Don't Cry: Stories (10 page)

He did not understand where the talking was coming from and he did not like it. The soul spoke in images of sight and sound that were quick and multiple, and which changed form by blending into one another. Because the young man had seized a piece of the soul linked to Ardor, many of these images were about love. But the glowing unknown attached to Ardor was, in the soul of this girl, Effacement. And so the pure, exquisite voice of her soul’s love could flowingly transform, for instance, into the shape of a naked woman on her hands and knees, holding a knife in her hand, poised as if to cut her own face. In the physical world, a picture like this would describe insanity and suicide. In the world of this particular soul, it described a mystery of Ardor and Effacement, a mystery the girl was expressing in human form on the night she invited the boy to have her. The soul addressed itself to the girl, innocently and literally mirroring her actions—and she could still hear it,

albeit dimly. She did not hear it with her conscious mind; she heard it like she heard her own breath, without being aware of it. And because the young man had possession of it, he heard it, too— and it was not like his breath.

He did not see the naked woman in his mind’s eye; he would never have allowed himself to become conscious of something so violently ugly. But he sensed it in his body, and sensed why it was there. Thoughts of the girl came to him, and with those thoughts, fear that he didn’t understand. Because he didn’t want to be afraid, he had contempt for her. He thought that would work.

The girl tried to feel contempt for the boy, too, but it is hard to have contempt for a person who’s made off with part of your soul. She went about her life—her job at a used-clothing store, her once-a-week volunteer stint at the Outreach Center for homeless youth, her evenings out with friends. Outwardly, she did not appear much changed by the misalignment; the first layer of her thoughts was more or less the same, logical and competent enough to get her through the day. But the next layer down, her mind was slowly becoming disintegrated and febrile, unstable on its primary support. Her perception was both heightened and dulled; she would suddenly weep at the sight of an old woman on the bus, or bewilder a friend with her excited analysis of a television character. But the intensity of feeling was misplaced and did not satisfy her. Her mind seized on triviality and substance without being able to tell the difference between the two; she went through it all like a computer on a search, looking tirelessly for what she lacked without knowing what it was.

And constant through it all was the memory of the boy she had so casually taken into her body. He was now always present for her.

more overtly than she was present for him. She thought of him against a vast, open sky, with a halo of piercing white. She thought of him astride a leopard, light and graceful in mid-leap. She thought of him moving in an aura of electrical fire, his heart huge and glowing with blue fire. She did not realize that these pictures came from her own soul, which was steadfastly signaling her from the boy’s room. She thought she was seeing the boy’s fantastical nature. And so she overruled her pride and called him. In two weeks, she left two messages on his answering machine. They went unreturned. She thought, I was very stupid just to have sex with him. I loved him, and I degraded us both. I am a terrible woman. I love him and now I will never see him again. Tears ran down her face.

Meanwhile, the young man was having his own difficulties. Although he was quick to be insulted by a girl who didn’t seem to take him seriously, he generally didn’t take girls seriously But serious or not, he’d regularly made off with prize bits of their souls: One (Gentleness) sat quietly, chewing its cud, one (Forbearance) grew up his wall like ivy, and one (Instinct) blundered dazedly around in the closet, looking for release. They were pacific and untroublesome, subtle feminine presences that soothed and grounded him—until now. The newly stolen soul was so talkative, so increasingly resdess, that it had gotten all the others going; if he could’ve seen the female souls clustered in his room, they might’ve looked like sexy juvenile delinquents hanging around a street corner, smoking and muttering. It wasn’t just the girls, either. His soul was starting to get in on it, too. The new captive was talking to it and it was beginning to talk back—or at least half of it was. For this

was a young man with a soul in two parts; he’d split it up so it would be harder to get.

He’d done this when he was about two. He’d done it at his mother’s advice; she had done it early in life herself She advised her son to follow her example after his father had walked away and left them in their small brick house. His mother was glad she had kept part of her soul back from her former husband, and she thought her son should learn to do the same. When she sat on his bed at night, singing lullabies and pop songs, he heard her advice, not in the songs, but in her supple voice. Her words would say, “You’ve got to hide your love away,” but he understood that meant “hide your soul.” Not all of it, just the vulnerable part. And, as he lay on the verge of dreams and sleep, she would show him how. One half of her smiled and bent to kiss him, and the other vanished in the dark like a cat. And, in the moment between waking and sleep, he followed her lead. The bright, strong half of his soul smiled back at his mother and received her kiss, and the weak part of him withdrew, even deeper than she. For although he took after his mother enough to follow her advice, he could not split so easily His fragile soul hid too deep inside itself. It made the darkness into which it fled a thing of shape and substance: a tiny model of his childhood home, except the model had no windows and only one door, which was always locked. The strong soul, out in the world of light and movement, forgot his fragile brother. The dark house became a prison and the soul inside a shapeless, nearly voiceless mass of pain that did not stir except in the young man’s deepest dreams.

Until now, that is. The chattering soul of the infernal brain girl was everywhere, including outside the prison, tapping on the walls and whispering through the bricks. Her terrible pictures penetrated the thick walls of the prison and the soul inside saw and understood—for he had been effaced for a very long time. The pictures did not seem terrible to him; on the contrary, their violence gave him hope because they confirmed what had happened to him. In the language of the soul, his eyes spoke to the girl through the prison wall in feelings, words, sights, and sounds.

Naturally, this response only increased the girl’s pain. On top of her own soul calling out to her, she was hearing from him, too, in the most confusing way possible. She heard him like the American sailors searching the Baltic for a wrecked Russian submarine at the bottom of the ocean heard, with their elaborate sonar, cryptic tapping, which they could not be sure of as signals, and which did not help them rescue the doomed crew. The signals of his soul were like this tapping, which could be anything or nothing, and they haunted her day and night. Day and night she heard him, and nothing she knew about obsession and projection could help her. | She wanted desperately to buy his records and bathe herself in his voice; she didn’t because she knew that would only enflame her. But now all music was about him, and she heard his voice in every singer. And she craved music almost as much as she craved the boy. Where her soul had once held space, there was now a ragged hole, dark and deep as the pit of the earth. At the bottom of it ran boil' ing rivers of Male and Female bearing every ingredient for every man and woman, every animal and plant. Without the membrane of her soul to buffer and interpret the raw matter of the pit, her personality was now on the receiving end of too much primary force. Music temporarily filled the empty space, soothing her and giving shape to the feelings she could not understand.

She went with her friend Angelique to see a live band with a

powerful woman singer. The woman sang like her songs were giant weird-shaped things pulling her this way and that as they came through her body and out her mouth. Her songs rose through the room in huge moving tableaux that dissolved in the darkness, then rose again—fantastic pictures heard as sound by the clumsy ear, but seen vividly by the souls present. The songs reflected these souls and spoke their language: Emotion, thought, sound, image, wordlessness, and words mixed together in the place between the life of this world and the pit.

But because the girl’s soul was missing, the music didn’t reflect her; rather, it filled her, and she reflected those around her. She experienced these reflections as a feast, as if she were a clear pool with senses and a mind, glutted on the sights that passed through it. She wandered away from her friend into the live darkness, blooming with the painted eyes and lips of a hundred stories. The rest room was a burst of light and filth, rushing water and voices. A young pregnant woman in high-heeled boots and a fur collar laughed and shook water off her fingers, as if she were scattering tiny jewels into the air. A sparkling bracelet flashed on her wrist. She smiled into the mirror and rubbed her belly, and this double reflection was delicious to the girl.

Still, she was full of humiliation and pain. She was full of anger at the boy and fear of him because she believed he’d caused her suffering. But because she still heard, without knowing what she was hearing, the plaintive message of his trapped soul, her abjection and anger were strangely mixed with tenderness and pity. She came out of the bathroom staggering a little; she already felt drunk.

Meanwhile, onstage, the singer was singing about love. She stood still with her naked legs apart, as if the song were splitting her open and offering her, whether she was wanted or not. Offering layer by layer, until she was splayed so wide that her spine was

made to offer its long, sensitive nerves. It was not an abject song; it was proud. It said, See how I can open. And at the end, when she put her legs together with a quiet "Thank you,” it said, See how I can close again. The crowd was still and rapt, receiving her, honoring her, acknowledging all things that open, including themselves. Bouncers and bartenders presided with nimble grace and witness. They had been there a thousand nights and they knew it already.

But the girl, who had opened with the song, could not close again She found Angelique standing alone with her arms wrapped around herself, her teeth clamped against the rim of her paper cup. When she saw the girl, she took her teeth off the cup, leaving a dark, blurred imprint of her lips. “What’s wrong?” she said.

“Oh!” Heavily, the girl put her arms around her friend and laid her head on her shoulder. She rubbed her cheek against her denim jacket and, shuddering, felt the movement of every stranger’s reflection flitting through her. Especially, and gratefully, she felt Angelique.

Angelique was a chunky redhead with a beautiful face: big lips, scarred skin, and green eyes that were watchful and passive at the same time, like an animal’s. Except her eyes were sad, too. Once they’d gone to L.A. and stayed on Venice Beach for a few days with some Mexican boys they’d just met. The boys had renamed them. They looked at the girl and said, “You’ll be . . . Prestige.” To Angelique, they said, “And you’re Infinity.” They were joking, but they were also right: Angelique had a window in her soul and Infinity poured through it, slow and sorrowful as dust. But while Infinity can be sorrowful, it can be calming, too. Right now, for the girl, that desolate calm was like a draught of opium. She shuddered again; in this borrowed Infinity, the boy was just one tiny star among thousands, speeding past.

Abruptly, Angelique shrugged her shoulder and stepped away.

“What’s wrong?” she asked again. The girl looked up, to see Infinity staring at her with the face of a worried office mate.

"Nothing,” she said, straightening. “I’m just drunk.” She looked at the stage, but instead of seeing the singer, she saw the boy, sitting next to her at the bar. He was talking about the movie they had seen. In amazement, she gazed at this ordinary boy who had apparently destroyed her. Help me, she said to him. Please help me. I don’t understand what is happening.

And he heard her. Her soul, still in his possession, made sure of that. He was sitting in a bar, half-listening to his drinking partner talk about the ghosts in his apartment while he brooded about his music. His songwriting had not been going well. He was used to writing music that was light and lovely; it had no weight because all the young man’s darkness and heaviness was concentrated in the prison house. It could’ve been a good thing artistically that he was finally hearing from the forgotten soul inside it; he could’ve used the weight of sorrow in his songs. But since it had been awakened by the foreign agency of the hijacked female, its effects came through an alien sensibility and were distorted. He felt chaotic inside, his thoughts like tiny boats scattered on a strange sea with a cold, unknowable heart.

The ghosts, his friend said, had come out of their usual comer and had taken to floating up around the bed as he lay in it, even floating between him and the books he read before going to sleep. The young man smiled.

"Why don’t you try slamming a book on them?” he asked.

The friend said something, but he didn’t hear it. He thought the ghost thing was ridiculous, and anyway, he had noticed a girl sitting across from him. She was beautiful, with dark, heavy-lidded eyes

exaggerated by makeup, and an almost overly full mouth. She looked at him, frank and confident in her beauty There was a black bat tattooed on her clavicle.

Well, chaos was not unfamiliar to him. In daily life, his emotions were chaos. He let himself become a vessel for them, letting feeling roar through him, pulling him around like a kite, boiling him like water in a kettle, dissolving him in a whirl of elements. Except that normally he could go into his studio and make order. He could make songs that were satisfying containers, for the kite, the kettle, the whirl of elements—he could put each in its place. The. things he was feeling now did not fit into the songs he was used to making.