Nothing got better.
The doctor’s office, faint bleachy smell, nervous on the red plastic sofa and reading a Redbook: “Is Your Mate A Workaholic?” No, but my lover—ex-lover has an annoying habit of trying to stick her head where it doesn’t belong. Or is that more of a Cosmo article? Ho, ho, ho.
“Mr. Reid? Nicholas?”
Follow the nurse, his ass round and womanly, his uniform baggy and blue and clean. Blood pressure, pulse, temp. “I understand you’re having a problem with infection? A hand wound?”
“Yeah.”
Reaching for my clumsy cover-up job, bandage palimpsests and I shook my head, pulled my hand away, hiding it like a little kid behind my back: “I’d rather, you know, if the doctor just see it. I mean,” lame little smile, “it kind of hurts, to touch it.”
“Fine.” It wasn’t but I got my way, which is what counts. If I had to put on a one-man freak show it was going to be by invitation only, thank you very much.
The doctor, skinny hands the color of weak coffee, grizzly gray hair. Bluff and bored, let’s get this over with. Cheer up, doctor, I thought, peeling at my bandages, this ought to make your day. A medical marvel.
He didn’t say a lot, at first, asked questions a little then a little more, touching my hand with those bony fingers, pressing my knuckles, the meat below the thumb.
“Hurt here?”
“No.”
Press, press. “Hurt here?”
“No.”
“How about here?”
“No.” I felt I was disappointing him. On the wall behind him was a calendar, peaceful winter scene brought to you by Searle: Please Buy Our Dope.
“How—”
The pain was so unexpectedly blunt that I jerked my hand away, tears in my eyes; some of the wound’s fluid splashed him, honey-colored drops on his fresh white coat. Cradling my hand against me, unconscious soothe of outraged flesh, and he asked me again, “How did you say this happened?” Not, note, how did it, but how did I say it did. A distinction, but I pretended not to make it and patiently told my lie again: a puncture wound from a very dirty metal rake handle. Why I said rake, living in a flat, I don’t know, but it was my bullshit and I stuck with it.
“Uh-huh.” He wasn’t buying it but wasn’t going to call me on it either. “Well. This is a very unusual infection, Nicholas. It has to be kept very clean. I’ll have the nurse give you some instructions for care,” as if my wound was a temperamental tropical pet whose very rarity demanded my attendance. He gave me a prescription for something, cephlasporin, sent me on my way. I paid cash, which made me further suspect, wandered off like a criminal with my spandy new bandage and my guilty pain.
It snowed all the way home, dull relentless flakes, more and more against my windshield and my wipers not up to the job, driving through a landscape smeared and troubled and my sore hand aching, aching against the wheel. Back home I tore off the new bandage, let my hand sit palm-up on the open windowsill to touch without catching the steady reach of snow. I slept there, and when I woke, in the early dark, my hand instead of being cold stiff as the rest of me was a lustrous pink, the flesh pliant and warm and I touched it, wonderingiy, and as I did a spurt of fluid as thick as jelly burbled out on the iced inner sill and in its yellow clot I thought I saw swimming a bright and winking eye.
Listless afternoon checkout at Video Hut, bandaged hand clumsy and cold, somehow, at the fingertips, was my circulation going or what. Learning to use the laser pen with my left hand. Learning to drink coffee with my left hand. Learning—it cost me some pinpricks—how to pin my badge on. My fellow grunts past asking now “what happened,” ignoring me and my wound with equal nonchalance. Just the way I like it.
No snow today but cold, oh yeah, I could feel it coming off the big front windows, feel its demand every time the door opened. Beside me, new grunt in short brown braid and badge askew, asking under his breath, “What kind of dumbshits come out on a day like this to get Booby Prizes?”
“Or Mommy’s Little Massacre.” Ignore the faint ooze beneath my bandage. Open door and “Look at this one,” I said, clandestine nod at a definite damage case, big guy in cracked brown leather, pale all over, pale like a corpse. “Bet he’s not here for the H&R Block tape.”
“Scary looking,” and just as he said it the guy turned, he couldn’t have heard but he turned, came walking straight toward the register, closed stride, and my new buddy melted backward, me left alone with my laser pen and my fucked-up hand, saying, “Can I help you?” in a less than forceful tone.
“Are you Nicholas?”
Flat, flat voice, not especially deep, and when he leaned hands on the counter I saw the pitted skin, hilly nails with years of black grease beneath. Up so close he was paler still, so white I thought Albino, though his eyes were a watery gray. Weird long lashes. He blinked a lot.
“Yeah, I’m Nicholas,” I said. “What can I help you with?”
Closer still, dull gas-station stink off the leather as he leaned down to me to say, “The Funhole.”
I stared. I think my mouth was open, requisite dummy stance but I couldn’t help it, I kept staring and he said, more flat and quiet still, “’S okay. Shrike told me all about it.”
“Who’s Shrike?”
Faint impatience now, which I suppose I can understand, here he was with his great mystic password and I was reacting as if he’d just stolen my brain. “You know, Shrike. You don’t have to be nervous, man. She showed me the video.”
Well. It wasn’t a bad name for her, Shrike. And she’d showed him the video, had she. So: this must be my replacement. Talk about eclectic. Looking more closely, “Randy” stitched in that lumpy universal red on the shirt beneath the leather, a tiny bisected skull, gold-toned and grimy, hanging from one grimier ear. White-blond hair, very clean, the cleanest thing on him.
“So,” I said. “What’d you think of it?”
“Oh man,” leaning even closer, and now that flat voice had passion, “what a fuckin’ trip, I couldn’t believe it. We must of watched it twenty times. Shrike says the more you watch it, the deeper it goes, goes in you, you know?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I watch it and I think, Now this is God, you know?”
“God. Yeah.” Lord of the fried. I smiled, involuntary sour twitch and—man of many moods— Randy laughed. “I knew it,” he said. “I knew I’d like you, man.”
What an accolade. Shut up, I advised myself, he can break you in half. We stood there smiling at each other for a few more seconds, me wondering what the hell to add to this surreal bonhomie, but Randy had no worries, he knew exactly what he was about. Leaning even closer, one more inch and he’d be right in my face, con-spiratory murmur: “So when can I see it?”
“See what? The Funhole? Haven’t, hasn’t Na— Shrike taken you there?”
“Oh yeah, we saw the room.”
What the hell? “But you didn’t go in?”
“Yeah, we went in, but you know what happens.”
When absolutely cornered, I reach, always, for the truth. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, I really don’t. You went in the room, that storage room, but you didn’t see it?”
Slightly affronted, leaning back and his gaze suspicious, was I fucking with him or what? “It’s like Shrike says, you have to be there.”
We stared at each other, this was making no sense at all to me when suddenly my mind translated his words into something even more senseless: not “you have to be there” but “you have to be there,” meaning me, which meant nothing. What did I have to do with seeing the Funhole, and why would Nakota say I did? She was a liar, sure, a twister, but what could she possibly get out of such a silly story, and what exactly had she said to convince Randy that what he saw would somehow improve with my presence?