Vanese in the hall, the door safely slammed and it bit my nipple, punishing petulance, before pushing free of my weight, then rolled in sullen circles a moment or two, growing revolutions till it reached the darker corners of the room, I couldn’t see it but I knew it was there.
“Nicholas?” Breathless, as if she had just run a mile instead of a few yards. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said slowly, rubbing my chest. “Vanese,” more slowly still, “don’t come here anymore. I know I asked you to, but don’t. Even if someone tells you I asked you to again. Because I won’t. Okay?”
Silence.
“Okay?”
“Yeah. Okay.”
“Things are just going to get worse.”
“Yeah.” Sure, and sad in the certainty. “Will you just promise one thing?”
“I’ll try.”
“If it gets too bad, will you get out?”
Quiet metallic rattle in the darkness behind me, a sound like knives in a drawer. “No,” I said. “You know I can’t.”
“Can’t what?” Cruelly abrupt, Nakota’s voice, and then Vanese in a tone I had never heard: “Can’t not save your worthless ass,” and a whack, something hit hard against the door and Nakota’s snarl, Vanese’s high-pitched curses and a sound at my feet, looking down in anxious impatience, now what, to see the skull spinning in happy little circles. A brief impotent kick, of course I missed in the echo of Nakota’s damaged howl, and Randy’s voice saying, “What the hell is going on here?” and then a bunch of voices, and I sat down and shut my eyes.
When I opened them the skull was lying placidly close, staring up at me with its stupid sockets, one of which closed in an impossible wink and without thinking a second I reached blind behind me, came up with a glass bottle of something and, right-handed, smashed it down with all my painful weakness, all my tired rage, and incredibly the skull splintered, chunks of steel and splits of glass, orange juice in my face and I cried out, pawing and blinking, and when I looked again the pieces of the skull were scuttling to the darkness, joining as they went.
I sat in the darkness and thought about Vanese, arms held to embrace the sorry mess of me, the look in her eyes as open wide. I never saw her again.
10
Later, through the murmur of her goons clustered around the door like cancerous cells: “Not funny, Nicholas.”
“Shut up, Nakota. Okay? Just shut up.” Sometimes, I thought, it would be worth it to die, just to stop hearing that voice. Like an ache in the ear, like a bad tooth audibly rotting. Like a cancer that talks. My one and only.
Malcolm, a cheap indignance that somehow sat well on him: “That bitch could’ve broken her jaw.”
The mask spoke before I could: “You shut up too. I wouldn’t mind killing you.”
Nakota’s sudden cackle, it was her kind of joke, mostly because it wasn’t. Then, but seriously folks, her eternal one-note tune, “Nicholas, you have got to realize we’re going to get in. At least one of us,” crude transparent threat, I covered my closed eyes with my fingertips, gently patted the tiny cuts left there by the skull-splitting glass. The mask kept talking, its comments directed to none of us, the principals, ha-ha, instead to the widening circle of usual geeks; it used my voice but I couldn’t understand the words. Big deal. Bad enough I could still understand Nakota. “It would be so much easier if you—”
“You never used to be boring,” I said.
“We’re taking the door off,” Malcolm said. “Today.”
“I don’t give a shit what you do.” So tired, inside, that it was almost true. “I don’t care what happens, I don’t care if you chew your way in, if you use yourself as a battering ram, whatever. Do what you want. But I’m not helping.” They kept talking, arguing with me (when had it ever mattered if I was listening or not?) and each other, and the muttering others who milled close and far, the tempo of their voices drifting like scum on an incoming tide.
I did my best to ignore them all, sat finishing my meaclass="underline" a warm ginger ale, chewy antique sal-tines, and raisins, a little red box of raisins and my eyes filled with quick and stupid tears: I remembered eating them in my lunch at school, saving the box to prop on my desk and pretend the Sun Maid was winking at me. As I thought this the little face on the box came alive, melted like living wax to become Nakota’s, complete with her customary impatient sneer, the basket she held filled not with grapes but tiny skulls. Sickened by this cheap cruel grotesquerie—was it really necessary to fuck with everything, did it all have to twist into the same gleefully ugly shape?—I flung the box away, heard the minute dusty sound of its landing, the immediate and larger sound of its retrieval, fetched back to me with the box turned so I could see the face again, the Sun Maid again, her little eyes rolled backward. in terror as the crooked teeth of the skull bisected her.
“Oh you motherfucker,” I said, and a calm, the stilling sensation of absolute rage descended on me like the slowly settling mantle of a saint and I grabbed the skull, ignoring its snapping mouth, moved not toward the Funhole—my first impulse, but none of that Brer Rabbit shit today, nice try but I’m not buying—but toward the door to open it, who gives a shit, who really cares anymore because I am TIRED, I am TIRED to DEATH and I yelled something, yelled as I pushed the skull at the door
and my hands went right through it, skull and all.
Malcolm shrieked. I heard the skull hit the floor of the hallway, felt something, Nakota’s slippery clutch most likely, as I pulled my own hands back through the seamless door. To stare at them, rocked back on heels and haunches, gaping like a monkey with a nuclear device. To stare particularly at the hole of my right hand and note, with a kind of dreamy detached nausea, the living leakage crawling up my fingers, painlessly chewing the flesh as it went.
Eating me alive.
And the more I watched, the less I feared. Because it really couldn’t get any weirder, now could it? Weirder or any worse, no. Just more of the same, world without end, Funhole forever.
Skin and bone, dissolving. Matter over mind.
Nakota pounding on the door, Malcolm yelling something about the skull. Other voices. I hoped Randy was there, it might make him happy to see his skull-thing capering around, baby’s first step and in front of company, too. I heard my own voice once removed, the mask issuing some kind of proclamation, hear ye hear ye, that guy in there just lost it for good.
Which was for once the truth.
Close by the Funhole, back curled C-shape and aching, red eyes so sleepless they rubbed against my lids like dry rubber, I sat watching the relentless creep of the fluid on my body, as if given free run it was going for broke: up, now, past the mountains of my knuckles, leaving a transparent reddish coating that was somehow not strictly devouring but dissolving the flesh beneath to form something—new.