The Cipher (24 page)

Even in sleep the cold pursued me, a bloodless feel to hps and fingers as if I lay drained, vampire's snack, unremembered suicide attempt. In my dreams my hand was a key, a literal key to the storage-room door, and on my breathless chest like an animate gargoyle the guy who had sat on the bed, sawing with a grainy back-and-forth verve at my ramrod wrist and behind him, lips pursed in silent glee, Nakota was busily nodding him on, an empty pickle jar in hand to catch the jiggering spray.

"That's right," she was saying, "that's right," and I woke, loud startled "Huh!" of sound and the flat was full of drizzly day, it was morning, maybe even afternoon. The blankets were twisted, tight and uncomfortable, around my waist, my wet right hand lay clenched against my sweaty face, and two of them, one the bedsitter, were sitting at the kitchen table. Waiting for me.

Trying to ignore them, I stumbled up, across to the bathroom, washed with one ear wearily cocked, what were they doing? Back out to get a beer, it was going to be that kind of day, I resumed my cocoon as the bed-sitter said, "Those people upstairs are real assholes."

No reply from me. It was not a statement I could legitimately argue with, but then again he was in no position to call names. They glanced together at me in my silence, and tried again.

"Nakota says you fucked up the video. Copying it."

I shrugged, the sudden rapid polka of an eyelid tic starting up, idiotic flutter and I rubbed at

my eye, pressed the cold can against it to make it stop. The whole flat stunk like the inside of a bar, that dry generic reek of alcohol and smoke. Maybe they'd had a party, while I'd slept my nightmare sleep, maybe Nakota had been the entertainment. Maybe I had, for all I knew.

"She says you don't know about the paths."

"I don't care, either." The beer tasted very bad.

"She says," said the other one, his voice a glottal mumble like he was talking through a tasty mouthful of snot, "you don't
believe
about the paths."

Oh, God. "I'll tell you what I believe," I said, with venom born of a restless night, a sorry ache in my head, a sorrier one in my hand that even now began to burble and spit, fat slow silver bubbles and I said it again, "I'll tell you what I believe. That nobody knows anything about anything more complicated than breathing in and out, and
especially
not about that fucking Funhole down there, and that includes Nakota, that practically
defines
Nakota, am I going too fast-for you or what?" and I hurled the beer so it barely missed the TV, one of my rare displays of temper but it pissed me off, it truly did, to wake after such a night to find the palace guard, armed with stupidity and questions, it was worse than having Malcolm there. I had my mouth open to continue in this vein and deeper when knock-knock, who's there, sudden anxious

fantasy of the irate neighbor from upstairs but no, almost worse: the Dingbats, all three, smiles turning to sudden worry as they saw the other two, the blurt of fresh beer stain on the wall, smelled the ozone of tension and tried to simultaneously discern and assess their effect on whatever was happening fast enough to stop if that was necessary.

All in all they were deeply confused and showed it, so openly that I felt a vast wave of irritable pity, and on that wave threw down the blankets saying "Wait a minute," and dressed, fast sloppy toilette and grabbed up my jacket, herding them before me out the door. In the dull arctic slysh outside I stood, eye ticcing as I zipped the jacket, and told them I wanted to go out for breakfast.

"It's almost dinner time," said Ashlee timidly.

"Not for me." Doris drove, the four of us squashed into her squatty little Honda, her stick-shift style particularly vigorous and unpleasant, my headache worsening with each slam from first to second, second to third. She cranked the heater till the windows fogged, till I could smell the distinct degree of each passenger's state of cleanliness, most of all unfortunately my own. Of course at the restaurant we got stuck with a booth; once again I ended up next to Doris, the grit of her eyelashes, the fudgy smell of her perfume.

Blew on her tea, splashing it on my hand in its stained washcloth shroud, and chattering drone, long spiel about various methods that might be used to accurately document the Funhole, it was after all a paranormal site, there were ways: temperature readings maybe, in the storage room and the room below, maybe an interview of each of us (a nod almost painfully meaningful, meaningfully at me) describing our reactions to, and theories concerning, the mystery; perhaps a thorough medical investigation of my hand? Ignoring this for the absurdity it was, I stared at my chili corn dog with loathing, Dave had talked me into it against my will and for once better judgment; it looked like something the Funhole might have coughed up.

"Obviously it's not a
natural
phenomenon," said Doris, clearing her throat, Ashlee a moment later in identical nervous echo. "I mean, there's this
hole
in the floor, but nothing's underneath it, it doesn't
go
anywhere. I mean that's what they'd say. Researchers. But we could document the things we do know, we could investigate—

"Like tapes, you mean?" Tactless Ashlee, and Doris's bright scowl of displeasure, no not tapes, but "You'd almost have to use some kind of video methodology that—Nicholas, what's wrong?"

I shook my head. Dave said something about science and mysticism don't mix and Doris said something back and it went round, predoomed attempt to classify the unspeakable, me turning my chili corn dog in small loathing circles to mimic, maybe, their talk.

After a while I noticed them noticing my glazed mourning, my lack of appetite, Doris in clumsy delicacy asking if "something" had happened; Twenty Questions, Oblique Edition with the three of them perched bright as birds until to shut them up I gave a clenched abridged history of the night before, just enough to give them the drift. And with luck the idea that perhaps for now my flat was not the place to be. By the time I finished they were done eating; I gave my plate one last resentful glance, pushed tardy out of the booth, no longer even nominally hungry but definitely sick. Sick around the edges.

The drive home, head leaning against the sticky passenger-side window, eyes closed. Would Mr. Bed & Friend still be there? Nakota? Complete with an army of blank-eyed vicious morons in big fat jackets with big fat notions force-fed them by that queen of misdirection, who was using them all as surely as she had once used the bugs in the jar, the terrified mouse at the end of a string? She would dangle them just as cold-bloodedly, and part of me said: So let her. Who gives a fuck.

I made them stop for beer. I even let them pay for it. What the hell. If I had to be a fucking guru, I should get some kind of privileges from it, shouldn't I? And even if I shouldn't, who cares? Who cares.

First up the stairs, slow breathless chug, hoo boy was I getting out of shape. As I passed the second floor, my entourage still unfortunately in tow (good job scaring them off, Nicholas old man) I was surprised by a wash of, what? Nostalgia? Oh
God.
Homesick for the Funhole. Maybe I deserved whatever I got, whatever that turned out to be. Still it was true, and never mind my posturing disgust, it was worse, and less, than a gesture. No matter what sort of place it was—dark stinks and dancing slag and undisguised a lure so monumental that it need only make its promises in fluids and in blinks—it was, beyond denial, the place for me. Oh, God.

The flat was silent, which cheered me momentarily, if I could just get rid of the Dingbats maybe I could get drunk and fall asleep, the day was shot anyway, wasn't it? But no sooner had I turned the key than the footsteps of the three heard vaguely from behind turned out to include a fourth. An unwelcome fourth, judging from the silence and I turned to see, who else, scary shorn head and a smile even uglier than before but in a new way: Malcolm. With a box under his arm.

"Look who's here," he said, as if this were his apartment and we some vulgar interloping peddlers, maybe come to sell candy or magazine subscriptions. "I thought you'd've taken a swan dive by now."

"Out the window," I asked, pushing the open door, "or down the hole?" I took the beer from Dave's arms, opened one right there. Malcolm stood to face me, cradling his damnable box and it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what was inside. He saw me looking and smiled.

"I finished it without you," he said. "I didn't need you after all."

"Congratulations."

"I'm gonna put it up tonight, when Nakota gets home."

"Who gives a fuck?" My trio fidgeted silently in place, Doris the first of the wedge, the other two slightly behind. The flat looked exactly as I had left it, cold and messy and unappetizing, my fading prints and magazine cutouts like some set designer's idea of badly simulated bohemia, flophouse chic. All it really needed was Nakota and her bunch for it to be truly hell. "Quite frankly, Malcolm, I don't care if you hang it around your neck," and out came a satisfying belch, big and round, "as long as you leave me out of it."

As if on cue, bang the door and Nakota, Mr. Bed, and three others, all but she smelling very much like Club 22, she was dressed in her barmaid black but I didn't think she would be working tonight. Not serving drinks, anyway. She took one look at Malcolm's proudly held box and said, "Done, I see," with the utmost boredom, not even malicious, not really, just an obvious trigger and she pulled it, almost out of force of habit.
^N

"Wait till you see it," he said, but she had already turned away, speaking to Mr. Bed in some incomprehensible private slang, again I heard the word "transcursion" and wondered if I ought to ask. One of Nakota's geeks reached for one of my beers and I grabbed his wrist, hard, though he outweighed me by a good twenty pounds, and said, "Put it back, fuckface."

Nakota laughed. "Bad mood?"

"Eat shit, you," and instantly her trio turned on me, and with a sad and astonishing courage, mine on hers: Dave, nervous and too loud, "Just be a little easy, all right?" and Mr. Bed's contemptuous smile and Malcolm's snort of disgust at the whole circus, for once I agreed with him, a circumstance so bizarre that in pained confusion I set aside my beer and rubbed hard at my head, dislodging as I did so the clumsy bandage and now, for all to see, the silver leak, sick glossy shine on my skin like mother-of-pearl, like the flesh of the drowned and I snarled "What the fuck's everybody looking at?" and took up my beer again, sulked my way back to bed, and Nakota's breezy nod, agreeing: "Really, what's the big deal? You've all seen freaks before."

Dingbats glaring at idiots glaring back, Malcolm clutching his box, Nakota across the room giving me the look I hated most, and the phone rang: Vanese, asking, Is Randy there yet? Just the element I wanted added to this mix, just the man I wanted to see. Rub, rub, at my head, my brain swollen from thoughts too big, it had all gotten too big. What began as me and Nakota, me and my erstwhile beloved speculating on a bleak .tantalizing chimera, had become people (who of course in their turn became factions, with competing theories and competing wants), and masks, and Randy's moving sculpture, become too big for me because I was after all just a small guy, just a little man, just big enough to fit morsellike down the Funhole. Nowhere to hide but the storage room, nowhere to go but up. Or down. Let the games begin? Not so much, I thought, no longer bothering to hide the gulping dribble from my hand, that I minded putting on a show. I just didn't want to put it on for
them.

Mr. Bed seemed now to be reading my sorry mind as, turning to Nakota with a backhand glance at me, asked sotto voce when the hell's the action, you promised, remember?

And Ashlee, of all people, loud and tremulous in the center of the room, looking at me,
to
me, "Nothing happens without Nicholas. Nothing
can
happen without him, so you just better stay out of his shit, all right?" and the three of them, my dingbats (and when, a cold snide voice blossomed to ask inside that three-story brain of mine, just
when
did they become
your
dingbats, when did you become some cheapshit stand-in god?), turned to me with an identical look between them, three faces with one emotion, and the naked responsibility I saw there making me almost frantic for escape but when you put the key in the lock, when you crank up the magic box, why then what happens? And who, who, I ask you, is ultimately responsible?

Frozen in my private sick tableau, half-conscious of the merry fluid, brisk and faintly odoriferous, looking past its snail-trail glimmer to the twist of Malcolm's face as he said, unnecessarily loud, "I'm going to do what I came here to do. You can come with me, or fuck off, or whatever you want."

And he marched out like a marine, Nakota's yahoos half-inclined to follow at once, as if, mindless as radkr, they must track any kind of movement, my—the others, Doris and Ashlee and Dave, looking to me. Me looking away, to meet the warm shock of Nakota's gaze, very close, how had she managed to get so close? In her voice a thrumming sound, was it really her voice? The phone rang again.

"Coming?" she said, leaning even closer to brush her speaking lips against my skin and for me a grateful shiver, it had been such a long time since she had deliberately touched me. She kissed my cheek, an action at heart so brutally calculated that I should have been sickened by its falseness, but how could I be when it was so essentially Nakota?