GLASS SOUP

by Jonathan Carroll

  And how did the priest know? Had this man recently died and then come back to regale the crowd with what he saw on the other side? As that thought crossed his mind, Flannery recognized Ettrich and Flora standing on either side of Isabelle. Both women looked especially good today. Black clothes really did highlight the female figure. He looked them up and down slowly with great lascivious appreciation. Flora had better breasts, but Isabelle had those long shapely legs Flannery preferred on a woman. He wondered what Isabelle was like in bed. It would be so much simpler if he could just kill her and her boyfriend and then go home. Unfortunately however she was pregnant with that child, that supremely dangerous child, and Ettrich was the father. Plus unlike the priest at the funeral nattering on about the hereafter, Ettrich really had returned from the dead which made him dangerous in his own right.

  No, Flannery couldn’t kill either of them. But he could make their every day misery and eventually drive Isabelle mad. Then she would run from her cursed life and enter the other dominion without hesitating. That was the plan and it cheered him. Raising his chin high, he moved toward the mourners.

  Looking at Flora, he thought of their relationship and how they had met. Or rather, how he’d arranged their meeting. Like many rich aimless women, Flora Vaughn considered herself to be very spiritual. She had originally tried reading the likes of Thomas Merton, P.D. Ouspensky, and Krishnamurti but her flitty, forever distracted attention span found them all much too dense and difficult to grasp. So she settled for the kinds of books and thinking that were accessible, blandly inspirational, and appeasing at the same time. The sort of New Age/self-help bunk that said You are a terrific person even though you think you’re a piece of worthless shit. But guess what? You can be even better if you follow these easy steps.

  They met at a Rick Chaeff lecture. Chaeff was the author of the bestselling book An Open Place and was touring Europe at the time to promote various translations of his work. Flora had arrived at the venue early so as to find a good place to sit for the lecture. She loved An Open Place and often carried a copy of it in her purse. The large room filled quickly.

  Eventually a big burly guy with a beard sat down next to her. He was holding a copy of the book. When she glanced over, she noticed that it was full of yellow Post-it notes marking different passages throughout. Flora grinned because her other copy at home looked exactly like that, only her Post-its were blue and not yellow.

  “You’ve been doing your homework, huh?” She pointed to his book. She spoke in English because the man next to her looked either English or American. He had the sort of hearty outgoing aura that announced Hiya, How’re you doing?

  He looked at her, perplexed a moment, then down at his book and slowly began to smile. “Do you know today was the first time I found out where the title of this book comes from? I never knew it before and I must have read the damned thing four times already.” She didn’t recognize it, but he spoke with an Australian accent.

  Intrigued, Flora smiled. She was wearing an anthracite-blue silk dress with a high neckline that clung to her in a nice way. It made her look both sexy and serious. “Really? Where does it come from?”

  The big man tapped the book. “The Bible; the lines are from Psalms:

  “ ‘He brought me out into an open place; he

  rescued me because he delighted in me.’”

  Flora sat back and crossed her arms, very impressed. “Wow! That’s exactly the whole point of the book.”

  “That’s right. But why didn’t Chaeff say in the book where the title came from? I learned something else too—”

  He was interrupted by a woman standing at the front of the room tapping the microphone with a pencil to get people’s attention. Obviously things were about to begin, but Flora was distracted now and wanted to hear the rest from this guy. Bending closer to him, she whispered, “What else did you learn?”

  “How to read in the dark.”

  She was flabbergasted and her face showed it. “Reading in the dark” was an essential metaphor at the heart of An Open Place. It had to do with learning to merge the human spirit with the five senses and thereby enhance their power immeasurably. Author Chaeff repeatedly stressed that accomplishing it was crucial to the spirit’s growth and a goal he had worked toward but never once achieved.

  “No! Is that true? You really did it?”

  Flannery nodded and slowly raised his right hand, palm out, like a witness swearing to the truth in court.

  He introduced himself as Kyle Pegg. She thought it an odd name but when he said he was Australian, it somehow seemed more acceptable. Plus she was curious. “Do you really know how to read in the dark?”

  “Yes, I do now. And you know what? It’s not that hard to learn.”

  What Flora and the rest of the world didn’t know was Rick Chaeff and most other self-help gurus floating around out there in gullible land were all creations of Chaos, as was Kyle Pegg/John Flannery. It was a minor but interesting way to fuck people up that worked surprisingly well. All you had to do was make them aware of their shortcomings, which wasn’t hard in this age of guilt and doubt. Next, convince them that they were nevertheless close to “the Answer,” the key to happiness, the end of the rainbow, Nirvana… whatever. Only a few baby steps more and you’ll be there if you follow my instructions.

  Except there was no there there because people were constantly changing and so were their needs and desires. They could never land on one spot and stay—sure that this was their happiness forever. Because mankind had the attention span of a housefly. How many houseflies do you know that have found their bliss and stay at home evenings?

  Of course Kyle Pegg knew how to “read in the dark.” It was no more than a parlor trick, a bad magician’s sleight of hand. He could teach it to anyone in fifteen seconds.

  For Flora, the Chaeff lecture turned out to be okay but nothing special. Perhaps she would have liked it more if she hadn’t met Kyle Pegg and he’d set her mind spinning before the talk began.

  The question-and-answer session at the end was interminable. Flora’s hands were crossed but she wasn’t aware that she was nervously jiggling her sunglasses up and down until Kyle looked over, distracted by the commotion. He looked at the sunglasses, then at her and raised his eyebrows as if to ask if anything was wrong with her.

  She made an exasperated face and hissed, “These questions are so stupid. If they’d read his book they’d know all this stuff.”

  “Do you want to go have a cup of coffee?”

  She was surprised that he was willing to just stand up and walk out on the spur of the moment. She liked that kind of courage and spontaneity. Although tempted by his offer, she shook her head. “We can’t go now—it’d be rude in front of all these people. We’ll go after.”

  He didn’t argue. He knew she would say no but wanted her to think he was game for anything when it came to making her happy.

  Afterward they sat in the Café Schwarzenberg eating pieces of chocolate and marzipan cake the size of small pianos. Kyle had two. Flora was tickled both by his gluttony and his obvious enthusiasm for her. Flora was a drama queen. She demanded the limelight. If you were willing to accept those two qualities, then she was your best friend forever, and she was a very good friend indeed.

  Her husband and children adored her but like everyone else in her circle, they danced to her tune and knew when to run from her temper. She was not content with one lover, so she usually had two. Every one of her men was completely different from the other. She told her boyfriends point-blank that she couldn’t imagine being monogamous, and that included them too. Take it or leave it. Sometimes people did leave. A lover walked out, friends got fed up with her vain nonsense and said no more. Flora Vaughn was hurt by these people but not for long. She was Italian. She was impatient. Life was opera. It was too interesting to her to get stuck on any one thing or person. She knew there were many others she could love and like and get along with, so it was rarely a big loss when someone did say bast
a to her.

  What Flannery/Pegg found most interesting about Flora was her uncanny ability to bring out qualities in people they never knew they possessed. For example from the beginning, she saw him as a sexy guy and took him to bed every chance she got. Big fat John Flannery. He thought it was funny because that went completely against the game plan he had devised to win her heart. But he had to give her credit—she was such a passionate and wanton lover that he had a really good time. Plus she taught him an array of sexual tricks that he immediately put to good use with her friend Leni.

  When they first met, Flora’s husband was a brilliant, sweet, dull industrialist who derived great pleasure from ironing his own three-hundred-dollar shirts while listening to obscure Sibelius symphonies. She rolled up her sleeves and tunneled beneath his ironed layers into some undiscovered part of his soul. There she found a suppressed weekend Rambo who, at her encouragement, took up archery and twice bungee-jumped off the eight-hundred-foot-high Donauturm. She was an interesting contradiction, especially for someone as self-absorbed as she was. But Flora was genuinely empathetic and understanding much of the time. It was one of the reasons why her good friends loved her.

  Still, there were limits. Leni never trusted Flora enough to tell her about John Flannery. She never told Isabelle either, although she had planned to. The problem with Flora was too often she took off in the worst possible direction with any new piece of information. Told it to the wrong people, or blabbed about it to others when it should have remained secret. She did this only because she was so happy and excited for you, but too often her enthusiasm had caused big problems. Or she would ask intimate embarrassing questions, the answers to which were either none of her business or ones you weren’t ready to give yet.

  Soon after they met, Kyle Pegg asked Flora not to tell anyone about him or their relationship. When she indignantly asked why not, he said the perfect thing to shut her up forever: “Because INTERPOL is looking for me. If they find me, I’m cooked.” That was all. His admission was so unexpected and exciting that she locked it inside her heart and never told a soul. Kyle said almost nothing more about it in all the time they spent together. Once he alluded to his “problem” having to do with counterfeiting American dollars in Syria, but no more. She wanted to know everything but the only other bit he admitted to was the fact that his name wasn’t Kyle Pegg, which was sort of the truth anyway. When she asked what his real name was, he hesitated and looked at her appraisingly. In a grave voice he said, “Maybe I’ll tell you when I believe I can trust you.”

  It was thrilling. She had never been with a criminal before. And a counterfeiter wasn’t a killer or anything. What was the term for it—victimless crime? She was involved with a man on the lam from the law who read Rick Chaeff books and treated her like a queen. Flannery cooked dazzling meals for Flora. He told her stories of his life and exploits in places like Samarqand and Aleppo. This man knew things. Strange, marvelous bits of trivia spilled out of him in a continuous entertaining flow. “Did you know the woodcock shits before it flies, so when you cook the bird you can eat all of it—the guts, everything.” “Historians say the first bread was probably made by accident about eight thousand years ago.” His conversation was peppered with wonderfully appropriate proverbs that made her laugh out loud. “When luck gets tired, it’ll even sit down on a dumb cow.” And sometimes his insights about life made her look at her life with startlingly new perspective.

  While making a shopping list one morning, Flora began daydreaming about Kyle Pegg and unconsciously wrote the word fireplace on the piece of paper. Because that’s what her newest lover was for her—a large, crackling fireplace that you wanted to sit by and watch for hours. It radiated warmth and comfort, but don’t ever forget the fire inside. Kyle was a criminal but that made him even more appealing to her.

  Flora’s criminal stopped now at the rear of the crowd to survey the faces and postures of the mourners who had gathered to pay their last respects to Leni Salomon. There was her husband. Flannery knew Michael Salomon because he had studied the man for some time to see if he could use him in any way. He was a handsome fellow, but those good looks were really his only high point. From certain angles he vaguely resembled Simon Haden. It made sense that Leni had slept with both men.

  Michael was a dentist and an oral surgeon. Leni made false teeth. They met when he visited her office one day to supervise work on a very complicated bridge for a child who had lost most of his teeth in a horrendous accident. Leni made the bridge and it was perfect, more than perfect. Sitting at her workbench, she held it out to the handsome dentist on her open palm and said, “Here you go—false teeth for mice.” They started dating. He was able to convince her that he was more interesting than he really was. Months later when he proposed marriage she said yes because something about him made her feel safe and protected. He secretly loved the fact she was both fine-looking and lame. There was something poignant about that, a kind of cosmic balance. He was fluent in English which was a real plus because she loved speaking that language. He owned a Laverda motorcycle for a while and looked heroic on it. She liked to ride with him, her cheek pressed to his back, arms wrapped tightly around his waist. Michael treated her like a lady and his absolute equal. They lived well. She owned two horses. He made a lot of money even though he was only an average oral surgeon. But he had trained in America which gave him a certain prestige with the Viennese. Both of them liked grilled salmon, ambient music, and contemporary fiction. He was a bore; she was a bit of a scold and at times a malcontent. They got along if they weren’t around each other too much.

  Now Leni was dead and he was bereft. How could this happen? Dentists plan. They map things out before they begin. He’d had the rest of their life together altogether in his head. Next year he would try and convince her to have a child. He wanted to build a house on a lake and fish there with his son.

  Flannery watched all this chaos, loss, and confusion twirl around now in Michael Salomon’s eyes, like a car careening on black ice, that great phrase for those insidious patches of hidden ice that catch drivers unaware in winter and from one second to the next send their cars flying off the road or into deadly spins. Dr. Salomon had been on black ice since hearing that his wife was dead. The horror was not only the total loss of control but the fact he could not get off this ice. Every way he turned in his life now there was only more confusion, more facets of loss. He had genuinely loved her, he had, but she had been just one element of his busy successful life. Only when she was gone did he realize what weight and importance Leni had carried.

  Now Michael looked from her coffin to the ground, the damp brown-black earth that would first hold his wife’s small body, then her bare bones, then whatever was left—a few teeth, a rotted shoe curled like a potato chip by dampness, and whatever crumbling faded cloth that managed to survive the long journey beneath the earth down the years.

  It was at that moment, this obscene moment between recognition and closure for Michael Salomon, when Leni’s ghost appeared to him and all the people attending her burial that morning, including John Flannery.

  Forty-one people had come. Some of them had known the deceased woman well, some barely at all. Some had been invited to the ceremony; some had heard about it from others or read the public announcement in the newspapers. Two of her former boyfriends were there. One of them still vaguely loved her. An old university classmate showed up who had hated Leni and vice versa. The only reason why this woman came was to gloat. A couple of children came; one because he was the dead woman’s nephew, the other because her parents could not find a babysitter in time. There was a seventy-nine-year-old pensioner who had not known the deceased, but stopped by on his morning walk simply because he enjoyed the communal feeling of funerals. About half of the people had eaten breakfast. Some hadn’t, and some could not because they knew that later they would be going to a burial.

  At precisely 11:17 the same image appeared in the minds of every single person in attendance: L
eni sat at the kitchen table in her apartment, facing forward as if she were a television news broadcaster facing the camera. She wore the black dress she was buried in. The expression on her face was calm and purposeful—nothing more. She held up a white piece of paper in front of her. Written on it in thick black, hand drawn letters were the words Glass Soup.

  Staring straight ahead, she raised this paper in front of her face to give a better view to what was written there. A moment later she lowered it and mouthed the two words. Glass Soup. Then she nodded as if to say Yes, you heard me right—Glass Soup.

  The children were the first to react to this vision of the dead woman. The little girl, who had come because there was no babysitter for her, immediately closed her eyes and made a wish. At just that moment she had been thinking about fairies, so she presumed quite reasonably that what she saw was a fairy in black who appeared because she’d been summoned. The little girl wished for an elephant; but only a small blue one that could get into bed with her at night and keep her company.

  The little boy knew that the woman he saw was his aunt Leni. But he had only the vaguest idea of what dead meant, so he sniggered. He was just beginning to learn how to read, but only in German. He did not know what the English words glass soup meant. So he sniggered at her and the stupid words she was showing that he did not understand. He would ask Aunt Leni what they meant when he saw her again.

  The adults had a wide range of reactions to the vision. Their faces showed surprise, consternation, some were distraught, and some were delighted because they believed in various gods and were sure that this vision of a living Leni Salomon at her own funeral was a sign from above. But none of these people, not one, not even John Flannery, thought that what they had just witnessed had also been seen by others. That is the wonder.