Kathe Koja - The Cipher

“Aren’t they beautiful?”

“No,” I said, and they weren’t, not to me. I had no desire to touch them but I did: to please her, yeah. Stupid reason, I know. Chances are she couldn’t have cared less. Balancing the least objectionable, the four-leaf-clover wings, admiring despite myself their crazed patterning, so delicate, etched and slanted glyphs in a language I could never hope to master. All at once I had a horrifying urge to eat those wings, stick them in my mouth, crunch their altered sweetness and I thrust them away, literally, pushed my arms out at Nakota; the wings fell gently to the floor.

“Take-it easy,” angrily, rescuing them in one cradling hand. After a moment she said, “I need a bag or something.”

All the way upstairs I fought the image, mutant bodies whirling in blind hurricane, came back with an empty plastic bread bag that said “Nature’s Wheat.” She filled it with her prizes, all the care of a researcher with difficult data, knotted the bag with meticulous ease.

“So.” I wouldn’t look at it, nodding to indicate the horrible mess in the jar. “What’re you going to . do with that?”

She shrugged. “Throw it away, I guess.”

“In the Dumpster?”

“Why not?”

Why not? I insisted on wrapping it back in its paper bag, I wanted to make her carry it but I knew she wouldn’t. Careful down the stairs, holding it as far away from me as I could.

“I have never,” I said, “understood the word ‘gruesome’ before.”

“It’s not that bad.”

Lots of trash in the Dumpster. Worried, I perched on the shaky ledge of a rusty black Toyota, rearranging junk, slick snotty-feeling trash bags, the better to stuff you into oblivion my dear. I made a joke about disposing the bodies, turned and saw no one. Bitch. Took her bugs and went home. The Toyota creaked, I jumped down, went upstairs. No chance of eating, uh-uh, and when I slept it was to dreams of pain, infestation of tiny vengeance and no matter how frantically I waved my arms, they found a way in anyway.

Early, and hot, and inexplicably crowded, me jammed ass to belly with, my luck, not Nakota: an opening, the Incubus Gallery, some friends of hers had a show. Metalworker, and everything looked like crucified clowns.

“They make money off this shit?”

“You used to sell your poems,” Nakota hissed back, nasty, but technically she was wrong: they were printed, my poems, my terrible American haiku, but no one ever actually paid me for them. Would I be working at Video Hut if there was any other way? Still I suppose I deserved to fail: with the black towering inspiration like the Funhole before me, what was I making of it?

All through the opening, as we drank cheap bad wine out of little plastic cups that smelled like mold, Nakota kept one hand in her jacket pocket: you could see her fingers moving in there, gently, as she talked. She had them with her, she whispered, the bugs in a new heavy plastic envelope; her eyes were shiny, she was wearing a T-shirt that read, in dripping shock-show letters, “Ant Farm.” “Joke,” she said, smugly patting her tits.

“Stop playing with yourself,” I told her, “it’s not worth it.”

When the wine was gone I made her leave; she didn’t want to but she did want to show me the bugs. We drove to a coffee shop down the street from Club 22, she had to be to work later, sat in an orange laminate booth and drank coffee worse than the wine, her spindly legs jittering, insect dance; I tried not to think that.

“Runes,” she said.

“Runes my ass. What do you mean, runes?”

“I’m serious. I think they’re some kind of language.”

I had had somewhat the same idea, but hearing her say it pissed me off, made me somehow nervous too; Nakota’s notions had taken me places that I had never dreamed of going, but the places were rarely good ones. “You’ve been reading too much Weekly World News ,” I said, looking down into my cup. “‘Giant Baby Born to Dead Man’ all that shit.”

Like handling filigree, fresh plastic parting to show me her remnant pets, and “Come on, not here,” and she ignored me, and again I looked. This time I saw the beauty, if there is beauty in death, little weird corpses I didn’t want to touch.

“Can’t you see them? Look,” her stubby chewed nail a breath above one wing, slow limn of its traceries. “Look at that.”

“Greek to me,” I said, as coldly as I could, sitting deliberately back, the booth my temporary limit. “Maybe it helps to be crazy,” but it was really no use, and a small part of me even enjoyed seeing that shine to her again, a glow like the makeup I knew she never wore, her hands gentle as a mother’s as she put them back, musing tilt as she lifted the coffee cup in those newly nurturing hands.

“I thought, what about a mouse,” she said.

At first I didn’t understand, then when I did felt sick. “Oh come on, ” pushing my own cup away, “aren’t the bugs bad enough? How gross do you want to get, anyway?”

“Who’re you, the Humane Society? It would just be a fucking mouse, Nicholas.”

She was serious. The mad scientist. And a part of me wondered, too, with an ugly curiosity, just what might happen to one of our furry friends dangled down that gaping blackness, what it might look like if it survived the trip; watch that first step, it’s an asskicker. My wonder drove me out of the booth, to sit grimly in the car while she finished—and she took her fucking time about it, you may be sure—and I said nothing until we sat idling outside Club 22, rhythmic slow cough of the exhaust, desultory rain on the windshield and reggae very softly on the radio.

“Come on, Nakota,” and I touched her, something I rarely did anymore, my fingers as gentle on her wrist as hers had been on the insects. “You don’t really want to do that, do you? Do you?”

Swiveling on the seat, hair swinging with the motion, mouth small and meaner than I had ever seen it: “You’re so stupid, Nicholas. You’ll always be stupid, and you know why? Do you want to know why you’ll always be stupid? It’s because you’re afraid to be anything but.” She didn’t bang the door—she had never been a door slammer—but I drove away as if she had.

No call, nothing, for two, three days. Fine. I could live the rest of my life without seeing what happens to a mouse when it kisses death, especially weird death; but her words hurt me, irritated me like a splinter growing up to be a sore. Afraid. Don’t be a stupid macho bastard, I told myself, and meant it, but it wasn’t so much the accusation of fear as the implication that she was somehow—it sounds ridiculous—intellectually braver than I, that she had the guts to push a thing past its limits, to turn it upside down and shake it with all her might, when I was frightened to handle it at all. Maybe it really was as petty-simple as who’s the better man; I’d like to think I’m smarter than that, but who knows. At least my own stupidity can’t surprise me much anymore.

It was stupid to miss her, but I did that too, and felt not bad at all but even justified: she was a pain in the ass like none other, bossy and reckless and careless of my objections and especially my feelings, but she was my partner in this, she had been there from the start, she knew. Most of all, she was Nakota, and that was changeless as theJFunhole itself.

Guess who called who.

“I can come over right now,” she said, and, I thought to her credit, there was no triumph in her voice. When she arrived, I knew why: box in her hand, tiny scramblings inside, the sound of scared little feet.

My face did something that even felt ugly, but surprised? No. Not really. She knew it, too. Set the box down on the kitchen table, moved across the room to sit, smoking, on the edge of the closed couchbed.