The Fall of Never(132)

Carlos dropped the towel and glanced back up at his reflection in the mirror. For the first time in his life he thought he looked like his father. Having left Carlos and his family when Carlos was just a baby, his only memories of his father were from photographs, or quick snapshot-like blurs that occasionally danced through his dreams. The notion of “father” was almost like a religion to him—reverent but fearfully so. Fleeting. And the irony wasn’t lost to him: that he suddenly resembled his own father—or the notion of “father”—now that he was preparing to become one himself. Grinning, exhausted, he wondered if anyone had a textbook explanation for such things.

“This Kelly girl,” Carlos said. “What’s so special about her?”

“It’s the power,” Josh said. “The same as Nellie. She has some gift and now she’s in some sort of trouble. I don’t know the details, Doc, and it just gets confusing. I’m getting this filtered in through Nellie, who’s been pulling it directly from Kelly’s mind. She doesn’t think Kelly even knows, understands—”

Carlos shook his head. “No,” he said. “What’s so special about her to you?”

“Oh.” The tone of Josh’s voice suddenly changed. “I don’t know.”

Carlos raised an eyebrow at Josh’s reflection. “You don’t?” he said.

Smiling, Josh said, “No, that’s not right. I do. I do know.” He pushed the door open a bit more and leaned against the frame, picking at his fingers. “She doesn’t know it, but she helped me overcome a pretty significant hurdle in my life. Like a million years ago we started working on some project together, and I really loved and believed in it…but mostly, I needed her to be there. Like I said, she didn’t know it, but she helped me overcome.”

“Shot,” Carlos said from nowhere, startling even himself. “You…you were almost killed…”

Surprisingly unimpressed, Josh only nodded.

Carlos shook his head. “How…how did I know that?”

Josh twirled a finger above his head. “In the air,” he said. “All that mental charge coming from Nellie. Filters through the entire apartment and lingers. Gets on us too—gets in our minds. What is it? Osmosis? Something…”

“To use her power,” Carlos said, “she has to disperse it all around her. And some of it we collect. We get a little bit of her power. Like dust settling after an explosion.”

Josh nodded. The look on his face was of tired disinterest. “You felt it in the room with your wife,” he said. “That’s when you went gonzo.”

“Do you think it stays with us?” The idea both frightened and enthralled him. “Forever, I mean?”

Josh shook his head. “No,” he said casually, “I think it passes right through us. We’re not the same as Nellie and Kelly.”

“Yeah,” said Carlos, “our names don’t rhyme.”

Grinning, Josh’s eyes dropped to his hands. “Your middle name Michael?”

“Nope.”

“Yeah,” said Josh, “it comes and goes.”

Michael’s my brother’s name, Carlos thought, but didn’t say a word. Maybe we’re all just a bunch of groping hands, frantically dipping into each other’s brains, grabbing hold of the meat, and seeing what it looks like once we yank it loose.

“There’s more to it, you know,” Josh said, though his voice now sounded very far away. Carlos was lost in the memories of his mind…on a bus with a diseased homeless man…

The doctor looked up, forced another grin. I think I’ve used my last smile for the night. “Yeah?” he said.

“To Kelly, I mean.”

“Oh.”

“Never thought about it much,” Josh said, “but I think…you know…” He shrugged, laughed. “How do you know, right?”

“About Kelly?”

“How do you know about anyone?”

“When it’s right,” Carlos said, “you just know.”

“Yeah,” Josh snickered, “I figured you’d say something useless like that.”

Carlos laughed. “Take it to heart, kid. Or throw it away. Do whatever the hell you want with it—”

The mirror above the sink began to rattle in its frame. The wall behind it puffed powdery smoke and the single light fixture in the ceiling started to dim. Carlos and Josh looked up at it in unison, a comparable expression of fear and bewilderment on both their faces. The rattling mirror shook harder. The wooden cabinets beneath the sink creaked and one of the doors split down the middle with a loud popping sound. They both jumped at the sound, Josh nearly spilling out into the hallway.

“There!” Josh cried, the tremors now making their way across the floorboards and vibrating his voice. “This is what it did when I paged you! This is what broke the windows!”

“This is coming from Nellie’s mind?”

“Yes!”

In the confusion, Carlos’s brain shook loose another thought: “Could it not be Nellie at all, Josh? Could it be your friend Kelly coming through?”

“I don’t know. What does it even matter? Let’s get the hell out of this bathroom before the walls come down on—”