“The donation center is open until five, so I should be home around the same time as you,” Cyndi said as she sat up and stretched. She winced at the pain that shot up her spine. It had been two weeks since the shameful accident, and she wasn’t sure how much longer she could keep the truth from Jack.
“Does it still hurt?” he asked, a look of concern crossing his face.
Seeing his expression made it that much more difficult for Cyndi to lie. She had to either come clean with Jack or stop things with Kevin, completely. “Yeah. I was hoping I didn’t need to fill the prescription again, but—”
“If it hurts, fill it. You don’t have to take them all,” Jack said, the sound of concern thick in his voice.
After several more minutes of mundane conversation, Cyndi was happy to have solitude once again, as Jack finally got out of bed and into the shower. She rolled over and tried to reenter sleep.
Chapter 3
I removed the coin from Cyndi’s hand and leapt from her bedside. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.
I looked at her, expecting to find a dispassionate countenance on her face. Instead, she wore frown lines between her eyes—almost as if she was in misery. I looked around for her medical chart in hopes of determining whether she was on any pain medication. Unfortunately, it was nowhere in sight. I suddenly remembered seeing it hanging just outside the door in the nurses’ station. Not wanting to explain my presence in the ICU ward, I opted to check the label on her bedside IV instead of going for her chart.
As I moved toward the medical contraption positioned on the opposite side of Cyndi’s bed, I heard footsteps right outside her room. The curtain was still closed, and I figured I had only seconds to get out of sight before somebody walked in. I burst toward the bathroom and latched the door behind me with only seconds to spare. Once inside the small tiled room, I discovered that it was a shared toilet with the adjacent room, and its door was wide open. Panic enveloped me as I inched toward the open door and peered into the adjoining room. My fear was quickly abated upon finding the room empty.
I moved back to Cyndi’s common door and waited, listening intently to the sounds that trickled in from her room. I could hear muffled voices, but nothing discernible. As I leaned against the closed door, my mind replayed Cyndi’s morning, clouding my thoughts. I decided that some fresh air was in order.
Hoping to get out of ICU unnoticed, I walked into the adjoining room and out into the wide open corridor. As I looked about the nurses’ station, it was clear that a shift change had taken place, as there were three new nurses milling about behind the counter. To my surprise, nobody paid me any attention. Seeing a second exit just to the right, I took my chances and walked right past the counter and through the door. Without turning to look back, I continued my march and headed for the exit stairway. Moments later, I stepped out into the morning sun. Mindlessly, I moved out into the burgeoning crowd of pedestrians and quickly fell in with the flow of foot traffic.
As I walked silently among the morning crowd, I wondered what I was going to do. I knew I had to collect Cyndi’s soul, but when was it going to come out? Did I have to experience her entire day, leading up to whatever accident had happened to her? I wasn’t sure I had it in me to experience the fornication from her point of view. Just seeing the few moments of her internal thoughts from yesterday morning was enough to make my blood boil.
As I moved through the streets of the city, the ebb and flow of the pedestrian crowd took me along the edge of City Park. Looking out across the vast acreage of green grass and flowering beds, fond memories began to surface in my mind, and I slowed my pace. I felt the people around me become agitated, so I began to make my way to the edge of the crowd.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Pardon me.” I repeated the niceties several times, without a single comment in return. I realized then that there really were some rude people in the city. Had I been one of them before, I wondered.
As I neared the edge of the crowd, I inadvertently bumped into another person.
“Forgive me,” he said as he continued walking away from me. Despite his reluctance to slow down, he at least exercised common courtesy.
Finally making it to the edge of the city herd, I sidled up to a metal rail at the edge of the park and stared out onto the massive lawn. “What the hell am I doing?” I asked.
Slowly, I looked around the park until I noticed a small footbridge a few hundred feet from where I was standing. I remembered crossing that bridge on the numerous walks that Cyndi and I used to take. Without any other reason to return to that bridge but for memory’s sake, I decided to cross it and follow the path for a while.
I stepped back into the flow of pedestrians until I reached the access point, moving through the crowd at my own pace. As I neared the break in the metal railing surrounding the park, I realized that nobody on the sidewalk was paying any attention to me whatsoever. I stopped directly in the middle of the moving crowd, and not a single person bumped into me or stepped around me. It was like I wasn’t even there, and the people somehow just avoided me entirely. That’s when I remembered something that Wilson had said while sitting on his park bench.
He’d said, “There are consequences. You would not be able to talk to anyone from your previous life again. The only conversations permitted would be with the dead or dying, much like I am speaking to you now.”
Curious, I turned to face the oncoming flow of pedestrians head on. As a particularly attractive young woman approached me directly, I screamed, “Can anyone see me?” at the top of my lungs. Not a single reaction from anyone in the crowd. I was invisible to the world around me. I began walking against the flow of the crowd, and not a single person bumped into me or stopped because of me being there. Everyone just … avoided me, almost instinctively. That’s when the sudden realization hit me: the person who had acknowledged me not five minutes earlier was the only one who could see me.
I stretched my neck above the crowd in hopes of catching a glimpse of the stranger, although I probably couldn’t have picked him out of a two-person lineup. I should have been disturbed about the entire crowd not acknowledging me, but it was the one stranger that did that really shook me up.
I rushed through the crowd to where I thought I remembered bumping into him, but he wasn’t there. Then I remembered he’d been walking in the other direction. Maybe if I ran in that direction I could find him again.
I began pushing my way back through the crowd, wishing I could talk to someone, anyone, that could help me complete my job. If Wilson could have only stuck around for a little while . . .
Suddenly, I vanished from the crowded sidewalk and reappeared next to Wilson’s dead body.
Chapter 4
“What the hell?” I said. Again, my stomach felt a little queasy, but I didn’t retch this time.
Wilson’s body continued to sit and stare at the faded billboard, his eyes beginning to develop a white fog. Freaked out by his bizarre, zombie-like eyes, I dropped my hand over his line of sight and tried to force them closed. But rigor mortis had set in and they were fixed open. I had a crazy idea to put sunglasses on him. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a pair with me, so I began to check Wilson’s pockets. In the first pocket I searched, I found a vintage pair of horn-rimmed shades and slid them onto his face. I leaned back and smiled. “When you’re cool, Wilson, the sun never stops shining.”
Satisfied with my attempt at lightening the mood, I sat down next to the dead body. “What’s going on, Wilson? I thought I was making progress this morning, but when I tried to take Cyndi’s soul, nothing happened. I opened the box and struggled to get her mouth open, but zilch. Does she need to be awake? Does she need to say something? What?” I leaned back and tried to figure out what I might have missed, but I couldn’t focus on any one thing. So many thoughts were galloping through my mind. “And another thing. I seem to keep mysteriously beaming, or whatever it’s called, from place to place,” I said. I leaned back and looked up into the cloudle
ss sky.
There was no response. The only sounds present were those echoing through the bustling city streets. That, and the sound of an approaching car.
I looked up the street and caught site of a police cruiser approaching slowly from the left. “Shit,” I said in a low voice.
Before I could get up from the bench, the cop car stopped directly in front of our park bench and the passenger window rolled down.
“Hey, buddy. Wake up. It’s time to move along now.” Wilson didn’t respond. I laughed.
“Hey. I said it’s time go!” the cop yelled from his cruiser. Moments later he got out of the passenger seat and slowly approached the park bench, his hand on his holster.
“What do you think this is? Let’s get a move on before I haul you in.” The cop stopped directly in front of Wilson, leaned down, and shook his lifeless shoulder. “Hey, buddy, are you all right?”
Wilson’s body drooped.
“Hey, hold yourself up now,” the cop said, but it was too late. Wilson’s body continued to slide to the right, nearly rolling off the edge of the bench. The cop touched Wilson’s neck, most likely searching for a pulse.
“Hey, Pete,” he said to his partner still seated behind the wheel of the cruiser. “I think we’ve got a dead one here. His body is cold, and I can’t find a pulse. You better call for a bus. I’ll see if he has an ID.”
The cop began to turn out Wilson’s pockets, starting with his back pockets first, but Wilson didn’t have a billfold. Next he checked the front pockets of Wilson’s trousers, and again he came up empty. Finally he opened up Wilson’s suit jacket and pulled a rosary from the inside pocket. After examining it for a few moments, the cop placed it in Wilson’s shirt pocket.
“He’s got nothin’, Pete. No ID, no wallet. He’s a John Doe,” the cop said as he returned to the cruiser. He leaned into the open door window to converse with his partner.
As he did so, I looked back at Wilson and could see the rosary slightly visible over the edge of his pocket. I knew then it might be more beneficial to me than it would be to the cops or the morgue. I reached over and tried to remove it from his pocket, but it was stuck. It actually felt like it was cemented in place. I looked back at the cop car, and both officers were staring in my direction. I tried again, but the rosary was still firmly in place. I wondered if while the cops looked at Wilson’s body, it somehow prevented me from taking the rosary from his pocket.
I stood up and stepped behind the park bench. As I did so, the cops turned their attention to something on the dash of their cruiser. At that moment, I quickly reached into Wilson’s pocket and pulled the rosary out effortlessly. It’d been quite some time since I’d practiced any form of religion, but I recognized the rosary as a Chaplet of Divine Mercy, just like the one my grandmother had. I slipped it in my pocket and walked away.
“Good-bye, Wilson. I hope you have a peaceful afterlife,” I said as I walked directly in front of the idling car. The cops paid me no attention.
As I crossed the street, I tried to figure out how it was that I could travel in jumps, or whatever it was. I thought back to the sidewalk in front of the park where I had just been, recalling what it was that I was thinking of at the time, and then I vanished once again.
Chapter 5
“Shit!” I said as I appeared on that very same sidewalk near the park entrance. At least the nausea wasn’t accompanying the travel jolt any more.
Once I regained my bearings, I again looked around for the guy who had bumped into me earlier. I knew it was a long shot to find that one person in a city full of millions of active people, but I knew I wasn’t imagining things. Or was I? Did he really bump into me?
Concluding that the guy was long gone by now, I decided to see if I could hone the transport thing a little more. I figured it was controlled somehow by my thoughts. When I traveled to Cyndi’s hospital earlier and then when I was beamed back to where Wilson was, I had been thinking about them individually just before I jumped. Then, just now, I was thinking about being right here in front of the park entrance, and poof.
I wondered . . . I thought of a new place, somewhere that I hadn’t yet visited by the mystical transportation technique. Then, I vanished.
When I rematerialized, I stood in front of my own apartment. The door was open, but a wide strip of yellow crime scene tape crossed the opening. I ducked under the tape and walked in. Nothing appeared to have been disturbed in the past thirty-plus hours. Cyndi’s heels were still on the kitchen floor, and the dirty dishes still sat in the sink. I moved farther into the apartment and down the hall.
As I approached the bedroom, visions of the previous day came flooding back. I pushed the detestable act from my mind and walked in. The curtains were now drawn, and there was a lab technician analyzing the room. He was taking samples from the bed and nightstand. This must have been the crime scene, I surmised. I wondered if Cyndi had been beaten. I wanted to ask the tech, but I knew he couldn’t see or hear me.
I moved past him and into the bathroom, looking up at the mirror in an attempt to see my own reflection. I could in fact see myself, but only faintly, like I was an apparition. I was transparent, as was everything that was on me. I looked at my business suit and noticed that the lapels were stained with vomit. If I were to change, I wondered, would my new clothes be translucent as well?
I darted from the bathroom and into the closet. I quickly flipped through the stack of hats on the top shelf and grabbed my favorite Yankees ball cap before returning to the mirror. The hat was just as transparent as the rest of me. I took the hat off and it remained transparent, but as soon as I placed it on the vanity, it became solid once again. Curious, I reached over and picked up the hand towel from the counter, and as I did so, it blinked into transparency in the reflection.
“Cool.”
I tossed the hand towel back on the vanity and headed back into the closet. Although nobody could see me, I could see myself, and I didn’t want to walk around wearing barf-stained clothing for the rest of eternity. As I browsed through my clothes, I realized that my choices were rather mundane. I thought of what Wilson had worn when we met and wondered if that was what he had been wearing when he became a soul collector or if it was a style that he’d adopted along the way. Either way, I felt I needed a new look. But until I could arrange some alone time in a menswear store, I’d have to choose something from my own collection.
After nearly twenty minutes of cycling through my entire wardrobe, I picked out a simple black suite with a white shirt. And although wearing ties made me feel staunch and uptight, I donned a thin black tie today, in honor of the multitude of ties that Cyndi had given me over the years. A smile crossed my face as I remembered her gifting me a tie for every year that we’d been together. The smile quickly vanished though as I wondered if all those years were filled with lies.
Once I was redressed, I reentered the bedroom. The crime scene examiner was finished processing the bed and had moved on to the dresser. As I walked past him, I said, “You’re gonna to have a blast once you get to the bath and the closet.” I smiled at my own sarcasm as I walked out into the living room.
Looking around, most likely for the last time, I began to wonder where I would sleep. Would I have a place to live? If I was to live life at an eighth the pace as everyone else, I’d certainly be around for quite some time. Would I even need to sleep? Would I eat?
I shook the many questions from my head and focused on the importance of the now. I needed to finish figuring out how the transportation thing worked. From what I’d gathered, all I had to do was think of a place and envision myself there. To try this out, I thought about one of my favorite vacation spots in the world—Hampton Court in England. I then envisioned myself standing in the middle of the king’s throne room. Within seconds, I was whisked off to the sixteenth-century palace. After walking around for a few moments—unseen by anyone, naturally—I thought about Wilson’s bench and envisioned myself there. Once again I appeared at the lone
some park bench within seconds.
“I think I’ve got this,” I said, but Wilson was no longer on the bench. The area had been cleared and the body most likely was off to the city morgue. Oddly, even though I barely knew the guy, I had a sudden feeling of sadness for the old man. Here he was, a soul collector for what, nearly sixty years? And now he was gone, not missed or mourned by anyone. I wondered who would miss me once I was discovered gone.
Not wanting to go down that depression-riddled rabbit hole, I decided I needed to face the challenges in front of me. I thought about Cyndi’s bedside chair and then I was there.
Chapter 6
Standing next to the bed, looking down at her beaten and bruised flesh, remorse flushed over me once again. I sat in the chair and wove her lifeless hand into my own.
“Where did we go wrong?” I asked. “Was it something I did or didn’t do?”
I caressed her hand, trying to will her to answer my questions. It felt like a wasted effort. I slipped her box from my pocket once again, hoping that I had endured enough of Cyndi’s final day to earn her soul.
I placed the box upon her chest and opened it. Nothing happened. I slid my finger between her lips in a halfhearted attempt to free her soul, but it was no use. Resigned to the fact that I had to finish reliving her day, I swapped the box for the coin from my pocket and placed it in her open palm.
Chapter 6.5
Walking down the busy sidewalk, Cyndi headed toward the foundation. From the moment she had woken up and heard Jack’s thoughtful words, her mind had gradually escaped the dreamlike state that clearly distorted her feelings for Kevin, and masked those that she had for Jack. Deep down, she knew that their fling had run its course, and it wasn’t good for her mental state to continue on with it. No, she had to end it. She knew that if she didn’t do it now, she might begin to develop stronger feelings for him, while pushing Jack further away. Deep down, she loved Jack, always had. But there was just something missing when it came to her feelings for Jack that she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Was that a reason to leave him? After so many happy years? She didn’t know. She was confused.
The Borrowed Souls: A Novel Page 6
