Kathe Koja - The Cipher

“You’re early,” I said.

“I’m trying something new,” she said, barely bothering to look at me. Not even the murk of the room could mar the thoughtful glimmer of her gaze, so pretty, Nakota, especially when contemplating things no one else can stand to think about. A memory, a parking lot of a bar called the Pelican, muggy Florida midnight and she, front and center in the dwindling circle, watching with eyes ashine the drunken chain-saw fighters, the frail scent of blood, the stink of gasoline. “They do it every other week,” she told me, matter-of-fact hand on the hood of my blue Dodge Charger, watching me puke on my tires. “Not the same guys, of course.” Of course.

“What are you trying?” I asked now, head canted back, just a little, a careful angle so I didn’t actually have to see it until I heard what it entailed. “Why couldn’t you wait for me?”

She ignored the second question. “I tried to get a cat,” she said, “but I couldn’t. Actually,” an almost, what, embarrassed smile, “I think I probably could have, but, shit. I like cats,” and she laughed a little, and I noticed how close she knelt to the darkness, how nonchalant. “Anyway this is better, in a way,” and she hauled up, for an instant, her descending prize: in a plastic baggie, a human hand.

My throat closed up, dry thumping fist begun in my aching chest and I pushed backward with a horror so simple I could have described it in a word: No. No.

“No,” I said, in an almost conversational voice, and she gave me a headshake of mild disgust: “Take it easy,” she said, dropping the hand a little lower, “it’s not like I cut it off anybody, or anything. I got it from Useless.”

In my terror the name meant nothing, then all of a sudden it did and I laughed a little, breathless with relief. Useless was her name for Eustlce, a photographer friend of ours who lived with a postgrad pathologist who was pursuing her internship at “U of G morgue,” fishing it lower, “it’s not like they’re gonna miss it or anything. I mean, what’s one less hand? They get ’em off the streets all the time. Useless takes pictures of them.”

“Hands?” I leaned over her shoulder, studying with pale interest the hand’s Caucasian skin gone muddy yellow, its regulation wrinkles, the marks where it had been separated from its host body. It pressed against the bag in a way that made me glad I hadn’t eaten.

“Vags. Vagrants,” delicate eyebrows drawn in a studious slant, faint radiation of beginner’s crow’s-feet around those eyes, I gazed at them, now, as I leaned closer still. “They die, nobody cares, his stupid girlfriend cuts them up and studies them or something.” She swung the bag gently, side to side, strange pendulum, and I caught at her coat, tugged it.

“Be careful,” I said, “you’re awful close.”

She shifted, not actually changing position. “I wanted to take pictures, before and after, you know? But Useless wouldn’t let me borrow his camera unless I told him what I wanted it for.”

“But he gave you the hand okay.”

“It’s just a hand.”

A dead hand, I thought, and had to smile, it was all so weird that it was actually funny. Relaxing back, or as relaxed as I could be around the Funhole, taking my weight on my haunches and looking at Nakota, the lines of concentration around her lips, her touch on the fishing line so sure, fingernails bitten past the skin line. For as long as I’d known her she’d bitten her nails, chewing them the way a child sucks a blanket, dull-eyed intensity. These days she must really be gnawing them, and I wondered if the hand had bitten nails too. I’d read that nails kept growing, after death, a little while. “Who bites the nails of the dead?” I said, silly sonorous voice, and was rewarded with one of Nakota’s rarest smiles, a grin of genuine amusement.

“I do,” she said, and went on fishing.

The hand was down far enough that it seemed small to me, tunnel-vision gaze into the black, Nakota paying out the line as smoothly as a reel. The hand’s skin looked whiter against the dark, the plastic bag translucent, its one visible aspect the green closure line at the top. Down and down. Write when you get work.

Then Nakota started, smiled a very different smile: “Something’s happening,” she said, and I saw her fingers tighten around the line, saw its visible sway in her grasp. Her face was suddenly grim, a businesslike frown, she must have thought she was losing it; her knees braced more firmly against the floor, I straightened too, quick nervous anticipation of possible need; like a fire extinguisher, in case of emergency break glass. Emergency, that was certainly the right—

A smell like a giant’s rot came like a train from the Funhole, so amazingly foul that even Nakota gasped, grip slackened on the fishing line, face folding like a fist in self-defense and I sank back, shirt fumbling-pressed to my nose and mouth, as the hand came crawling jauntily up the line, some fluid beading lightly on the stub of its wrist, and I screamed into my shirt and grabbed Nakota’s arm; her control of the line wavered, the hand swung in drunken ovals over the abyss, then quickly corrected with the 61an of a circus acrobat and climbed higher, nearing the lip of the Funhole and I yelled, “Nakota, get rid of it!” and she swore at me, no words but a sound like an animal and refused to let go of the line.

“Let it go!” I shouted again and gave her forearm a stiff downward slap, causing the hand to grip more tightly to the line as if the motion had frightened it. I slapped her again and the hand jiggled in corresponding panic, I moved to slap her a third time and she backhanded me, hard and blunt, the hand swinging up and wide and free of the Funhole, slamming into a pile of empty Clorox jugs like a bowling ball down an alley, scattering the plastic jugs with a wet thump and me skittering to my feet, grabbing Nakota who hit me again, her whole face blotched with rage, dragging her to the door where we stood, me pinning her arms down, she kicking me backward in the shins.

Nothing happened.

She stopped kicking me.

Still nothing happened. I let her arms go and she immediately punched me in the face, very hard, darting at once to where the hand had landed. I touched my face, gripped the doorknob, waited.

“It’s dead,” she said.

I kept waiting.

“It’s dead,” she said again, insistently, holding it up by the line. Gentle swing and it was dead, unmistakably, limp and sorry and somewhat the worse for wear.

“Well,” she said. “I’m gonna throw it back in,” and before I could begin to move she did. Line and all.

She saw my face, God knows how it looked, God and Nakota, and she laughed. A little shakily. “Don’t worry, it’s not coming back out. Like a black iiole, remember?”

“I hope—”

“I know I’m right.” A pause, her lips in wistful twist, an expression so not-her that I felt, for a frightened moment, that more than the hand had changed. “I wonder,” still tilted, small hands on her shoulders, “what it looks like. Down there.”

“Next time use an eyeball.”

And her face began to crumple, a muscular change and she burst into an incredible hoo-hoo braying laugh, I had never heard her laugh so hard or so loud, it sounded like bottles breaking and I had to laugh too, she collapsed across me, arms hooked like crooks around my shoulders, her whole body shaking with the velocity of her mirth. We laughed our way out of the room, all the way back to my flat, laughed ourselves into the shower and screwed in the coolish spray, thready blood in the draining water, her skinny elbows protruding around me like the feather-less wings of a bird.