So much of our time—not wasted, but spent, transformed, transfigured, what was her new word? Transcursion. Yes. A long transcursion, and maybe it was a waste, after all, but if it wasn’t for the Funhole, for all the grand compelling horror of its presence in our lives, would we have had any time together at all, would she have continued to bother with me, be my lover —however brief and ugly—again?
Let her in.
No. She’s mine.
“She-loves you,” the mask said, sweet duplici-tous reproach, but even I was too smart to fall for that bullshit. Love me, never, and we could never have been normal, greeting-card lovers, no walks in the park for us, she was definitely the midnight-shamble-through-the-graveyard type and very likely would not have permitted me to shamble with her unless it was at a decent two paces behind. I couldn’t mourn what would never in all the world have happened, but I felt the sadness, as if I could.
So much, missed, the time instead spent sitting in the dark and waiting for something to happen.
Something’s going to happen here.
Yelling outside and Nakota’s howl, nothing I wanted to hear so I put my hands, my slick and dripping hands against my ears, stuck them closed, stubborn and prim, gluey like blood and kept thinking, remembering, the times spent staring down into this blackness that had finally not only run my life but run it over, killed in effect not only the things that were my pleasures but the body that hosted those pleasures. And in return, gave me what? Fear.
The most potent of the gifts. And exhaustion, the grayest. “Nicholas,” her cold insinuating voice, but vibrating, prickling with a triumph that instead of frightening me confirmed in sorrow my blank new visions, my scary old thoughts, “Nicholas, I can read these runes. And I was right” Maybe she was.
Now there’s no one left, out there, to impede her with arguments or threats; now there’s only her tools and flunkies surrounding her. Irresistible force and immovable object, yes sir, that is my baby. In the end I never could, never had been able to stop her; I could barely slow her down. So why stick around for the main show? Why not just get it over with, once and for all and for good? love you better
Rising, my legs weak, all of me all a-twitter because I was (was I?) really going to do it this time, no more bullshit fuck-around, headfirst into the maelstrom. I couldn’t finally, stand— irony is everywhere—leg muscles in open rebellion, crawled instead past my old shiny pile of shit, crawling to the darkness, white as a maggot creeping onto the lip of a fabulous wound.
“Look out,” I said to no one.
Shaking, yeah, my arms unable to hold my weight, moving now on sheer willpower, humping boneless as a worm through the dust on the floor, the faint barefoot marks obliterated now by the labored smear of my passage. See, I can be determined too, I can work for what I want. Sweat on my nose, running slow and exquisite, cool and itchy and into my mouth and it didn’t taste salty, no, it didn’t taste like sweat at all.
Empty bottle of something rolling gently into my leg and my head so close, almost dangling over the open blackness, shivering, shivering, feeling a metallic cold against my skin and in my open mouth, impossible to breathe in that negative air.
But I don’t need to breathe, I thought, where I’m going.
And Nakota’s yell and her banshee laugh, too loud, much too loud and again that echo from the Funhole, twin to her voice, and I turned to see the door bowing inward, bending, like hot rubber and steam in my eyes, scrabbling to make the last few feet push that body, push that motherfucker to the limit, come on, and the mask crying out, “Come in! Come in!” and she there, coming at me, bending with a diver’s grace to insert herself, finally, into that big black hole, fuck it with her thin arrow of a body and her greedy smile and her dissatisfied grinning soul Prey and predator, all in one; eat, and be eaten.
“Look out,” she said, my last words but with an inflection I could never match, wide ferocious rapture and stepping onto me, it was deliberate, I know it was because it was her, all of her defined in that gesture and I grabbed her ankles right above her sneakers, sunk my hands, my strong new rotten hands into her flesh and squeezed, crying out as she did not, squeezing all the way to the bone. Feeling the pivot and gash of her tendons, the slippery juice of her blood, crippling her backward as the bones warped and splintered and, finally, her shriek, as wet a cry as I had ever feared hearing, and I saw the bright betrayal in her eyes, more monstrous even than the pain, the certain hatred that I was as she was and always had been, had been hiding my evil under the thinnest, strongest veiclass="underline" of weakness. Nicholas Wiener. Cutting her off, literally, at the ankles.
“You cocksucking son of a bitch,” in the cold dull voice of profound shock but there wasn’t room in her, now, for much more talk, sodden fall onto her back, whack like that night on the sidewalk and I lay panting and sluglike beside
her, I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry and I realized that whiny wrong-speed voice was me, I’m sorry about that too and “If you’re so sorry, “from her mouth but not her voice, oh no, not at all, “then why did you do it?”
“Why didn’t you just wait.” I whispered. My voice made tiny puffs of grayish pink in the air above the Funhole. “You wouldn’t have had to wait long.”
Which was true. Which was why there was no answer.
She was bleeding to death, I knew that, lying beside her in her blood and I tried to touch her, my red hands on her stumps, and with difficulty she opened her eyes, drunk voice (but her own), raised brows and all, “It said you were the key. It said you were what made it work.”
“I’m sorry.” I’m sorry, dear, that I cut your feet off, there really wasn’t a better way. “I never . ever wanted to hurt you.”
“Then you fucked up.”
Her feet were still there, strange in shoes on the lip of the Funhole and I saw something, dark, not so much arm or tendril as suggestion of both come slipping out, quick and steady
oh no you don’t oh no you don’t you greedy fuck, you don’t get any of her and I grabbed those feet, how fast I moved for someone recently paralyzed; you should have held on to me longer, asshole, it was you slowed me down to
give her time to get in, time to use the key you finally gave her. Some tricks can backfire can’t they, can’t they? “Can V they!” hugging the feet to me, cooling relics and she groaned, a sound almost theatrical in its volume, and I heard, from the hallway, the noise of someone throwing up, big irregular bursts of sloppy sound.
I put her feet down (a safe distance, I may add) and took her, held her, like a cold baby against my oozing chest, rocking her, back and forth and her eyes closing, go to sleep baby, go to sleep honey, her mouth opening, pulling down in a grotesque arc like a stroke victim’s, pulse wild and arrhythmic, eyes opening so so slowly and in a cracking voice she said, “You hurt me, Nicholas,” as if in the end she could believe every evil but that, and I cried onto her face and saw my tears, little and last brutality, become as they fell small Funholes, dark and tiny pits in the landscape of her skin.
Crying, and I kept rocking her, rocked her until I realized that she was dead. Her mouth stayed ugly, but when I closed her eyes, the lids obeyed, stayed shut. I kissed her face. It was so cold.