maybe it was happy with the taste of my blood, you fucking asshole get away from there, get away!
Out. Out and hurrying down the hall, no tension in me but the tension of fear, good clean healthy fear, all the way outside where I teetered and slipped on the snowy pavement, ice beneath and instinctive hands outstretched to save myself, slamming down hard enough to knock out my breath, both my hands hurting so that I felt instant tears dripping instantly cold. It took me fully half a minute to even sit up, and when I did I saw the crows, big black wings in thoughtful telephone-wire posture, apprentice urban vultures. It seemed just as my glance found them they flew, not toward me but up, mobile clouds before the weak and desultory sun.
I stopped at a drugstore, sat in my car applying careful Band-Aids to my lovely new hole, and was in fact only twenty minutes late to work, a circumstance pointed out to me with exquisite scorn by the manager and as gratefully received by me. Let the day begin, I thought, and my hand throbbed in damp cool agreement.
No more video, I told her.
Imagine the scene. But I did it anyway, threatening her with a calm authority I definitely did not feel, inside I was shivering but I told her no, no, you want it, you take it somewhere else. “I don’t want what happened to happen again,” I said.
“It won’t.” Sullen soft-voiced rage, eyeing my wounded hand—the right one, of course; she had no eyes for the one she’d bitten, no, that was too normal for her—her own hands shaking so from temper that she could barely light her cigarette. “I’m not scared.”
“I am.”
More sullen still, “You know I don’t have a VCR.”
“That’s tough.”
At a loss as to how to adequately punish me, cigarette clenched between her teeth and hands tightening, untightening, far more angry at my calm than she would ever have been at my anger: “You’re absolutely spineless, you know that? Worthless spineless gutless”—extensive litany of my crop of failures, and as she tolled them all I thought of the deeper failures, things she did not and never could know, things she might—would—consider unworthy of memory, things that to me carried with them regrets with edges still so bitterly sharp that even the thought of them brought the same bright instant shame; watching-that mean little mouth moving, moving, cigarette burning unnoticed and silent splash of ash, knowing that oh, yes, I had done banal and infinite wrong, but this time, for once, I had not.
Finally, frustrated: “I’m taking this,” shaking the tape at me like a fist.
“Go ahead.”
And gone, ash fragments left behind, spoor that I swept into my palm and dusted out into the cold night air, imagined I saw it settle on the snow below to form patterns like the runes she always said she saw, insect wings, all the insects buried now in peace under this selfsame snow.
Nursing my hand, sitting at night—alone, did you have to ask?—and examining its growing soreness, the way the, what, infection seemed not to spread but to deepen, the gray edges of the wound now blackened. All my other, transitory souvenirs of that night had healed, even Nakota’s bite marks, all of me good as new or as good as I was going to hope for. But not my right hand.
It wasn’t getting better, either.
I kept it covered, no sense displaying the war wounds now is there, graduating from Band-Aids to gauze and tape for as it grew worse, it just plain grew: its circumference widening as gray went black, the skin there slick, now, as plastic, expensive plastic, nothing but the finest rot for me. Fluid still came from it; that was the part I hated most, goddamn fucking drippy stuff, mostly a dribble but at times such gush that it soaked the cuff of my shirt, and me sometimes at work and trying to make like I spilled my Coke or something, I mean how many Cokes can you spill? And it smelled, yeah, but not like you’d expect: a changeable odor, sometimes so garbage-rank it turned my stomach to change the bandage, sometimes so sweet it almost smelled—tasty. Even Nakota, on her cold infrequent visits—I caught her looking, nose wrinkled like a cat’s, but too proud, certainly, to ask.
Which was another, much larger problem, far more painful than my stupid artificial decay, far less curable. She had left me: for punishment, of course, over the video, which she was assiduously watching elsewhere, had to be since I hadn’t seen it, much less watched it, for over two weeks. (And where was she watching it? Had she actually gone out and bought a VCR? Not a chance. Then with whom? And how did she explain it, if she bothered at all? Swallow those questions, I thought, swallow till you choke but don’t ask.) God how I missed her, and not when you would think, no lonely nights spent snuffling into my bachelor pillow, yanking at my stiff bachelor dick. Instead it hurt most at the times she was there, wrapped in the ratty sport coat she now affected constantly, pipestem jeans and -too big Keds jammed with men’s ankle socks and always wet, her hands always cold looking, lips chapped past red to a nasty-looking ash color; occasionally they would split, I saw blood in the cracks. It made me want to cry, I realize that sounds ridiculous but that’s how I felt.
She would sit back on the couchbed, knees crossed, staring at me and my constant prattle and me staring inwardly, wondering too at my own transparent jabber, all of it saying so clearly Come back. Come back and don’t be mad anymore.
But still I couldn’t give in.
Even though I knew she had to be watching it elsewhere, knew I was saving her from nothing and in fact maybe making it worse for her without me to watch her, then what? I was a pretty shitty guard dog but I was something anyway, to stand between her and her, own recklessness, I had kept her from so much already. Maybe that was the problem, too, or the backbone of it, my veto of the video the last straw for her. God who knew. All I knew was that even if it kept her from me, I had to keep saying no because I could not stand, could not stand to have to watch her constantly, wondering if tonight would be the night she would sneak off and me have to chase her, maybe hurt her, to make her stop. Or worst of all she might get away from me entirely. Kill yourself, Nakota, if you have to; I love you but I never could stop you, really, only slow you down. But I reserve the right not to have to watch. Anyway—trying to comfort myself, wretched notion but—anyway, she seemed much less zombified now, as if the hours (I supposed) of unsupervised addictive repetition had cost the video some of its cold hypnotic charm, what were once vices etcetera. Stupid—I keep saying that, don’t I?—but a necessary fiction for me to keep going. If I failed her—again—if there was no way out of it, it was at least not as an accomplice.
This reasoning worked until she would stand, not smiling, and say, “Let’s go.” And she leading, me trailing, off to the Funhole.
She came, of course, not for me but for the Funhole, and this was maybe the most mystifying; I was sure there were many times, most times, she visited without me, her schedule could easily permit this, she could have rented a flat in the building for all I knew. For me the wonder was why she bothered taking me along at all. No questions from me, though. See her rarely, touch her never, but if that was all I could get, then I was going to take it and be, if not glad, then sorry, but in silence.
Down the hall. Staring into that dark mouth, closer now, both of us, she hands in pockets or on her knees (always, always a chill for me to see her do that, remembering) and me behind her, her knight in twisted armor, awkward picking at his bandaged hand as his lady fair beheld her grail.
In silence, always, and always parting at the stairwell, she hurrying off brisk and wordless, me to trudge upstairs to try to concoct a distraction, something, once I even pulled out my pathetic roll of poems. Beer, too, but you know? I didn’t want to drink it. Instead I would sit at the window, eyes closed, breathing cold air until I fell asleep. Waking with cramped shoulders, piss-full, my hand hurting, hurting.