The room was cold. Why not: everything else was, the hall was ridiculous, but it was still somehow a surprise, I hadn’t been in there since that night with Randy. Days. Randy’s sculpture, to which he scurried as soon as I got out of his way, was unchanged, or at least I saw no difference. Vanese took a place by the door; still careful, but her gaze went back and forth, the Funhole and me and Randy and Nakota and back to the Funhole again. Nakota ignored everything, knelt beside me where I stood, at the lip of the void. Her hands lay palms-up on her thighs. Maybe she wanted a hole, too, just like mine.
I felt so good.
It was not a sensation I associated with the spot where I stood. Empty, all of me, even of breath for I let it dribble out as I got to my knees beside Nakota, worshipful posture but I didn’t feel worshipful, no, that wasn’t the point at all. Never had been. Emptiness. Yes. Because that’s what the Funhole was, wasn’t it, that was the key and clue: a negativity, an absence, a lack. A depression, that’s what a hole was, no matter how dark and lively, no matter how ultimately full. Even an empty road leads somewhere, right?
But this time, feel it.
“Watch me,” I said, aloud but only, really, to Nakota, and in a motion that had, to me, that same kind of half-speed car-wreck intensity, I thrust my arm in full length.
Feel it.
I did.
Not what you would think, no, not suction or even a true sensation, but if you could touch an insubstantiality, a fever dream, rub hallucinations on your skin, if you could cradle your own mind when you dream, trace the hills and gutters of the brain’s landscape—there really is no explaining it, I’m sorry but it’s so. Even they, who were there, even Nakota who was in all senses closest to me, well. They didn’t really get it either. / didn’t get it all, but what I got, going into it* with empty eyes open and empty hands at the ready, was horrifyingly intense, not so much empowering but the sensation of such, I heard my own voice howling as if I was in pain but I wasn’t, you see, I really didn’t feel anything bad at all even when I looked down between my open orbiting knees and saw the steel of Randy’s sculpture running over the skin of my knuckles, dripping down to fall not into the Funhole as one would think (and one would think) but flying off in a strange arc as if repelled, dropping somewhere to the right but my vision didn’t go, didn’t really go that far. Nakota was trying to touch me, I could see that much, but she wasn’t making contact or if she was I wasn’t feeling it. I had my other hand, my right hand, out of the hole now, some other part of me was inside, or maybe not because I was falling, losing altitude we call that, God damn sometimes this was funny. Sometimes / was funny. But apparently not now because I heard voices, they sounded scared or screaming or something and I was trying to stick my right hand, my palm, my hole into my mouth, trying to suck the blackness there, it had a greasy bad smell like the Funhole itself but would it taste sweet, so sweet, would it lie on my tongue like honey, drip from my lips like blood?
“I wish you would all be quiet,” I said. No one heard me. Maybe I didn’t really say it at all.
I was on my back on the floor. I could taste the iron of blood, I was having a great deal of trouble seeing. “Uh-oh,” I said. “Randy, did you beat me up?”
To my great surprise I found they could hear me, and I saw Randy’s face, astonishingly red for that white skin, I didn’t know albinos could get that red. “I’m sorry,” he said, “Nicholas, man, I’m sorry but—”
“He thought you were going down,” Nakota said, not looking at Randy; without another word I saw, I knew she thought it perhaps the premier idea of all time, certainly my greatest hit, and was inevitably angry beyond telling that Randy had arrested my descent and yet maybe a little glad too. Why dear, I didn’t know you cared. Although of course she didn’t; all she cared about was being the first one down.
“Was I?” My mouth felt very loose, a bad feeling. I tried to spit and gagged on blood. “Let me up,” I said. The back of my head hurt, too.
“Nicholas, I—”
“Shut up,” Nakota said, with such viciousness that startled even me, but she made no motion to help as Randy and Vanese lifted me to my feet, walked me down the hail and up the stairs to the flat. Randy began a halting monologue that lasted until I was sitting on the couchbed, a wet dirty washcloth pressed like a membrane against my mouth, which refused to stop bleeding, saying essentially the same thing: that he had not meant to hurt me, that things got so weird so fast, that trying to eat my own hand was one thing but when it looked like I was going headfirst into the Funhole, well.
“I’m sorry, man.” He looked sorry too.
“Don’t,” shaking my head, wanting him simply to stop saying it. He was a good one for repeating himself, Randy. I leaned back on the couchbed, closing my eyes for a moment as Vanese, nail clippers in hand, worked to cut the tape for my ragged new bandage; I was all out of surgical tape and had to settle for electrical tape, which was so very old, I told her, that all the glue was probably dried and therefore worthless. I definitely did not want to have to look at my hand. The idea—not the memory, for at that moment I couldn’t accurately remember anything—that I had tried to suck on my wound was making me so retroactively sick that I felt I might have to vomit if I thought about it too hard.
“Why’d you do that for?” Vanese asked me, in the unconscious scolding tone of an older sister, rip rip rip at the tape. “No telling what’s down there.”
Nakota, arms tightly crossed as if that was the only way to keep from slapping the shit out of someone: “That’s pretty much the point, isn’t it?”
Rip rip. “I don’t see you volunteering to go down there.”
“I tried.”
“Uh-huh.”
“She did,” I said. I felt consummately shitty. I felt like 1 might cry. I wished I could get better very fast so I could run downstairs and do it again. There is no rational way to explain that, because it was no rational wish, but it was intense as a bodily need, demanding as hunger or desire. “A hard-on of the soul,” I mumbled, and laughed into my washcloth, sticky and damp with blood.
Randy was miserable, there in his neutral corner; he probably felt worse than I did, which would have taken some doing, but his was a malady of action, mine obviously a cruder sort of melancholy, the weltschmerz of a man who has just had his clock cleaned. “Hey Randy,” I said, through my baggy lips. “Get us some beer.”
For no reason, or rather, her reason, Nakota laughed. And it wasn’t for me asking for beer, either.
Randy found four beers in the refrigerator, opened them all. Nakota looked at hers as if he had just offered her bottled spit. Warm spit. “No thanks,” she said.-Vanese took hers with an absent nod. She must have been an older sister, or a mother or nurse, her whole attention was so absorbed by the task at hand. So to speak. Either that or she was just very conscientious. Or anal-retentive.
“Does that hurt?” she asked me.
“Very much,” I told her, although it was by no means the most painful part of me. She shook her head, to herself, set down the nail clippers and picked up her beer. A long swallow. She had a pretty throat, Vanese.
It hurt to drink, but the beer tasted good. I wiped my mouth and face one last time and put aside the washcloth. “Still snowing?” I asked Randy.
He looked out the window. “Yeah, pretty bad. Blowing around some.” Vanese joined him at the window, said something, quietly, to which he shrugged*