The Cipher

by Kathe Koja

You can know something and never think about it, if you’re any good at it.

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?

It was at one of my parties that we found the Funhole, not, I think now, by accident but by secret true design;

This kind of adventure was not only her climate, it was maybe the only climate in which she was meant to live.

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.

It’d be like going down there yourself, almost. Almost as good.”

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,

I wondered what she’d think if I showed her the Funhole. You think you’re on the fringe of society, huh lady? I’ll show you the edge of the fringe,

“I feel like I’m underwater,” she said. “And that I’m burning.”

You can get used to being wrong all the time; it takes all the responsibility out of things.

I was so tired of hating myself. But I was so good at it, it was such a comfortable way to be,

It’s so easy to be nothing. It requires very little thought or afterthought, you can always find people to drink with you, hang out with you, everybody needs a little nothing in their life, right?

somebody has to take the goddamned brunt even if it’s a void.

I felt I could spend my life there, or die there, it made no difference really.

“When Life Gives You Lemons, Make Lemonade.” Well, life had given me shit, and I was making a compost heap. Or more succinctly, life had given me a Funhole, and I was making a grave.

And I felt not even happy or good but at least not bad and that was surely more than enough and certainly much better than I deserved.

What do I want. I thought. Transformation? Do I want, at all?

Because in the end we are what we are, we want what we want, whether we know it or not. Whether we care to resist or not, or whether in the end it’s worth resistance after all.

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

I didn’t feel like eating, as if my sense of purpose could only be nurtured and sustained by physical emptiness.

I blew smoke on the hole in my hand and felt nothing.

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.

I felt as if I were moving through water, a vast and calm preoccupation that in its way shielded me, protected me from the emotions of others, from the facts, and facets, of life.

And I cried harder, so hard and long that, childlike, I cried myself to sleep. And dreamed for once of a paradise that even I could reach, past darkness, a place where there was nothing left for my heart to carry.

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

but it was kind of late in the day to worry about morals, or fairness, especially as regards Nakota, who considered the concept of fair play as quaint as that of true love.

You would think, I thought, it would hurt more, feel more, something. But no. Just the march of fluid and the trickle of smoke, the drone outside and the mumble of the worshipers, stupider bastards there never were unless you count me, lying like a fetus beside the mother of all holes, watching myself be painlessly eaten alive, a living chrysalis. And proud of it, too, which was maybe the funniest part of all. Or the sickest. But it’s so nice to feel wanted, isn’t it.

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?

I couldn’t mourn what would never in all the world have happened, but I felt the sadness, as if I could.

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.

Love is a hole in the heart.