“Well,” Doris, nervous in a new way, swift looks between the three of them but never at me, “it’s some of the people who hang out at the Incubus. They’re not interested in Art, you know,” including without conscious thought that obligatory capital A, as I sat kneading my bad hand against my good one, a warm foreboding, Ashlee picking her hangnail a mile a minute. “They just want to, to—”
“They want to be on the fringe,” Dave said, from his useless stance at the refrigerator, searching for wine that wasn’t there. “They want stuff that’s, you know. That’s out there.”
“And Nakota told them about the Funhole?” Any other time I might have laughed at the squeak of my voice, a cartoon character confronting the inevitable mortality of the brick wall, the canyon floor, the OFF switch on the TV. “She told them?”
“I think,” Ashlee, very slowly, looking all around her for support, “she showed them the video.”
“It makes a very powerful statement,” said Doris, with a solemnity that roused in me the immediate urge to strangle, her, Nakota, myself. Everyone. A greasy tingling in the hole of my hand, crushing it hard against the sloped bone of my kneecap, over and over and thinking, thinking, staring at nothing until in sudden pause I looked up to see the three of them, staring at me with such childish woebegone anxiety that I felt a mingled rage and tired—what? Pity? Sympathy? They were just dingbats, after all, the minor-league version of what they decried, looking for the small thrill, the neatly boxed excitement. The Funhole Gift Set, prewrapped.
“Go home,” I said, “go away for a while. All right? I just want to be by myself for a little bit. All right?”
And their nods, more eager to be gone than they wanted me to see, jackets and smiles and they would call, yes, maybe they could come back later? Maybe we could all talk? Yes, yes, nodding at them, don’t let the door hit you in the back. Nearly sprinting for the phone.
Randy wasn’t home, but Vanese was, and in her silence, created by my anxious questions, I knew she knew what Doris and the others were talking about; I leaned my forehead against the wall, I closed my eyes to await the answer.
“Bunch of assholes from the gallery,” she said, “they’re always up for some weirdness, the bigger the better. They’d just eat that video up.” Stringent disgust, I could picture the look on her face and felt no reassurance, it was as bad as I feared. The floor, falling beneath me. Things are never so bad they can’t get worse. Especially when Nakota is around, especially when she’s mad.
“That fucking bitch,” she said. “Just doesn’t care, does she?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think she does.”
After I hung up, I stayed standing, trying harder and harder to think but finding a mournful fatalism every way I turned, there was no way out. I knew what she was doing, now, and no doubt Malcolm was in on it, both of them pissed at my groupies, as they called them, at the fact of my groupies, at anyone—what had Doris said, yeah, sharing theories with me. Treating me as more than a barely necessary appliance, the crank that makes the magic box run. No camcorder, I had ruined that for her, no new video for you, Nakota. No copying the old one either, she maybe blamed that on me, too. And Malcolm beside her, to nurture her spite with the spurts and gushings of his own, withholding his mask from me, from his traitorous disciples, why hadn’t I seen any of this coming? Was I always doomed to be the fucking dupe, the one who never knew what was going on? Stumbling around, waiting for the anvil to fall on my head. No wonder I had a hole in my hand.
The fight above my head was still going on, the kind of circular bitching that reaches a certain level and then goes nowhere in particular but round and round. I turned on no lights, got a beer in the dark and crept to bed, lay like a troubled fetus in the soiled swirl of blanket and sheet. No Funhole for me tonight, my hand at this decision racked with a sudden petulant throb, my own petulance rising with a brief but telling urge to cut the motherfucker off, how’s that for downing a lifeline, cutting off communication one might say. Call me Lefty. Maybe I could just—
Talking. Not above me. In the hall.
A questioning tone, some guy, something, and then Nakota unmistakable: “He’s not here.” Someone else, and her scornful answer: “Because it doesn’t work without him, dipshit.” More talk. As slowly as my breath was fast I set the beer down, careful, careful, pulled the covers up so there was only a dark half circle, breathing space, tried to look like a messy bed. They were still talking but I couldn’t hear, pulling up the covers had made it worse. What to do. Maybe I could play turtle, put my head out enough to hear and then if the door—
Which it did, and the light too at once and my clumsiness betrayed me, Nakota in instant triumph seeing the whorl of blanket for what it was and saying, “There he is,” and me raising my head, reluctant and half-blind, blinking at her groupies.
Whom I saw at once were more trouble than I felt up to handling: six or seven of them, hunching shoulders, big jackets, hands impatient in pockets and eyes like tracer gazes going all around the room, all of them stupider, meaner, wilder, more prone to that special brand of idiocy which most often turns into wreckage, spillage; blood. They smelled blood, all right, or maybe worse that more esoteric fluid that dribbled from me now, in a brightly vindictive stream that soaked the pillowcase and turned the sheet to clotted silver, a party color is it, well let’s start the party now. When in doubt, attack, right? And I was nothing if not always in doubt. About something.
But not Nakota, who, I saw and plainly, relished this role as field marshal, why not, it was the kind of situation she was born to not only milk but throttle till it was as juiceless as a skull in the desert. Head back and hips like rim shots as she walked over to the bed, sat chummily beside me and said, brisk elbow and dry grin, “So. What happened to your little friends?”
“They got a life,” I said, as shittily as I could muster, which Wasn’t much but it might fake out her buddies who now stood like half-domesticated slaves in the center of the room, waiting for her to say something, to tell them what to do. “What’s all this?” gesturing openly with my leaky hand. “Malcolm’s friends?”
It didn’t piss her off, as I had lamely hoped, or fool her for a minute. We both knew who they belonged to, and never mind that Malcolm’s charisma quotient had always been at least a quart low, that he couldn’t assemble an army at gunpoint. But let’s just remember, shall we, let’s make sure we don’t forget that he’ll be more than happy to hoard what Nakota collected, her cadre of dissatisfied jerks masquerading as the cheapest kind of mystics, fun junkies out gunning for the biggest fun of all; he’ll be more than ready to use whatever weapon, however blunt, they constitute, to serve whatever banal and horrible concept he—and worse, she—thought “best.” And of course we also know who it’s best for.
“We’re going to watch the video now,” Nakota said. “Join us.”
“I was sleeping,” I said, and she shook her head. “No you weren’t, you fucking liar. If you don’t want to watch with us, then get the hell out.”
You wish, I thought, that sudden concealed sparkle a clue as subtle as an ax. I know what you want me to do, I told her with my eyes. And I won’t. No, I won’t.
And I didn’t. Instead I lay tense, faking nonchalance as I observed Nakota’s sorry fucks sprawled slack-jawed before the TV, watching the video, the video, the video until I wanted to jump up and run out of the room, which was probably part of the point. Maybe all of it, though I wasn’t vain enough to think so, and anyway Nakota was famous for her crisscross motives, occasionally reaching heights so dizzy-ingly Byzantine that even she couldn’t say with certainty what the real reason was.