Kathe Koja - The Cipher

Inside I cranked shut the windows I’d opened for her cigarette stink, leaving the one by the couchbed open; I’d always liked night air, especially when I was a kid and was told it was bad for me. Shut that window! You’ll get pneumonia! Very cool outside tonight, maybe even kissing forty; stupid Nakota, no jacket. You’ll get pneumonia.

Hunger headache, in the mirror my sallow face pale. Okay, what’s to eat. I hated to shop, it all turned into shit eventually anyway, so as a result there was usually very little to eat and none of it very good. Or fresh, but I was inured to mold, I could eat anything and keep it down. Beer kills the germs, I told people. Tonight it was cracker-and-peanut-butter sandwiches, the peanut butter cheap and thick, the consistency, I told myself as the crackers broke and crumbled, of actual shit. Though of course I had never eaten any, not that I remembered, and that’s the sort of thing you would remember, isn’t it? What would happen if you stuck food down the Funhole?

“God, stop it,” mumbling aloud around a mouthful of sludge like some derelict in the park, shut up, shut up, drink some beer, read the paper. Ann Landers, my boyfriend wants to secrete stuff in my root cellar, I’m only eleven so what the hell? city funds new sewage plant. Imagine that. Two new movies opening, one about sex and one not. Won’t see either, I get enough movies at work. Video Hut, Assistant Manager speaking, may I help you? The screens going every open hour of the day, pushing this movie, that movie, trailer after trailer until we can all, even the dumbest of us, recite them word for word. Once in despair I tried to melt my Video Hut name badge in the microwave: stylized red popcorn box, kernels round as breasts popping voluptuously free above my misspelled name, the whole lurid thing nearly three inches wide. Wouldn’t melt, either. I don’t know what it did to the microwave.

I took a beer to bed with me, along with a new old copy of Wise Blood. Flannery O’Connor, God I love her. She died before I was born. I have everything she’s ever written. That night, knees up under the fraying red quilt, I didn’t read so much as flip, skipping around to my favorite parts, I could recite them but at least they were worth recitation. I was feeling okay from the beer, halfway reading and halfway thinking of Nakota, flabby little halfway erection, cool night air turning cold on my cheek. Was the air from the Funhole cool, too, if you put your face by it? Directly above it, say? nice and close? Would there *be a sensation of vacuum? suction, gentle pull like a lover’s tug to bed?

“Stop it,” alarmed, pulling myself upright, scared, yeah, wouldn’t anyone be? No. Nakota wouldn’t. She’d go like a zombie, sleepwalking down into the lip, so soft, opened like a kiss, black kiss to suck you down, suck you off, yeah stupid tentpole dick and where are you going, you fucking dummy? I was shaking, I put everything down, got up fast and turned on the stereo, loud, rude-boy reggae. I did not like this, I did not like any of this at all, do they call it a siren song because it cuts through everything else?

Beer. Beer cures everything, maybe even this. Standing at the refrigerator, oblivious of its stored-cooler scent, can burning cold into my hand, I do not want to go in there, in the dark, I don’t even want to think about seeing the, seeing it, drink, drink and fall asleep, and I did.

Woke up with a headache that moved immediately to my stomach in a slow barrel roll of nausea as soon as I sat up, but there were no voices in my head but my own and I was glad, glad as I cursed my way into the shower, glad as I drove breakfastless to work beneath trees bare as telephone poles and signs for things I never did or would. In my pocket, hasty hidden crush like pornography, the bad poem (poems?) I had written in my fear; I would not read them, I was ashamed to throw them away.

At a red light I dared to pull one out, unroll it: the first thing I saw was the word “nacht,” and next to it something scribbled out so ferociously the paper was bent outward. Or inward. Depending on your bent.

Long spin of the workday, coworkers joking in humors I never felt, dreaming over my register, watching customers thread the aisles like rats in a maze: good rat, here’s your titty video.

I had started there, Video Hut, some months before, and by virtue of being the employee least likely to say no became assistant manager. Shitty pay but I bet you knew that; really, my needs were even smaller than my check. Making no living as a card-carrying poet had accustomed me to a philosophy that made minimalism seem lavish, I had lived like a cockroach for so long that a full tank, a full refrigerator were no longer even desirable: I mean, what would I do with it all?

So: my squalor: third-floor flat, one small room and two smaller, couchbed and shitty furniture, real good stereo and even better prints— Klee and Bacon and Bosch predominant, the best ones clipped from back issues of Smithsonian that I got free from the throwaway pile at the library—and my favorite, a black-and-white photograph of Nakota, wrapped in rags like cerement’s, rising from the tomb of my bathtub, in my other, seedier place, though God knows this one was pretty seedy. At least I never cared when it got wrecked during a party.

It was at one of my parties that we found the Funhole, not, I think now, by accident but by secret true design; I understand why they call it looking for trouble. Did I say wrecked? Especially that night: detritus smeared all over, puddles of spilled beer and toppled ashtrays and some crusted cheeselike stain on the shower curtain that even I, drunk as I was (and I was), couldn’t bear to look at. Nobody was left but me and Nakota, and some girl whose name I still don’t know, she openmouthed, as dead-looking as any live person can be, her skin a special color and her wingback hair stiff with gel and still sprightly, as if, ignoring its comatose platform, it was ready for more fun.

“Any more beer left?” I could hardly talk, but I was skimming, yeah, I felt good. Nakota, snorting some weird concoction she got from this guy in Southfield, nostrils rimmed in alarming pink, shook her head to let me know she disapproved of my addiction while coddling hers.

I don’t know, now, how we got into the second-floor hall, but I recall the still, dank base-ment-air, the way it smelled; I have a thing for smells, you must have noticed. Nakota was the one who opened the door: I definitely remember that, and her hand as she pulled me inside. Terrier instinct for the Big Bad, that’s what I think now, but then? who knows, maybe I thought I was going to get laid or something. Lucky me.

Dark inside, and so drunk I almost fell—can you imagine?—right across it, right into it maybe; she grabbed my sleeve, ripped it to the cuff. Her voice, her growl: “Look, ” pointing me, “look at that.”

Just as it is, no bigger or smaller, and we stood there so long I began to believe I was hallucinating, not only the Funhole but everything around me; it was that strange. The coarse dark of the room itself, the mashed cleanser boxes and the coiled piles of rags, Nakota’s breathing like a runaway train, and that, it, before me, defying disbelief. You always think you’d like it if the Twilight Zone came true. You can forget that shit.

“Shit, ” said Nakota.

I don’t remember getting back to my flat, don’t remember anything though I would love to now. Waking to the urgent need to piss and vomit, with luck not simultaneously, noticing in passing that the passed-out hair-girl was gone and Nakota, sitting up, awake, yeah, probably hadn’t even been to sleep yet. She gave me a nod as I stumbled past her, another on my slower, more painful way back.