The Cipher

by Kathe Koja

A clocked minute of static—a long time to sit and watch nothing, I was all for fast-forwarding but Nakota glared me down—then a sip of absolute blackness, recorded blackness, rich and menacing as an X ray of a cancer. Nakota, lips parting to say something but the thought drowned in the flash of an image: something like bloody stalks, caressing the screen like hands behind the glass, so greedily intimate even Nakota gave a tiny backstepping whoop. Then as if a barrier shattered, ferocious fun, whatever provided the images warming to this game: a vast black grin like the Funhole itself become its namesake, black asshole-mouth studded with teeth or bones like broken glass and in that Pandora opening Nakota breathless and me with my mouth hanging wide open, village idiot at freak show, a vertiginous glide forward as upon the screen came things I didn’t want to know about, oh yes I’m quite sophisticated, quite the bent voyeur, 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, do you see what I’m saying, the Funhole was a goddamned carnival ride next to this nonfigure and all at once what I wanted least, least, far less than...

Was the darkness always there? Was all it needed to infiltrate a lack of determination to keep it out?

I was so tired of hating myself. But I was so good at it, it was such a comfortable way to be, goddamn fucking flotsam on the high seas, the low tide, a little wad of nothing shrugging and saying Hey, sorry, I didn’t mean it, I didn’t know it was loaded, I didn’t think things would turn out this way. 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? Call the specialist when you do. You don’t even have to call, chances are I’ll already be there, you’ve just overlooked me because I’m in a corner, crouched like a dustball, a cobweb, my busy little spaced-out grin and oops it seems I’ve stumbled on some sort of exalted hellhole, Funhole, do excuse me while I let it out, while I let it into my body, while I let it run my life because somebody has to, right? somebody has to take the goddamned brunt even if it’s a void.

Not what you would think, no, not suction or even a true sensation, but if you could touch an insubstantiality, a fever dream, rub hallucinations on your skin, if you could cradle your own mind when you dream, trace the hills and gutters of the brain’s landscape—there really is no explaining it, I’m sorry but it’s so. Even they, who were there, even Nakota who was in all senses closest to me, well.

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.

Vanese got them out, the two of them—there would of course be no moving Nakota—I knew it was her and I wanted to tell her I was grateful, wanted to give her my thanks but there was no way I could because I needed all my concentration, every rubbery scrap, because something was eating at me, something stroking my bones from the inside out and there was no cure for that but to give in, give over, crawl headfirst and kill me, fuck me, I don’t care. Why are you so suddenly crazy, I asked myself, some tiny distant human part of me tight with terror and disapproval. I thought you could handle this, I thought this was a purely philosophical FACT-FINDING MISSION, and all the rest of me could answer was Pain. And desire. Because it kept talking to me, that voice, seeming to say things I had no right to hear, and there in the dark I lay naked to listen, one hand in the hole and the other on my cock, sweating, blood thin in the corners of my mouth, my eyes wide open as they never were, my erection one hungry center, a focus for my want. And that voice, oh my God, it used no words but what it said, what it said. As if things lay displayed that my dry daily brain could not have fathomed, would have dismissed from disbelief or terror, or both. Or worse.

By her hair, I grabbed her by her hair and dragged her down, not caring if we both fell into the Funhole, if we died there, oh Jesus I was worse than crazy and she egged me on, shrew hands locked to me like crampons in my flesh, climbing me, crawling me like an insect, a leech, all bones and teeth like fucking death, yeah, her mouth open on me and screaming something and my hips pounding down as if I meant to break her bones, shatter her pelvis for joyful spite, a smell around us as primal as sex but not from us, oh no, not from us at all. And her banshee voice, howling something and I was coming and I didn’t care, I didn’t care, I wouldn’t stop and pounding and pounding in the lessening drain of my corroding orgasm and still that voice that was no voice at all and I bent my head impossibly back and saw our orbit, our slow decaying gyration above the Funhole, looked and saw as if in a mirror that Nakota’s eyes had rolled back in her head and there was blood all over my mouth, all over her face, and the look on my face scared me so badly that I felt us fall, as if belief was all that held us; like Peter on the water I screamed, and Nakota in my arms unconscious, no help, a drag on my strength and perhaps it might be better, it might be easier for us all if I threw her down? Right, and I held her tighter, tighter, willing myself to block our fall with my body, stretched starfish-wide—measured in seconds, but it was that elongated time again, car-wreck time—and hit instead of...

She kept talking, on and on about transcursion, giving me first the dictionary definition—a passage beyond limits; extraordinary deviation—and then her own, infinitely more twisted interpretation: a change effected so deep, so fundamental, that when you emerged on the other end (if there was an other end, she wasn’t sure and seemed content not to know; for now it was the trip that mattered) you would be yourself a process, an agent of the change, a branch office, say, of the Church of the Transcursion.

But what she failed to notice, or maybe had and didn’t care, was that no rules also translates into, and past, no safety, to the chilly land where no one’s in charge and that most specifically means you. Or in this case, me. Maybe she’d thought about that, too, and just didn’t give a queenly shit. I did; not enough to stop, obviously, but enough to wonder, what would it be like to pass at once and finally into that daunting atmosphere, that place where the rug stays permanently pulled out from under you, where the murderous tilt is the lay of the land? How would it feel?

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?