The Fall of Never (3 page)

She stepped into the apartment, peeling her black coat off and draping it over a wicker chair beside the small sofa. Grabbing a mineral water from the fridge, she moved to the computer beneath the two narrow windows overlooking Washington Square and pushed a Thelonious Monk CD into the drive. Setting the bottled water down, she gathered up her Nikon automatic from the top of the CPU and peered through the viewfinder, snapping off a series of apartment shots, not caring that there was no film in the chamber.

The urge to urinate hit her then, suddenly so overwhelming that she nearly collapsed to the floor. Weak-kneed, she managed to scamper to the bathroom, kick her pants down around her ankles, and drop down onto the toilet seat just as a warm spray of urine came squirting out of her. It seemed like the stream would never stop.
If it wasn’t for the fact that I haven’t had sex with a man in over a year,
she thought gloomily,
I’d think I was pregnant.

She showered for nearly an hour, pulled on a cotton nightshirt, and decided to settle down for a night of reading on her bed when the telephone rang. It was Josh.

“Sorry to wake you,” he said without waiting for her to speak, “but something’s pretty fucked up over here.”

“Where are you?”

“My place. I’ve been running over the dailies for the past half-hour or so…well, trying to, anyway…but it looks like the damn thing blew one hell of a green fuckus right out of—”

“Hold on—what the hell are you talking about? What’s going on, Josh?”

“The dailies are scrubbed. Fucking
dead.
Which is absolute bullshit because I watched some through the monitor at Nellie’s this afternoon, remember? You were there, you saw me watching them. Everything was fine then, so I don’t understand…”

“Are you saying the tapes are ruined?” She could feel a heavy headache coming on. “Everything we shot today?”

“Ruined or
something,”
Josh said. He sounded rightfully pissed off.

“Something? What the hell does that mean?”

“I don’t know. It’s not like the tape is permanently damaged because the damaged sections seem to change every time I view it…like maybe something’s wrong with my player, I don’t fucking know. It’s not messed up in the same spot every time, you know what I mean? But it’s not my player because I tossed in a copy of
Monty Python
and everything worked fine, worked all right, so then I throw in one of the dailies again and fuck it all—the tapes just won’t play right, Kell.”

“All
the tapes?” She was staring at the digital readout on her alarm clock beside her bed: 10:32 PM. She wasn’t even tired.

“Looks that way,” he said. Kelly thought she heard someone yelling in the background, but she supposed it could have just been the television. “Every goddamn thing we shot today.”

“Maybe the camera heads were dirty and got shit on the tapes,” was all she could think of. “I’ve got cleaner here. And if not, maybe I can clean it up digitally on the computer.”

“You want me to run them by tomorrow?”

She was still staring at the clock: 10:34. There would be no sleep tonight again, no matter how tired she eventually got. That sensation of
building,
of blossoming inside her continued to grow, to push against the inner wall of her body. No—no sleeping tonight. “Could you bring them by now?”

“Now?” he said. Again, Kelly thought she heard someone shouting in the background. It sounded like a woman and a man arguing. “It’s late…”

“I just thought you might be going out…”

“I can drop them off, sure. Just figured you’d be too tired to get fired back up again.”

“Well, if we have to reshoot, I’d like to know as soon as possible so we can plan around it.”

“All right,” he said. “Be there in twenty.”

Twenty minutes later Josh showed up with his nylon case slung over one shoulder and a pizza in the other hand. His teeth were still chattering from the brisk walk from the cab to the apartment—it had gotten that cold—and his face looked bright red. “Figured we might as well eat,” he said. “Sorry, but I didn’t pick up any beer.”

“Get in here,” she told him, taking the pizza from him and setting it down on the mock-granite coffee table in front of the sofa. “There’re beers in the fridge, if you’re really looking to dull the senses.”

He moved into the kitchen, unzipping his leather coat and tossing it over a chair. Peering into the fridge, he said, “You said you had beer in here.”

She opened Josh’s nylon case and selected one of the videocassettes from inside, pulled back the rear panel and examined the film. It looked fine. “There is,” she called back.

“No…there’s Coors and Bud Light but no
beer.”
He shut the fridge, a Coors in his hand anyway. “No real beer. Must be your girlie side. Funny, I didn’t realize you had one.”

Ignoring him, she carefully pushed one of the videocassettes into the digital video camera which she then plugged into her computer, cued up the tape, and eased back onto the sofa with the camera on her lap. In an instant, Nellie Worthridge’s kitchen appeared on the screen with Nellie herself in her chair, fixing lunch at the counter. “Could be just a hunger headache,” Nellie was saying as she toasted her bread.

Josh came up behind Kelly eating a slice of pizza. “This part’s fine. Fast-forward it for a few seconds.”

She did, then hit PLAY again.

“See?” Josh said, his voice raised a notch. It was evident by his aggravated tone that he’d been driving himself crazy with these videos for a good portion of the evening. “You see what I’m saying? Looks like the tape is screwed.”

The screen blurred, went to static, flashed a negative image of Nellie Worthridge’s kitchen, and then fell to static again. Kelly leaned forward and popped the tape cassette out of the camera housing, flipped back the cassette’s rear panel to examine the tape again. “Looks fine,” she said, slipping the videocassette back into the digital camera and pushing PLAY.

The picture returned to the screen—a shot of withered old Nellie Worthridge eating a piece of jammed wheat-toast—and held steady for several seconds before blurring and falling to snow again.

“That’s odd,” she muttered. “If the tape was messed up, we shouldn’t have seen that image when I put the tape back in.”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

She rewound the video and hit PLAY again. Nellie was back at the toaster once more, complaining about her hunger headache. The image held. The toaster popped and Nellie took the toast from it, set it on the counter, and began spreading jam on top of it while smiling absently at the camera. “Get too sick eating breakfast nowadays,” Nellie said on the video.

“Okay,” Kelly said, “two seconds ago we weren’t able to view this scene, and now we—”

As if on cue the image on the screen dispersed, splintering like rays of lights, just as a wave of peppery static flooded the screen. The audio went out as well—didn’t slow or bend or speed up, just went completely dead. Kelly let it run for a while, waiting to see if it got any better, but it didn’t. She kept it on visual fast-forward, but the picture did not return. Only snow and dead sound.

“They’re all like this?” she asked Josh. “All the tapes? Everything we shot today?”

“Everything we shot today,” he repeated dully, finishing off his pizza and taking a slug of beer. “I’m beat.”

She put the camera down and sat in front of her computer, her fingers quickly tapping over the keypad. “Rewind the tape back to the beginning,” she told Josh, “back to where it was fine.”

Josh did so as Kelly brought up the clear digital image in a tiny box in the upper left-hand corner of her computer screen. She typed some code that enlarged the frame. “Go ahead and let it play,” she said.

Josh hit PLAY on the camera and the video started up again, Nellie Worthridge talking about her hunger headache while fixing toast at the kitchen counter, the toaster popping, Nellie smiling at Josh behind the camera. Then it went to fuzz. This time, Kelly tapped out a procession on the keyboard and the lines of static minimized, showing only the faintest picture behind it, as if they were watching the scene through a partially opaque shower curtain.

“I can clean it up a little,” she said, “but it doesn’t seem to be doing much good.”

“And where’s the sound now?”

“I don’t know.” She looked at the audio bar at the bottom of the monitor. “Audio’s registering, we just can’t hear it anymore.”

“That’s so bizarre,” Josh said. He was scrutinizing the other videocassettes he brought with him in his nylon carrying case. Kelly turned to say something and caught the blinking red light of the camera out of the corner of her eye, and froze.

There is a door, and behind that door there is a flash of light, a very cold flash of light, and when you step into that light you can feel the hands on you, the hands guiding you, and you are stepping in something too, something wet and you think it is water at first, but then you realize that it is not water and it is coming from you, and you were laughing about it all just moments before but now you are afraid, now you are very much afraid, and now you think that you might even die here…

“Excuse me,” she managed, hopping up from behind the computer and barreling past Josh like a runaway eighteen-wheeler, her destination the bathroom at the end of the hallway. She hit the toilet bowl like a bull colliding with a matador. Lucky the lid was up, she vomited a filmy green foam into the bowl. Her stomach was empty—she hadn’t eaten anything all day—and she could feel the bile pulling up from the deepest bowels of her being, before breaking off into a series of barking dry heaves. After a few lumbering moments, she reached up and flushed the handle while catching her breath. Shaking, beads of sweat breaking out along her skin, she leaned back against the tub, eyes shut tight. She was aware of Josh standing in the bathroom doorway glaring down at her; she could hear his breathing mixed with her own.

“Kell,” he said, but nothing followed.

She just held up one hand to him, palm out, like a crossing guard halting traffic. The last thing she needed to hear right now was a lecture from someone, from anyone. She was suddenly too frightened to listen to rational thought, too. From behind her closed lids, the image of the blinking red beacon taunted her. And damn it, she
knew
that light, had seen it somewhere before but couldn’t put her finger on it. It was like some memory from another life, something she almost remembered, yet her physical brain would not allow the entire thought to fully process.

“I’m okay,” she finally managed. She thought Josh would come to her side and kneel down beside her, but he only remained standing in the doorway, silent and staring. “I just…something I ate today didn’t agree with me, I guess.”

“Yeah,” he said, his tone monotonous, “something you ate today.” He had been with her since dawn and hadn’t seen her eat a single thing. And she knew he was thinking just that.

“Don’t start, Josh.”

“No,” he said, “of course not. I’ll never start, right?”

She didn’t know what he meant by that and said nothing when he turned away and walked back down the hallway. Listening, she heard him gather his things, open the front door, and slam it behind him. Her head still against the rim of the bathtub, she listened to his footsteps recede down the hallway until there was nothing left to hear but the simmering hiss of the toilet.

Something jarred her awake in the middle of the night. Some fleeting sound, there and then gone, too quick for her to catch. But it had been there.

She lay in bed for a long while, staring at the dark ceiling. The lull of traffic down below used to soothe her, put her right to sleep, but not tonight. She’d grown immune, she supposed. Either that or she was in some bad shape. Through her bedroom door she could see the bathroom across the hall even in the dark, a bitter reminder of what had happened earlier that evening. She closed her eyes, trying not to think about it, trying not to think of that peculiar image of hands reaching out for her, of water—no, it wasn’t water, it was blood, somehow she knew it was blood—running down her legs and pooling on the floor. A bright light…a closed door, her hand coming out and slowly turning the knob, pushing it open…

I won’t be getting back to sleep tonight,
she thought and got up.

In the kitchen she fixed herself some warm milk to which she added a tablespoon of sugar. In the dark, she crept back out into the main room with her milk and sat down on the couch. The only visible light issued in from the two windows on either side of the computer desk, and the computer monitor itself, blinking its KEEP EARTH CLEAN, IT’S NOT URANUS! screensaver. She reached up from the couch and tapped the space bar on the keyboard and the screensaver disappeared. What took its place was the paused video stream from the tape she’d been watching with Josh before getting sick and charging into the bathroom. Setting her milk down, she got up and sat down in front of the screen, rewound the video stream, and played it back. Nellie Worthridge’s voice came out, too tinny on the computer speakers: “Could just be a hunger headache.” Hunched over the keyboard, she watched the old woman spread jam on her toast and smile at the camera. Then the camera panned to the left, following the old woman over to the cupboards where she replaced the jar of jam. One of the gears stuck on the wheelchair and Nellie toggled with it for perhaps a second or two—Kelly remembered this happening—before bringing the wheelchair back around. At that moment, the audio stream died and the sharp black-and-white fuzz invaded the screen.