“A portent,” again, and portentously, just to make sure I got it. “You’re fading, Nick, no pun intended.”
“I really don’t want to talk about this, Malcolm,” I said, in my new, polite way, distractedly eyeing the monochromatic fireworks going off in my left knee as the mask sneered down at me like a mocking mirror. “I really don’t have anything to say.”
“I wish you would both shut the fuck up,” said Nakota, not even brusque, “especially you, Malcolm. Nicholas, I’m only going to say this once.” Silence from the gathering of idiots, ringing her like scum. “We all know it’s me who should be in there. You even say it yourself, in the video. I’m a perfect candidate for a change. A becoming.”
“This,” I said, suddenly aware of my own anger, not hot but warm and chafing, an itch in my mind, “is like every stupid philosophy book I ever read in college, only worse. Next you’ll be saying it’s a big existential garbage can,” and I turned my back on the door, on the mask. “Why don’t you people go home?” I said. “And speaking of home, Nakota, when’s the last time you paid the fucking rent?”
“The rent?” Honestly perplexed. “Who cares about the rent?”
“I do.”
“If you care so much, why don’t you come out of there and do something about it?”
Not by the hair on my chinny-chin-chin, and you’re not as smart as you think you are, either. “You can sleep in the streets if you want, but won’t that impede your access, a little? Cramp your style?”
She ignored that, ignored me, began to talk again, rapid-fire histrionics and an offhand direction to somebody else, not Malcolm, do this or get this, just another in her unlimited supply of demands and I just stopped listening, I turned my face away and shut her off in my head. I’d rather remember you the way you were, Nakota, back when I could still stand you.
Leaning back, my changing body so much weaker now, bumping gently into an empty Ritz cracker box, the filmy plastic skin of a package of cheese, had I eaten those things? When? Was I still eating? Maybe the Funhole was feeding me, like a raven in the desert, maybe I was eating myself. Consuming myself, to feed the change? That would make sense, wouldn’t it.
So much sense, in fact, that the whole idea made me feel like puking, I didn’t want to think about it anymore. Lying flatter, in the dirt and sticky dust, my ear nudged by something pointy and soft and I saw the bear pad, and I smiled.
Empty pages. Better that way. I had had some ideas, hadn’t I, of writing more poems, sharp and deliberate prod to the reanimate corpse of my zombie talent, had I imagined a topical application of the bizarre might succeed where sheer bent-browed struggle had failed, who was I kidding? Not even me. So why deface the simplicity of a little bear pad with my bargain-basement angst, why try to describe the indescribable when I had completely failed to explicate even the known? Known, shit, even the boring.
I reached for the cover, to close it decently and for good, but my right hand stuck to the page, tugging at it and “Shit,” and instead of ripping it came away whole, and wet, big juicy Rorschach of red and on an impulse (oh really?) I pushed the torn page underneath the door.
“Here,” I said. “Make a speech about this.”
The quality of the silence that followed told me that this was an extremely bad move. Nakota’s “Hey,” and gleeful? Oh yeah. You bet it was a bad idea, you asshole, why do you persist in giving her ammunition when she can already blow your ass to hell with the stuff she’s got?
“Hey,” again, to them, “look at this,” and their delight in hers, probably none of them had brains enough to understand whatever it was she thought she saw there, the only symbolism they recognized was the meaning of the golden arches. But they chattered back and forth, one to the other and all to Nakota, who seemed to be ignoring everyone or at least spoke to no one,
not even Malcolm, whom 1 heard struggling for airspace: “But I think what it means—wait a minute, you guys, listen to me—I think—listen—”
And Nakota, feverish, implacable, all of her one tense tremble that I could feel, earthquake weather, in the surface of my skin, in the violin quiver of my loosening bones: “It’s the insects. Nicholas! It’s the insects, the same stuff that was on their wings. Runes, remember?”
Runes my ass, that’s what I’d said, and now when I did believe I had even less inclination to believe, more reason to, but in the end it was—it was—just more shit I didn’t want to know about, because why shouldn’t it be true? Exact minute replication, transmitted from my rotting hand, of the phantom scribbles on the backs of ruined bugs’ wings, surely that was a tiny piece of strangeness in this huge sprawl, I can do the White Queen one better, I can believe ten impossible things before breakfast and nine before my hand falls off completely. Trump that, Queenie.
“And Nicholas—” her fist on the door, here’s another queen. “I know how. “Queen of heat and brutal desire, of everything crooked and twisted and wrong, something very wrong about her voice, now, something ominous and ominously exultant. “It’s like a key,” as intimate as if she spoke into my heart, and I thought, She’s been right ail along. She’s the one who should be in here.
Then why not let her in?
Oh no, maybe I said it out loud, “Oh no,” laughing the way you do when you refuse completely. I moved, slow because it was difficult, as far away from the door as my exhausted muscles would take me—was it harder to move today than it had been yesterday, was that some kind of portent or just faulty memory and when was yesterday, anyway?
Back against the door, looking up once to see the nothing face above looking down at me, and I closed my eyes and started walking, not backward, but through my memory as if it were a house with many rooms, some small, some locked, some doorless, some with tenants so aggressive and powerful I crept past them in silence and hoped for their clemency. So many rooms, and Nakota in most of them, or all the ones that mattered, anyway.
Especially, of course, the rooms in the Funhole wing. Watch your step, please.
Her passion had always exceeded mine, her impatience; all the ideas hers, really, all the way back to the bugs in the pickle jar, through the video, and Randy, even Malcolm (though in the final analysis he was my mistake), all the plans and notions hers and me the straight man, stumbling after, and how not to fathom her ridden, enraged, by her own jealous want and that want turned foul as an old infection, as crusty as a sour boil as she watched me, always ahead of her, the chosen one who kept saying, “Who, me?” Me, the empty vessel; not you, dear, cold caldron of desire. Was that why it was me, after all? The perfect stooge and puppet, incapable at last not only of guiding but even holding the reins that had inexplicably been placed in my hand—but when had any of this shit been explicable? The real question wasn’t who but why me? But how do you get an answer from a process? And how delude yourself to trust it, if you got one?
I remembered her refrain, not plaintive but as wistful as she ever got, “What would it be like to go down there?” What would it look like? Alice’s rabbithole, we had called it in the very beginning, before we knew better, before she started to hate me. Still with all her poisonous excess, I could never have had a better, a more suitable companion, never someone else.
Another memory, did this really happen or did I only want it to: fucking her against the walls of the Funhole, telling the beads of her sweat like some strange rosary, her head hunched down and eyes closed like fists, her hips hard against me like a beating heart. Hair flying in my face, I always loved her hair, I always loved her. I always will. I always will.