The Fall of Never(30)

The brownstone’s back porch faced the rear of a three-story apartment complex. Between the two buildings was an enclosed yard, half unkempt weeds, half blacktop. Someone—probably some kid from the neighborhood or even the apartment complex itself—had written the words DENIS DOES DAILY in bright orange chalk on the blacktop.

You know as well as anyone else that a stroke can cause dementia, that someone who’s suffered any sort of chemical or physical unbalance concerning the brain is apt to say and do things that may seem peculiar, that may seem almost frightening.

Yes, that was true. But such an injury didn’t generally render the victim psychic, did it? Strokes usually didn’t grant the stroke victim the ability to see things into the future, wasn’t that correct? Or to know secret things about other people…

There’s an explanation for that. She must have heard—

But that was bullshit, self-appeasement at its finest. How they hell could the old crippled woman know anything at all about his unborn son?

Child, he mentally corrected himself, it is not an unborn son, it is an unborn child. We do not know the sex of the baby, and until we do, it will remain simply a child. As if that truth would somehow rectify Nellie Worthridge’s prediction. What if it’s a girl? If it’s a girl, the baby won’t be named Julian and then all that old woman’s spouted fortune will mean nothing, nothing at all. Or what if it is a boy and we simply call him by a different name? Wouldn’t that make her statement untrue then? Fuck tradition and f*ck Marie’s father—we could call him Billy or Jimmy or Bobby or something equally unoriginal. At least then we’d be safe.

He couldn’t help but cough up a chuckle—it really was all too much, wasn’t it? Psychic old women with no legs and unborn babies already given a death sentence! It was something out of a second-rate horror movie.

The sliding porch door opened and Carlos tossed the smoldering cigar over the porch railing reflexively. Marie stepped outside, a knitted afghan about her small shoulders. She looked tired, with dark looping rings beneath her eyes. But still beautiful. She’d always been beautiful, Carlos thought.

“Chilly out here,” she said. “You like it, Carlito?”

He closed his eyes, shivering at the name. “I do,” he said, masking his discomfort.

“You were quiet at dinner.” She came up behind him, began rubbing his shoulders. “It was hard today? Work?”

“No,” he lied, seeing Nellie Worthridge’s contorted old face tell him that his son was destined to be born dead. He had said it so simply to that Cavey fellow earlier that day, so plainly…but there was so much more than that, so much more than the simplicity of words.

Words are unfair, stupid things, he thought then. Controlled by words, everything real is corrupted, everything real is destined to be cheapened somehow. I don’t think there is a single human being who can find the words to express how that old woman made me feel today.

“You want to talk about something?” Marie said, pressing her lips to his ear.

He smiled, but he shook his head. “How do you feel?” he asked her.

“Tired but good. It’s nice to see you for dinner once in a while. Sometimes I think you’re having an affair with that damned hospital. Does it have bigger boobs than I do?”

He laughed. “Much,” he said.

Giggling, she jabbed lightly at his ribs. “We’ll see about much, Doctor. So maybe there’s some beautiful supermodel nurse you work with, right?”

“Yes,” he said. “After a long, dreary day of high-fashion photo shoots, Nurse Bambi likes to unwind by putting in ten hours at New York University Downtown. You got my number, all right, Mrs. Mendes.”

“Smart ass. You always joke. Everything is one big stupid joke with you.” She was still smiling; he could hear it in her voice and didn’t need to look at her face.

Not everything is a joke, he thought. Infants born dead aren’t a joke. Old, crippled psychics—nothing funny there, either.

“Too cold,” his wife said, pulling away from him. “Do you think you’ll be coming to bed soon?”

“Soon,” he promised, and she left him alone on the porch with his thoughts.



He had a withered old aunt who lived just north of the New Jersey Pine Barrens and, as a child, his mother would make him and his three brothers visit her twice a year—once in the summer and once in the winter. Aunt Teresa—whom the four of them called Aunt Tet—was a skin-and-bones woman with large brown eyes and fingers as long and wiry as pipe-cleaners. She always reeked of ammonia and mothballs and her little cottage (houses built near the woods are called cottages, his oldest brother Michael once explained to the rest of them) was always like a sauna, no matter how late into the winter they’d arrive. Often, Aunt Tet would try to scare the boys (or try to win them over by scaring them—young boys could be peculiar) with stories of the Jersey Devil, the cloven-hoofed serpent-child that roamed the wooded Pine Barrens circuit. According to Aunt Tet, way back in the Olden Days (any period of time just greater than a year, explained Michael, was called the “Olden Days”—capitalized and everything) a woman named Leeds gave birth to a creature of unimaginable horror. It had the head of a horse, the body of a chicken, and the forked tail of the Devil himself. Upon giving birth, the poor Leeds woman was systematically killed and partially eaten by her malformed offspring, who then spread a set of bat-like wings and flew up the chimney and into the nearby Pine Barrens. Aunt Tet’s favorite part was the big closer: And people say that to this very day, the Jersey Devil still haunts these woods, stealing chickens and pigs and dogs and cats in the night. And sometimes, she’d add with a sugary coating of extra inauspiciousness, stealing children.