It was barely three hours when I heard her, cautious down the hall. Whom were you expecting, dear, Jekyll or Hyde but the joke’s on you this time. The joke’s on you because it’s neither, it’s someone different, it’s someone you don’t even know. I opened the door as Nora had, before she even knocked.
“Nicholas.” All in baggy black, extreme thrift-shop raggishness even for her. Wearing her windbreaker in this intense cold. She smiled, it was a real smile. Naturally. I had gone off with the keys to the toy box, and now I was back.
“I have to do something,” I said. “I need you to help me.”
“What kind of help?” Eagerly. Eagerly, picture that. Was I angry at her? No. Yes. You want me to be a fool, the Funhole’s conduit, clown prince? I can’t be anything, now, other than this one thing, and if you’ll hold on just a minute, I’ll show you what it is,
“I want you to move in here,” I said. She opened her mouth to speak but I cut her off. “I don’t care where you sleep,” which right now was true, maybe I never would care, I didn’t know; all I knew was now. “I don’t care about anything except having this flat paid for, which I can’t do because I lost my job.”
“You—”
“I want you to move in as soon as you can. If you can’t afford it, get Randy in here too.”
“He lives with Vanese.”
Vanese. Oh yeah, the girlfriend. “Fine. Get her too. Cheaper by the dozen.”
“Nicholas, are you sick or something? Did—•”
“Be in here by the end of the week at the latest. What is it, Tuesday? That gives you three days. You don’t have much stuff, you can do it.”
“Nicholas.” Insistent tone, her hand on my arm more tentative. “Is something wrong?”
“I tried to kill myself,” I said, and flicked off her touch; still, a tremor. “It worked.”
The Funhole. Roiling, and in the swallowed glimpse behind my eyes, a foreign smile in my personal darkness, a figure. Welcome home.
It took her less than two days to get her stuff in, and I was right, there wasn’t much. Cartons of books mostly, some crummy clothes, a plastic sack of toiletries. A twin bed with a mattress so fragmenting and decayed I took one look and refused to let her bring it in.
“What am I supposed to sleep on, then?”
“The springs. The floor. Out in the hall if you want.” I stood arms crossed, looking at her as she stared warily back at me. She was not the type to blossom under hard treatment, under any other circumstances she would have told me without preamble to go fuck myself, but there was something manifestly afoot and she definitely wanted all the way in. I knew she thought that my stark change in behavior meant I had finally gone straight over the edge; whether she believed me about the suicide attempt I didn’t know. I knew what I knew and I was done puzzling, I was done with a lot of things now.
An immobile day, that long cold Friday. No food, I didn’t feel like eating, as if my sense of purpose could only be nurtured and sustained by physical emptiness. I sat in my chair by the window, left hand cradling right, watching what went on down below, people driving and walking in the worsening weather, the spattering of snow now the first breath of a real storm, it was going to be bad, they kept talking about it on the radio. Six to eight inches, they said. Maybe more.
Nakota kept the radio on, kept prowling the flat, waiting for what? Directions? A sermon? A quickie fuck? I hadn’t touched her since I’d been back, hadn’t felt like it, though there was a part of me that would have been extremely pleased just to hold that skinny body, hummingbird heartbeat against my chest, faint whiff of cigarette breath in the air before my face. But I made no move toward her. Another appetite blunted. I didn’t talk much either. Every once in a while I’d look up and catch her looking at me, head faintly tilted, understanding nothing. There was no way she could know what I was thinking.
“Don’t look at me,” I said once.
She ignored me, but there was something, then, in her glance that I didn’t like. If she was going to start respecting me, she had picked one hell of a time. The idea was almost funny but I wasn’t in a real laughing mood.
About six-thirty, the flat dark, only the green radio light: “Is Randy coming?” I asked her. Outside white sky, a downpour of snow. When she answered, her voice startled me; she was much closer to me than I’d imagined, sitting close enough to touch.
“Him and Vanese,” she said.
“The more the merrier.” I had a weird urge to smoke. “You got a cigarette?” and she lit one for me, passed it to me, her fingers careful not to touch mine. I hadn’t smoked in so long I hit the cigarette like a joint: horrible sensation, that hot dry feeling in my chest. The nicotine made me dizzy. I blew smoke in the air and couldn’t see it because of the dark, tried to feel it with my fingers. I blew smoke on the hole in my hand and felt nothing.
“Nicholas?”
“What?”
“What’s going to happen? I mean, what’re you going to do?”
’Throw you headfirst down the fucking Funhole.. Shut up, Nakota.”
Although I didn’t feel particularly angry when I said it.
It was nearly seven-thirty when they knocked: I heard Randy’s voice, a lighter voice murmuring behind. Nakota leaped up as if the room was on fire. She’d been waiting, patience steadily withering, for them to come—she never could stand waiting for anything—convinced their arrival heralded the Main Event. Which was quite correct. She literally banged the door open.
“Took your sweet time about it, asshole,” she said, very bitchily, she’d been saving it up for days. Had to unload it on somebody since I was temporarily off limits.
“Hey, it’s a fucking blizzard out there, okay?” Randy in the doorway, tentative: “Can you put a light on or something, man? It’s darker than shit in here.” And behind him, the source of that lighter voice, standing silent; and her silhouette as thin and insubstantial as paper, a cutout doll.
“Do what you want,” I said.
They came in, hooded eyes blinking in the changing light, Nakota refusing to move for the woman, they pushed shoulders, the kind of juvenile territory shit I thought only men fell for. Apparently not.
“You the guru?” the woman said to me, Vanese, coming closer, wary highstep, the moves of a person who can cut out in a hurry. Hands in cheap leather slash pockets. Big carved cheekbones, big red plastic earrings. Biggest of all were her eyes, deeper brown than her skin, that same wariness clear in their darkness. “If this’s as weird as Randy says, I don’t know.”
“It is,” I said. “And I don’t know either. You staying?”
“Yeah,” from Randy. Her shrug. “I guess.”
“I got your note,” Randy said. “Shrike said something, you quit your job?”
“Yeah.” I looked at him, at Vanese, fingers moving in her pockets, picking at something, a cuticle, a sore. Longest at Nakota, scarecrow, my heart’s desire still; Leeched by the force of the days past and to come, pilloried, walled up but stilclass="underline" desire. Who can fathom that, deeper than change, deeper than the Funhole maybe. “Come on,” I said, looking only at her. “You wanna see something, you’re gonna see it.”
Down the hall, our little band of pilgrims, refugees before the fact. Vanese tried to ask me something but Nakota shushed her so violently that she subsided, though not without a glare. I could feel something, not pain, in my hand, a sensation like pins and needles but less distinct, a buzzing in the flesh. It was that hand I put to the door, and when my careful palm touched the knob I felt not a jolt, as I’d somehow halfass expected—too many horror movies. But the buzzing—now a flicker, like fire in my skin, as if you could feel a burn without the pain, as if your flesh could melt on the bones. Like wax. Like steel.