A clocked minute of static—a long time to sit and watch nothing, I was all for fast-forwarding but Nakota glared me down—then a sip of absolute blackness, recorded blackness, rich and menacing as an X ray of a cancer. Nakota, lips parting to say something but the thought drowned in the flash of an image: something like bloody stalks, caressing the screen like hands behind the glass, so greedily intimate even Nakota gave a tiny backstepping whoop. Then as if a barrier shattered, ferocious fun, whatever provided the images warming to this game: a vast black grin like the Funhole itself become its namesake, black asshole-mouth studded with teeth or bones like broken glass and in that Pandora opening Nakota breathless and me with my mouth hanging wide open, village idiot at freak show, a vertiginous glide forward as upon the screen came things I didn’t want to know about, oh yes I’m quite sophisticated, quite the bent voyeur, I can laugh at stuff that would make you vomit but how would you like to see the ecstatic prance of self-evisceration, a figure carving itself, re-created in a harsh new form from what seemed to be its own hot guts, becoming no figure at all but the absence of one, a cookie-cutter shape and in but not contained by its outline a blackness, a vortex of nothing so final that beside it the Funhole was harmless, do you see what I’m saying, the Funhole was a goddamned carnival ride next to this nonfigure and all at once what I wanted least, least, far less than to be struck blind or any kind of petty death was to see the figure turn (as it did now) in slick almost pornographic slowness and show me, show me what there was to see
and I had to turn away, Nakota finally slack-lipped too beside me, had circumstances at last gotten too strange even for her? “God,” barely a word, in a self-protective spasm I covered my face with my hands and I heard her little shriek, shock-show denouement, and when I looked again the tape was buzzing blank, show’s over, folks, nothing to see here.
The whole thing had taken maybe five minutes.
Nakota: I could see her hand shaking as she pushed at her hair, see her visibly swallow, imagine the dry click of her throat for mine was the same, the same. “Do you think—” she said, and stopped. I thought she might say something else, but instead she ejected the tape, pocketed it with the same reverent care as one would a beloved relic, picked up purse and sport coat. Gone. She never turned to look at me, and for once I barely noticed, didn’t care, because I had some big fucking fish to fry, yeah, and the flat was too crowded with her in it, too crowded with me in it so I got up too, dressed and gone, picking up in almost absent passing the camcorder. I would return it, yeah, but to hell with work for today. Videos, I’ll give you a video. Not for the squeamish. Category, um. Let’s say Foreign Film. Or Comedy, depending, all depending on your personal true-blue bent and if you’re benter than most this’ll be a thigh slapper. Maybe more. I’d slap my own thigh if I could remember how to work my hand.
After Video Hut, my careless key: driving. Around and around, almost no gas so I had to stop somewhere. A greasy booth at White Castle, hamburger squares gone cold before me, my hand tight as a tourniquet around the coffee cup, size of a urine sample, tasted like hell but then I’d seen hell, hadn’t I, or hell’s heaven, not the same difference at all.
A kind of a bag lady stopped by my table to ask if I was done with my hamburgers. She smelled distinctly of gas-station washroom soap. She had on three T-shirts and a jacket that reminded me of Nakota. I shoved the burgers at her. “Help yourself,” I said.
“I can’t,” she told me. Which made a lot of sense to me. She took my hamburgers and sat two booths away to eat them. I wondered what she’d think if I showed her the Funhole. You think you’re on the fringe of society, huh lady? I’ll show you the edge of the fringe, it’s even out on video now.
I sat there until they told me to leave. Must have been close to two hours, I wasn’t wearing a watch. When I got home Nakota was there, playing it again. I wasn’t sure I wanted to see it, so I sat down and took her hand in mine, very firm, didn’t give a shit if she wanted me to or not. She didn’t seem to mind. Or notice.
“Why is it,” as the preliminary static went by, her almost whisper, “that it seems, you know, weirder on a tape?”
“Because it is.”
I don’t know what about it seemed weirder to her; certainly the reanimation of a dead man’s hand is pretty fucking weird, as weird as the spontaneous rearrangement of insect parts or the eclectic combustion of a mouse. To me it was the affirmation that the Funhole was not a thing or a place but an actual process, something that was happening, and that the process could be, was, actually transferrable to tape. On another level it was somewhat like an operation. Or a death. There’s this video at work, you probably heard of it, Faces of Death it’s called, the penultimate moment captured on VHS. Same principle: you know, everybody knows about death, but to actually see it, wow. Dickbrains are daily blown away by this, no pun intended. Maybe for me this was the same: the Funhole, bugs mouse hand holy shit and look, look, here’s how it really happens! Look!
For Nakota, who knows, no telling or even guessing with her, but she seemed truly stunned in a way I had rarely seen before. It was some kind of affirmation for her, too, but of what, again who knows and she wasn’t talking. Maybe, I thought, we were both hypnotized. Mesmerized, in the original sense. Or maybe we were just the particularly stupid brand of geek who doesn’t believe it till it’s on TV.
I sat still through it all. I watched the part I had not wanted, before, to see, and was sorry I had. She didn’t look sorry but she didn’t look good, either. From the pocket of the sport coat she took her cigarettes and two small yellow tablets.
“Want one?”
I shook my head. “What are they?”
“Kind of crank. I’ve been takin’ them all day.” She dry-swallowed them; I’ve never been able to get over how she was able to do that. It almost gags me just to watch.
“I’ll stick with beer/’ I said. There was still a lot left. I gave her a glass of water and she got up and stirred two packets of sugar into it, shaking the packets to ensure she got every last granule.
“Why’d you do that?”
“Why do you keep your sugar in packets?”
“If I buy it by the bag, the bugs get it.”
“So let ’em.” She drank the glass down, not even stopping for breath. Then she grinned, fox-head grin. “I feel like I’m underwater,” she said. “And that I’m burning.”
She put the tape back on. She played it over and over again, until I couldn’t watch anymore and sat quietly getting drunk. When I looked at the clock on the counter, I was surprised to see it was only four o’clock. I wouldn’t even be home from work yet. I’d forgotten to leave a note, but it seemed so worthless I didn’t care. Maybe the Funhole had finally gotten all the way inside my head and was driving me painlessly crazy.
I got so drunk I fell asleep on the kitchen floor. When I woke up the first thing I did was crawl to the refrigerator and get another beer. Nakota was still in her perched posture on the couchbed. The TV light was the only light in the room. Raining outside and that the only sound, it really was like being underwater. The world’s most piquant aquarium. And you are there.
“You’re watching that like porno,” I told her. It came out so garbled I wanted to laugh, but she was, a ritual masturbatory excess, maybe she even was jerking off. The perfect avant-garde stroke tape. Boy was I funny tonight. Too bad no one was laughing but me. Or even listening. Nakota sure wasn’t. I fell back to sleep with a mouthful of beer, woke again to the toll of a monstrous headache, beer soaked and clammy on my shirt and skin, TV buzzing and Nakota fast asleep, back curled like a question mark and hands, childlike and defenseless, loose-fingered against her cheek as a shadow grew on her face like a cancerous smile.