Fall

It was Keegan, drunk and paranoid. "Lynn," he said, "you gotta come get me. There's fish with legs. Fish with legs. They're all over the place, Lynn. Everywhere."

"Aww, Keeg," she said, "Why'd ya have to call me? I was sleeping."

Andrew rolled over and muttered, "If you want to go chasing old boyfriends at three o'clock in the morning, I'll still be here in bed when you get back."

Even after a year, she was loyal. She could still feel Keegan's poetry ringing against her, and she could allow that feeling to carry them together. But she could also feel him vanishing. She remembered, in a rather frightening flash, the time he had bolted himself in her kitchen screaming about ice cream cone men who were going to lick him to death. By the time the police broke down the door and got him out, he had gouged abrasions across his own face and chest. Lynn hoped rather fervently that Keegan's fish with legs were harmless.

The air outside was thick and damp, like just after a rain when the evaporation hasn't started yet. The night was a bleak, black something, studded with white pools made by streetlamps. Lynn shivered and huddled down in the seat, willing the heater to warm her car.

She found Keegan cowering in a phone booth near the corner of West and Main. In one hand, he clutched upside down a paper bag with an empty bottle, and he trembled violently.

"Green and seaful and fishy fishy fishy," he mumbled. "And their legs. Kneecaps, Lynn. They had kneecaps." He was still cradling the phone to his ear. She gently took it away, replaced it in the cradle, and stood away to look at him.

"God, you look horrible," she said. It was all she could think of to say. It was all there was to say. His beard was a thick matted tangle, coated with saliva and blood. One eye was an almost deliberate purple, and the other had settled into black. One of his shoes dangled soleless around his ankle like a useless prop. Trembling and muttering, he embraced an old winter coat around himself. "Silver and green. Was eight of them. Eight legs. On every fish. And kneecaps. That was bad. Kneecaps."

Heavily, she asked, "Where'd they go, Keegan?"

"Dunno. Just went. All when you came."

Sometimes, Keegan's hallucinations had a basis in reality. He regularly mistook airplanes for flying saucers, and he once magnified a dog bite into an entire race of canine invaders come to rid the earth of pestilent humans. He had gone crashing through her apartment, in their last days together, shattering all of the glass, because he said it reflected back the inescapable truth of human imperfection. She never understood him like this, but he was so helpless, so childlike, that she couldn't deny him.

"Where have you gone, Keegan?" she asked. "Where have you left yourself? Your poems? Where are you?"

He made a visible effort to relocate his dignity, dragging one hand through the matted beard, smoothing out and trying to zip the winter coat. She had watched him, a thousand times, go through this ritual for her, but tonight it was pointless. She looked away from his fingers twisted impossibly in his beard and flinched when he cried out pulling them free.

"Lynn," he said. "Lynn. Look at me. Look at me."

Compelled by his voice, she turned back to face him. He dropped the bottle, and clutched the coat convulsively shut. Then, he stammered, "Fall. This is. This is Fall.

I reach for my salvation

to numb my lips and tongue.

But full is you and empty me;

I've much to overcome.

A million lives you think I hear,

but you don't understand.

I take my living second hand.

And these are the colors of Fall."

Then, he staggered out of the phone booth, fell backwards against it, and broke down in tears. "Don't leave me, Lynn, don't. I need your help. I need..."

The world circled down around them, piercing indiscriminately with its white pools and black somethings. A sobbing man with a bloody beard, and a woman too clean and sleepy to be standing alone in this thick damp night.

The friction of tires announced a second car.

She turned around to face the police cruiser. "Need help ma'am?" asked the cop.

"He does," she pointed to Keegan. "He needs an ambulance."

"Lynn, no, Lynn, no, Lynn, please," Keegan begged.

"Right," said the cop, and leaned down to use the car's radio.

Keegan howled, something between the cry of a wolf and a man, and he lurched away down Main, his one shoe spinning circles around his ankle. After a few steps, he tripped and went crashing head first into the sidewalk. He did not move again.

Nearly overpowering came the urge to go kneel beside him. To hold his wrist and look for a pulse. But she had knelt beside Keegan too many times, on too many sidewalks, waiting for too many ambulances. Now, though she could not leave until she knew he was safe, she stood aloof waiting, and she did not follow him to the hospital.

Andrew was up when she got home, sitting at the table drinking chocolate. He said, "I expected you to be gone a long time."

She sat down and took a gulp from his mug. "There wasn't much more that I could do than call an ambulance."

"Why do you still jump out of bed when he calls you at three o'clock?"

She leaned over the table, massaging her own shoulders. "Baby," she said, "Oh Baby, if I knew that I probably wouldn't go. Pour me something stronger to drink. I feel like I could use a dose of forgetting."

Andrew brought her a glass, and as she sat holding it against the dim of the kitchen light, she glimpsed a bloody bearded reflection vanishing into the night around her.