The Fall of Never(73)
And thought of his wife.
Chapter Seventeen
Piloted by fever, Kelly wove in and out of dreams.
At one point, she found herself standing by a gurgling brook in the middle of a dense forest, the landscape green and full in every direction. Something wet ran down her forehead and stung her eyes. Bringing a hand up to her face, pulling it away, she saw it wet with blood. Panicked, she dropped to her knees and gaped at her reflection in the running water—and glimpsed a pale, fleeting figure moving behind her. She felt her insides freeze up, her stomach knot. Her small hands—still the hands of a child—knotted at the edge of the brook, clawing at the earth. A phantom wave of near-recollection shook her, like something from some ancient nightmare dreamt when she was a different person, inhabiting a different body…
She stood quickly, frightened, and turned around—
—to find herself the centerpiece in some abstract pantomime version of Earth, where the trees swiveled and twisted at impossible angles and the leaves—grotesquely green—defied gravity, growing straight up. Rattles of flowers exploded at her feet in a myriad of hues. Colors were horribly brighter. Smells were sharp and acidic. Behind her, the sound of the gurgling brook now shook like a waterfall; she could feel its strength reverberating in the ground. Instantly, she was aware of every molecule in her body—every sinew and blood vessel and follicle of hair; every organ pumping or contracting or secreting. With each exaggerated inhalation she could feel the icy burst of air rush into her lungs, fill and expand multiple pockets of flesh deep inside her chest, could feel oxygen being absorbed by each individual blood cell.
She saw the pale figure again, blurred and indistinct amidst a mine of firs, darting toward a darkness without source. And then she was running. Each step against the ground was purely reflexive. In a spontaneous impression of human articulation, she forced out a guttural laugh—or something akin to a laugh—and felt it rise up in her throat and explode out her mouth. The forest closed tight around her, whipping her with tine-like fingers and inflexible arms as she ran. And strewn almost functionally among the foliage: empty bottles and cans; broken plastic forks; a torn piece of clothing; a moldy bowler hat; a discarded automobile tire bursting with steel tread; a mud-soaked ball of socks; half of a NO TRESPASSING sign. She streaked past these items like mile-markers on a freeway, their presence hardly registering.
And there—a ramshackle structure tucked between a stand of trees, half-cloaked in shadow. A house. And was it real? Clapboard siding and iced shingles, perfect octagonal windows, empty of pane, with a steepled roof and a solid white door: to taste this house, she understood immediately, would be to taste saffron and ginger and spiraled cinnamon quills. It was the accumulation of dreams and prayers and whispered childhood fairy tales. She paused to stare at it and discovered that prolonged scrutiny caused the structure to yield and waver, to swim in and out of existence, out of reality. At one point she could make out the trees behind the house, could see straight through it. It wavered, like an image veiled by waves of heat. And with that dissipation came the true smell around her—not of spice and sugar but of rot and decay. She closed her eyes on it. She blocked it out.
Out!
And when she opened her eyes she was in a bland white room furnished only with a single bed and a window cased in wire mesh. A sweat broke across her face and her arms sprouted fleshy knobs. The woods and the house and even the fleeting figure had been only a dream; she was here now, here—the institution. The floor was dull and scuffed, cold beneath her bare feet. She could see her toes, pale and like giant grubs, beneath the hem of her nightdress. The room itself was stiflingly small. She could see her distorted reflection in the brass doorknob. She went to the knob. The door was locked.
I can unlock it, she thought.
She willed it to unlock and stepped into the narrow corridor outside her room.
The familiar tang of antibacterial soap and detergent accosted her. And beneath such pungency lingered the faint aroma of vomit, sour bodies, and bug spray. Above her head the tracks of sodium lights flickered and buzzed. The hallway was spotless and lined with closed doors. Behind each closed door she passed while moving down the corridor, Kelly could hear the muffled shuffle of feet, the soft moans and sobs of young girls. Some of them sounded in pain; others simply sounded lost inside their own heads, the sounds they created only human sounds by the farthest stretch of the imagination. A frail Asian girl shambled past her in a pink robe, seeming to materialize out of nowhere, and whispered, “Electrical tongue.”
There was a workable recreation room at the end of the corridor, dressed in stiff blue carpet and a row of ping pong tables. A multitude of television sets lined the far wall before a row of pebbled windows like soldiers in a line-up. Cross-legged on the carpet before a worn and tattered sofa, two teenage girls sat playing cards. They stared up at Kelly in unison as she passed by, a twin expression of disinterest on their faces. Beside them, a portable radio volleyed between intermittent bursts of static and a Dean Martin number.
“You move very slow,” a female voice said to her left. She turned and saw a tall, pale woman in a nurse’s uniform carrying a stack of books. The nurse looked angry. “Don’t you understand that these boots can’t hold up all this cedar?”
“I don’t understand you.”
“Damn you,” said the nurse…and it was suddenly the pinched and bitter face of her mother. “How could you have forgotten? What kind of games are these? You get me so angry sometimes, Kelly. How could you forget about him?”