I had a friend in high school named Sally Newlyn who explained what had gone wrong with God's plan for the world. During one of her schizophrenic episodes, she told me that God had given mankind a finite number of souls. He set them free in the sky where they orbited silently until they were needed for the newly conceived. He intended for the souls to be reincarnated so that humanity would grow more generous and wise with each generation. But God had underestimated man's propensity to go forth and multiply, and so, on our planet today, millions of bodies were roaming the earth searching in vain for a soul.
We were sitting cross-legged in an abandoned shed we'd discovered in the woods, passing back and forth a thermos of rum and Coke. I listened to her with rapt attention, because she often spoke important truths when she stopped taking her medication. Salty's eyes were on fire, and I reached out and felt her pale forehead, but it was cool to the touch.
"That's what's wrong with me, Celeste," she said close to my ear in her small, urgent voice as tears fell from her eyes. I didn't get a soul."
"Oh, Sally," I said, pulling her into my arms and holding her tightly, as if that could keep her demons away.
When I was a sophomore in college, she killed herself.
I learned of Sally's suicide on a December morning when an old friend called me on the hall phone in the dormitory. Afterwards, I sat alone for a long time in the communal kitchen, listening to the midweek silence. I tried to get on with the day but I couldn't move. I remembered what Sally had told me several years before about God's plan, and I could not shake the thought from my mind.
I began to look into people's faces, searching their eyes for a glimmer of their souls. It became a compulsion; I pictured the inside of their heads as a room-something like the set in Beckett's Endgame--with no doors, only two windows looking out onto the world. If I could furnish the room, or at least see the view from the windows, a little corner of their soul was revealed.
I remembered Sally's eyes, and in them I could still see a warm and sunny greenhouse crowded with rare and rich-smelling plants, fragile and in constant need of care. But as she grew ill, the light in her eyes slowly dimmed, and in the greenhouse of my memory the plants shriveled up and died.
I lost my mother when I was ten, and although I remembered her well, I could not recall the event with any certainty. Trying to spare me pain, my father had filled my child's mind with reassuring stories that tenaciously lodged themselves in my imagination, leaving little room for the truth. In my mother's eyes I imagined an exotic French boudoir, with a mauve chaise longue, silk tapestries of naked demoiselles covering the windows, risque lingerie peeking out from a closet, old clothbound books strewn everywhere, and in a corner, a bar for the many guests she might have had in real life, but never did.
At twenty-eight, I found myself in a small, dark apartment in New York City, quite alone. Having lost almost every person who had ever meant anything to me, I confronted my own soul-room for the first time. In mirrors, my blank eyes stared back at me. The walls and floor were bare. The windows looked out onto a dirty airshaft, a brick wall.
And then I met Alex, at a Fourth of July party on a chartered yacht, the way people meet in movies.
During the past six months, I had managed to get to my teaching job at Columbia University; to the public school in Harlem where I taught creative writing to eighth graders; and to the Korean deli: familiar places and preplanned destinations.
When summer finally came and I was relieved of my teaching obligations...
