Mirror Ball (continued)

(continued)

In fact, the ragged man was not homeless. He had a room in a tiny rotting hotel with a hot plate, a buzzing box refrigerator, and stacks of magazines piled up against a wall. People assumed he was homeless because he stank and was ragged, because he asked for change, and because he was empty like the girl. His soul hadn’t been stolen; he had lost it, gradually, over a period of years. He had lost much more than she had. Unlike hers, his soul had been connected to his heart. Because his heart had been deranged by the loss, he’d tried to call back his soul by opening his mind. It didn’t work, and he had been without so much of his soul for so long that his open mind was like a gaping wound. His openness had made him wise, but it was not a wisdom he could do anything useful with. His mind hurt him all the time, and the constant hurt made him full of pity for everything that hurt. But because his pity came through his mind, it translated as a thought disturbance rather than feeling, and so was hard to express. He stood before the kneeling girl full of sympathy he couldn’t feel and didn’t know how to express.

“Do you want money?” she asked.

“Could you help me out?” He hadn’t known what else to say. Reflexively he extended his hand.

“Um, hold on.” She opened her purse and pawed through it. Absently, she wondered if the man might rob her. She found her wallet, pulled a dollar from it, and handed it up to him. He took it and paused, as if trying to decide what to do. The circle of whirling lights enclosed them like a spell cast long ago and forgotten, all the force gone out of it but still haunting its spot. He was trying to remember how to talk to girls.

“That’s all I can give,” she said. “I’m not rich.”

He saw she had no idea what was happening to her. Even if he could talk to her, she would not be able to answer. Sorrow and loneliness roared through him—so much force that came to nothing. He decided to try anyway. “You aren’t what you think,” he said.

“I don’t know what I am,” she answered.

You are a sack of things without a sack, he thought, but the thought sped by too fast. “Six farts going off in a bag,” he said. “Broke the bag and fell out.”

She gave a short, nervous laugh. Making a girl laugh—that was good. Grateful for her laughter and wanting very much to help, he decided to show her what was inside him. If you had been looking at him, you would’ve seen him open his coat and stand as if he were sexually exposing himself. But that gesture was symbolic. Hoping that the girl would have eyes to see, he made his coat the cover for his daily self and, in opening it, revealed the disfigurement of his soul. He did it like a leper might stand in mute greeting before another leper. He did it to show understanding and also to warn.

Her personality didn’t see, let alone recognize, what she had been shown; her personality just saw a homeless guy holding his coat open. But beneath her personality her soul saw what he was showing and shrieked in fear. A block away, the missing piece came awake so suddenly that the other souls trapped in the room with it started and stirred, like restive animals. Do not let that happen, it signaled her. Do something—now! NOW!

At that moment, the boy and his guest walked into his room. Even though the boy was drunk, he was sensitive enough to feel the agitation present there. Not guessing what it was, he mistook it for his own excitement, and he thought he was more attracted to this girl than he was. The girl felt it, too, but, likewise, mistook it for the intensity of the boy himself. Within moments, they were stretched out on his bed, kissing. This girl had no intention of revealing her soul. But in the charged atmosphere of the room, she couldn’t hold it back altogether, and it floated to her surface, where he could feel it, just under her skin, delicious and tantalizing. She closed her eyes and arched her neck, and he saw the subtle beauty of her eyebrows, the elegant bone of her nose, the down that covered her face. He felt like he loved her, even though he knew he didn’t.

The ragged man sighed and closed his coat. He thought he saw a flicker of recognition, but she just sat there, staring at him. He tried another approach.

“Why don’t you go home?” he asked. “You shouldn’t be out here.”

“I’m waiting for someone.”

“Oh,” he said. “A … boyfriend?”

“Yeah.”

His memory became a tunnel of girls, and he fell down it. Some of them were shouting angrily, others were indifferent, and some were laughing with happiness and kissing him with warm, live mouths. One was crying because she was pregnant and too young to have a baby. He sighed again. Now here was this one before him, pert and pretty and torn down the middle. Of course this boyfriend had something to do with her predicament, but what could he do about it? He gave up. “Well,” he said, “don’t wait too long, sweetheart.”

“I won’t,” she said. She watched him walk down the street, hunched as if subtly crippled. There was a drunk scream from the next block over, and she heard it as a refrain: Do something—now! Now! She took her cell phone out of her pocket and dialed the boy’s number.

When he picked up the phone, a dark little silence followed his hello and he knew who it was. “Hello?” he said again. The girl on the bed propped her head up with her hand and looked at him. Wonderful: her deep eyes and her blunt-tipped nose and the sharp angle of her elbow.

“We have to talk,” said the voice from the phone.

At the sound of it, her captive soul unfurled itself again, and a wave of urgency passed through the room.

“It’s four in the morning,” he said.

“I know. We need to straighten some things out.”

“Well, we can’t do it now. I have company.” Her soul rolled through the room, crashing like Rip van Winkle’s ninepins. He couldn’t hear it, but his soul, which was getting nervous, roughly and quickly translated it to his mind as Give me back my Golden Arm!

“You treated me like shit!” cried the girl.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “I treated you like you treated me.”

She didn’t say anything. She gazed at the new place inside her, longing to enter it with him. She thought, I love you, I love you, I love you.

He sensed the new place, but he didn’t see what it had to do with him. He sighed. “Call me tomorrow and we can talk,” he said. “But right now, I’m busy.” He hung up and the ninepins crashed again as her soul flung its full weight against the prison door inside him. The girl on the bed sat like an alert cat, sensing an invisible war.

“An old girlfriend?” she asked.

“No, just somebody I went out with once.”

Give me back my Golden Arm!

“I hope she’s not a stalker,” he added. He sat on the bed; his guest sat up and watched him intently. Deep inside him, deeper than dreams, a drum was beating. It had taken several hours for the girl’s call for help to filter down to the bottom of the boy’s soul; it had just now gone through the prison wall and reached the prisoner inside. He recognized her voice instantly. He rose and gripped the handle of the prison door. With all his strength, he pulled from the inside while the female pushed from the outside. Theboy’s inmost foundation began slowly to rock. Debris was loosed. The pit was disturbed.

“Do you want me to go?” asked the tattooed girl. “No,” he said. He meant it; he didn’t want to be alone.

The girl lay against the storefront door, her open lips pressed against the tiny, hateful phone, her eyes closed, her face knit tight with pain. Day was coming. In the shallow dark, the mirror-ball lights swarmed biliously. Her heart felt swollen and grotesque, as if it were taking over her whole body, including her head. Her mind felt nearly gone. But the ragged man had helped her after all. Because a tiny bit of her had seen what he showed and had the sense to fear it, she made herself stand up. “Don’t wait too long, sweetheart,” she muttered through her teeth. “Don’t wait too long, sweetheart.” She imitated the ragged man’s voice as she walked home, hunched in the cold and nearly growling.

The girl from the bar was naked before the boy, as he was before her. She had the turgor of a healthy plant, dense with moisture, so aroused that she was already lost in it. Her soul moved beneath him, luxuriantly turning in her fecundity. The crashing inside him was matched by the hard, socketed joining of their bodies; he pushed from the outside, she from the inside. Deep things were roused and driven toward the surface: Bits of primary matter joined with feeling, memories, and dreams swarmed upward like bats from a dark shaft. The girl beneath him released her own darkness like a wave of perfume. Overwhelmed without knowing why, the boy pressed into her body as if for refuge. She gave it to him, hot and jumping. Her little demon consorts punched their fists in the air and cheered. He let go of everything but the feeling of her body and the sight of her face, her lips parted just enough to show a sliver of teeth. The prison broke. The boy had a sensation of flying as his freed soul shot up and up and up. The boy rolled off the girl, so moved that he nearly passed out. He touched her face with astonished fingers. “Who are you?” he whispered. She smiled. His awe was misplaced, but that scarcely mattered.

Between sleep and wakefulness, he remembered the soul of the girl he’d taken and thrown away; it was like you might suddenly remember something strange that you’d done during a blackout drunk. He got up to look for it, and, to his amazement, bumped into several others before he found it. It was clear what was called for—and yet, as he looked at them, he realized he had grown attached. He had to sit for some moments, just looking at them— Gentleness, Forbearance, Instinct, and Ardor—before he could herd them into the hall and out the door. Perhaps some of them were attached to him, too, for, once outside, instead of dispersing right away, Forbearance and Gentleness clustered at the door, giving off an air of doelike confusion.

But the intrepid soul attached to the brain of the girl who had knelt under the mirror ball that night did not hang around. As soon as he released it, it made a beeline toward its proper owner, who was mercifully still asleep, and so was spared the strange sensation of reentry. The window of her heart was just open enough for it to slip in.

Almost a year later, they passed each other on the street. They might have tried to avoid meeting, except that neither recognized the other until it was too late. This was because the appearance of both had been subtly altered. Each of them was vaguely aware that the other had changed, but neither suspected that the other had a thing to do with it. Each merely recognized the other as an enemy with whom they were no longer at war, and they both had tentative, tolerant eyes that said, I like you fine as long as you don’t start anything. They said, “Hi, how are you?” on the approach and “Good!” on the way past. Both of them turned to look at each other, got caught, and quickly turned back. Neither of them saw their souls, unfurled in the sun and glimmering at each other with recognition and regard.