F&SF 2011-11-01 - Nov_Dec

by F

  It was through TV work that I met Bob. He was at a wrap party for the second season of "Leaping Lizards," the network sitcom that became my sinecure for six years. Bob attended, invited by a writer who was interviewing the stars for a magazine article. He looked so out of place that I was moved to engage him in conversation. I was delighted to find out he was the only one present who knew anything at all about what I considered my real work, even if he didn't know about the poetry. How could he? Hardly any of it had been published, and most of that in literary journals with tiny circulations. But Bob read the sf magazines and he remembered my name.

  I mentioned the poetry and he asked to read some of it. Not only did he read it, but he made astute observations, all the while apologizing for his lack of formal education and saying that the only poetry he really understood was the limerick.

  "You have nothing to apologize for, Bob," I said, an opinion I would voice on more than one occasion. "You have a sharp and analytical mind."

  It was true, except when it came to his personal life. There he was completely at a loss, unable to form any kind of romantic attachments, except for his brief time with Rosa, who was more like a mother than a girlfriend in many ways. He clung to friends until they were forced to find some way out of the relationship, despite their fondness for him. He was invariably injured, although I'm sure no one ever meant to hurt him. It was just the way things were. The way he was.

  I encouraged him to try writing and acting, but he never did. He loved the arts, sure, but he would never give them a try. He always protested that he couldn't stand the uncertainty of such a life. The best he could do was breathe the same air as the creative people he admired, collect their work, and slog through rush-hour traffic to his dreary job five days a week so that he could enjoy his passions on the weekends and evenings.

  His birds, his collections, and his friends were all he cared about, but even those, as dear to him as they were, couldn't satisfy him. I suppose that was what accounted for Bob's final collection. He loved his Blu-rays and CDs, but they were inanimate if he didn't play them. He loved his books, comics, and posters, but they meant nothing until he took them out and looked at them. He loved his birds most dearly, but their conversations were severely limited. He adored his friends, but they grew apart from him, hurting him.

  But souls in bottles...? Even if souls were kept under glass, they could still reason, couldn't they? They would never leave him. Maybe they even knew he was there, taking care of them. Maybe they appreciated him. I remembered what he said about feeling them.

  Bob's jar was sitting on the kitchen table. I had just brought it down from the attic. The glass was perfectly clear except for my finger smudges and the distortion of its curves. I picked it up, wiped it with a paper towel, and held it up to the light.

  "You in there, Bob?" I asked.

  I sensed nothing, no emanation of any kind. I put the jar down and drew up a chair to stare at it. Still nothing. I rested my palm on it. I closed my eyes and waited.

  A slight vibration may have been caused by a truck rolling past outside, or even a temblor.

  Or maybe it was Bob, saying hi.

  "How ya doin', buddy?" I asked the Mason jar, feeling foolish but speaking with sincerity. "If you're in there, I guess you'll want to know that Rosa and I are taking care of business for you. We found homes for the birds and gave your movies and books and records away...and we distributed the souls to the right people, just as you wanted. We're trying to do right by you and follow your directions to the letter. Oh, and I'm donating my stipend to a bird sanctuary."

  Whether he could hear me or not, I was sure he would have approved. Somehow this experience made me appreciate belief in the supernatural in a way that reading about it never could. Bob had followed his own spiritual dictates and now I was kneeling at the altar he'd built out of discs, paper, bird doo, and glass.

  "You're coming home with me, Bob." I picked up the jar and put it in a cardboard box I'd already stuffed with padding for the drive over to my place. I saw Luisa through curtained windows as I hefted it across the porch and set it on my car's roof while I searched for my keys. I waved to her and then unlocked the trunk.

  I put Bob's soul inside.

  "It's dark in there, Bob," I said, "but it's the safest way to get you home. It'll just be a little while."

  I got in and started up the Prius, preoccupied with thoughts of how stupid I was to think there could be anything to this odd business. I went through a stop sign and got in a pretty bad accident three blocks away. I don't remember much about it.

  I AWAKENED in the same hospital where Bob died. I was told later that when I became conscious the first thing I asked about was the jar. Nobody knew what I was talking about.

  Medicated, I drifted in and out of consciousness. I suffered two broken ribs, a fractured elbow, and a mild concussion. Every time I went to sleep somebody woke me up.

  "What happened?" I'd ask.

  "You've been in a car crash," a plump nurse named Marie would explain.

  "Where am I?"

  I was told the name of the hospital once again.

  "Is the jar broken?"

  She didn't know the answer to that one.

  Next time I drifted off and somebody awakened me, I asked the same questions. Concussions are like that. If you go into a deep sleep it can easily become a coma, so they have to keep waking you up. But every time I came to I had little or no memory of where I was or why I was there. I asked the same questions so many times that they put a notice on a white board in front of me with answers to all of them except one. It listed the name of the hospital, the fact that I'd been in an accident, and a few other salient details, but nothing about the jar. After a while things started to make some sense.

  I heard Rosa speaking on one of these occasions.

  "It's okay," she said. "I think he knows I'm here."

  "Good," the nurse said. "Don't let him fall asleep, okay?"

  "Okay."

  "I'll be back." The nurse went out to check on some other poor soul.

  "Rosa...," I said in a hoarse voice.

  "Hi," she said, squeezing my hand. "Don't try to talk."

  "I want to," I said, clearing my throat. "Did you do it?"

  "Do what?"

  "Break the bottle at PV."

  "No, I haven't done it."

  "Do you believe there's a soul in that bottle?"

  "Bob believed it."

  "I'm sure he did, but it's still just a bottle."

  "Is it?"

  "Better be," I said, "because I think his soul jar is gone forever."

  "The accident?"

  "Yeah, I was taking it home with me. The jar was in the trunk."

  "Oh." She looked stricken.

  "It happened right near Bob's house," I said. "I barely remember it."

  "You're going to be okay, though."

  "So the doctor tells me."

  "It's a shame it had to happen this way."

  I was in too much pain to shrug. I wasn't sure if she was talking about the jar's loss or my injuries. They seemed like parts of the same thing, but I had no idea what that thing was.

  "His soul could be anywhere by now," Rosa said.

  I sighed. "His soul, if it exists at all, is right where it always was."

  "Where's that?"

  "Nowhere," I said. "Everywhere... How would I know?"

  "But you said—"

  "What I meant is that you can't keep a human soul under glass. If it exists, it's an intangible entity."

  "A spirit."

  "That's another name for it, sure."

  "You can't bring yourself to believe any of it, not even a little bit for Bob's sake?"

  "Let's just say I find it highly unlikely."

  "Unlikely, but not impossible?"

  She had me there. "It's impossible to prove one way or the other. It has to be taken on faith."

  "Well, then."

  "That's the trouble with woo-woo," I said. "You c
an't test it."

  "Maybe we can."

  "Huh?"

  "Some people test for ghosts." Rosa and Ted used to listen to Art Bell late at night, an indulgence I had always frowned upon.

  "Yeah, a smear on a lens or an electromagnetic pulse in an empty house and the true believers are convinced. They don't use anything resembling logic in most cases, because they've already made up their minds."

  "Well, where do you think those smears and electromagnetic pulses come from?"

  "I've got plenty of old pictures with smears on them," I said. "As for the EMPs, they're all around us in any electrically wired house."

  "Oh."

  "But simple facts like that don't stop the nonsense." I realized that I was becoming quite animated for the first time since the accident, trying hard to be logical. "People believe what they want, even if it's magic."

  "Is that so bad?"

  "It's a waste of time."

  "Don't you like to waste time?"

  I laughed a little. "Before Johanna I did, if the company was good."

  "She didn't make you happy, so why go on trying to please her?"

  "Everybody has to smarten up sometime," I said, trying to forget my soliloquy to Bob's jar shortly before the accident.

  "Being smart is one thing, but doubting the wisdom of people who love us is something else."

  "What's that got to do with ghosts?"

  "I'll buy you an EMP detector for your birthday and you can find out," she said.

  I laughed, which made Rosa smile.

  "You're gonna be all right," she said, "as long as you can laugh."

  "It's just the drugs."

  I gave Rosa my house key and she went to my place to check my messages. One was from the towing company. They'd found a briefcase, some loose papers, and an intact cardboard box. They wanted to know if I intended to claim them. I hurriedly punched in their number, afraid that they'd thrown Bob's soul jar out with the trash.

  "We have it here," the woman on the phone told me when I finally got through. "You can pick it up anytime from nine to five at our office."

  "Can you deliver it?"

  "No, sorry."

  "But I'm in the hospital," I explained.

  "Sorry," she said, "We have a strict policy."

  "I'll pick it up as soon as possible," I said.

  "We can hold it another couple days."

  "Thanks, I'll try to get someone over there by tomorrow."

  "Okay," she said. "I hope you feel better."

  I thanked her and hung up. I told Rosa the unexpected news about the jar.

  "It's not broken?" she asked.

  "Apparently not," I said. "I was hit in the front end on the passenger's side and the jar was in a well-padded box in the trunk. It could be shattered inside the box, but they didn't seem to think there was any damage done."

  "They'd hear it tinkling if the glass was broken."

  "Right."

  "I'll pick it up for you today."

  "Thank you, Rosa."

  Rosa had always been someone you could depend on. She not only retrieved the box, but she retrieved me from the hospital when the time came. There was a long wait for the wheelchair, which particularly annoyed me because by then I was capable of walking without help, but it was a hospital rule. Marie offered to wheel me out when they finally found a chair, but Rosa said she'd do it.

  "Did you bring Bob's soul?" I asked her as soon as we were out front in the hazy sunlight. I got out of the wheelchair, blinked, and groped for my shades, tears coming to my eyes because of the brightness.

  "No, it's at your house."

  "You didn't leave it outside, did you?"

  "Of course not. You gave me a key to check your mail and things," she said. "Don't you remember?"

  "Oh, yeah." The concussion and medication had left me with a lot of fuzzy memories of the past few days. It was possible that some memories had been obliterated altogether. I was careful not to bump my cast or rib brace while Rosa helped me get into her car. I was still hurting all over, but Percocet helped. I was quiet while Rosa started up the engine and turned on the stereo.

  "Let's get down to PV and straighten things out," I said.

  "What things?"

  "The souls."

  "How do we straighten them out?"

  "We'll let them go."

  "Bob's too?"

  "Especially Bob's."

  "I thought you didn't believe stuff like that."

  "I don't, but let's say I'm addle-pated from the pain and the meds, just for the sake of argument."

  "Okay."

  "What good would it do to keep him in the jar?"

  "Okay, but how about the bottle he gave me?"

  "I think it's the evil lady he told me about."

  "Why?"

  "The bottle's really old."

  "It's a nice shade of green," she said. "And it's got some kind of foreign writing scratched into it."

  "It's probably Thai, and he said it was green," I said. "I've got a hunch it's the same one."

  "It's a long drive to the beach," Rosa said. "Why don't we do it somewhere nearby?"

  "We need the other soul, too."

  "Look in the back seat," she said, "on the floor."

  There it was. "Good."

  "I've been driving around with it ever since I took possession," Rosa said. "I didn't want to bring it into the house."

  "Why don't we just take them to a hilltop and let them go?"

  Rosa snapped off the radio and eased onto the freeway. I was pretty sure she liked the idea. Since her husband passed away she was willing to do anything to take her mind off her loneliness. I hadn't realized how much I'd missed her, but now I knew we'd always be close.

  We picked up Bob's jar and drove into the San Gabriel hills. Rosa pulled into a turnout overlooking the valley and shut off the engine.

  "Is this okay?" she asked.

  "Fine."

  "It's probably the right thing to do," she said.

  "It'll be symbolic," I said, "if nothing else."

  I felt a mounting sense of excitement. But then Rosa asked a question that dampened the mood.

  "Didn't you say the Thai woman was evil?" she asked.

  "Supposedly some kind of sorceress."

  "Uh-oh."

  "Don't worry, she's had two or three hundred years to mellow out."

  "Why would being imprisoned in a bottle improve her disposition?"

  "Solitude. Just a few days in the hospital made me think about things."

  "Really?"

  "Yeah, now I'm willing to entertain certain...possibilities."

  "Weasel words."

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "I've known you for what, fifteen years? You've always said there's no such thing as the supernatural," she said. "Now you're weaseling."

  "Maybe you're right."

  "I know I am." Rosa frowned.

  "You're a thoughtful person, Rosa."

  "No, I'm a ditz, but that's why I drive up here in the hills, so I can think."

  "This isn't a random spot?"

  "No, you can see for a long way."

  It was true. The suburban sprawl below looked about the scale of an electric train layout. "Have you been up here many times...lately?"

  "Since Ted died, you mean?"

  "You don't mince words, Rosa."

  "Yes, I come here a lot," Rosa said. "It takes too long to drive to the beach."

  "I know how much you miss him."

  "I miss them both." Rosa pulled back the emergency brake. We sat there for a few seconds.

  "Well, if you're right about who's in that green bottle," she said, "I guess there's not much danger to her enemies if we let her go. They're long gone by now."

  "Yeah, and why should she be mad at us for freeing her?"

  Rosa nodded. She got out and walked around to help me. The morning sun felt good and there was a pleasant breeze stirring. She opened the trunk.

  A box rested on the
carpeting. Rosa lifted it out of the trunk and set it down on the gravel. Then she got the other box out of the car, setting it down next to Bob's.

  "These things don't really happen, do they?" Rosa asked.

  "You tell me," I said. "You're the one who listened to Art Bell."

  "That was just for fun."

  "And this isn't?"

  "No."

  I had to agree. Despite the hazy sunlight, I was spooked. It was the first time in my life I'd done anything like this. I had always been contemptuous of people who believe in such things.

  Rosa took out the boxes one at a time and set them on the gravel. First she opened the one with the green bottle and held it to her breast.

  "Here goes," she said, trying to pull out the cork.

  As I had predicted, the effect of centuries made it difficult.

  "Did you remember to use the WD-40?" I asked.

  "I've sprayed it a couple of times," she said. "I thought maybe once it soaked in...."

  She tugged at the petrified cork. She couldn't get it to move.

  "You're stronger," she said. "Why don't you try it?"

  I lifted my elbow to indicate the cast on my right arm.

  Rosa sighed and tried it again.

  "It's not going to come out, is it?" she said.

  "No."

  "I guess I'll have to smash the glass."

  "Maybe you can just break it off at the neck," I said.

  "Maybe."

  She picked up a small rock and held it over the green bottle, hesitating. For a moment I didn't think she'd do it. I must have blinked. I heard the musical shattering of glass without actually seeing her do it.

  A flock of starlings flew over and then the sky was blue emptiness, without a cloud in sight. I wish I could say that the wind became still or I heard a celestial choir or something cinematic; there was nothing my physical senses could perceive.

  But I felt something.