2
Gone as usual in the morning, and me left behind and naked, inner thighs lightly scaled with the dried spoor of our lovemaking: she liked to stay on top afterward and let the juice run down, and I liked whatever she liked. Imagining in the shower that I could smell her still, the angular scent of those secret bones, had she always smelled so fierce and so good? Recalling those gone times, old memories lit by the fire of the new, I did not this time wonder how long it would last; I was too smart for that now. Take what you get, and don’t think. Of course it could never be that easy, but there were moments, like now, that I could successfully pretend that it was, and I had no inclination to try to peer past those moments. I’m not one who wants to know the future: at the best it spoils the present, with longing or dismay, and at the worst, well. Who really wants to find out how tight the sling is, for your own very personal ass, who wants to know how deep the shit will really be? Not you. Not me either. Because it’s rarely bliss saved up, is it, when you finally get there. I’ll take my now, waking with a lover’s scent still on me, around me, take my hopes before they’re maybe tragedy; a good morning is still a good morning, even if it leads to apocalypse at night.
For once up early enough to have breakfast, so I did, an oily tuna sandwich wrapped in half a paper towel arid eaten in the solitude of the morning hall, second-floor hall but you probably knew that. Looking at the door. Thinking of the Funhole inside.
Other devotees it surely had, in its inexplicable history as weird-ass god-thing, and what sacrifices? No one had Nakota’s brute gift for imagination, but no doubt the process that was the Funhole would accept lesser treats; odd that we had never found evidence. I couldn’t believe that no one else in the building had stumbled over this particular piece of real estate. It would be— not “nice”, but good, in some fathomless way, to talk with someone else about this, particularly if they were even slightly more normal than Nakota. Or me.
Read your own poems, I told myself, and smiled, a thin scoff. I still wrote them, or rather found them written; I rarely remembered the act of writing since I was usually shitfaced when I did it. I couldn’t bear to try reading them, and was too ashamed to let anyone else see; my mus-cleless talents as a poet had peaked in my moody English Department years, declined still less poignantly as I pushed with the grim fatalism of the true asshole to make a living from my “work.” Nakota was right: I had no business mocking her weird sculptor friends.
Footsteps, aiming down the stairs, and I pushed off hurriedly from the wall, stuffed the last of my sandwich into my mouth, nonchalantly swinging around the chewed-looking newel post as the walker passed me by, a skinny black-haired white man just this side of boy, head down as if in communion with a daily tragedy too dense to share even by acknowledgment. Which was okay by me: I’ve never resented being ignored. I watched, waited for him to push his way out the big downstairs door, then hustled myself back up to get my name badge and my coat. Be on time today, I thought. Or even early.
Still I found myself dreamy, imagining the drivers beside me on the road as fellow participants in an odyssey the nature of which we were never meant to guess, tasting here and there of the surreal to a greater or lesser degree, depending on nature or circumstance or both. My, aren’t we the mystic this morning, but I did not exactly laugh as I normally would have, and at red lights I studied them, those drivers, with a compassion I never felt, looking past their morning stares or blunt car-phone smiles, past all I saw on the surface, the divination of an eye accustomed to much stranger sights. Nakota would have dismissed them with less than a sneer; I wondered what would happen if they came to the Funhole, unsuspected font of the bizarre. Would the pressure of its strangeness weigh them, as we two were weighed, would they run from it, pray to it, doom it in their minds to nonexistence by virtue of its relentless incredibility?
The mood stayed with me all day: things at work acquired a significance: a customer’s choice of video, sure, you could read runes in that any day of any week, but I saw, in this new state, deeper, encountered signs I had never before known: the slick sound of a Visa sliding across the counter, the feel of the counter itself, the way the endlessly playing monitors flickered in and out of blackness in the existential spaces between Streetgirls II and Dead Giveaway and Dog Gone Wild, the scent, even, of the money paid or the customer’s fingers or the very air in the heat beneath the fake marquee lights, all of it told me things, showed me things, and gifted somehow by the Funhole—was that the source?
—I saw, if not the meaning of patterns then patterns of meaning, and for me that was enough.
The mood holding, I drove not home but to Club 22, sat drinking a Pabst until scowling Nakota’s shift began. Her frown did not lessen for me but she came to me, not at once but that too had portent: she knew, didn’t she, that I was there for the duration, that I could wait.
Thin in dusty black, the leather of her work shoes cracking along the stress line where sole met upper, hair scooped into a deeply unflattering topknot: my love. Did I say that? Again?
“Hey,” I said.
“What’re you drinking that shit for?” knocking at my bottle with one sharp knuckle, tiddlywink-ing it so it rocked in place. “At least drink something human.”
“Are you coming over tonight?”
Interest in those opaque eyes, I had known her so long and in the end so poorly. “Why? You got an idea?”
I shook my head, mood pointing lower, picking at the dull gold foil, Miller High Life, right. I got some high life for you. “I just, I thought you might like to come over for a while.”
“I don’t think so. I have to check some things out,” and she turned, sloppy tray, heading for three solitary drunks lined at the bar like listing gravestones. Old-fashioned Christmas lights behind her as she served them, blinking on and off in a causeless rhythm more reminiscent of power spurts than festive design. I drank my beer and went home.
Pausing on the second-floor landing, listening to the woozy shrieks of what, anger or pleasure, it was just sound to me, somebody doing something in one of the flats. Close by the Funhole, would living next door to it cause an issuance, a distortion, in your daily rhythms, would you brush your teeth with mare’s milk, would you crawl around and dart your tongue like a rattler? Would you bite?
I wanted very much to go stand by the Funhole door, put my ear to it, listen with all my might, bring paper and pencil, yeah, write what you know. Instead I went up to my flat to eat stale shitlike peanut-butter-and-pita-bread sandwiches and contemplate, with my new and moody gaze, the warped fluttering Bosch triptych hung sorry in an unworthy light: The Garden of Earthly Delights with its incipient birds and copulations, none more beguiling than the standard of strange that was my daily life. Still I found I appreciated them, all of them, more fully than I ever had, demons and rabbits, butterflies and spikes, loved them more and felt bad that my copies weren’t even proper prints, just magazine pages, symbolic somehow I knew but not why.
I fell asleep with a headache beginning to eat away at my seamless wonderings, woke up to a ghost of the same headache and a couple pages of writing that began with the phrase, “The giant said you gotta give to get.” Truer words, etcetera, and with a cooler heart and growing headache I rolled them in a graceful ball and threw them out the open window.
Nakota’s day off, so to speak, had borne new fruit: she was over ten minutes after I got home from work, glittering with her news, not bothering-to sit, this was apparently too important. “Listen: I got a new idea.”