She told me this the afternoon after Nakota’s video-slinging event, while the flat was pleasantly empty but for us, me with a plastic sandwich bag full of ice cubes pressed, at her insistence, to the swollen cut above my twitchy eye.
“That girl is some kind of hard-nosed bitch,” Vanese said, without admiration. “What she needs is somebody to take her down a peg or two. Or twenty-two.”
“Sorry, wrong number.”
“What’re you going to do, Nicholas?”
“About what?”
She sighed, a sad little sound that made more melancholy the backdrop of the sullen afternoon, dusty shadows lying in flat oblong planes, making of the whole room a complicated rebus of exhaustion and want. It even depressed me, and I was used to it. “Oh, Nicholas,” that older-sister face again. “You’re supposed to be in charge.”
That surprised a laugh from me; I shook my head. “No way. No way. If anyone’s in charge around here it’s the Funhole.”
“That’s just what I mean. The Funhole, shit, that’s no person, that’s not even hardly a thing.” Strong stirring motions in the sluggish goo of her convenience-store coffee. “Somebody has to be in charge, and it picked you, didn’t it?”
Again, “No way,” uneasy with the very idea, more uneasy still as she nodded to my newly rebandaged hand, courtesy herself, saying with that nod, Well isn’t that the proof? Isn’t it? “No,” I said. “I’m just the first asshole to stick his hand down there, that’s all.”
“You really think so?” A pause, what was she thinking that needed careful phrasing to speak aloud? “Shrike, Nakota, she says you’re the one who makes things happen. You think she could’ve melted that camera? Think any one of us could have—”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said, reaching balanceless from where I sat for the refrigerator door, hobbling in my seat, and I almost fell; could any clown such as me be in any kind of charge, strange groundskeeper for the gateways and the paths as Nakota kept insisting on calling her revelations, in charge of things I could barely comprehend, let alone understand? The sun slipped another notch, the shadows uglier in their depthless length. Bleakly, “There’s no more beer.”
“That’s all you need—put that ice back on your head.”
“Be my mother, Vanese?”
She smiled, a little. “You just better be a little careful, you hear me, Nicholas? Especially now, with your three new friends. I keep telling Randy, and I tell you, they’re the shape of things to come.”
“Then the shape must be a question mark.”
I wanted to make her laugh, wanted to hear it, but her smile was too small; pouring out the sludgy coffee, picking up her key chain: heavy fake-gold heart shape chunky with keys, beside it some kind of tiny dangling locket, Randy’s picture probably inside. “Is Randy coming tonight?” but she shook her head, he was tired, he had been snappish lately, neglecting his own work to come dally at this darker shrine.
“He needs some time off,” over her shoulder as I followed her down the hall. “You ask me, you could stand some, too. Little rest makes a lot of difference.”
“I bet it does.”
Pausing there a moment, long intake of breath to ask a careful question: “Do you know—what does ‘transcursion’ mean?”
I shrugged. “Never heard of it.”
“Me neither,” gentle unconscious gnaw of lip, “but they were talking about it, before. I heard Shrike, Nakota say it once or twice. I just wondered if you knew.”
“Never heard of it.”
Famous last words.
Still Malcolm’s tools lay unused, still he kept minimal contact with me; hadn’t even been oyer to watch the video—actually a moot occupation, I hadn’t seen it myself in weeks and in fact it wasn’t even there to be seen: Nakota presumably carrying it around with her, sleeping with it at night (but not with me); while still nominally in residence she too was unusually scarce, though she always managed to be around on the occasions when I found myself beside the Funhole, greedy for the revelations she was sure she could interpret, hungry to walk at least mentally the paths she kept insisting lay spread before us, before her, like some dark garden. Garden of evil. She read a lot of Ben Hecht. Malcolm did too, or said he did, privately I thought he never got further than the tabletalk equivalent of Cliffs notes but what did I know, maybe he was a closet scholar. Yeah, like Nakota was a closet nun.
Maybe they watched the video together; they’d done that before, hadn’t they. Maybe the video was, now, a tool for them, and more, perhaps the third component in a manage & trois, she and Malcolm twisting, sweaty and boneless, in the leering glow of its looped images. Of course that would bother me, but not for the usual reasons, Nakota’s idea of faithfulness was remembering my telephone number and anyway there was nothing, from her point of view, to be faithful to: I was the one who loved, not she. Worth worry, though, was the wonder of what she was really up to; there was no sense asking her, nor Malcolm, neither were likely to tell me if the flat was on fire.
Working on the theory that even a broken clock is right twice a day, I asked Doris et al if they knew what Malcolm was doing, if they thought he was coming back to finish the mask or at least get his crummy tools.
“Is he working on something new?” I asked, sitting before them, hands loose in my lap, faint sounds from the flat above us, somebody fighting, slow and dreary repetition of shopworn curses and sighs. “Some new project or something?”
Shrugs, blank looks, their natural habitat. Ashlee picked a hangnail with a surgeon’s precision. “I don’t know,” Dave said. “Last I heard, he was still working on the mask of your face.”
“We don’t see that much of Malcolm anymore,” said Doris.
“Why not?”
No one answered me. I asked again, more crossly, for God’s sake even they must have reasons for their actions: “Why not?”
Back and forth, a look passed like a dead fish, you tell him. No, you tell him. Finally Doris said, “We don’t share theories with him anymore.” -
Share theories. I’d’ve had more luck asking the Funhole. I opened my mouth to say I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, but Ashlee spoke up, a subdued tone, frown line between her eyebrows: “It’s those people, you know? Nakota’s friends. I don’t like them.”
Nakota’s friends. Is there a word for the feeling that trickled down my spine? “What friends?”
“You know,” reprovingly, but with a hint of unease, perhaps I did not know, perhaps she would have to actually tell me. Looking for help to Doris and Dave and my voice rising, I couldn’t help it, “What friends, for fuck’s sake? What’re you talking about?”