He grinned. “You mean like magic?” He waved his hands around, like a magician performing a trick with invisible props. “There’s no such thing. There’s the reality you know and the reality you don’t, but everything follows the same laws of physics. I just might know a few more of those laws than you do. But I can’t turn you into a donkey or make vines grow out of the toilet. That sort of thing doesn’t happen.”
“But the soul is an actual thing?”
“Absolutely. Just like an appendix is an actual thing. That wart on your left big toe is real too, but if I were to remove it, you wouldn’t miss having it, and it doesn’t do you any good.”
“And there’s no way to prove you’re telling the truth?”
He looked at me, and his eyes glistened strangely. “You know I am.”
The thing is, I did. Or at least I thought I did, because when I thought about them, his words had the weight and texture and sound of truth. “Let’s say you are telling the truth. Then that means there is such a thing as a soul. If that’s true, then all the fucking bullshit we’ve learned about religion and heaven and hell and all that is also true, or could be. Right?”
He didn’t nod or shake his head. He just watched me.
I asked, “Wouldn’t I be a moron to sell my soul for a shot at a decent life on Earth and then trash my chance for eternal happiness? Who would take such a dumb-ass bargain? If anything, the idea that you’re telling the truth would give a person the strength to endure all the shit life throws at them because it means that they’re safe from hell and destined for heaven.”
The man thought about this for a second. It looked like no one had ever confronted him with these ideas before, but they seemed obvious to me.
“You’re basing your assumptions on medieval ideas about the soul,” he said. “That’s very much like basing your flight plan to India on medieval maps. The soul is real, but that doesn’t mean it’s what priests and philosophers tell you it is. To be blunt, it is a commodity, one I can use and profit from. This isn’t about heaven and hell. It’s about supply and demand. This is the economics of the marketplace, so don’t go thinking that just because you have a soul you can use Dante’s Inferno as a travel guide.”
“But it’s a soul,” I said. “Isn’t it, like, the essence of who I am?”
He waved his hand in the air in a dismissive gesture. “Who says? Listen, if you needed a heart transplant, and I offered to sell you a compatible organ, you wouldn’t worry about the love and goodness and hopes contained in the donor’s heart, would you? It’s a piece of flesh, and it serves a function. The soul is the same thing. It’s a part of you, and one you can live without. Giving it up doesn’t necessarily mean you are giving up anything else.”
“But it doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m not.”
He shrugged. “You want to do business, I’m your man. You want to talk metaphysics, there are some deep-thinking hard timers in maximum security. They’ll be happy to discuss this once they’ve knocked out all your teeth so they can rape your mouth.”
I’d had a chance to ease my way by selling out Marco and Teddy, but I hadn’t done it. I’d taken the hard way because the hard way felt like the honorable course. So I sure as hell wasn’t about to take the easy way now. I knew—and you have to understand this—I knew what he was offering me was the real deal. I knew all I had to do was say yes, and I also believed him when he said I wouldn’t miss having it. It would be like that wart, useless and there, and then useless and gone.
But fuck it. I didn’t like his attitude. I didn’t like the idea of some stranger buying and selling pieces of people, pieces of me. I didn’t like that he danced around the details rather than answering my questions. No matter what I got in this bargain, he would always have power over me.
“Not interested,” I said.
His smile made me want to punch him in the teeth. So smug and satisfied. “Marco said you might not. He said you were too much of a pussy.”
“Oh, then I’ll show him and prove he’s wrong,” I said in a lilting voice. “Did you actually think that was going to work?”
“The thing about Marco and Teddy,” he said, “is that by getting out of jail, they created kind of a vacuum in the legal system. They’d been arrested for the crime, and then they were let out. Someone else had to look guilty, and that’s where you came in. You’re sitting right here because those guys took the deal. And now you’re going to do time for them.”
He wasn’t going to force me into making a decision I didn’t want to make, but I needed to know if this was for real. “When they made the bargain, did they know this would happen?”
He shrugged. “They knew it might. But they also thought you would get out of it, just like they did. Teddy was sure you’d say yes. Everyone says yes. Just about.”
“Not me.”
“I won’t come back,” he said. “There are perfect moments for trading, and this is yours. If you say no, you’re saying no forever.”
“Fine by me,” I said.
He coughed out a mocking laugh. “When you’re shitting on that public toilet tomorrow morning, and you’re struck by the realization of what your life is going to be for a very long time, you’ll be sorry. And then it’ll be too late.”
I looked over at the toilet, and it did seem a pretty good metaphor for what was coming, but I wasn’t about to let him talk me into it.
I turned back to say that, but he was gone. Vanished. Just bars and darkness across the hall. Any doubts I had about the truth of what he’d been saying were gone. I’d been offered a deal, and I’d said no. And now I had a long time to think about whether or not it had been the right call. And I knew something else. Whatever the world was, and however it worked, it wasn’t like I’d always thought. It wasn’t like how any of us had always thought. But the real deal—that was a big fucking question mark.
NOW THAT I knew there were others, I started walking the city, more and more. I watched the crowds in the street, watched how they looked at the world, how they interacted with it: stabbing at the buttons of cell phones, dancing around little dogs on leashes, haltingly raising their arms for a cab.
And the way they watched things. The way they looked at one another, and the way they looked inward. Lots of people look inward when they walk, but maybe sometimes they looked inward at what wasn’t there.
I saw it more. Flashes of it. People with dead, painted-on eyes, people who I knew without a doubt were hollow and empty and drifting, like something had just fallen out of them as they walked down the sidewalk.
So many of them were . . . well, not rich, but healthy, whole: they looked like Gap models, like bit players in a commercial, not the image of howling rock star success, but the image of comfort, of contentment, of having bought something and found genuine fulfillment in it.
I hated them. I hated them and the cold and the snow, and I hated how it made me feel colder on the inside. They’d said yes, and I hadn’t, and I hated myself for it.
It took weeks for me to notice the next big thing, though, weeks of roving and walking in circles. And when I first saw it, it took me a while to realize what I was seeing was true.
There was one block where I saw more of them than anywhere else. Not just the random outliers, drifting down the pavement. Flocks of them. Gangs of them. Dozens and dozens of them.
This was where they lived. This was where they congregated, all the ones who said yes.
I felt like I’d penetrated some foreign territory, like a spy on the other side of the Berlin Wall. Were they watching me? Would they suddenly turn hostile, now that I’d found their big secret?
As I huddled in a doorway, I realized they wouldn’t. In fact, they didn’t give a shit. It took me a minute to realize that to them, to these gleaming, effervescent, happy people with empty eyes, I was probably just some homeless guy. I looked the part, at least. I was scruffy, beat-up. I was someone who’d seen a lot of things and been changed by it. I was not like them, but neit
her was I anything to care about.
I kept coming back to that block, not sure what I was looking for. Somewhere behind the cold stone walls of that city block was the truth, the thing that had been hiding from me all along, and I had to find it.
Or him, actually.
It was sheer random chance that I saw him. The door of a very upscale apartment building opened, and I expected to see, well, anyone walk out. At first, I couldn’t even really tell it was him, since it was so dark at the door’s threshold.
When he took a few steps out, I realized I knew that walk. That swinging-dick swagger . . . It was unmistakable.
“Marco,” I said softly.
He was dressed in a cream-white jacket and corduroy pants, and he wore his beard trimmed so neat and clean it might have been cut by a surgeon. As he walked out, he flipped out a pair of sleek little sunglasses, and he slipped them on with the air of a man confident that he’s the protagonist in the movie of his life.
Marco turned back to the door and said something. I saw a shadow at the threshold, and a gorgeous woman in a faux-fur jacket and stripper stiletto heels came clip-clopping out. Usually these ornamentations would make any woman look ridiculous, but she was the sort who used and worked them effortlessly, so that you didn’t even notice how impractical they were.
The girl put her arm in his, and they walked off into the city, she with the pristine, pneumatic efficiency of practiced beauty, he with the relaxed contentment of a man freshly scrubbed and refreshed after a long bout of athletic sex.
I stood there in silence for a long time. It started snowing again. When the snow covered the toes of my shoes, I left.
THE NEXT TIME I came back I brought a knife.
I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it. I mean, I vaguely knew. I knew that I wanted to see Marco die, and if that meant I had to do it myself then, well . . . that would need to happen.
Everything had a faint unreality to it as I huddled in an alley outside of his building. I was aware how all this should go—I follow him, wait until he’s alone, then confront him, cut his throat—but it felt like I was trying to live someone else’s story. I had never killed anyone, even in prison. I’d been in fights in prison, but I hadn’t much enjoyed them. I’d seen men die, and I hated seeing that.
I wanted Marco to die. I never ratted him out. I took his years, gave him my own. But I’d never realized how different my life could have been.
He was so happy. Even though his eyes were as empty as all the other hollow people’s, he just . . . he just looked like someone everyone wanted to be.
I stood and watched as his apartment door opened. Two young girls came out, trotted down the street. I relaxed. I realized that I’d actually been dreading it: if it was Marco, then I’d have to do what I set out to do.
Then the door opened again, and out he came.
My whole body went rigid. Again, he composed himself on the sidewalk, before setting off with his confident swagger.
I knew that if I took one step after him, I’d have to follow him the whole way, and the more I looked at him, the more I’d want to do it.
My body quivered, frozen. I watched impotently as Marco blithely strolled down the street, turned the corner, and was gone.
Coward, coward. Always such a coward.
I WANDERED THEN. I think I wept. I wasn’t sure.
The buzz of yellow sodium lights. The endless tumble of snow. Hallways of towering granite cliffs, riddled with dead little windows. Not unlike the hallways I’d left mere weeks ago. Was this place not unlike a prison? Faceless, miserable people bundled in bright clothing, shuffling along empty stretches, returning to their cells.
I walked down, down into the subway, found some miserable little line hidden in the exposed guts of the city, and sat there listening to the trains, thinking, alone except for a homeless man slouched in the corner.
I looked at my face in the reflection of the knife’s blade. The bright, happy young man who’d dabbled in crime had long been erased by sunless years and unspeakable abuse.
How I wished I’d said yes. The hell with all the spiritual navel-gazing. There could be no worse punishment than this, to be alive, and powerless, and empty, and forced to see people living lives that could never be yours.
There was a voice in the subway station. “You look,” it said, “like someone in a world of hurt.”
I turned my head. The homeless man in the corner raised a hand and pulled his hood back. A familiar face, as familiar as the twenty-dollar bill, smiled out at me as it emerged from shadow.
“Hello again,” he said.
“YOU’VE SEEN MARCO,” he said. He had the same odd, off-color skin, the same weirdly placed features, but he was older and certainly more haggard, even more like an old photograph than before. “Don’t tell me you haven’t. That could be you, my friend. The deal’s a better bargain if you make it before you waste your youth in prison, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t value to be had. You’ve got many fine years before you—or, shall we say, they could be fine. That’s option number one. Number two is that hepatitis C drags you down any day, any minute, poisoned blood washing into your body . . .”
He knew about the hep C. I hated his advantage over me, but whoever this guy was, he wasn’t Satan. At least I didn’t think so. There was something about him this time that smacked of desperation, like a salesman down on his luck. He had the same jolly, confident tone, but I’d picked up a few skills in prison, and one of them was learning to tell when a guy was talking out of his ass. This guy wasn’t just making me an offer, he was trying to save his own bacon. Maybe he had a quota to make. Maybe it had cost him something when he’d let me slide the first time. Who the hell knows how it works in the soul-selling business? Whatever it was, I wanted to find some way to work it.
“I thought it was a one-time offer,” I said.
“It was,” he said with an easy grin. “And now it is again.”
I thought about what he was offering, and what it might mean. I thought about Marco and that woman and all those people in that neighborhood who didn’t seem to know or care that they’d lost something. If you don’t know or care, how important could losing it be?
“Let’s talk,” I said.
***
WE SAT IN a local coffee shop that fortunately wasn’t very crowded. Maybe it had been before we came in, but if so, it soon thinned out. The few other patrons shot menacing stares at us, but I ignored them. None of those people had anything on me, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to be intimidated by the evil gaze of a bleach-blond mother who had been ignoring her toddlers while typing into her phone. So I sat with Andrew Jackson while retro cool jazz played over the sound system and strange coffee machines belched out steam like ancient factory equipment.
“The hepatitis goes away?” I asked him.
He raised a saucer full of latte and savored the scent. “Mmmm. Caramel. Yes, my friend. Health is yours for the asking. And more than that—good fortune, friends, women. People will want to help you, give you what you desire, open the doors that now block your every move. No one will want to cheat you or kill you or rob you or rape you—a little protection that might have come in handy over the past few years, I suspect.”
Was that why I had been too cowardly to kill Marco? Was I feeling the effects of Marco’s deal, and he’d been protected against me?
“Health is good,” I said. “So’s people being nice.”
“Women being nice,” he said with a wiggle of his eyebrows. “Girls gone wild, my friend. Wild.”
I said nothing for a long time. He drank his latte and appeared content to wait.
“In the stories,” I ventured, “you make a deal, and then something you didn’t think of comes back to bite you on the ass. People will be nice to me and luck goes my way, so how do I know a brick won’t fall on my head or I won’t be paralyzed in a car accident?”
“The brick won’t fall,” he said, “and you won’t get in that car. It�
�s a matter of chance, a matter of choice. The world operates in patterns. I can put you in a place where the patterns always work in your favor.”
“What guarantee do I have?”
He appeared curious now. “What kind would you like?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t want to be ripped off.”
“I assure you, no one’s out to trick you. It’s all aboveboard. If we don’t keep our part of the bargain . . . if you fall victim to the wrong sort of pattern, I suppose, and experience devastating bad luck . . . then we are obligated to void the contact. You will, of course, be dead or paralyzed or otherwise unfortunate, but you’d be out of the contract. We can’t keep what we take if you don’t get what we promise.”
“Would that be bad for you?” I asked.
He cocked his head, like an animal hearing something not quite disturbing. “It wouldn’t be good, no. But we’re not here to discuss me. I see you’re interested. There’s no time like the present to commit.”
I nodded. There was, in fact, no time like the present.
His expression brightened. “Then shall we proceed?”
“Give me twenty-four hours to think about it.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” he said sadly.
“You seem to want this deal,” I told him, “so I think you can. I’ll be back here, in this coffee shop, in twenty-four hours. If you don’t show, we’ll just say I lost out again, forever. Until the next time.”
“You drive a hard bargain, my friend. A very hard bargain.”
I WENT BACK to the neighborhood, the one full of people with dead eyes. I bought another cup of coffee and stood leaning against the wide of a building, breathing into the cup, letting the steam blast my face.
Those people walked past me, happy and smiling and full of life, hardly seeming to notice that they appeared dead. At least they did to me. Maybe they didn’t look that way to each other. Maybe, I thought, they didn’t look that way to anyone else. What if you had to say no to the deal in order to spot all the people who’d made deals of their own? The more I thought about it, the more sense that made. A beautiful woman walked past me, her face so lovely it almost hurt to see it, but she had the eyes of a corpse. How could it be that no one else was repelled? The only answer was that they didn’t see it.
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