The Fall of Never

by Ronald Malfi

  God, if You are going to take this woman, please let me at least speak with her first. I know how selfish that sounds, but please…please…

  “Nellie,” Josh said, his voice just above a whisper. “Nellie, are you awake?”

  The person on the bed shifted positions. Then a voice, more like a monster’s voice than a human being’s: “Daaahl…”

  “Wha—” Mendes stuttered…then recalled the effects of the stroke, the speech aphasia.

  “Hey there, Nellie,” Josh said. Even in the dark Mendes could tell he was smiling. “You feeling all right?”

  “All right,” the woman managed.

  “Doctor Mendes is here,” Josh said. “From the hospital.”

  Silence from the bed.

  Josh made a sound of discomfort. “Nellie,” he said again.

  “Doctor?” In her handicap, the old woman managed to break the word in half: Dah-tuh.

  Uncertain whether he should even respond, Mendes forced out a weak, “I’m here.”

  More silence. Then she spoke again, “Please wait…wait outside…Doctor…”

  “Yes.”

  He turned and quickly negotiated his way out of the darkened room without slamming into anything. Finally out in the hallway, he released what felt like a week’s worth of pent-up breath, and moved into the tiny living room where he collapsed against the arm of the sofa. God, the smell. Somewhere behind him, Ellington had concluded “Black Beauty” and now had his orchestra rolling through an up-tempo rendition of “Cotton Tail.”

  Again he thought of the dream in the hallway and the umbilical cord that had glided with sinuous conviction from between those two subway doors and across the floor toward him. Having just learned of Nellie’s powers—“abilities,” as Josh called them—he wondered if his dreams were somehow connected to the old woman. Surely that would explain him dreaming of her hallway—a hallway he’d never been in before until tonight. Yet…was that even possible? True, he knew nothing about telepathy and those who possessed such an ability, but didn’t it seem just a bit inconceivable?

  Josh came up behind him, walked past him and toward the kitchen. “Have a seat,” he said. “You look like you’re about to topple over.”

  Mendes eased himself onto the sofa. His head was throbbing, the palms of his hands dripping with sweat. “What did she say? Is she upset? Is she sick?”

  From the kitchen, Josh said, “She’s confused, that’s all. She doesn’t want you to think she’s upset that you’re here. Like me, she knew you’d pop up eventually.”

  Pop up eventually, Mendes thought, his mind racing. Christ, you make me sound like a goddamn piece of toast!

  “Will she speak with me?”

  “Yes,” Josh said. Mendes heard him turn on the sink, run water into what he assumed was the coffee pot. “She’ll be out shortly.”

  “Is she sick?” Mendes repeated. And when Josh didn’t answer, he picked himself off the couch and poked his head into the kitchen. “Josh…”

  “She’s sick, yeah,” Josh said. He was pulling coffee mugs from a cupboard with deliberate slowness.

  “You know, I’m still…” He regrouped his thoughts. “I can have a look at her, Josh. I’m still a doctor. I don’t mean to come off so selfish. I know you care for her. You’re a good friend.”

  “Thank you,” Josh said, not facing him, “but I don’t really think there’s anything you can do.”

  “I can try.”

  Josh rolled his shoulders. “Yeah,” he said in a voice that conveyed not even the faintest glimmer of hope.

  “Josh,” Mendes began, “I think—”

  “Doctor,” Nellie said from behind him.

  Startled, Mendes jerked his head around. The little woman had crept up behind him in her wheelchair. In the short time she’d been absent from the hospital, Nellie Worthridge had lost considerable weight. Her face was gaunt and bony, her skin the color of drying wax. Her eyes looked as though someone had hastily thumbed them in place. Mendes could see the strain the stroke had on the left side of her face: her mouth was pulled slightly down and to the left in a perpetual scowl, the skin taut and nearly transparent across her left cheek. Enormous blue veins pulsed at her temples.

  “Nellie,” he heard himself say. To his own ears, his voice sounded very far away. And very frightened.

  “Come,” she managed.

  “Yes?”

  With her good hand she motioned for the doctor to move nearer. With some hesitation, he did. The old woman accomplished a smile and wrapped her arthritic fingers around the thumb of his right hand.

  “I understand,” she said with near-perfect clarity. “We even said so, Josh and I, that you were…” All of a sudden she appeared close to tears. “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry?” he said.

  The grip on his thumb tightened the slightest bit. “I can’t see…”

  “My son, Nellie,” he said. “I need to know about my son. I spoke with my wife’s doctor and you were right, it’s going to be a boy. Julian. Don’t you remember saying that name? Don’t you remember what you said about my son?”

  A single tear slipped from the corner of Nellie’s right eye and traced the wrinkled contours of her cheek. It reached her chin, clung there suspended in time, then dropped suddenly onto their clenched hands.

  “I don’t remember,” Nellie said.

  Mendes pulled away and straightened up. Over his shoulder he saw Josh leaning back against the kitchen counter, watching him. Beside him on the countertop, the coffee percolated.

  “There are things I know,” Nellie said. Her voice was almost apologetic. “Some other things I cannot. Some things I see, Doctor. Some things I don’t.”

  “Josh told me about…” About what? How could he say something as ridiculous as “telepathic powers” while keeping a sane mind? In fact, though he had no reason not to believe Josh just moments before, he suddenly felt as though his world had just been pulled out from beneath him. Suddenly, he felt angry.

  “Let’s sit down,” Josh spoke up. “All of us. Nellie, I’m making coffee—”

  “No.”

  “Hmmm?”

  With much difficulty, the old woman shook her head in defiance. Her eyes were pinned on Mendes. He couldn’t shake her stare, practically couldn’t move. He thought he even felt a heat emanating from those eyes, bridging the gap between them, and warming his own flesh from across the room.

  “No,” Nellie repeated. “Doctor Mendes isn’t here for a friendly little chat. Doctor?”

  “I’m sorry,” was all he could say. “I’m not even sure what I expected.”

  “Please,” said the old woman. She manipulated her wheelchair around and maneuvered it around the other side of the couch. The intent in her eyes was unmistakable—she wanted Mendes to sit directly in front of her.

  As if pushing through a dream, he repositioned himself in front of the old woman. The record had reached the end; the phonograph needled crackled and popped ceaselessly, the only sound in the room.

  Nellie rested her good hand in her lap and sat without a word, her darkened, rheumy eyes staring at the shadows that played along the opposite wall.

  “Nellie?” Mendes said, leaning forward on the edge of the sofa. “You’re sick,” he said.

  She waved her hand at him. “What you hear someone say,” she said, “and what you experience for yourself sometimes makes all the difference in the world, don’t you think?”

  “All right.”

  Slowly, she brought her right hand up off her lap, palm up. Her fingers were all gnarled and bent at right angles, curled and twisted like dehydrated vegetables. When she brought her eyes up to meet his, he noted strong reflection in them. “There is nothing good about knowing certain things, especially when we can’t do anything to change them. I have come to know a few things in my time. Some of those things have been good. Have been beautiful, in fact—such greatness in some, such harmony. Then there are the others, and there is nothing good there, Doctor,
nothing of beauty. They’re people just the same, but it’s almost as if the Lord had forgotten to add some significant ingredient that makes them complete. And I’ve seen both types of people in my lifetime. Plenty. I’ve lived a long, long time.”

  Josh moved behind the sofa in the darkness and turned the phonograph off. He remained beside it, his hunched form silhouetted before the blue illumination of the drawn window shade. Yet Mendes did not notice this. He had fallen into Nellie Worthridge’s incredible world.

  “You scared the hell out of me when you said that about my son, Nellie,” he whispered. “And all I’ve been able to do since then is return to what you said, go back to it over and over and over again, and I can’t keep doing that. I’m driving myself insane thinking about it—God, even thinking about how someone could know something like that—and I’m causing my family to become very worried about me. Please don’t think I blame you for anything. I just…I came here because I need to know what to do. I need some sort of truth, some sort of verification that if what you said is actually going to happen, then I need to find a way to prevent it.”

  Sitting before Mendes, the old woman looked to him like a small child. Her face, half cast in darkness, even took on the appearance of youthful innocence. For the first time he noticed dark patches of bruised flesh running up her arms and creeping up the right side of her neck.

  “Maybe there is a way,” she said quietly.

  Mendes put a hand atop Nellie’s own, his breath exhaling in one long sigh. “Yes. What? Tell me.”

  “You can’t be afraid.”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t want to be. Not anymore. That’s why I’m here.”

  Again, Nellie overcame her paralysis and offered him a warm smile. Her right hand again slipped around his own. Easing back in her chair, she closed her eyes and widened her nostrils, inhaling deeply. The stale, humid stink of citron and body odor rushed back at Mendes yet this time he did not recoil; he merely sat beside the tiny woman in meditative silence, his eyes glued to her shimmering face. He could feel her grip on his hand slowly grow tighter, tighter.

  —tighter, tighter—

  Behind the sofa, Josh Cavey slipped out of the living room and disappeared in the darkness, leaving the two alone. Mendes, in all his concentration, did not notice this either.

  Carlos Mendes is ten years old again and trudging along a bustling sidewalk. On his back is a backpack filled with comic books and root beer, while his arms hug a brown paper sack busting with groceries. It is hot. A faded Yankees cap keeps his dark hair matted to his head—at ten, he wears the hat even if it reaches two hundred degrees—and salty tears of sweat burst from his forehead and temples. The sweat rolls down his face, stinging his eyes and tickling his neck.

  He arrives at a cross-street and stands behind a large wedge of people huddled against the curb, waiting for the traffic to clear. He cannot see the traffic, cannot see past the thick thighs and thicker hips of a woman in a floral-printed dress just a foot in front of him. Arms aching, he shifts the grocery bag and daydreams about the root beer hanging from his back. Root beer is his favorite—at least for this summer.

  A gap in the traffic sends the wedge of pedestrians scooting across the street. Carlos Mendes scoots with them, nearly riding the coattails of the zaftig brunette in the flowery dress. To his left he hears a man shout something about goddamn son-of-a-bitch cracks in the street. Somewhere up ahead he can hear someone—a policeman?—bleating a whistle.

  Two minutes later and he is seated at the back of the uptown bus, bumping along through the stop-and-go traffic. With the shoulder of his T-shirt he wipes sweat from around his mouth and sits watching the traffic through the side window. Beside him on the empty seat is the bag of groceries and his backpack. As if struck by sublime intentions, he yanks the pack nearer to him, unzips the pouch, and produces a bottle of root beer and a bottle opener—what his brother Michael calls a “popper-topper,” even though Michael was older. He pops the cap, lets it drop to the floor of the bus, and guzzles half the bottle in only two or three chugs. The root beer has gotten a bit warm in the heat but it is still good.

  The bus stops and a handful of passengers boards. All but one of the newcomers claim some of the empty seats close to the front of the bus. The one remaining passenger moves jerkily toward the rear of the bus. He is old and looks lost, Carlos thinks, the way his grandfather sometimes looks. He wears a long coat and a hat like the detectives wear on the covers of the murder mystery novels he sometimes reads when his mother has gone to bed, and he walks with a disjointed, almost painful confusion. Though he is looking directly at Carlos—or at the seat beside him—he continues to shuffle around as if still searching for something or someone. At one point, it almost appears the old man will stand for the entire trip. Then, without asking permission, the old man approaches the bench seat beside Carlos, bends awkwardly at the knees, and pushes Carlos’s bag toward Carlos. The man drops himself onto the seat. Suddenly afraid that the stranger has crushed his mother’s groceries, Carlos reaches over and slides both the grocery bag and backpack all the way onto his lap.

  The old man turns a white, blotched and grizzled face in young Carlos’s direction. He neither smiles nor scowls—just stares him up and down, as if considering whether or not it would be appropriate to eat him.

  “Ain’t right takin’ up two seats,” the man says, his eyes still on Carlos.

  Not saying a word, Carlos turns away from the stranger and looks back out the window. A few kids have unscrewed the cap on a fire hydrant and are trying to fill up plastic water guns beneath the blast.

  He is suddenly aware of a ghastly stink, like burning cabbage, and he jerks his head back around to see that the stranger has slid closer to him on the seat and is leaning down as if to speak with him.

  “Be it okay,” the stranger says. “Harm ain’t done, not here, no sir. See? We just sittin’ t’gether, me an’ you, you an’ me.”

  Carlos feels a hot lump of spit at the back of his throat. And of course his mind suddenly replays the barrage of precautions his mother has drilled into him since he could walk and talk—precautions about strangers in strange places, about not talking to such people, not even making eye contact if he could help it.

  He turns again and looks out the window.

  He feels the old man press his shoulder against his own. And he is trapped, right here on the bus, caught between the window and some smelly old strange man. He suddenly doesn’t want the rest of his root beer. And when the bus comes to the next stop he silently prays that the strange man will get off. But he doesn’t.

  If he doesn’t get off at the next stop, he thinks, then I will.

  The stink of cabbage is nearly suffocating him. For some crazy reason, he thinks of the time Michael and Juan pinned him to the kitchen floor and proceeded to stuff Michael’s sweaty gym socks into his mouth. They managed to get both socks in there too, before his mother came in and they both scattered like mice.

  “Petey,” says the stranger.

  Carlos doesn’t answer.

  “What’s your name, boy?”

  Carlos still doesn’t answer.

  “Not nice to ignore someone when they’s talkin’ to you.”

  “Carlos,” he stutters finally, feeling his entire body break out in a wave of perspiration. Looming large in his head is the image of his mother’s face, her heart broken, wracked with disappointment, as if he has just driven a spear through her chest.

  “Carlos-Carlos,” the man says. He is rolling the name around on his tongue, trying its pronunciation with different accents. “You dark. You ain’t a nigger-boy, is you? You ride the bus a’ time? Me—I don’t like it.”

  Carlos cannot look away from the stranger, he is so completely frozen in terror. The man’s face is loaded with red, flaking patches of skin and bulbous whiteheads. His lips are like two broken snaps of balsa wood, brittle and peeling. And behind those lips is a row of teeth the color of turpentine, gums the color of day-old
bruises. A dried tongue of snot clings ornately to one nostril.

  “I think I sick,” the man says. His eyes are moving fast. They are yellow. “You get sick onna bus, boy?”

  “No.” It is hardly even a whisper.

  “Thass you a big fella then, right? Carlos-Carlos-Carlos. Big like some big man.”

  The bottle of root beer suddenly drops from his sweaty hands and lands in his lap, dumping the remaining soda on his pants. A burning embarrassment abruptly wells up inside him and he wants to scream, wants to cry. His breath starts coming in great wheezing gasps.

  “Now-now-now,” the stranger says, “what we done? You done it, Petey can see you done it. Foolish thing, it is.”

  And then the man’s right hand comes out, slides itself between the bag of groceries and Carlos’s chest, and reaches down for the bottle. Paralyzed with fear, his throat too constricted to utter a single sound, he can only watch that hand slide across him and reach down into his lap. It is like watching a film in slow motion. The hand is enormous, he sees, and sprouts silvery wires of hair from the knuckles. It is a multicolored hand, adorned with a selection of brown splotches and tiny, bloodied nicks and cuts and scratches. The fingers are impossibly long and wide, capped with thick nails packed with crud.

  The hand lingers in his lap too long. Carlos feels a pressure in his groin as Petey the Stranger presses the glass root beer bottle into his privates, delicately swiveling the bottle from side to side. And that desperate scream is caught in his throat, caught there and useless, and he actually feels his mind begin to creep away from what is happening. In a flash he is back on the kitchen floor. Juan’s knees are pressing into his wrists, pinning them to the linoleum, while Michael straddles him good and holds his legs to the floor beneath his weight. In Michael’s hand is a balled up pair of gray gym socks, still dense with sweat, and jeez-it-all if he can’t smell those socks from here, from where he lay bound by his brothers to the floor, from here on the bus—