“Don’t remind me. I still get flashbacks.”
It was schoolyard bickering, stupid, but one thing was ominously apparent: Nakota did not like Malcolm. Not the usual halfass contempt she felt for almost everyone, but actual malice. Which made all this far more dangerous, gave rile the sensation of walking not on ice but on something much more volatile, walking on the backs of giants. And she behind me. Wearing stilettos.
“So.” Grinning at him. “Want to watch a movie?”
Oh boy. She never was one for wasting time. I opened up a beer, thought longingly of the mad quiet of the Funhole, lying there in my prayerful trance, why I was turning into a regular Nakota. Bedlam instead tonight, obvious in Malcolm’s reply: “I don’t watch films anymore.”
“‘Films,’” with one of her ugliest smiles. “I’ll show you a fucking film, you roach.” This endearment meant nothing to me, but Malcolm tightened up like someone had just shoved an icicle up his ass. “Nicholas, put the video on.”
“Wonderful,” Malcolm said, “home movies.”
“You’ll like this one,” I told him. Now that it was inevitable—and let’s not forget, kids, who put this whole doomed scenario into action—do I see a show of hands?—I was determined to have whatever weak fun I could. “Lots of action.”
I hadn’t seen it myself for a while, I was courting enough disaster as it was. I had no idea if Nakota was still watching regularly, but if so, it just didn’t seem to pack the same wallop, or maybe she was wallop-proof by now. Maybe it had never been intended to pack the same wallop. Maybe it was just a lure, why not.
Malcolm’s string of bitchy comments—he was one of the truly bitchiest guys I had ever seen— wound down shortly after the first minute. Silence was an uncomfortable mode for him but he was so busy trying to figure out how the hell we’d faked this that he wasn’t ready for the real, and at the part where, Nakota claimed, it all diverged for everybody (but me; and yes, I saw it again, the cool beckon of that same figure, and had the same reaction, a curling-up inside, a mortal shriveling) (but this time, what? something worse and I shrank from the naming, pulled back as if from some unfathomable contamination that had already gone fatally far), the climax, so to speak—then he froze, mouth literally open, and open it stayed long seconds after the tape was over, disappeared into buzzing gray silence.
I rubbed my eyes, drank a little of the beer. Nakota smirked. Still Malcolm said nothing.
Finally, in a tone stripped of all falsity, burned down to a nub of hungry essence, he turned not to Nakota but to me: “I have to do you,” he said.
“Do me?”
“Your face. Make a mask of your face, like that,” gesturing at the TV. “Like the one in the video. I don’t know how you did that, but I want to try to duplicate it if I can.”
Nakota, strolling naked for a glass of water, taking Malcolm’s matches from his shirt pocket. “Malcolm’s famous death masks,” she said. “Not sold in any stores. Not shown in any galleries, either.”
“Will you do it?”
I didn’t know what to say, fell clumsily back on the truth. “I don’t know. I don’t know if I want to.”
“Nicholas has his own work to do,” Nakota said. “He doesn’t have time for you.”
“Why does everybody in the world talk for you?” Malcolm said to me. “First Randy, now Queen Bitch here. Just tell me, will you do it or not?”
Nakota clearly wanted me to refuse, but I had no interest in pampering her spite. If it had been Randy asking, I would have said yes at once, but I didn’t like Malcolm, I didn’t trust him, it was like keeping half a snake in your pocket, a sicked-up vicious pet. Vanese’s advice or no, to me it seemed the best idea entirely to get him out of here with the least possible damage. Worse, any time spent dicking around with a mask, even to pacify him, would steal my Funhole time, so much of which already went to waste in the unavoidable things I had to do to live. And I simply didn’t want to do it, I mean who wants a death mask of their face? No. Bad idea, Malcolm.
“Will you do it?”
I shook my head, positively no, and said, “All right.”
And then—I can’t imagine what my face looked like, I couldn’t have been more surprised if an animal had crawled out of my mouth, those were in no possible scenario the words I had meant to say—I just sat there in mute asshole gloom while Nakota and Malcolm leaped headfirst into war.
They were pretty energetic about it too. It was easy to see what they saw in each other, although in modulated degree and for wildly different reasons; in fact it made me wonder what it was in Nakota I loved. Although that was a question whose answer I had never failed to find, and at this point it was almost comically moot, and anyway I had other, more simple problems to consider if not solve. Such as my inexplicable acquiescence to Malcolm’s death-mask wish. Which seemed to somehow fill the bill begun by my equally inexplicable boasting that had brought the whole circus into lurid life.
About the point where Malcolm was screaming, “Because I’m an artistV and Nakota was screaming back, “Yeah, you’re an artist all right, a bullshit artist!” I left, closing the door behind me, not even bothering to do it quietly. They wouldn’t have stopped for money.
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.
Malcolm was, unfortunately, as good as his word. Next day and already bustling around the flat, apparently come to stay: dragging his stuff in, plaster and cheesecloth and tools in a fake leather case, talking all the time and me leaning up against the couchbed, hearing like an echo’s echo, a trickle of dream that Funhole music, not command but insinuation; it was hard to concentrate on anything else. Especially Malcolm.
“—longer than you think,” sketchpad too, expensive-looking charcoal pencils and sitting me down, bossy and rude and making me sorrier I had agreed to this, always assuming that were possible. My motives were unfathomable at best but this time it was all beyond me, I might have been predicting the movements of a stranger, and if I cared to try I would end with nothing more than a vaster confusion. Who deciphers the thoughts that come, windborne, from others’ heads? And who gives a shit, once thought becomes action? We all know who gets the blame.
And all this time Malcolm talking, directing, overruling, my God he was a windy fuck. Making fun of my magazine prints on the walls, saying Bosch was a poseur and Bacon a fag. Making fun of my photograph of Nakota and saying it looked like a B-movie outtake. Telling me all about himself, since I obviously did not want to hear. Call it punishment.
He was pretty good, though, sketching. He caught not only my features but what I did With them, and I saw in his sketch a kind of premature aging, the stroking finger of a dissolution coming on me like disease. I’m dissolving, I thought, seeing not so much the lines, the gradual leech of life, but the laying-on of a kind of hyperlife, like a sugar carving melting in blood. Look close now: what’s wrong with this picture?
He saw it too, but wasn’t smart enough to recognize in his head what his eyes already knew. “You won’t win any beauty contests,” he told me, “which probably explains that bitch of yours.”