“She was good enough for you once upon a time,” I said, but very mildly; I had no interest in defending Nakota’s honor, not that she had any.
He dismissed that, it was a long time ago. “Sit still,” he said. I did, still wondering why, was still sitting when Nakota came home, casual bang of the door, grinning at me.
“Tedious, isn’t he.” pouring a mineral water. “Malcolm, are you planning on moving in? Because if you are, I want your share of the rent up front.”
“I wouldn’t live here if you paid me,” he said, but it was abstract venom, he really was absorbed in what he was doing. Imagine. Nakota was more pissed that he wouldn’t fight than she would have been if he had—she was a person of simple wants—and in a sulk spoke to neither of us, punishing me, too, as a matter of course.
Which was all right with me, because I could still hear that music, and it was getting to be one hell-of a strain to try to listen over everything else. With their mouths shut it came clearer, it was almost pleasant to sit there in the cool silence, aching back and open mind, listening, listening—
To the quality of the silence as it changed and, irritated, reluctant to open my eyes, I did, and saw them both, she on the couchbed and he a few feet nearer, staring at the TV. Because the video was on. Of course.
She had done it to piss him off by distracting him, but then again it was her favorite show, too. They really did have a lot in common, much more so than she and I. Small mercies, right. I didn’t want to watch but oh yes, there was no avoiding, and so I did, seeing again the same figure, feeling again that overriding mutter of dry disquiet but growing, grown, into something more that I could not name.
I thought, I don’t need this. I don’t need any of this, I can have the real thing, and I stood up and walked out, no need for an exit line either since nobody noticed I was leaving.
In the storage room I sat on the blanket, my bear pad close by like a toy, breathing in and out the rich bubbling stink of the air, watching from the corner of my eye as Randy’s sculpture lifted one armlike stalk and began to move it back and forth, beckoning or warning but it was a little too late for both, wasn’t it, and either way I didn’t care. I lay with my cheek on the bear pad, staring sideways into the Funhole’s depths, thinking through the music of processes both irrevocable and remote; call it reverse entropy; call it the Little Bang.
I don’t know if they joined me, later, but when I woke up I was alone, so cold my skin hurt, the garbagey reek from the Funhole all over my hair and clothes, my blanket and pad. Olfactory spoor. A marked man. Upstairs Nakota’s sleeping face frowned in protest as I walked past the couchbed to the shower, the blue TV light made dimmer by encroaching dawn.
In the shower I let the water run hard, especially on my hand, pounding through the syrup to the lessening meat beneath; if I had cared I would have been plenty pissed at what was happening to my hand, the damned thing was almost all hole now, and what happens when there’s nothing left but bone, huh? Huh? I flexed it, forced myself to use it, to hold the soap, to wash. More syrup bubbled out, a twinkling gray like a bad special effect, refusing the water’s best efforts to wash it away. Last laugh. As usual. It’s hard being a conduit. No flowers, though, please.
Malcolm worked hard, I’ll give him that. Unfortunately he had seized upon the continuous play of the video as essential to his work, and when I complained told me I was chickenshit, I had to learn to let go of my petty fears. This was so funny I smiled beneath the tickling cheesecloth; step two already, we had gone beyond the preliminaries more quickly, he said, than usual, he was obviously inspired by the megaweirdness (his phrase).
“I got you,” indicating with nimble plastery fingers, “there.”
The sensation of plaster on the skin, even through cheesecloth, is like being buried alive in cheap cement, nose straws or no nose straws. Heightened of course by my petty paranoia, I did not like the video playing all the time, it was like leaving your front door open all night long and trusting to your own stupidity that nothing naughty would shamble in. All I could see was the inside of my eyelids, all I could hear was Malcolm’s voice, muttering to himself as he slopped plaster and stared at the TV. I didn’t like it, being there in such a stupidly helpless position while he worked on me, what if he decided the video was telling him to suffocate me? One nose straw was beginning to tickle with every breath. I tried breathing less often but that’s more difficult than it sounds and I had to stop. And still Malcolm’s atonal mumbles, and the faint sounds from the TV.
But it was definitely his medium, and never mind Nakota’s kneejerk spite: he wasn’t going to make anyone forget Rodin but he knew what he was doing, and in his sure and shaping hands the plaster became the vehicle for, if not the macabre transfiguration he seemed to hope for, then for me the seeds of simple change, if only by way, a subtle way, of observation: a new kind of seeing previously unconsidered and now in an instant become the norm. Or maybe all the, what, megaweirdness was inspiring him more than he knew, maybe the constant black mutter of the video was telling him more than his ears could hear, more than my own attenuated straining could decipher.
And when we, he, had finally done for the day, the night, as I washed my red and itching face, over and over, who should show up but the Malcolmettes. Three of them, anyway: Eenie, Meanie, and Shitty. Or something. I was never all that shit-hot with names anyway and these three were strictly interchangeable. The only way I could find to distinguish them was that one’s lab coat was a rusty-blood color and the other two were women. One of which, when she opened her mouth, revealed herself to be the one from the Incubus, the one who’d scoffed at my drunken promises of strange.
They didn’t bother sneering at my apartment, it was beneath them to even notice such boring squalor, but they couldn’t say enough about the death mask. Clustered close around it and nodding hack and forth: Technique, they said, it was pure technique, pronouncing it like it was the grail of words.
“This compares with a Caldwell,” red lab coat said, offensive thrust of nubby chin, please God, I thought, don’t let him stroke it knowingly. “Easily:’
“Or deVore,” said the other, non-Incubus woman, who stood so close to me I could smell the stain of her breath, without, of course, acknowledging me at all, though it was my plaster face she now examined so tenderly. The others nodded, Malcolm with a certain smug restraint, a Borscht Belt parody of Hamlet doing humble. “Midperiod deVore,” the woman added, hasty caret-dip of head.
“Who the hell,” I said, so pleasantly adrift, “is deVore?”
“You wouldn’t understand this,” she told me, simultaneously swiveling and stepping back so as not to accidentally touch me while she told me off, “but it’s an honor to become one of Malcolm’s masks.”
“That would be why he works in a clothes store,” I said, and just then saw Miss Incubus standing before the TV, head to one side like my dog used to do when she was hearing sounds no one else could. All I saw on the screen was static, but I shut it off anyway, brisk hard finger punch to OFF, too hard because I was scared. Of what she’d seen. Not for her, or not for her precisely, but wasn’t it bad enough that Malcolm had seen it? Did we need to get all the rest of his crew in on it too? What a sweet Pandora’s hell that would be.
And then of course, operating on the premise that anything, no matter how bad, can always get worse, here came Randy, and Vanese, who continued the evening’s merriment with a deadpan: “Oh my,” and Randy standing sidekick, hands on hips and mouth dour in a frown.
“Don’t tell me you let this cocksucker con you into something stupid,” no eyes for the other three, who returned the favor and, bored children, started playing with the stereo, trying to find something they liked, no doubt an impossibility.