GLASS SOUP Read online

  “Get away! Don’t touch me.” She spoke in a strong angry voice. He hesitated, thinking she was bluffing. When he realized she wasn’t and could make real trouble for him, he took two giant steps back and smiled. Leni didn’t look at him again as she walked the remaining blocks to her house. Fearful that he might still be somewhere near, she could smell herself as she limped along. She hated the man for frightening her and hated her body for its betrayal.

  “It is me in all those cars—every one of them.” She said it evenly now while watching the traffic. Despite the noise, Haden was pretty sure he’d heard her correctly. When she spoke again he was eager to hear how she worked her way through this.

  “But fear is driving the cars, not me. I’m just the passenger. Back and forth, it doesn’t matter where they’re going. Every single one. That’s why it smells so much around here—every car is full of me and my fears.” She swept an arm from left to right, taking in the scene. At the end of that arc her arm remained in the air for a few more seconds, pointing forward. Eventually it dropped slowly to her side, brought back to earth by this sad realization. Then to Haden’s surprise, she appeared to chuckle. “You were right, Simon—it really is a Highway to Hell. Mine.”

  Her back to him, she closed her eyes tightly and sucked in her lips, as if fighting back tears. Perhaps she was.

  “He went to Harvard. He was the only person I ever actually knew who went there. I never heard from him again after he left Vienna.” She was talking about Henry County but Haden didn’t know that. He thought it prudent to remain quiet and let her talk.

  But Leni had nothing more to say. Instead she took a deep breath and walked straight toward the highway and its monster traffic. Cars raced back and forth in an endless stream. The two of them were already near enough to the traffic to feel its strong gusts of wind. The closer she got to the road, the more fascinating it was for Haden to see what she was actually going to do. It looked like she was going to walk right into that traffic. Was it possible? Would she really do that?

  Stepping onto the road, she reached forward with both hands and quickly pulled them apart, like she was opening a pair of curtains. Without a sound the scene in front of them tore in two like a piece of ripped cloth, revealing pitch blackness behind.

  It was as if all that they had been seeing was really only a picture projected on a mammoth movie screen Leni had ruined by tearing it in two. The road, the cars, the sky, the horizon… Where she stood now there was a large opening in the center of the world. It went up toward the sky and down to the ground. Solid black peeked at them through the crack. Without hesitating she walked through the tear she’d made and disappeared.

  “How did she know? How could she have figured it out so fast?” Haden asked, looking around for someone who could answer his questions. But he was alone out there by the side of a busy road. Alone and frustrated. “I feel like a fucking retard. Damn!” He walked hurriedly over to the long tear in Leni’s dreamworld, pulled the two dangling flaps apart, and followed her into the darkness. “Damn!”

  “You create most of your own fears in life. That’s what keeps you busy: something to worry about at every turn. But when you’re dead, there’s no reason to be afraid of those things anymore.” Leni said all this and then looked at Bob to see if it was correct. The animal remained silent, but nodded its great ursine head in slow, complete agreement.

  Simon Haden said nothing. He only sat there and stewed. Occasionally he shifted his unhappy eyes to Bob the Bear, which was looking at Leni with warmth and complete approval in its eyes. The three of them sat on chrome bar stools in the middle of an empty stage. Haden was so resentful of what had been going on that he even began hoping his old friend Bob would fall off. The polar bear kept scrooching around on the unstable stool, making it wobble and teeter. It was so goddamned big and so was its ass. How could it remain balanced on such a small seat? It must have been like sitting on a 25-cent piece.

  “Go on,” Bob said, eyes still on Leni.

  She rubbed her hands together as if she were warming up. “I saw those three slices of lemon in the cup, and then that hand with the green fingernail polish. Both images brought me back to moments where I was petrified with fear. It suddenly dawned on me that I’d carried those fears over here with me from life.

  “But that’s ridiculous; why do that? When you’re dead, life’s experiences have no importance anymore. Or they shouldn’t. I won’t see Henry County ever again unless I conjure him. And I’ll never bring back that creep on the bus. So why am I letting those fears drive on my highway still?” She shook her head at the idiocy of the idea. “It’s like you move from Finland to Brazil, but insist on bringing your warmest parka along. Why? It’s always hot in Brazil. You never need a parka there.

  “When I was alive the worst fear I had was of dying. Well, I’m dead. All the crap that frightened me before is over. It’s finished because I’m here now.”

  Both Bob and Haden lifted their heads when she said the word crap so vehemently.

  “Simon, thank you,” she said to him and smiled.

  Caught off guard, it took some seconds for his brain to shift from rat-brown jealousy to surprise and then halfway back to skepticism. “Thanks for what?”

  “I’m not sure yet. I haven’t figured it out, but for now just thank you.

  “Bob, where are we? What is this place?”

  “It’s a theater.”

  They waited for more but no more came.

  “Bob, we can see that.”

  The bear squirmed some more on its bar stool. “I’m sure you could, Simon. But I was answering Leni’s question.”

  “The dead put on plays?”

  “They only rehearse here. No plays, just rehearsals.”

  “Rehearse what?”

  “Specific dreams that you had at night when you were alive. This place was Leni’s theater. You had one too, Simon. Certain crucial dreams were carefully planned and choreographed here. This stage is where particular elements of Leni’s dreams rehearsed their roles.”

  Haden asked the question first that was simultaneously on Leni’s mind. “Every dream we had meant something? Every one of them? The dream where I went into the kitchen and made a grilled cheese sandwich with a banjo instead of a frying pan? That meant something?”

  “No, only some dreams; maybe ten or twelve over the course of your lifetime. For example both of you dreamt this meeting when you were alive, in your own separate ways. Leni dreamt it when she was twenty-five, Simon when you were nine. Both of you dreamt it exactly as it is now—this stage, the three of us talking, the works.”

  Now it was Haden’s turn to squirm on his bar stool. “I dreamt of Leni when I was nine?” He sounded incredulous.

  “Yes, but you quickly forgot about it the next morning. The only thing you remembered was a big version of me,” Bob scolded.

  “Why do we have those dreams? What good does it do to see the future if you have no context?”

  For the bear it was a relief talking to Leni Salomon. She was so much more rational and easy to deal with than Haden. She didn’t explode in anger or tiresome, self-pitying rants like Simon so frequently did. A no-nonsense pragmatist, Leni asked pertinent questions and then moved on after getting the answers, whether she liked them or not.

  “Remember those tests where they showed you ten or twenty different photographs very quickly and then afterwards questioned what you remembered?”

  “When they asked for details in the pictures?”

  “Exactly.”

  Haden and Leni nodded as one—they remembered.

  Bob went on. “There was a time when you would have remembered everything in every photograph. You could have said how many blades of grass there were. Or how many clouds were in the sky and described each of their shapes, everything. But I’m not really talking about photographs now—I’m talking about your dreams.

  “At the beginning, mankind had two minds. One you could call his day mind, the other the ni
ght mind. They complemented each other perfectly and were meant to work in concert. When a problem arose in your daily life that you were unable to solve, normally all you needed to do was go to sleep. Then the night mind, with its different way of perceiving things, would take over and help figure it out. Not always, but much of the time. Using these two together like that kept you more balanced, open to other possibilities and approaches.”

  “It sounds like that right and left brain theory. You know the one that says each hemisphere of our brain has its specific purpose. One is creative, the other is analytical—”

  Bob dismissed her statement with a wave of its big white paw. “No, Leni, it’s very different from that. The reason why people have such difficulty understanding life is because it is meant to be comprehended on both a conscious and unconscious level. Imagine your life as a piece of meat that can only be properly eaten if you have both an upper and lower set of teeth to chew it.” To demonstrate this, the bear placed its paws together one on top of the other. It flapped them open and closed a few times like a masticating jaw.

  Haden wasn’t having it. “Most of my dreams are ridiculous. The rest are forgettable.”

  “You’re right—now they are, but not in the past.”

  “How come our two brains don’t work together anymore?”

  “Chaos.” Bob said the word calmly and evenly.

  “Explain.” Haden looked at Leni to see if she was paying attention. Then he slowly crinkled his nose, narrowed his eyes, and held up a finger for the others to wait a sec while his body decided whether or not it wanted to sneeze. It did. He was one of those sneezers who are so violently loud that they can drown out any sound in a room when they let fly. Leni saw it coming on his face and turned quickly away—she had already experienced Simon’s blasts when they were alive.

  Turning her head, she happened to look toward a far corner of the stage and saw something that caught her eye. Haden sneezed again. Very curious, Leni got off her stool and limped over to what she had seen. Bending down, she picked a bright yellow rectangular flashlight off the floor. The kind with a handle across the top and which throws a very powerful beam across any darkness. Stuck all over it were decals of Walt Disney characters.

  “My God, this is it.” Cradling the flashlight in both hands she looked at it as if it were a holy object. She was so overwhelmed with emotion that she brought it to her lips and kissed it.

  “What is that? What have you got there?” Simon asked in between sniffs.

  She held up the flashlight so he could see it and said happily, “I haven’t seen this for twenty-five years. It saved my life when I was a kid. Is this the one, Bob, the real one?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s so wonderful. I am really glad.” She returned to her stool, put the light in her lap, and covered it with both hands.

  “What’s the big deal about a flashlight, Leni?”

  “I was very afraid of the dark when I was a girl. My parents put night-lights in my room, left the door to the hallway open. I slept in their bed with them when things got bad, but nothing really worked.

  “One summer I went away to camp. While I was gone my father painted the ceiling of my room a brilliant shade of turquoise and covered it with hundreds of gold stars all about this big.” She held up her thumb and index finger to demonstrate that the stars had been about the size of a large coin. “But best of all, he gave me this.” She patted the light as if it were a beloved pet. “He told me that whenever I got scared at night, I could turn this flashlight on and point it at that blue sky above me. Then I would see that the only things up there in the dark were gold stars and all of them were my friends.

  “Do you know how many times I turned this on to look at those stars when I was little? Probably every night for years, and almost every time it worked. All those perfectly shaped stars. They were my friends and protected me from the dark. I rolled over and went back to sleep.”

  “Try it now.”

  Leni could barely contain herself. “Should I?”

  “Sure—turn it on and shine it up at the ceiling.” Bob’s voice and its tone said nothing more than that—give it a try.

  “Okay.” Her thumb slid to the on-off button.

  “What about chaos, Bob? I thought you were going to explain that.”

  “I will in a minute. Go ahead, Leni—do it.”

  She switched the light on. Its beam leapt across the stage and made a vivid white circle on a far wall. She moved the beam up toward the ceiling.

  “My God!”

  What first crossed her mind when she saw the scene above them was one of those plastic domes you shake to make a little snowstorm swirl inside. These snowflakes are usually white, but once in a while they’re gold or silver. Now Leni felt as if she were inside a snow dome. Because her flashlight lit up a storm of a million different-colored flickers and flakes falling slowly to earth in the air everywhere above them. Astounded, she moved the light beam from here to there, back and forth, left to right across the ceiling above the stage. Everywhere the whole sky was full of glittering shining flakes.

  On closer examination, however, she realized something even more wonderful—although they were the size of snowflakes, each one was actually a tiny different Victorian Christmas tree ornament. She knew that on sight because she had been a passionate collector of these ornaments for years and now recognized many as they drifted past.

  On impulse she dropped her glance to Bob. The bear stared straight at her, ignoring the storm. The multicolored blizzard of ornament/flakes fell slowly down around them onto the floor. Leni and Haden kept looking back and forth between this dazzle and Bob. But the bear said nothing—it only watched their reactions.

  “Put out your hands.”

  When they did what immediately caught their attention was that none of the flakes that fell on their bodies remained. Any that made contact with them passed straight through their hands, knees, shoulders… and kept falling until they reached the floor. They watched these colorful ornaments fall and saw some of them touch but pass right through their bodies as if they were made of air themselves. This delighted Leni. She grinned at her empty open palm, wriggled the fingers, and said, “I guess we really are ghosts.”

  For a while after she spoke it was as silent in that theater as it is on any empty street at 3 A.M. in the middle of a great snowstorm.

  In time Bob spoke again. “This is how it began. Don’t ask when that was because I don’t know. Eight zillion years ago. Five trillion millenniums. Whenever. There was a big bang. In fact there have been several big bangs, but I’ll get to that in a while.

  “Before it blew apart, that was God.”

  “What was God?”

  “Everything joined together in one grand design. That was God. But God blew apart, scattering his bits and pieces to every corner of every universe. His bits and pieces made up universes.” The bear stopped to let the image sink in before continuing. Leni found herself looking closely at the snowstorm falling all around; as if it meant more now because she knew how important a part it played in this story.

  “Now imagine every one of those snowflakes is an individual life. That one is a tree and that one is a bug, that one is a person… every single flake is a distinct life. Some of these living things are intelligent, some aren’t. The bug is smarter than the tree. But that has never mattered until recently. Every thing lives its life, has its experiences, and dies.”

  “Then what?” Leni spat out.

  Haden was surprised by the terse way she asked the question. “Then we all come here, obviously.”

  “You be quiet. Bob, then what?”

  Miffed by her rudeness and the way she had dismissed him, Haden shot back, “Look at your feet.”

  Until then Leni had been so captivated by the snowstorm and watching the polar bear explain God that she had not thought to look down. She did now and what she saw on the floor was startling.

  The snowflakes that had fallen had formed an
d were continuing to form a beautiful abstract design. She had never seen anything like it before, but there was a grace and harmony to the design that was profoundly affecting. Seeing it for the first time was like coming upon an abstract painting in a museum and being so struck by its combination of balance and colors, shapes and emotional weight, that you’re held fast and stare at it in a kind of trance.

  Almost as amazing was imagining that each flake of the falling snow was a life and appeared to know exactly where to go when it fell toward the floor. The white ones dropped in among the other whites, the blues into the blues, and so on. As the two people stared the layers grew thicker, the colors more vivid and complex.

  “What is it?” she asked in a low, reverent voice.

  “The mosaic.”

  “And what is the mosaic?” She addressed Haden now because he had told her to look down and then the name of the miraculous thing at their feet. Obviously he knew what was going on. “How do you know these things, Simon?”

  “Because Bob explained it to me before you and I met up. That’s why I came to find you.”

  “What is the mosaic?”

  “God reassembled.” He glanced at Bob to see if that was a proper way of putting it. The bear nodded its approval.

  Holding on to the sides of the stool with her hands, Leni pointed at the mosaic with her foot. “That’s God?”

  Haden started to answer but Bob talked over him. “With the big bang theory scientists say that the universe will continue expanding outward to a certain point. But eventually it will slow, stop, and then begin to return to its source. Eventually it will all coalesce again. The same is true with this.

  “There are really two mosaics, Leni: the one that is your life and the larger one that is God. How they happen is similar. When you were born your being exploded out into this new life in every direction. All the experiences you had, all the choices you made, all the different things that went into creating the person you were before you died—”