The Fall of Never(83)

“That is what you were thinking?” he said.

“Hmmmm.”

“You said you never wanted a television set in the bedroom,” he said, moving closer to her side of the bed. He wanted to reach down and touch her, run his hands through her dark hair. But he couldn’t move beyond his feet. “Don’t you remember? Or are you just so fickle?”

“I think maybe that was a bad idea,” she said. She still sounded half-asleep. “I think that with a television in the room you could sleep with me. You could watch the television while I sleep and then you would fall asleep too.”

“Is that so?”

“It is. And we would be together.”

“Oh, well,” he said, “we’re always together. Really.”

“Not always. Not really.”

“You would get sick of seeing me so much,” he said.

“Sometimes I think I will forget your face. You’re gone too much.”

“I know,” he said. “So then a television?”

“I think that is a good idea. I like that idea.”

He watched her body shift again. She tugged the bed sheet over her body, wrapped it around herself with little difficulty. His eyes lifted and came to rest on the wooden crucifix on the wall just above the bed’s headboard. And for an instant he thought of Chopin and Mozart and wet, sugary fruit and heartfelt laughter in theaters and home-runs, and was suddenly certain once again of the existence of a higher being. In fact, the certainty flooded him in one hot current, making his bare feet break out into a sweat and causing an involuntary tug at the corners of his mouth. It was powerful and inclusive: something that fashioned God not as nonsense but as fact. But like a flashbulb, it was there and then gone.

There are such great, wonderful creatures who suffer such fantastic atrocities, he thought.

“Marie?”

She did not answer.

He bent and hovered above her face for a moment, reveling in the pureness of her breathing, before kissing her softly on the cheek and disappearing into the hallway.

A moment later he discovered himself pacing the kitchen in search of his cigarillos while heating some tea on the stove. But his mind was not eager to commit to the search. He found himself thinking about the rush he’d felt when Nellie had touched him, and the way he’d somehow slipped into a…into a what? A fugue state? A hypnotic trance? A coma, even? The way the room had spun, the way his vision had clouded—and then his mind became his vision, his memory. That day on the bus, so long ago, had surfaced in his head as if the events were unfolding right then and there for the first time. Everything—he was aware of everything: smells, colors, pressures, heat, cold, moisture. All the senses were present. All the senses in the human thinking brain. And she was there. Nellie Worthridge had been there. And was that even possible?

“Medical science be damned,” he grumbled and found one of his cigarillos in the cupboard above the sink, wedged between a box of ten-inch fireplace matches and an old pasta maker.

Ten minutes later and he was out on the back porch, sipping his tea and inhaling cigar smoke. It was cold and the night seemed unusually quiet. Folding his hands, he leaned forward on the deck railing and stared at the freshly fallen snow below.

If it’s true, he thought, and Marie can sense something wrong with the baby, how is she able to keep it together so much better than me? How is it possible that she can even be asleep right now? I don’t understand. Is it a question of the strength of her own faith? Is she at peace because she believes that it will all work out, that she believes in a just and compassionate god? And if so, how does one believe in something so arbitrarily?

He found himself grinning.

He once believed without question. And now…

An idea struck him then. It was a simple idea, a simple solution, and it would work. Was it wrong? Would it be taking advantage of Marie’s faith? And not just her faith in God but her faith in him as her husband, as the person she was supposed to trust over anybody else? Damn it, he hated to lie to her…

“It is for her own good,” he whispered, blowing plumes of smoke into the freezing night air. “Her good and mine.”




Not until the arrival of morning did Carlos realize he hadn’t slept through the night. His mother shuffled into the kitchen to set the coffee just as Carlos heard the shower off the master bedroom turn on, the cold pipes bucking and reluctant in the walls.

“You look sick,” his mother said without looking at him. “Again you were up last night. Still not sleeping. Not good.”

He ate breakfast with his wife.

“Am I to suspect you will be spending the day with me?” she asked playfully. That morning, she looked almost like a child to her husband. And it frightened him how much love he suddenly felt toward her.

“With you,” he said. “There’s something special today.”

“Like a surprise?”

“Like a good blessing. From a friend.” He smiled and watched her eat, watched her eyes and the way they crinkled at the corners. “Do you feel all right?” he asked her.

“I do.”

“Nothing wrong?”

“No. And you?”

“Me?”

“Mr. Sleepwalker,” she said. “Mr. Zombie-Man.”

“It’s insomnia, not somnambulism.”