Soul Suites

by Hulden Morse

  “They say,” Elaine started, “that the smallest caskets are the hardest to carry.”

  “So, you’re telling me that the weight of potential is greater than the weight of memory?”

  “Huh?”

  “A baby is nothing but potential. The parent doesn’t have much memory of the baby. But an adult doesn’t have much potential, what everyone mourns is the memory of them once they’re gone.”

  “But potential is lost in both situations. It’s just that, more potential is lost the younger they are,” Elaine argued.

  “You could say the same thing about memories. Losing a parent, assuming you have this long history with them, should be harder than losing a child where you don’t have as much history.”

  “But that’s almost never the case. I don’t think memory is the primary factor.”

  “So it all comes down to potential?” the doctor asked, his eyes bright with energy.

  “Well, I think it all comes down to what you’re losing. Someone who feels they’ve lost more will inevitably feel more loss,” she responded, not entirely sure why they were still discussing the topic.

  Paul then chimed in from across the room, “So that chick that you saw, Doctor. You think she mourned an unborn baby more than she would have mourned a ten-year-old kid of hers? Hypothetically.”

  “Well, that seems to be what Elaine is saying. Though I think her logic is flawed.”

  “I’m not saying it is universal,” the technician countered, “I’m just repeating a saying that the smaller the casket, the heavier it is. Because the amount of loss is proportional. Something like that.”

  Raymond smiled at her. “I bet it didn’t feel so heavy to her boyfriend.”

  Elaine was about to say something but chose to keep her thoughts to herself. Some things were best left unsaid.

  “Is this what you all do while you’re waiting?” Ramona called from her stool. “Talk about caskets for infants?”

  “Ah, we’re just talking to talk,” the doctor said coolly, afraid that he had gone too far with the conversation. “I don’t mean to belittle it all. I’ve seen my fair share of premature burials. Some harder to watch than others. But it’s good to share experiences amongst ourselves.”

  Paul had set the poster upon a cabinet and was staring at the subject absentmindedly while Elaine looked to her boss, admiring his intelligence but questioning the motives behind such driven actions that created the world around them. Those walls, that equipment, the subjects, the procedures, her paycheck, were all thanks to that man. Yet she could never figure out the true character beneath an exterior that begged people to stay away.

  “Right. How about we bring Ms. Lester back?” Dr. Raymond said.

  The man stalked over to his subject and began chest compressions. The techs had syringes full of cardiac stimulants prepared for the doctor’s use. He enjoyed the work and his responsibilities. That could not be denied. Though he often missed what he had trained to do during his years as a resident. The doctor missed building a relationship with his patients. He could walk into the office and ask them how their day was, how their mother was doing, if they enjoyed their trip last month. And it was rewarding to have them take an interest in his own life. Sometimes he needed that sort of interaction that made the long days and stressful hours worth it.

  The Trial Technicians were nice enough, as were the other members of his team, though Dr. Raymond could never fully be himself in the facility. The man felt like he was constantly hiding, always shying away from truly opening up to someone. Those were not his people. They harmed others because it was interesting or paid well, a most disturbing concept to someone that became a doctor in order to better the world. He simply could not relate to anyone in that building.

  Chapter 22

  Tentacles and porn, bath salts and weed, toilets and clams, desktops and moans. Some things were meant to go together, forming a natural bond that was unmistakably tight and undeniably effective. One could not exist without the other for they complemented one another like child and mother, or pillow and smother. In a world wrought with chaos and eternal ambiguity, the pattern of pairings took on an almost therapeutic role, feeding the anxious public with comfort and knowledge that everything had a lifelong partner, such as the beautifully poetic humans and regret.

  Those ideas sparked and ignited in Damian’s mind, bringing him back to his days in college where drugs started to become an everyday crutch and all the concerns, questions, and fevers of the planets seemed to spontaneously correct themselves. Clarity was brought through the aromatic cloud that Damian called his penetrable wall. It was physical, perceivable, yet one could pass through the grey fog and reach the other side to find an entirely new world where ideas became the foundation for poor life choices. The man was driven mad with philosophical debates within his own head, coming to eye-opening conclusions that made no sense once the drugs had flushed through his system. However, he need only administer another healthy dose of that day’s poison in order to see how simple life could be.

  And while he laid there, curled up beneath his stiff sheets on the bottom bunk, completely sober yet continually reaching for the high he used to enjoy, Damian felt like he had made sense of the world around him. Everything had its place. Everything had a reason and a purpose. Everything except for Charles. His roommate was the CEO of a large company, hardworking and successful, with a family and a home. He seemed pleasant enough and driven to do right by others, yet the man was there with him, in that locked room, within what seemed to be a rehab center. Those two did not go together. Bruises and rings, Damian and Charles. Families and pain, Damian and Charles. He liked to think of himself and that man as equals, but this did not change the fact that his roommate had no reason to be trapped within such a facility. Broken dreams and forfeited opportunities were what brought his own tortured soul to that room. What had led a man who had anything he wanted to be confined in a place he did not want to be?

  “Hey, Charles?” Damian called through the darkness of their room.

  “What’s up?” the CEO said, unable to sleep. He guessed that their light had been switched off hours ago and he had been lying in that bed longer than his memory could recall, though in actuality he had no way of determining exactly how long they had been resting in mutual silence.

  “What are you doing here?” Damian questioned his roommate.

  “I could ask you the same thing.”

  “No. I mean, I get why I’m here. Bad choices, drugs, livin’ in a tent . . . I deserve to be here.”

  “Now wait a minute—”

  “Yes, I made bad choices,” he interrupted. “But you, you I don’t get. How does someone running a big company get here?”

  Charles did not respond immediately, possibly pondering the question at hand or simply unwilling to touch on the subject. His quiet voice eventually cracked through the darkness.

  “Well,” he started, “I went undercover for my company. To find out how we were functioning. A sort of quality control check, if you will. I was on the streets for several days, living and sleeping. I went to bed one night and then woke up here, just like you.”

  “You were pretending to be homeless?” The man didn’t know what to think of such a blatant deception. He knew plenty of people that chose to be homeless, such as himself, though he also didn’t feel like he had much of an option. He could have worked harder to get a job, make some money, get his own apartment, and pay his bills like everyone else, though the point of living sans a roof was to avoid the cumbersome responsibilities that came with being a participant in society. Life was simpler, more enjoyable this way, and he never had to worry about missing credit card payments or servicing his car. He was free to be himself all day, every day.

  Yet Charles had an established life. He had a responsibility to his family and friends. He had a home to look after and payments to make and a company
to run. Ditching well-established obligations was very different from deciding not to take on those obligations in the first place. It was bizarre.

  “So, you just decided to be homeless? With your family there an’ stuff?”

  “Not really,” Charles responded. “It was supposed to be very temporary. I was to be recruited into my company’s program within a week. My wife thought I was on a business trip. She wasn’t supposed to find out that I was sleeping on the sidewalk until after the entire experiment was over. But somehow I ended up here.”

  Damian nodded in understanding. He could sympathize with someone putting every piece of their being on the chopping block in order to pursue a passion. Charles devoted himself to his organization. Damian had devoted himself to art in his younger years. Unfortunately, things changed. And in both their situations, change was not for the better.

  “You’re worried, aren’t you?” the skinny, black man said as he stared at the bottom of his roommate’s bunk.

  “Yeah. I’m pretty damn terrified.”

  “I get what you’re saying about this place. Some of the things are weird. Like locking the doors and the guards. But I just can’t believe people would be that mean. Maybe I’m in denial or whatever, but for right now, for me, it’s a very pleasant place to be.”

  “I understand, Damian. I do. But we need to accept what’s going on around us. They threatened me today. With something called a water trial.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I haven’t a clue. But it seems like they’re using it as a punishment for me trying to escape.”

  “Well, maybe you shouldn’t have tried to escape.”

  Charles chuckled to himself, admitting defeat against the man’s logic.

  “Look,” Charles started, “I am—”

  A scream penetrated their wall, jolting both men with frightened surprise. It was not loud, possibly coming from a faraway room, though they could tell that whoever emitted the cry had put all of her energy into the outburst. The scream lasted several seconds, several long, agonizing seconds, before it quickly ceased and the echo faded from the dark room.

  Both men laid there in horror, unsure what to make of the spine-tingling sound. Was someone in trouble? Should they try to do something? But what? They were trapped in that small space without any means of escape. The silence was painful as it crept around the room, bleeding down every wall and every piece of furniture, reminding them that appearances were not always indicative of what happened within.

  They suspended all conversation, waiting for another screech to find its way into their pitiful home. With thickening tension and violent turmoil brewing within Charles’s mind, he swung at the mattress beneath him, beating his fist into the soft springs, never once feeling as if he had relieved any stress. A dark aura (sinister, conniving) descended upon the CEO as he drove himself further into a realm from which there was no escape. His mind desperately fought to remain free from those pits, yet the fatigued body could no longer prevent itself from succumbing to despair. He longed to scream, but knew it would only solidify his spot in that horrid world. He would not go back! He would never return! And here Charles was, on the brink of destruction, fueled by an outside source yet ultimately condemned by the weakening of his psyche. He was lost.

  “So, uh,” Damian said in an obvious attempt to distract himself, “what got you interested in helping the homeless?”

  “Now that is a great question,” Charles responded quickly, grateful to have something to talk about that would bring his mind away from the self-deprecating tendencies he was failing to subdue.

  “When I was a boy,” he said, picturing an eight-year-old version of himself sitting uncomfortably on the stone steps of his childhood home, “someone spoke to me and the other kids, talking about life and how to be a good person. I don’t remember much about the speaker or much of what she said, but I remember how she closed her presentation.”

  This famous philanthropist had told him that every creature on the Earth had a right to life. Humans had the power to take life or give it. Each person was challenged with making the ultimate choice to either be the giver or the taker. When Charles Pearson heard this as a child, he had only just recently discovered his mother dead in their bathroom, a belt tied around her scarred arm and the pupils of her eyes so unnaturally large that he could scarcely make out the brilliant green hue they used to carry. She had looked alive, an expression of surprise on her face, yet he instantly knew that she was dead. It was something inherent in a human, possibly in other animals too, that one could sense the absence of life from a body. Maybe that was the soul in which so many people believed.

  The mother’s demise came only two years after his father had left. The five-year-old Charles did not understand why his daddy had disappeared or to where he had gone, but from that point on he and his mother were alone. And not much later, he was alone. And before he could blink his equally green eyes, young Charles found himself in a dilapidated orphanage with twenty other boys, fighting for attention from the understaffed caregivers that did their best to maintain a façade of love and concern in a house for the left behind and forgotten.

  That was when Charles heard the game-changing words of that philanthropist. The speaker had been brought to the orphanage by the building’s owner, Mr. Molteers, in hopes that seeing the sorry state of those boys would open the wallet of such a successful person. The caregivers relayed the owner’s intentions to the boys and instructed them to look sad and lonely and tell the philanthropist all that they wanted to do with their lives. Charles had never thought of that before. Charles had never been asked a question like that. He couldn’t imagine having a career or a family or ever making something of himself. A future was never something he had considered possible.

  The young boy felt lost throughout the entire presentation. The philanthropist was given the opportunity to speak before the orphans in an attempt to inspire them to reach for their dreams, but Charles did not feel as if he belonged there. He wanted to leave the room so badly. He continually looked around for an excuse to rise from the ground and scurry back to his bed. No excuse came, and the confusing adult continued to spew out ideas and phrases that made no sense to him. That was until she uttered those words that were forever branded in Charles’s mind: “Either be the giver or the taker.”

  Charles reached the conclusion of his story and realized how similar he was to Damian. They had both lost their families, yet in very different circumstances, and they had somehow reacted to their tragedies in such different ways.

  “I decided then that I wanted to be a giver of life. The other boys joked after the presentation, saying that they wanted to take away life and they kept hitting each other while yelling that they were stealing their life. It became a game, and I didn’t get it. I couldn’t fathom why someone would joke about that. I was eight! And I decided then that I was going to do anything I could to help people. When I had reached my own dreams by creating a family and living a stable life, I wanted to help others reach their dreams.”

  They did not talk for a few minutes. Charles fought away the tears that threatened to appear as he imagined his youth, and Damian was busy processing the information that had just been divulged.

  “I never realized how similar we are,” Damian said after a while.

  “I know,” Charles responded, concerned that their connection extended deeper than the loss of their families at a young age. Though when his roommate asked another question, one that shook the CEO to his core, he realized that this man may have been thinking the same thing.

  “Uh, Charles?” Damian said. “Ya ever thought about suicide?”

  “Um, yeah… Started when I was nine.”

  “Jesus. What happened when you were nine?”

  Charles swallowed hard. “Mr. Molteers put a lock on his office door. And started working with us boys one on one.”

  Chapt
er 23

  Paula Hamilton contacted the directors of the five districts in question and demanded that they perform a full internal audit. She was met with quite a bit of pushback from those directors, who stated that they typically planned ahead for internal audits in order to properly delegate resources. Such preparation prevented the substantial undertaking from affecting the operations of the company. Never one to be intimidated, Hamilton used all her powers of superiority to force the directors into submission, saying that it was in the best interest of the entire organization if the audit be performed.

  Each director said that it would take at least a month to conduct the audit.

  Hamilton gave them a week.

  She devoted that week to locating an Interim CEO, someone within the company that could handle such a responsibility until Charles was found. She confidently appointed the director of the Los Angeles district to the role. He gladly accepted the promotion, even if it was just temporary, and subsequently found someone to replace him as head of one of the largest districts in Reaching Dreams.

  The assistant, now free to allocate more time to the case, contacted each director after they had reached the end of their allotted time. Only three of the districts had actually been able to complete the internal audit. The other two, Indianapolis and Cincinnati, said that it would be another couple days before they could compile the necessary data in order to accurately finish the task. Hamilton expressed her displeasure at those districts, but secretly understood that her expectations were incredibly high and she was impressed that three cities were able to complete the undertaking on time.

  Each report was sent directly to her desk, and she invited the CFO and COO into her office to go over the audit. What they found was incredibly disconcerting.