Vanese went still, all over, and then, “You are crazy, “pulling back, away from me, “you are all Crazy,” and suddenly she ran, almost stumbling down the stairs, she had no coat, she was out the door. I felt the new cold of the night rising around me, on my bare skin, and then we were at the flat, the trio simultaneously opening the door and obscuring our entrance, Malcolm helping me into a chair as Randy lay Nakota on the couch-bed.
“What happened?” he said. “What the fuck happened in there?”
Nakota again, nothing short of death could shut her mouth: “Nicholas… lost it.”
With admiration.
They left us, finally, Malcolm flanked by the stunned Malcolmettes—seeing was, apparently, believing—and Randy carrying Vanese’s coat. “You gonna be all right, man?” looking at us both, stupid survivors, tired maybe of patching us up, or watching us patch each other. Maybe just tired.
“We’re fine,” Nakota said authoritatively. “We’ll be fine.” Then, “Randy—did you see it?”
I thought she meant the spectacle, wondered how in hell even she could be so brutal, then saw his slow nod.
“It’s slag,” he said. “Fuckin’ slag.” And was gone.
Feral-bright eyes, poking me in the ribs. “We melted steel,” she said. “Both of us. We melted steel.”
I had never seen anyone look so smug. Torn lips—which accounted, thank God, for most of the blood, though her mouth was going to look pretty weird from now on—and loose teeth, raccoon bruises around both eyes, glittering eyes because she was one happy girl, our Nakota, our crazy Shrike, maybe Shrike was a better name for her after all.
“I think we should always have sex there,” she said.
“I think you’re a goddamned lunatic.” I rubbed my eyes, sore left-hand fingers, I hadn’t looked at my right hand—wrapped now in the last clean towel in the house—and I wasn’t about to. “Nakota, I hurt you. I could’ve hurt you more, maybe, God. I don’t even want to think about it, okay? I don’t even want to go—”
Instantly angry, “Don’t be such an asshole. This is what’s supposed to happen, don’t you know that? Don’t you understand anything,?”
“No,” I said, in simple truth. “No I don’t.”
“Then shut up.”
She fell asleep. I hurt too much in too many places, most internal, to join her, but could not make myself do more than lie there in the dark. Around me pure silence, no video, no voices, just the pale sporadic clatter of late traffic, Nakota’s snore-breathing, soft rattling whistle from her injured mouth. Enough light to my eyes to see her, she looked like someone had worked on her with a pipe, and I began to cry, for her, because she was hurt, because I had hurt her. Because to her it didn’t matter. Because it almost surely would happen again.
“Oh, God,” in my throat, almost unheard but she heard it, half opened her eyes, and on that ledge of sleep I saw a gravity, the faintest breath of a genuine sweetness in the slow tired blink of her eyes, of the sore smile she gave me.
“Shut up,” she said, and touched my elbow, meaning it for a squeeze. “Go to sleep.”
And I cried harder, so hard and long that, childlike, I cried myself to sleep. And dreamed for.once of a paradise that even I could reach, past darkness, a place where there was nothing left for my heart to carry. And I lay at rest there in paradise, and, looking up, saw distant and far above me a circle edged in black, and beyond that circle, like a living cloud, the quiet darkness of the empty storage room.
7
Well, Imagine for yourself the excitement, the speculation, the breathless phone calls that smelled strangely of a bent respect and constantly threaten to become drop-in marathons, even quiz festivals—they were such a curious bunch, the trio that Nakota, bright eyes and sagging lip, had maliciously christened the Three Dingbats. The only way I could keep them away from me was to threatened to bar them forever from Funhole proximity, taking shameless advantage of rights I did not have. But they didn’t know that, which was good enough for me, though I also knew it wouldn’t work for long.
Malcolm was a more difficult matter. I had promised to do the mask, and now was certainly the time to continue since I had rarely looked more like death. And I got him to stop playing the video, though only just. But. what was almost worse, he insisted on going over and over the scene in the storage room, blood and sex and revelation, a puddle positive of melted steel; cold fingers patting my aching face through the chalky slap of plaster, he was doing the mask over, he had had new insights, he would share them all with me whether I liked it or not. Nakota could at least find periodic escape in the musty comatose serenity of Club 22, but for me it was nothing but Malcolm, and his theories, and the nervous blurt of the ringing phone bringing questions and questions, the endless loop of speculation that if not meant so seriously would have been hilarious. In a pitiful way.
“They’re your friends,” I said to Malcolm. “You talk to them.”
He shrugged. “They want to talk to you, Nick.” Offhand smile of petty malice, scraping tool tapping lightly against the table’s crooked lip, crooked as his own, as warped as his enjoyment of the whole scenario: his pet puppies surrounding someone who doesn’t like dogs.
Exhausted by their idiocy, their stupid unending phone calls, by the specter of our little merry band grown insidiously larger, the exponential creep of a process whose end I not only could not predict but did not want to understand, I took the predictable way out. I told them they could visit but that was all, if they took even one step toward the storage room that was it, they were gone. They agreed with a haste that was suspicious even to me, and I fool easy.
Throughout the day’s work I speculated on that call.
“What the fuck,” I said to Malcolm.
“Don’t move your lips! For God’s sake, how many times do I have to tell you not to move while the plaster’s drying,” fussing like a nurse in the violent ward, so obsessively close in his inspection that if I looked, and I could hardly help it, I could see the miniature veins in his eyes, red as a dingbat’s lab coat. When I was again successfully immobilized, he slouched back across the room, to sit smoking a succession of his horrible cigarettes while I sat straight-backed as a mummy, the usual unbearable itch begun in the small of my back, waiting for the plaster to dry.
“The whole thing blew them away,” he said.
Too bad not for real, huh? Although this was not true, or not entirely; I had nothing personal against the Dingbats, I just wanted them to go away. Taking Malcolm with them. Neither of which was even remotely probable anymore.
“I mean it really blew them away.” Long expansive puff; how, I thought, can he smoke those things without puking? Even Nakota couldn’t take the smell, which lay all over the flat now like a base coat of cancer. “They can’t stop talking about it.”
Yes, I noticed, but to say it wasn’t worth his inevitable squawk about the plaster, so I didn’t. Now my hand was throbbing, too, in a more-than-usual way, and I rubbed it, slow, against my thigh in an empty search for comfort, wishing it wasn’t so cold in the flat, wishing Nakota was there, wishing I was alone. By the time he freed me from the plaster I was so jittery with irritation the very swish of his hair was enough to make me want to stuff him headfirst down the Funhole without so much as a cheery farewell, and of course it was just then that the door opened to reveal the grinning triumvirate of Dingbats, all of them, God help us, wearing sunglasses. In the snow.
First of all they wanted to watch the video, and when, yelling from the bathroom where I sloppily scrubbed my face (the only pleasure I was likely to have all day), I told them no, they said they wanted to “interview” me about my “feelings.”