt too much in too many places, most internal, to join her, but could not make myself do more than lie there in the dark. Around me pure silence, no video, no voices, just the pale sporadic clatter of late traffic, Nakota's snore-breathing, soft rattling whistle from her injured mouth. Enough light to my eyes to see her, she looked like someone had worked on her with a pipe, and I began to cry, for her, because she was hurt, because I had hurt her. Because to her it didn't matter. Because it almost surely would happen again.