The Fall of Never(3)

I kicked that habit, she thought. Yet, here you are again. An old goddamn friend, right?

It was easier thinking about the project, easier to get her mind off this inexplicable growing tension that had been building up inside her for the past month or so. Some nights, she would wake up in a cold sweat and bolt for the bathroom before she vomited on the floor. Occasionally, when riding the subway, she’d be gripped by an overwhelming sensation to urinate—urinate so furiously that she feared something had ruptured inside her. The feeling inside her was so strong, and so indescribable. At any moment, she expected one of Shakespeare’s ghosts to materialize before her and profess some unavoidable, impending doom.

“You’re running yourself too hard, darling,” she whispered, her eyes running over her reflection in the mirror: dyed black hair; a crescent moon of earrings along the outer cartilage of her left ear; unpainted fingernails gnawed down to the quick. There was even the light pink tissue of a road map scar along the top flesh of her left hand—the consequence of a drunken night and a broken glass at some loud club.

A shudder passed through her body.

Who am I? Who have I become? And what has been happening to me this past month?

Disgusted with herself, she looked away. Turned on the cold water, ran her hands through it, washed her face. An image surfaced in her head then: the image of a beacon…a flashing red light, blinking as if in code, as if desperate to gather her attention…

“Yes,” she repeated. “Working too hard.”

Her stomach felt queasy and she took three deep breaths before exiting the bathroom.

Outside the café, Josh stood on the curb holding Kelly’s coffee in one gloved hand, shivering against the wind. It was only mid-November and already the temperature was teetering on freezing. It was going to be one hell of a cold winter. “I was starting to get worried about you,” Josh said, handing over her coffee.

She tried to sound composed. “Thought I fell in, did you?”

“Just some strange folks in this city, gotta be careful,” he told her. “Last time I used the bathroom here I was almost mugged. And what’s with those guys who stand in front of the urinals with their hands on their hips? Whack-jobs. I mean, it’s like watching f*cking Superman take a piss. I don’t get it.”

She laughed and a billow of vapor blew from her mouth. “Can’t say I’ve ever seen that before.”

“No,” Josh said, absently considering, “I guess you haven’t.”




Nellie Worthridge was eighty-seven years old and had no legs. When she was twenty, she lost them in an automobile accident—along with her father. Now, she was a withered old thing with a surprisingly pleasant disposition and an animated face that lit up whenever Kelly and Josh turned up outside her tiny West Side apartment. Nellie Worthridge was Subject Number Four of the project, a woman Kelly had read about several months ago in People Magazine, back when the project was still in its infancy. For most of her life, Nellie relied on her motorized wheelchair to get her from place to place and, when in the comfort of her cramped but immaculate one-bedroom apartment (which she hardly left, except to shop for groceries and to play Wednesday night bridge), she frequently ditched the chair and moved about on the palms of her hands. It was sad, but Kelly’s first impression upon seeing such an acrobatic maneuver was that the old woman looked a bit like some withered old wind-up toy. After their first meeting with the woman, as she and Josh took a cab back to the Village, Josh had commented on how much Nellie Worthridge reminded him of his own grandmother.

“Just something about her, I guess,” Josh had said. “In the way she talks, or in her mannerisms or something. I don’t know. I guess deep down, all old ladies are the same animal.”

That was back when Kelly thought she might actually want to sleep with Joshua Cavey, that she might actually be attracted to him. Not because of the grandmother comment, but because of Josh’s line of thinking, and the countless other expressive comments he made, and also in the divine things he saw in ordinary life. He was, in a word, refreshing. But even then, despite her attraction, she realized that a relationship was the last thing she was looking for. In the Big Apple, even refreshing things went stale rather quick.

Like most elderly people (although this was just an assumption on Kelly’s part—she had never really been close to anyone considered “elderly”), Nellie Worthridge awoke at the crack of dawn and was already brewing coffee when Kelly and Josh arrived at her West Side apartment.

“It’s a cold one out there this morning,” Nellie said from the kitchen vestibule. “It’s going to be an angry winter, you mind me.”

“I believe it,” Josh said, dropping to one knee and unpacking his recording equipment.

Flipping through the notes in her notebook, Kelly backed against the wall between a picture of Jesus and a crocheted tapestry of a rainbow. Nellie’s apartment always smelled like a fusion of body odor, lemon Pledge, and camphor—the same smells she subconsciously associated with a high school gymnasium. Despite her handicap, Nellie was a fastidious woman who kept her apartment so ridiculously spotless, one would guess the apartment’s owner had died some time ago and no one had been inside the place to make a mess in a matter of months.

Kelly heard Josh mutter something to himself while searching through his labeled videocassettes. From the kitchen vestibule, she could hear the motorized whine of Nellie Worthridge’s wheelchair as the old woman urged it forward along the floor.