The Fall of Never(112)

—Stop that. I don’t like that.

“How come you didn’t stay? How come I can’t see you?”

“Because you’re not trying hard enough.” There was a slight irritation to his voice…and for the first time, Kelly realized she was actually hearing this imaginary boy speak, not just thinking the words inside her own head. She could hear him.

“Talk,” she said.

“Talk,” he repeated.

To her astonishment, she watched as a billow of white vapor materialized from nothing and dispersed in the air. Breath, she heard a tiny voice whisper at the back of her head. That was breath. Simple Simon is breathing.

She noticed that milky shadow fall back across the ice again, slowly shifting in form and solidity. Any distinct features the reflection might have had undulated beneath the formation of its body—its face, head, arms and legs.

Beside the reflection, a hazy shadow fell across the grass. Shimmered. Faded. Held.

“There…” she breathed, suddenly aware of her heart beating in her throat. “There…”

Like a ghost before her eyes, the creation that was Simple Simon—her creation—took form and held against the light of day. He wasn’t quite there—depending on how she looked at him, the reliability of his physical body either increased or diminished—but at least now she could see him.

She slid off her throne and slowly circled around the boy, catching him from every possible angle. He looked watery, translucent. Yet at times when his skin held solid, she could see that it was a pasty white color. His body professed no discernible sex (Kelly was too immature to consider such things when thinking of the boy), like the torso of a plastic doll. His head was hairless—she’d forgotten to imagine hair too—and two black orbs had collected in the center. Simple black eyes, no pupils, no lids nor lashes. Perhaps these were simple details a trained artist would have remembered to include, but they had never crossed Kelly’s mind.

“Can you see me now?” His voice wavered, as if he were speaking under water.

“You’re real,” she said. It was all she could say. Again, she felt the earth begin to shift, to spin around with her at the center. A blast of pain ruptured inside her abdomen and she collapsed to the ground, curled like a shrimp plucked from the riverbed. Carried along with the pain was the faint sensation of nostalgia, and she suddenly realized that she had to urinate, that the pain wasn’t in her belly at all but between her legs. Just like that day she stood unflinchingly in the icy water of the brook.

A shadow moved across her as she lay on the ground, moaning.

“Turn away,” she sobbed.

“Why?”

“Don’t watch me.” She pressed her eyes shut and fumbled with the snaps on her jeans. A cramp tightened inside her right thigh, sending shooting pain through the length of her leg. She struggled with her jeans and, after several drawn-out seconds, managed to yank them down around her ankles. Unable to move hardly at all, she could only roll onto her back, her eyes still clenched shut, and relieve herself. Around her, she could feel Simple Simon’s presence again—stronger this time—as if he were not only a figment of her imagination, but a thing of nature as well.

Something nudged her arm and she opened her eyes. The boy stood above her, still hazy and crude as a sketch, looking down with those solid black eyes. The boy’s bare foot was pressed against her arm. There were no toes, per se; five small lumps, more like the suggestion of toes. With one hand, Kelly managed to pull her jeans back up, buttoned them. Then she reached out and pushed two fingers against the skin of the boy’s foot. It felt pliable and cold to the touch. Like touching gelatin, she thought.

The boy watched her as she backed away from him, still on the ground, and righted herself against a tree.

“Did you do that?” she asked.

“What?” His voice seemed to come from everywhere at once.

“You know. Did you just make me…feel like that? Like I had to pee. Like that day in the brook.”

“I’m not real,” he said. “I’m in your head. You did it to yourself.”

And didn’t that make sense? In fact, over the passage of time, it seemed Simple Simon began making more and more sense. Imaginary or not, he’d become her friend. She spent the following summer in this imaginary Never-Never Land with Simple Simon. She read aloud to him and he told her things about people in the neighborhood, specifically the young boys and girls with whom she’d never dared become friends.

“How do you know all these things?” she asked him once.

Simple Simon was crouched beneath a tree, his pale legs bent up to his chest. By summer, his eyes had grown real—pupils, sclera, even lids and lashes—and he watched her now as she sat, eating an apple beneath one of the giant fir trees.

“I see them,” he said.

“But how?”

“I don’t sit in these woods all the time. Like I told you, I sometimes get lonely. I need to go places and do things.”

“Sure.” Kelly laughed. “If you’re so bored, I can bring you games, books or something…”

“I keep busy enough,” he told her. He looked away, at the rumbling brook. He never touched the water. “I’ve built a house.”

The notion struck her as impossible. “A house?”