The Fall of Never(10)

The memories immediately following the shooting were tumultuous ones. He recalled the sounds of people standing above him, and even remembered the wail of the ambulance as it pulled up outside in the street. He even remembered someone in the distance shouting, “Listen, this is not what I meant by ‘immediate’! This is not what being ‘quick’ is all about! What you fail to understand is that fast is fast and there ain’t no other way about it!” Whatever that meant.

In those moments he thought of God. Insanely, he imagined Him as a giant insect with a large, bulbous head hosting countless feline-like eyes. And when God spoke, His voice was like resonating guitar strings in a silent room, and the trick was actually deciphering those plucked notes and arranging them into some semblance of comprehension.

Monsters, he thought again. He lit the joint and inhaled vehemently. Who would have ever thought such things existed?

Yet for what it was worth, it was Sampers who had eventually led him to Kelly Rich, and that was a good thing. A very good thing. Obsession, Josh quickly discovered, was simply a fungus waiting to take hold. In many respects, it was a monster in and of itself, very different from Sampers, and somehow worse too because of its inability to think, to feel, and to contemplate. Obsession was just this thing, and in the months following his run-in with the greasy-haired kid with the handgun (particularly during his time in recovery), he discovered that the fungus had somehow managed to catch hold of him. It grew on his brain, impeding him from stepping outside his apartment other than to go to work, forcing him into paranoid seclusion. But he’d always been strong-willed, and after he realized the fungus wouldn’t just disappear on its own, he knew he’d have to find a way to scrape it off.

It was an obsession with survival, an obsession with the fear of dying. We never realize just how close we are to death, just how fleeting life is, until it is nearly taken away from us. It was an obsession with paranoia in a way too, and Kelly saved me from it.

Kelly…and her project, We the People. For some reason, he felt like his old self again when working on the project, partially because it kept his mind focused, but mostly because he genuinely believed in the project. The money was nowhere near what he usually made on a freelance project, but he’d discovered a sense of kinship with Kelly and an uncommon sense of peace in the work itself. Answering Kelly Rich’s ad in the university paper, he understood, was what had really saved his life.

“And what the hell is wrong with you now, Kelly?” he said aloud, still slowly rolling his left shoulder. In the past few months they spent working together, Josh felt he’d grown to understand Kelly Rich. And the Kelly Rich of the past few weeks was not the same Kelly Rich of the past several months, was not the same Kelly Rich whose ad he had answered. Something had changed within her recently—something akin to the degeneration of the human soul, the human spirit. Not that he really believed in such things. But he understood that something was wrong with her, and it bothered him that she felt so insecure about talking to him about it.

Or maybe she doesn’t even know herself, his mind added as an afterthought. Maybe she’s just as lost as I am.

Then why was she so cold about it? Why did it seem like she was trying to cover something up? Something big that she was afraid of, for whatever reason people have for being afraid of certain things? He was here to help, was her friend. Couldn’t she see that? Didn’t she even care?

Now I’m really getting ahead of myself. Why in the hell should I even expect her to tell me her deepest, darkest secrets, anyway? It’s not like we’ve been best buddies for the majority of our lives. Despite how closely we’ve worked together on this project for the past several months, we’re still essentially strangers in the whole scheme of things. And we’ve cultivated our relationship that way on purpose, so who can really blame her? Everyone’s got secrets.

And that was true. Kelly knew nothing about Sampers, knew nothing about that late afternoon over a year ago when Joshua Cavey took two burning-hot slugs in the upper torso, had nearly died, and he had no desire to tell her about it. Sure, she knew he liked cappuccino and was a damned good editor and occasionally went skiing in the Adirondacks. Likewise, he knew some cursory details concerning her divorce and knew she spent her childhood upstate—was a “country girl,” according to him, but that was really about it. As far as their friendship went he never really opened himself up to her, so why should he expect her to do the opposite? That wasn’t fair. As his mother would say, that was being downright stupid-headed.

You only get what you give, he thought, thinking it was a line from some song. You only get what you give and if you expect anything different, then you’re only being stupid-headed.

True.

He smoked.




After grabbing a bite at Bastian’s, he took a cab to Radio Shack where he bought some cheap videotape, and then to Nellie Worthridge’s apartment. If they were going to need to reschedule yesterday’s shoot (and he was positive that they would), he wanted to set everything up again without having to bother Kelly. Perhaps the project was adding to her stress. Maybe showing her those ruined tapes last night hadn’t been the best of ideas.

He stopped at the grocers and filled a plastic bag up with oranges. The old woman had a fetish for oranges and Josh did his best to support her habit. He liked the old woman: she was much more cheerful that the seven-hundred-pound woman with the plate of brownies. She had been depressing. Nellie, on the other hand, always managed to lift his spirits.