The Cipher

by Kathe Koja

The question exhausted me; I refused to try to understand. Skid and drift, that was me and the way I lived my life, foolish, hopeless, irredeemable, a broom-closet hellhole my epiphany, my one true love a woman who had never come close to loving me, even on my best days, her best days, this woman my lover now again in what was at most a terminal waste of time. Ah God, the happy hells I can create, you too, all of us. Even Nakota. We are all our worst best friends. Don’t agree? Go fuck yourself.

a good morning is still a good morning, even if it leads to apocalypse at night.

—I saw, if not the meaning of patterns then patterns of meaning, and for me that was enough.

I can laugh at stuff that would make you vomit but how would you like to see the ecstatic prance of self-evisceration, a figure carving itself, re-created in a harsh new form from what seemed to be its own hot guts, becoming no figure at all but the absence of one, a cookie-cutter shape and in but not contained by its outline a blackness, a vortex of nothing so final that beside it the Funhole was harmless,

The Funhole. Roiling, and in the swallowed glimpse behind my eyes, a foreign smile in my personal darkness, a figure. Welcome home.

The hallway was extra cold, but the odor of the storage room was ripe and welcoming as a womb, and with embarrassed pleasure I slipped inside, lay facedown beside the Funhole, my right hand resting lightly on its lip. I thought I heard from its deeps not music but the elegant drone of bodily organs, a sound so unimaginably soothing that I felt I could not only sleep there, I could sleep forever, till all of me was a death mask, a human catafalque turned to happy dust on the quiet floor. The last thing I did before I slept was remove my bandage, and let my hand dangle, a sweetly sordid treat in a smiling mouth.

Pandora could not correct her original error, but I bet she didn’t go around opening boxes anymore.

Speculation becomes meaningless when it never blossoms.

All bodies are, in some sense; engines driven by the health or disease of their owners, jackets of flesh that are the physical sum of their wearers. But to become your disease? To become the consumption itself?

But worst of all, the darkest part of me suspects a truth so black it turns my nebulous fears of a Funhole somehow empowered and unleashed by my addition to the laughable specter of an underbed bogeyman: what if it is me? What if somehow I’m crawling blind and headfirst into my own sick heart, the void made manifest and disguised as hellhole, to roil in the aching stink of my own emptiness forever? Oh Jesus. Oh God that can’t be true. Because then I’d never stop thinking.