The Cipher (23 page)

Maybe they watched the video together; they'd done that before, hadn't they. Maybe the video was, now, a tool for them, and more, perhaps the third component in a manage & trois, she and Malcolm twisting, sweaty and boneless, in the leering glow of its looped images. Of course that would bother me, but not for the usual reasons, Nakota's idea of faithfulness was remembering my telephone number and anyway there was nothing, from her point of view, to be faithful to: I was the one who loved, not she. Worth worry, though, was the wonder of what she was really up to; there was no sense asking her, nor Malcolm, neither were likely to tell me if the flat was on fire.

Working on the theory that even a broken clock is right twice a day, I asked Doris et al if they knew what Malcolm was doing, if they thought he was coming back to finish the mask or at least get his crummy tools.

"Is he working on something new?" I asked, sitting before them, hands loose in my lap, faint sounds from the flat above us, somebody fighting, slow and dreary repetition of shopworn curses and sighs. "Some new project or something?"

Shrugs, blank looks, their natural habitat. Ashlee picked a hangnail with a surgeon's precision. "I don't know," Dave said. "Last I heard, he was still working on the mask of your face."

"We don't see that much of Malcolm anymore," said Doris.

"Why not?"

No one answered me. I asked again, more crossly, for God's sake even they must have reasons for their actions: "Why not?"

Back and forth, a look passed like a dead fish, you tell him. No,
you
tell him. Finally Doris said, "We don't share theories with him anymore." -

Share theories. I'd've had more luck asking the Funhole. I opened my mouth to say I don't know what the hell you're talking about, but Ashlee spoke up, a subdued tone, frown line between her eyebrows: "It's those people, you know? Nakota's friends. I don't like them."

Nakota's friends. Is there a word for the feeling that trickled down my spine? "What friends?"

"You
know," reprovingly, but with a hint of unease, perhaps I did not know, perhaps she would have to actually tell me. Looking for help to Doris and Dave and my voice rising, I couldn't help it,
"What
friends, for fuck's sake? What're you talking about?"

"Well," Doris, nervous in a new way, swift looks between the three of them but never at me, "it's some of the people who hang out at the Incubus. They're not interested in Art, you know," including without conscious thought that obligatory capital
A,
as I sat kneading my bad hand against my good one, a warm foreboding, Ashlee picking her hangnail a mile a minute. "They just want to, to—"

"They want to be on the fringe," Dave said, from his useless stance at the refrigerator, searching for wine that wasn't there. "They want stuff that's, you know. That's out there."

"And Nakota told them about the Funhole?" Any other time I might have laughed at the squeak of my voice, a cartoon character confronting the inevitable mortality of the brick wall, the canyon floor, the OFF switch on the TV. "She told them?"

"I think," Ashlee, very slowly, looking all around her for support, "she showed them the video."

"It makes a very powerful statement," said Doris, with a solemnity that roused in me the immediate urge to strangle, her, Nakota, myself. Everyone. A greasy tingling in the hole of my hand, crushing it hard against the sloped bone of my kneecap, over and over and thinking, thinking, staring at nothing until in sudden pause I looked up to see the three of them, staring at me with such childish woebegone anxiety that I felt a mingled rage and tired—what? Pity?
Sympathy?
They were just dingbats, after all, the minor-league version of what they decried, looking for the small thrill, the neatly boxed excitement. The Funhole Gift Set, prewrapped.

"Go home," I said, "go away for a while. All right? I just want to be by myself for a little bit. All right?"

And their nods, more eager to be gone than they wanted me to see, jackets and smiles and they would call, yes, maybe they could come back later? Maybe we could all talk? Yes, yes, nodding at them, don't let the door hit you in the back. Nearly sprinting for the phone.

Randy wasn't home, but Vanese was, and in her silence, created by my anxious questions, I knew she knew what Doris and the others were talking about; I leaned my forehead against the wall, I closed my eyes to await the answer.

"Bunch of assholes from the gallery," she said, "they're always up for some weirdness, the bigger the better. They'd just eat that video
up."
Stringent disgust, I could picture the look on her face and felt no reassurance, it was as bad as I feared. The floor, falling beneath me. Things are never so bad they can't get worse. Especially when Nakota is around, especially when she's mad.

"That fucking bitch," she said. "Just doesn't care, does she?"

"No," I said. "I don't think she does."

After I hung up, I stayed standing, trying harder and harder to think but finding a mournful fatalism every way I turned, there was no way out. I knew what she was doing, now, and no doubt Malcolm was in on it, both of them pissed at my groupies, as they called them, at the
fact
of my groupies, at anyone—what had Doris said, yeah, sharing theories with me. Treating me as more than a barely necessary appliance, the crank that makes the magic box run. No camcorder, I had ruined that for her, no new video for you, Nakota. No copying the old one either, she maybe blamed that on me, too. And Malcolm beside her, to nurture her spite with the spurts and gushings of his own, withholding his mask from me, from his traitorous disciples, why hadn't I seen any of this coming? Was I always doomed to be the fucking dupe, the one who never knew what was going on? Stumbling around, waiting for the anvil to fall on my head. No wonder I had a hole in my hand.

The fight above my head was still going on, the kind of circular bitching that reaches a certain level and then goes nowhere in particular but round and round. I turned on no lights, got a beer in the dark and crept to bed, lay like a troubled fetus in the soiled swirl of blanket and
sheet.
No Funhole for me tonight, my hand at this decision racked with a sudden petulant throb, my own petulance rising with a brief but telling urge to cut the motherfucker off, how's that for downing a lifeline, cutting off communication one might say. Call me Lefty. Maybe I could just—

Talking. Not above me. In the hall.

A questioning tone, some guy, something, and then Nakota unmistakable: "He's not here." Someone else, and her scornful answer: "Because it doesn't
work
without him, dipshit." More talk. As slowly as my breath was fast I set the beer down, careful, careful, pulled the covers up so there was only a dark half circle, breathing space, tried to look like a messy bed. They were still talking but I couldn't hear, pulling up the covers had made it worse. What to do. Maybe I could play turtle, put my head out enough to hear and then if the door—

Which it did, and the light too at once and my clumsiness betrayed me, Nakota in instant triumph seeing the whorl of blanket for what it was and saying, "There he is," and me raising my head, reluctant and half-blind, blinking at
her
groupies.

Whom I saw at once were more trouble than I felt up to handling: six or seven of them, hunching shoulders, big jackets, hands impatient in pockets and eyes like tracer gazes going all around the room, all of them stupider, meaner, wilder, more prone to that special brand of idiocy which most often turns into wreckage, spillage; blood. They smelled blood, all right, or maybe worse that more esoteric fluid that dribbled from me now, in a brightly vindictive stream that soaked the pillowcase and turned the sheet to clotted silver, a party color is it, well let's start the party now. When in doubt, attack, right? And I was nothing if not always in doubt. About something.

But not Nakota, who, I saw and plainly, relished this role as field marshal, why not, it was the kind of situation she was born to not only milk but throttle till it was as juiceless as a skull in the desert. Head back and hips like rim shots as she walked over to the bed, sat chummily beside me and said, brisk elbow and dry grin, "So. What happened to your little friends?"

"They got a life," I said, as shittily as I could muster, which Wasn't much but it might fake out her buddies who now stood like half-domesticated slaves in the center of the room, waiting for her to say something, to tell them what to do. "What's all this?" gesturing openly with my leaky hand. "Malcolm's friends?"

It didn't piss her off, as I had lamely hoped, or fool her for a minute. We both knew who they belonged to, and never mind that Malcolm's charisma quotient had always been at least a quart low, that he couldn't assemble an army at gunpoint. But let's just remember, shall we, let's make sure we don't forget that he'll be more than happy to hoard what Nakota collected, her cadre of dissatisfied jerks masquerading as the cheapest kind of mystics, fun junkies out gunning for the biggest fun of all; he'll be more than ready to use whatever weapon, however blunt, they constitute, to serve whatever banal and horrible concept he—and worse, she—thought "best." And of course we also know who it's best
for.

"We're going to watch the video now," Nakota said. "Join us."

"I was sleeping," I said, and she shook her head. "No you weren't, you fucking liar. If you don't want to watch with us, then get the hell out."

You wish, I thought, that sudden concealed sparkle a clue as subtle as an ax. I know what you want me to do, I told her with my eyes. And I won't. No, I won't.

And I didn't. Instead I lay tense, faking nonchalance as I observed Nakota's sorry fucks sprawled slack-jawed before the TV, watching the video, the video, the video until I wanted to jump up and run out of the room, which was probably part of the point. Maybe all of it, though I wasn't vain enough to think so, and anyway Nakota was famous for her crisscross motives, occasionally reaching heights so dizzy-ingly Byzantine that even she couldn't say with certainty what the real reason was.

See her now, hair pulled into some weird new topknot, big fat coat that she no doubt had appropriated from one of her followers, knees bent and dirty shoes up on the edge of the couch. See the hinty smile that whispers of plot, see the glaze of her eyeballs as she watches a scene she's seen a zillion times and more but she doesn't care because it's not really what she's seeing, oh no, there's quite a different movie playing in the cold zone between object and inner vision. And so absorbed myself I didn't notice the new mimicking smirk till it was right in my face, build like a decadent soccer player and blue eyes lined thick like Cleopatra, a smell from the big jacket like cigarettes and too sweet after-shave. A chummy lean, like we were pals.

"She says," said the face before me, indicating with a nod Nakota, "that you can start that hole up."

That hole. "You believe everything she tells you?"

"Only when she's right." Smirk magnified by closeness, something gummy in the corners of the mouth. "She's been right all along."

"So far."

"Yeah. So far."

Sudden and startling, a yell from upstairs, the fight invigorated and louder now than the TV, not that there was much of a sound track but the mutters and grunts of the watchers, most of whom turned now to Nakota, interrogatory stares and she said, "It's the people upstairs" like they were too stupid to figure this out for themselves but in fact they must have been if they needed her to interpret two people screaming "Fuck you" at each other.

"You know Malcolm?" said my new friend, reaching into his jacket to pull out a pack of Kools. I nodded, and he did too, as if this was just what he'd expected. "I saw the mask," he added, and smirked again, seemed about to comment further when a truly banshee-quality groan from above and Nakota, looking at me, said, "Do something about that."

I was about to suggest an alternative plan, involving a painfully novel sex act she might perform either alone or with her followers, when I saw one of them leave his comfy position on the floor, out the door and his purposeful feet in the hall, and I thought: Oh. I see, and even if I hadn't Nakota's gratuitous smile crystallized the notion: she was showing off. And a tiny chill as wet as a trickle of blood shivered through me, raising my skin to pebbles of gooseflesh, I pulled the dirty blankets closer and the guy beside me said, "You cold or something?"

"It's just my leprosy," I said, making the mistake of using my bad hand to adjust the blankets, that jumbled flood of silver leaking firm and shiny across my wrist, across the bedclothes. My earlier bravado evaporated, I tried to hide the mess but no, he was staring at it with a genuinely blank look, as if I had just farted out a cloud of ducklings, or began coughing up hundred-dollar bills.

With my other hand I swept the covers back up, now you see it now you don't as victorious footsteps and Nakota's errand boy back, smiling proudly: "I told them to shut the fuck up," and the others grinning in return and Nakota not grinning at all, just the smallest fold of a smile, pointed at me like the casual tip of a knife. I nodded—touch6—maybe she would be satisfied with that particular hoop, maybe we wouldn't need to see another proof of what she could make them do.

They were still there when I fell asleep, uneasy at sleeping in that company but unable finally to outwait them. The last thing I remember hearing was Nakota telling them about the jarful of bugs, so very long ago, strange den mother and her troop of devil scouts around the flickering cathode fire.