The Fall of Never(5)
That wasn’t good. Recently, the project seemed like it was on a perpetual downslope, and for the past week or so she had begun doubting herself. And that just wasn’t good, wasn’t good at all. The onslaught of doubt, she understood, signified the eventual renouncing of the whole project altogether. And early on, she had been so excited about the project’s potential. As most great ideas do, the initial concept of the project dawned on her before she even realized she had been looking for it. It was simple: a series of videotaped biographies, only not about actors or musicians or politicians or war heroes, but about average people who have overcome tremendous adversities in their lives. She’d call it We the People, and would present a new individual with each installment, show how they lived, how they got by day-to-day, and what their specific adversities were. The concept had struck her like a thunderbolt, nearly rattling her brain, and on the heels of the concept she’d thought: Yes, this is it, you are it, you are the art I’ve been searching for all along and I didn’t even know it. How many potential subjects lived in all of Manhattan? Hell, how many potential subjects lived on her very own street? Sure, there would be research and lots of work and she’d probably need to go to the University to gather some help…but this idea…this idea was a good idea, and it would certainly work.
She’d met some amazing people, and interviewed and photographed them all. Belinda Charles, the seven-hundred-pound woman sentenced to live out the remainder of what promised to be a cruelly short life atop her filthy mattress. Jackson Tanner, the teenage boy who’d bitten down on the business end of a handgun, pulled the trigger and blew the bottom half of his face apart…only to survive. So many unbelievable people living so many unbelievable lives. And, of course, old Nellie Worthridge, absent of both her legs since the age of twenty and looking like a wrinkled old wind-up toy.
“On your orders, my lady,” Josh said from behind the camera, snapping Kelly from her daze.
“We ready, Nellie?” she called into the kitchen, not looking up from her notebook.
“I’m just doing what I do, dear,” Nellie called back.
“All right,” Kelly said, trying not to think about that red blinking light. “Roll camera, Josh.”
Chapter Two
It was raining and near dark once Kelly and Josh finally wrapped up the shoot. It had gone smoothly, and both Kelly and Josh were pleased with the footage. Sometime around noon, Nellie’s headaches returned (Kelly insisted Josh keep the camera rolling, even though the headaches really had no bearing on the project itself) and the woman began quietly moaning to herself. She maneuvered her motorized wheelchair over to the sofa in her tiny parlor and, without any assistance, lifted herself up onto the sofa and eased back against one of the arm rests. Josh offered to get the woman a glass of water and some Advil, but Kelly shook her head, insistent upon their complete and total lack of interference. Soon, Nellie’s headache subsided enough for her to crawl back into her chair and fix herself something to eat.
“Could just be a hunger headache,” the old woman told them as she fixed herself some whole-wheat toast and jam. “Ain’t seen food since supper last night. Get too sick eating breakfast nowadays.”
Outside, the sky looked the color of fading iron. It had gotten colder, the wind picking up, and the collection of yellow cabs cluttering the streets already had their headlights on.
“You feel like catching some eats?” Josh asked her.
“Not up to it,” she said. “Think I’ll just head home, get some sleep.”
He nodded. “Yeah, that’s probably a good idea. Think maybe I’ll go home and go over the dailies.”
“Dedication,” she said, half-smiling. “I like that in a scrub.”
“You know me,” he said, hailing a cab. “Fingers to the bone, right? Share a cab with me?”
She rode with him back to the Village, thanked him for all his hard work (this was a habit; it was the least she could do, given the fact that Josh Cavey worked for free), and crept up the steps to her third-floor apartment like a dejected mutt. Her apartment was small and gloomy, with only two narrow windows facing Washington Square in the main room. It was very obviously the home of someone subsisting on city grants and the emolument for her former duties as a wife and homemaker. The walls boasted a dreary collection of monochromatic Gothic prints, mostly from local artists, and a collection of abstract sculptures could be found resting on nearly every applicable surface: “pene di partecipazione azionaria di uomo,” and “donna senza mammelle” and “masturbazione.” Bookshelves groaning from the weight of thick, leather-bound volumes…a vase of wilted peonies…some week-old Chinese take-out growing fungus on the kitchen counter…a lamp in the shape of a turtle, its shell a patchwork of colored glass rectangles…
She stepped into the apartment, peeling her black coat off and draping it over a wicker chair beside the small sofa. Grabbing a mineral water from the fridge, she moved to the computer beneath the two narrow windows overlooking Washington Square and pushed a Thelonious Monk CD into the drive. Setting the bottled water down, she gathered up her Nikon automatic from the top of the CPU and peered through the viewfinder, snapping off a series of apartment shots, not caring that there was no film in the chamber.
The urge to urinate hit her then, suddenly so overwhelming that she nearly collapsed to the floor. Weak-kneed, she managed to scamper to the bathroom, kick her pants down around her ankles, and drop down onto the toilet seat just as a warm spray of urine came squirting out of her. It seemed like the stream would never stop. If it wasn’t for the fact that I haven’t had sex with a man in over a year, she thought gloomily, I’d think I was pregnant.