The Cipher Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    My disgust bred the same in others, increased as the day waned, as if it were a worsening virus and me Typhoid Nicholas and pretty damned glad about it too. Fat women in "Damn I'm Good" T-shirts and men with bald heads and tit videos and teenagers with shitty attitudes, all of them leaning across the counter, slapping their plastic cards and nails drumming, impatient with my lack of speed. I could have gone slower, was tempted to, realized it would just keep them there that much longer. So I rushed, pissed and uncaring, grabbing their money and slamming the register drawer with a rote fillip as patience-less as their stares, responding to their rudeness with my own point-blank fuck-you glare.
    When my shift was over, without even counting out my drawer I left, into a growing rain, complement to my mood but making it worse. Rain leaked down the inside of my window; I tried to crank it all the way closed but the last sullen half inch defeated me. The whole car smelled like a wet dog.
    So did my fiat: I'd left the night's window open a crack, or maybe Nakota had. Sure, blame it on her. I sat at the kitchen table, on the one chair' that didn't teeter, scooping salsa from the jar with saltines, reading the paper, trying to ignore my mail, trying to ignore the almost certain knowledge that the phone would ring, she would call with a bright new atrocity. And what would I say? Why ask when you know?
    She didn't call.
    Working, I told myself, but I knew Thursday wasn't one of her nights. Where then? Lots of places, the Incubus Gallery, maybe another shitty opening, maybe anything with her. Maybe sitting hunched up over her mouse head, trying to tease out its secrets, to decipher from its deformities the specifics of its journey, telling over the new abnormalities like a rosary for a special new religion; high priestess, she was made for it. The cult of the Funhole. Step right up, we can't offer you salvation or forgive your sins but we can give you one hell of a ride, just check out Mr. Mouse here, or his pioneering compatriots, the Flying Bug Brothers. Let me especially draw your attention to the one with two heads.
    When I slept it was a surfacing, uneasy sleep, no question of rest. Dreams instead, plenty of them, dreams of frustration that rose, froze into fear, mild at first then so rich with terror that I woke, over and over again, my mouth dry enough to be painful, afraid to get up and get a drink of water. Worse yet, my dick was inexplicably hard. I refused to acknowledge it, I didn't want to begin to think why. It took forever to get back to sleep.
    Leaving for work, running late and damn, the phone, her? It was. "How about tonight?" blunt, no niceness in her, my sweet Nakota, and me smiling, her tame asshole, yup uh-huh.
    "Come over," I said, rubbing keys in random hand, wanting to ask where she was calling from and knowing better than to try. "You know what time I get home."
    "I might get there a little early."
    "Don't, Nakota," not knowing what she had in mind, sure she wouldn't spend the minutes in passive waiting at my bower door.
    "Don't tell me what to do," and she hung up on me, oh good I told myself, heart running hard, now you've pissed her off. Nothing less predictable than a pissed-off Nakota, and you, dickhead, you had to load the gun, didn't you. I stood there in my own anger until, looking without seeing, the dull numerics of the clock on the counter turned over: 8:28, shit
    Down the stairs, halfway and I forgot my fucking badge, up the stairs again and down, looking once and furiously at the storage-room door, nondescript portal to all that was confu-*sion in my life, but then again without confusion—jamming ignition key, some jolly bastard on the radio—without confusion, why where would I be?
    Imagination can be hell. I spent the whole day jittering,