“Accident,” I said, letting my gaze move sadly away from hers, which wasn’t hard; she took it the way I’d wanted her to, wrong, and said no more about it. I have always depended upon the tact of others, uh-huh.
Turned out she would be leaving in the morning, early, to do some skiing with friends. I imagined her friends: blond, bluff looking, jeans and down vests in sensible colors, yelling to each other over swipes and passes of clean snow. It was like a cockroach dreaming of the smell of disinfectant. She kept talking but all at once I found I was waking from a doze, she was taking the coffee cup from my hand.
“Nicholas, hey, you fell asleep.” Before I could say anything, “Don’t worry about it, long day, long drive. My fault for keeping you up talking. I’m sorry I don’t have a bed for you, but the couchbed isn’t too bad. Probably,” pulling down the blanket, bilious print and warm looking, “you won’t be up when I leave, so help yourself to whatever you want, food, whatever; there’s some stuff in the freezer too. There’s a spare back-door key hanging right by the door, so you can get in and out.” There may have been more but I heard none of it, slept instead in a circle of dreams, none of it restful, none of them kind.
The quiet of the morning woke me; at home there was always some kind of traffic, day and night background. No snow falling, but a kind of overcast that might linger all day, same dour gray into the night. Into the kitchen, the warmest room in the house. It must cost a shitload to heat a house this big, no wonder she kept it cold. My hand throbbed as I made coffee, pouring water and my motions slow, sliced an orange. The acid of the juice found a sore on my tongue.
As I ate, slowly, like a convalescent, like one of Nora’s patients at Sunny Days, I thought of all the things I had avoided during my poet days at school and beyond, days of waking late and drinking early, wandering through life with my one constant a constant shrug: regular jobs and regular people and regular hours, all the commonplace pains and terrors that, by fleeing, I had somehow replaced with these others, this whole grotesquerie that was—yeah, c’mon, say it out loud, there’s no one here to hear you—driving me out of my mind. Driving me crazy. Because I had no way to cope with it, no way to understand why what had begun as ignorant dabbling had evolved into all this.
What had I done wrong?
What had I wanted that made this happen?
Nakota’s taunts and Randy’s silent doggish respect, the bugs in the jar with runic wings, the video and its glimpsed emissary figure, the hole in my hand, the void in my head that led me into this, now there was a real Funhole, where the darkness came in. Was the darkness always there? Was all it needed to infiltrate a lack of determination to keep it out? and had I really done all this to myself, by myself, by being the little I was?
I was. so tired of hating myself. But I was so good at it, it was such a comfortable way to be, goddamn fucking flotsam on the high seas, the low tide, a little wad of nothing shrugging and saying Hey, sorry, I didn’t mean it, I didn’t know it was loaded, I didn’t think things would turn out this way. It’s so easy to be nothing. It requires very little thought or afterthought, you can always find people to drink with you, hang out with you, everybody needs a little nothing in their life, right? Call the specialist when you do. You don’t even have to call, chances are I’ll already be there, you’ve just overlooked me because I’m in a corner, crouched like a dustball, a cobweb, my busy little spaced-out grin and oops it seems I’ve stumbled on some sort of exalted hellhole, Funhole, do excuse me while I let it out, while I let it into my body, while I let it run my life because somebody has to, right? somebody has to take the goddamned brunt even if it’s a void.
Even if it’s chosen me.
Because how bad can it be, right, if it wants me, how dangerous? If it will settle for a tool this poor HOW BAD CAN IT BE.
“God,” thick mucus voice and tears running out of my eyes, “oh God,” and I wept into a paper towel, crying hard in the kitchen’s warmth, my body half-folded against the table, retching sobs like vomit. I cried a long time, past pain until I felt so empty nothing hurt, nothing anywhere, if I had died I could not have felt more husked. A walking depletion. “Aren’t you the poet,” I said out loud, my voice a hush in the larger silence, and I wiped at my eyes, then almost smiled, weary, when it hurt: orange juice in my eyes, burning like gasoline. You dickhead.
After eating I went slowly back to the couchbed, more comfortable than mine at home and larger, the blankets certainly cleaner. Nesting there with my right hand on my chest, its returning pain a pulse so metronomic that for whole moments I did not even feel it, instead only the sensation of great emptiness, as pleasant in its way as the bare cessation of pain after 5 protracted illness. Asleep again, till the place where I lay woke me with its warmth, the strong slant of the afternoon sun pointing straight at me, on me. I lay there, completely empty, in the sunlight. When the sun went down I got up to piss, drink water, back to the nest. I felt I could spend my life there, or die there, it made no difference really. Typical, I thought to myself, of myself, but even the hatred was gone, washed out maybe by the force of its own corrosion, replaced by the great nothing, a void far deeper than any Funhole could ever be.
I lay there for three days.
I got up once in a while to piss, the intervals lengthening as the hours passed, dark or light in the hallway and me trudging back to my nest, my chrysalis, that sense of emptiness filling, little by little, with a certainty, a necessary idea of what fulfillment, for me, might be. What to do. What do you need. I asked myself, and the answer came, filtering through my weakness, perhaps even enhanced by it. What do you want?
Dreams. Out of focus, surreal in their ferocity, blunt contrast to my daytimes of staring up at the ceiling, at my leaky hand, at the pale water stains and minute drifts of dust in the corners of the room. One dream in particular, its edges blurry-bright, one long stretched face like a frame around my terror, a frame from the video as if I lay behind its very eyes, the eyes of that animate nothingness, woke me weeping, left me so wet with sweat I thought for one half-conscious moment that I had either pissed the bed or died bleeding; night sweats, that was called.
Evidence of extreme weakness. As if I needed any.
The next morning I woke to see my right hand twitching slowly and violently, like a large and dying insect, floundering hard against the flat pillow without producing any sort of feeling in my flesh. It was like watching yourself in someone else’s dream, so incredibly bizarre that it was almost entertaining; I was very much past giving any kind of a shit so I watched it, wondering if some weird necrosis was taking place, my hand cut off, so to speak, from its fathering Funhole and dying as a result. “My hand and my dead hand,” I said out loud, and while it flopped and twisted I sat watching, smile turned to grin, found I even had a hard-on and grinned at that too.
My hand stopped, and I laughed, a little dying cough, the way you finish laughing, in stages, at one hell of a joke. I used that hand to dial the phone, ignoring the immediate and surprising pain this caused, forcing my finger into the retro rotary dial to call work and tell them I wouldn’t be coming in anymore. This was no secret; in fact they wanted very much to tell me first. My last check was in the mail, the manager said, sounding pleased.
“And you won’t come in my mouth, right?”
She didn’t get it. I hung up and went into the kitchen, sat in my underwear eating Cheerios out of the box; they were very stale, almost like Styrofoam or rice cakes, apparently Nora didn’t like Cheerios very much. Still in my underwear, my mouth full of half-chewed Cheerios, I began to search the house for the .22 I knew Nora had, she used it for target shooting, well I had a target in mind.