The Fall of Never(6)

She showered for nearly an hour, pulled on a cotton nightshirt, and decided to settle down for a night of reading on her bed when the telephone rang. It was Josh.

“Sorry to wake you,” he said without waiting for her to speak, “but something’s pretty f*cked up over here.”

“Where are you?”

“My place. I’ve been running over the dailies for the past half-hour or so…well, trying to, anyway…but it looks like the damn thing blew one hell of a green f*ckus right out of—”

“Hold on—what the hell are you talking about? What’s going on, Josh?”

“The dailies are scrubbed. Fucking dead. Which is absolute bullshit because I watched some through the monitor at Nellie’s this afternoon, remember? You were there, you saw me watching them. Everything was fine then, so I don’t understand…”

“Are you saying the tapes are ruined?” She could feel a heavy headache coming on. “Everything we shot today?”

“Ruined or something,” Josh said. He sounded rightfully pissed off.

“Something? What the hell does that mean?”

“I don’t know. It’s not like the tape is permanently damaged because the damaged sections seem to change every time I view it…like maybe something’s wrong with my player, I don’t f*cking know. It’s not messed up in the same spot every time, you know what I mean? But it’s not my player because I tossed in a copy of Monty Python and everything worked fine, worked all right, so then I throw in one of the dailies again and f*ck it all—the tapes just won’t play right, Kell.”

“All the tapes?” She was staring at the digital readout on her alarm clock beside her bed: 10:32 PM. She wasn’t even tired.

“Looks that way,” he said. Kelly thought she heard someone yelling in the background, but she supposed it could have just been the television. “Every goddamn thing we shot today.”

“Maybe the camera heads were dirty and got shit on the tapes,” was all she could think of. “I’ve got cleaner here. And if not, maybe I can clean it up digitally on the computer.”

“You want me to run them by tomorrow?”

She was still staring at the clock: 10:34. There would be no sleep tonight again, no matter how tired she eventually got. That sensation of building, of blossoming inside her continued to grow, to push against the inner wall of her body. No—no sleeping tonight. “Could you bring them by now?”

“Now?” he said. Again, Kelly thought she heard someone shouting in the background. It sounded like a woman and a man arguing. “It’s late…”

“I just thought you might be going out…”

“I can drop them off, sure. Just figured you’d be too tired to get fired back up again.”

“Well, if we have to reshoot, I’d like to know as soon as possible so we can plan around it.”

“All right,” he said. “Be there in twenty.”



Twenty minutes later Josh showed up with his nylon case slung over one shoulder and a pizza in the other hand. His teeth were still chattering from the brisk walk from the cab to the apartment—it had gotten that cold—and his face looked bright red. “Figured we might as well eat,” he said. “Sorry, but I didn’t pick up any beer.”

“Get in here,” she told him, taking the pizza from him and setting it down on the mock-granite coffee table in front of the sofa. “There’re beers in the fridge, if you’re really looking to dull the senses.”

He moved into the kitchen, unzipping his leather coat and tossing it over a chair. Peering into the fridge, he said, “You said you had beer in here.”

She opened Josh’s nylon case and selected one of the videocassettes from inside, pulled back the rear panel and examined the film. It looked fine. “There is,” she called back.

“No…there’s Coors and Bud Light but no beer.” He shut the fridge, a Coors in his hand anyway. “No real beer. Must be your girlie side. Funny, I didn’t realize you had one.”

Ignoring him, she carefully pushed one of the videocassettes into the digital video camera which she then plugged into her computer, cued up the tape, and eased back onto the sofa with the camera on her lap. In an instant, Nellie Worthridge’s kitchen appeared on the screen with Nellie herself in her chair, fixing lunch at the counter. “Could be just a hunger headache,” Nellie was saying as she toasted her bread.

Josh came up behind Kelly eating a slice of pizza. “This part’s fine. Fast-forward it for a few seconds.”

She did, then hit PLAY again.

“See?” Josh said, his voice raised a notch. It was evident by his aggravated tone that he’d been driving himself crazy with these videos for a good portion of the evening. “You see what I’m saying? Looks like the tape is screwed.”

The screen blurred, went to static, flashed a negative image of Nellie Worthridge’s kitchen, and then fell to static again. Kelly leaned forward and popped the tape cassette out of the camera housing, flipped back the cassette’s rear panel to examine the tape again. “Looks fine,” she said, slipping the videocassette back into the digital camera and pushing PLAY.

The picture returned to the screen—a shot of withered old Nellie Worthridge eating a piece of jammed wheat-toast—and held steady for several seconds before blurring and falling to snow again.