And there we were going the wrong way, going down the hall instead of down the stairs, and a very small part of me was banging its head in frustration and terror against the furry walls of my great and perfect drunkenness, and we were shushing each other like giggling idiots, which in fact we were and wasn’t it fine, though, wasn’t it fun} And my unsore hand, my good bad hand, on the doorknob, and inside the sweetest smell in the world, a siren smell like heaven and beer and open pussy and summer all the time and Randy beside me, did he smell it too, saying something and” I nodded at him, yes, yes, working at my bandages and I couldn’t quite get them off, the tape snarling on the gauze and it was pissing me off so I ripped and worried them with my teeth, spit them down and off, oh what a kind relief and I stuck my hand down the Funhole just as far as it could go, as deep as it could get, down that sweet-smelling friendly hole and did it feel good? Oh God you know it did. And I wiggled it around, yeah, and I didn’t really feel anything because it was feeling me and it was a wonderful thing, I couldn’t imagine why I’d been so scared before, it was just what was meant to happen, what wanted to be.
“—please—”
Not my voice, no. Was there someone here with me?
“—on, man, listen to me, you got—”
Oh my yes, Randy, my good friend Randy, and we’d come here for him, hadn’t we? Yes. Yes, don’t be selfish, at least listen to what the poor son of a bitch is saying and boy is he sweating, is it hot in here or something?
“—Dead End.” Yes indeed this boy was sweating. “Look at it, man!”
He sure likes to call me man, doesn’t he, and the idea made me smile, a lazy smile and I turned my head but it was sort of hard to see so instead I turned my body, slow one-eighty rotation and my arm was the axle, the dear hole the fixed point around which I spun, feet in the air and graceful as a swimmer and sure enough, Randy’s sculpture was doing something very strange. No wonder he looked so scared.
“Is it melting?” I asked.
“Don’t touch it anymore, okay, Nicholas?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and I was. “Did I break it or something?”
“No.” Everything about him was shaking. Even his voice. “But every time you touch it, part of it—melts, okay? So don’t touch it anymore.”
He was right, I saw that he was right: where my hand had presumably been, on the crooked metal rungs, were somehow indentations, melted to resemble the footsteps of something very strange indeed. And down its length, he must see it too, that greasy nacreous shine, that signature video light. What next, the figure itself? Climbing?
“Nicholas?”
“All right,” I said—I was nothing if not agreeable—but all at once I started to feel very weird and I realized it was the beer, it was being so drunk, I was going to throw up and for some reason this struck me as hilarious. Pukin’ down the Funhole. Even Nakota couldn’t match that. But if I did then I would have to throw up on my own arm and I didn’t really want to do that, so I reached out my free hand to Randy and asked in my agreeable voice, “Would you please pull me the fuck out of here? Because I think I’m gonna barf.”
I did, too. It was amazing.
Alone.
Cold.
On the bathroom floor, my head very near the toilet bolt, its rusty crusted sharpness pressing with a kiss’s delicacy against my left ear. All of me aching but in particular my right arm, my nose full of snot and all the light in the room wrong, somehow, too bright and too pale.
Why was I lying on the bathroom floor?
The memory did not come in pieces but all at once, and when it did I retched, sorry little sound, there was nothing left in me to void. More than anything I did not want to look at my hand, no, I don’t think I can do that. No.
“Nicholas.”
She scared me so much I whacked my head against the toilet, she was the last person I wanted to see, I was so glad she was there. She
squatted, tilting her head, and reached to gently turn my face toward her.
“Big night last night,” she said.
Tears. Isn’t that just what you would expect from a fucking self-destructive self-pitying derelict and she was getting them, I wept as I rose from floor to knees to standing slouch, she tried to lead me to the other room but I resisted. Hot water, rub the whole bar of soap on my face, hold it with your left hand if you please, please.
“Randy called me. He was here till about six, six-thirty, he would’ve stayed longer but he had to get to work. He said—”
Palm up, left palm: the universal gesture for “save it.” She left me there to wash, and I scrubbed at my face. God how I hated myself. Look in the mirror, you dumbshit.
I looked at my hand.
Half-dollar hole. At least.
There are no words to tell how I felt at that particular moment. I used up the rest of the gauze, quick and clumsy, found Nakota making instant coffee. She stopped to watch as I dressed, goose bumps and my cold legs stepping like a nervous dance, and then she was beside me, motioning my clothing away and down, unbuttoning with sure fingers her own baggy dress.
Warm skin beneath the comforter and the heating motions of her flesh, Hps against my throat, teeth tugging at the hair on my chest, nipping a line down my belly and then taking me, still half-soft, into her ovaled mouth. I rubbed with one tender fingertip the skin around her lips, my eyes closing in pleasure and dumb-animal relief, and held her head against me gently, gently till I came. In silence then I lay beside her as she used my left hand, my thumb, to come herself, then lay in that silence with me, her head almost on my shoulder.
Finally into my near-placid near sleep, her in-sectile voice: “Randy said you melted his sculpture.”
I didn’t answer.
“It’s steel, Nicholas. Do you know what the melting point of steel is?”
Wearily, I knew what was coming: “No, Mrs. Science, but I bet you do.”
“Three thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Give or take a degree.”
Well.
“He said you levitated again. With your arm in the Funhole.”
I didn’t speak. I had nothing to say. “Nicholas,” urgent, sitting up, and I saw the cold wash stippling down her skin, she didn’t notice, “there’s something so big happening to you, why do you have to get fucked up to let it happen? I wish it was me,” and that, of course, was the whole camp follower’s crux. Which made everything she said suspect, not that it wasn’t suspect enough, but then again at least she wasn’t running screaming away from the freak I was becoming, at least she could still blow me for old time’s sake or why ever the hell she did it. Not love. Probably wanted to suck off the hole in my hand but was too shy to ask.
“I’d know what to do with it.”
Ah, God. And I had almost gone in headfirst to save her. I put my right hand deliberately on her face, squeezed with my painful fingertips her bony cat’s chin.
“I.don’t want any of this to be happening,” I said.
“It’s a little late for that.”
“I want it,” as deliberately, “to go away.”
“The Funhole’s not going anywhere,” and the way she said it, the calm gloat of her gaze, gave me an intense urge to smash her face straight through to the back of her skull and horrified, I almost jumped out of bed, somehow feeling the way her skin would split, her caving nose and lips blown back by the force of my fist, my right fist. “Leave it alone,” I said. My voice was shaking.