The History of Soul 2065

by Barbara Krasnoff

  He shrugged. “Actually, I don’t do children myself. They need special treatment, so I got permission to hire somebody. Young man—was a clown before I dropped a load of leukemia on him. Has a real gift for talking to kids.”

  “So why haven’t you got somebody for the old guys?”

  “Excuse me?”

  Jakie pointed a finger at him. “Let me ask you—as human to god—how old are you?”

  “Well, when you take into consideration the last Ice Age …”

  “No. I mean, how old are you supposed to be? Twenty-eight? Thirty at most, right?”

  “About there.”

  “So how the hell do you expect to convince people to pass along quietly when you look like some snot-nosed 20-something executive who doesn’t give a damn about anything except his own bank account?”

  The man stiffened. “No need to get insulting.”

  Jakie pulled himself up in bed, ignoring the drips and wires. “I’m just being honest here. I mean, tell me: How many of my generation have you really been able to convince? Or do you end up walking out of here like you were just going to with me, leaving them panicked and scared and—let’s face it—hating your guts?”

  The man stared. “You’re trying to convince me to hire you, right? Sorry, but with all the downsizing that’s going on in today’s economy, we’ve got to pick up staff from other departments.”

  “I’ll work on commission.”

  “Good try. But I told you, I’m not hiring.”

  Jakie knew that he had to keep the man there as long as possible. “Look, I’m just pointing something out that you must have noticed a long time ago. If you enjoy scaring the hell out of a bunch of retirees and dragging them screaming into that good night, you’re doing a great job. However, if the idea is to persuade them that this is good news, and that they’re going to be out of pain, and not have to deal anymore with hysterical families and doctors who only care about their wallets, then you’re going to have to get somebody who can talk to them. In their language.”

  The man’s eyebrows met. He was obviously thinking about it.

  “Take a chance,” Jakie urged. “Look at it this way. You can fit a man for a new suit by pushing him into uncomfortable positions, sticking him with pins, and making him feel like a total shmuck. On the other hand, you can treat him like a prince, tell him how fine he’s going to look, and measure him so fast and smooth that he’s finished before he knows it. You’re trying to fit your…worshippers…into a brand new suit. Isn’t it better for everyone if they think they want to wear it?”

  The man started to nod to himself slightly, the way somebody does who has become convinced of something. Jakie knew that look. He was already congratulating himself on a new job when the goddamn PDA played a little tune, totally breaking the mood. The man glanced at it and then looked up.

  “Sorry, Jakie,” he said. “Got to go. Got at least ten more to deal with tonight. Death should be around in about an hour.” He waved his free hand, turned, and was out the door before he could say another word.

  Jakie yelled after him, “The hell with you, you son of a bitch! If you think I’m going to let you take me down without a fight, you got another think coming!” He tried to get out of bed, chase him down, but as soon as he shifted the first muscle the pain was there and he was flat on his back, trying to breathe past it and pressing the button like a maniac.

  After what seemed like an eternity but was probably more like ten minutes, the nurse came in, glanced at the chart, and injected something into the tubing. Another minute, and the pain ebbed enough for Jakie to be able to do some thinking.

  The god of cancer.

  Right.

  It was the meds. Or the disease. Or both. Hell, the guy in the next bed didn’t even recognize his wife. Should Jakie be surprised that he was seeing gods with designer-label suits?

  Although Ben said he had a visitor last week.

  So if he wasn’t imagining this. If it was true…

  When the kids were small and didn’t want to wear their boots, Becky used to tell them, “It’s better to have and not need than need and not have.” It may have been a little cute, but it was good advice. And if he wasn’t crazy or hallucinating, then his best chance was to put together a really good sales pitch, something that’d reel Death in, that’d make her want his product so bad that she’d beg him to sell it to her.

  You can do it, Jakie told himself. After a lifetime of dealing with bosses, unions, buyers, and Immigration, he’d learned how to handle difficult customers. All he had to do was prepare his pitch. Because if it didn’t work, he was soon going to be staring up at six feet of dirt.

  An hour later, a nice-looking young woman walked in wearing a cotton poplin number that was supposed to look hand-loomed (and, Jakie knew immediately, wasn’t), and sipping from a bottle of soy milk.

  Jakie was ready.

  “I’m glad to meet you,” he told her, smiling like somebody’s sweet old grandpa. “Have a seat. A nice girl like you shouldn’t look so stressed. Let’s see if I can help.”

  In the Loop

  A story of Morris Feldman, Chana’s grandson

  1997

  Hi, said the voice.

  In fact, the voice had been saying Hi for at least 20 minutes, or so it seemed to Morris as he guided his Honda Civic home. The traffic on Brooklyn’s Belt Parkway was lighter than usual that evening, for which Morris was grateful. If he hit rush hour, the 45-minute trip to his apartment in Bay Ridge from his parents’ house in Long Island—no, strike that, it was now only his mother’s house—could take almost two hours.

  On his left, Canarsie Bay swung into view, looking cleaner and bluer than any Brooklyn water had the right to be. On his right, several heavy-duty vehicles lumbered across former junkyards that were now cleared in preparation for a new mall. Morris had been under the impression that malls were going out of fashion, but apparently somebody had decided Brooklyn needed another one.

  Shouldn’t they have started construction already? It was hard to remember. Since over a year ago, when his father first got the cancer diagnosis, and then got worse, and then died, he had been making this trip on a weekly, then daily, basis—a trip which, before then, he had made maybe once a month. But now, he could drive this route blindfolded. He certainly no longer needed to pay much attention to the road, short of keeping an eye out for crazed drivers or heavy traffic. So he’d just sit back, blast the radio, and sing along at the top of his lungs, whether he knew the words or not. Better than thinking.

  But the trip didn’t usually take this long. He peered through the windshield. He was only just past JFK Airport, and—wait a minute, didn’t he just pass Canarsie? That came after JFK Airport, assuming that he was driving from his parents’ house, rather than to…That was it. Or was it? He glanced to his right, where several seagulls flew off the bay, and tried to remember whether he was going straight to his parents’ house, which was a right turn off the Hillside exit, or to the hospital, which meant that he took the highway up to where it intersected with the Long Island Expressway.

  Hi, said the voice again.

  Morris tried to ignore the voice as he continued…West? East? On his way to the hospital? To his mom’s house? Home to Bay Ridge?

  Perhaps it was something on the radio, some weird subliminal message under the music that he hadn’t noticed before. He shut the radio off and tried to just concentrate on the highway before him. Damn. He hated driving into Manhattan, but his father was meeting a new doctor, and his parents wanted him to be there…

  No, wait a minute. He was going west, but not into Manhattan. His father wasn’t seeing a doctor to find out whether the cancer was progressing, he was dead, and Morris’ sister Marilyn was calling relatives, and Morris was driving home to pick up his wife Joan.

  Was he driving home? Then why was the bay on his right instead of his left?

  Excuse me? asked the voice politely.

  This time the radio wasn’t on and the
windows were closed. Morris looked out at the car in the next lane, to see if somebody was trying to flag him, but the driver was staring straight ahead, ignoring him.

  And anyway, now that he thought about it, the voice seemed to come from his passenger seat.

  He looked to his right, and there was a man. No, a woman. Sitting. Bald. With red hair.

  Morris wondered whether he’d better watch the road before he had an accident, and then realized that he was parked at a rest stop, in a littered parking lot that led to an equally littered beach. Because it was winter, there were just a couple of other cars there, while a lone old man collected shells on the sand and a few pigeons huddled miserably on a bench.

  Hello, said the man/woman, flickering like a broken neon sign. You are still Morris? Male offspring of Jakie and Becky? Hello, Morris.

  “Hello,” Morris replied. He was not surprised that there was an hallucination sitting next to him in his Honda Civic on the side of the Belt Parkway, although perhaps he should have been. Maybe it’s just exhaustion, he thought. Weeks of spending hours at his father’s bedside, arguing with doctors and looking for nurses and helping with bedpans and calling for painkillers, and probably long overdue for a day or two off. Although he hadn’t been to the hospital for a while, and he remembered asking his sister to call relatives about the funeral, and wasn’t he driving home to pick up his wife?

  When are we, Morris? asked the figure, switching from svelte to obese. Morris tried to focus on it, to make it stop changing, and then gave up.

  “You mean where are we,” he said. “We’re on the Belt Parkway. In Brooklyn.”

  Are we? asked the figure, its eyebrows rising and its dark/light/striped (striped?) hand reaching up to scratch its head.

  “On my way home,” Morris said. “Or to my mother’s. Or the hospital. I’m not sure. I think I’m having trouble thinking. It must be exhaustion. Or dehydration.” His father had suffered from dehydration for a short time, and they thought that might be causing his loss of awareness, until they diagnosed a stroke. Whatever the cause, nothing ever brought him back again.

  The man/woman nodded. Is it fun?

  “Fun? Are you out of your mind?” Morris snorted, no longer caring how strange things were or who his passenger/s might be. “Who could possibly consider this fun?”

  The adult/child cocked his/her head. A small gold/silver/jeweled pin glistened in its nostril/ear/eyebrow. Not fun? So? Leave.

  “Leave? Yeah, sure,” Morris sighed, but then thought, why not leave? Start the car and drive past his parents’ house, past the hospital, abandoning the loop that he’d been on since the day Marilyn had called him, sobbing, telling him about the tumor that had been found nestling in his father’s spine, having grown there quietly for years until it decided to touch a nexus of nerves and scream out its presence. Back and forth, from one house to the other, detouring for hospital visits and doctor visits and then back home to stare at his computer and look for answers and hope for rescue. He could drive past all of that, east to Montauk and the ocean, or west past Manhattan to New Jersey and the rest of the United States. He could. He couldn’t.

  You can leave, the figure repeated. You are not here.

  Not here? It could be true, Morris thought. If he were really here, he’d be alarmed at the multicolored multigendered multiclad multipeople flickering at him from his passenger seat. He thought of friends who had experimented with the interesting and available hallucinogens that were floating around campus when he was a student. Maybe he should look them up, ask them about the experience. Hey, remember when you put that tiny piece of paper on your tongue? Did you meet people who were many people at once, who refused to stay still and become one person so you could understand what the fuck was going on?

  What the fuck is going on, the person said. Is we are trying to rescue you. Us. From now.

  Traffic on the Belt was slow, in deference to the late hour and the early darkness. Morris took a breath, and remembered his visitors’ original question.

  “Okay. Let’s start from the beginning. When am I?” he asked.

  Good question. The creature was obviously delighted, and crossed one/two legs over the other/s. You are now.

  Morris raised his eyes to the heavens, or, in this case, to the roof of his car. “This is bullshit,” he said. “I didn’t take philosophy in college, and I’m in no mood to play Mensa games.”

  The creature looked dismayed and vanished. There was a short pause, and Morris was about to start the motor when it returned—or, rather, she returned. This time, although the colors of her hair, eyes, skin, clothing kept flickering into familiar and unfamiliar groupings, her height, weight, and gender seemed to be reasonably consistent.

  This is now for you, the woman said, as if the conversation had not been interrupted. You decide the now. We have joined you here because you are losing this now, and have forgotten how to reach ours.

  “Ours as in yours?” Morris asked.

  Ours as in yours, the woman told him.

  Children screamed happily as they chased seagulls across the beach. “I can’t go anywhere,” he said. “My father needs me. He’s ill.”

  Morris thought for a moment. “He’s dead.”

  In a manner of speaking, said the woman. As are you. As are we. In a manner of speaking.

  Morris decided he wanted to get out of the car. He wanted to walk around, to do something to prove to this crazy hallucination that he was alive, that he was real, that he really needed to drive to the hospital, to drive to his parents’ house, to drive home and hug his wife. But when he put his left hand on the handle of the door, it felt slippery, insubstantial, somehow wrong.

  “A manner of speaking?” he asked, frustrated and angry. “What manner is that? What the fuck does that mean, anyway?”

  The creature reached forward and touched the back of Morris’ hand. It felt cool, warm, rough, smooth at the same time, although Morris wasn’t sure how he managed to process all those sensations simultaneously. This is/is not you, it said. This is not your when. Your when is with us, but you chose to sample this one. And stay. Why did you stay?

  Stay? Morris realized that his hand was shimmering slightly, and that the sensation was a pain/pleasure/numbness that was creeping slowly up his arm. He tried to look out the window of the car, to straighten out his head, make things sane again, but snow had gathered on the vehicle and all he saw was a coating of white.

  You are a visitor, the woman told him. You were bored, numb, uninterested, and needed to be angry, upset, and here. You can leave. But you. Forgot.

  “Forgot?” asked Morris. “Forgot what?”

  This now is past, she continued. Your now is later. Much later. But you need to remember the will-be so that it can become your now.

  Morris took a breath. He stared at the blue sky outside his window and thought about the exhaustion, the terror, the grief of his trips to the house, to the hospital, to the cemetery.

  This is your past, she said. Our past, since we are part of you. You reached through the eons and chose this.

  “Chose this?” Morris flicked his hand around in a gesture indicating the car, the highway, the drive, and his life. The feeling had now crept up to his shoulder, his neck, his head, and it was making him irritable. “Why the hell would I choose this?”

  This now seems unpleasant to this you, said the creature. But it seemed fascinating to the will-be you. She paused. Wait, she said. I’ve learned more. I can be clearer now.

  Morris flinched. There was a brief, bright click in his head, as though somebody had finally found the right radio station, and the woman stabilized into his next-door neighbor, a thin, elderly lady with short graying hair and piercing black eyes.

  “Okay,” she announced in a no-nonsense Bay Ridge accent. “Here’s the deal. You are, and you are not, Morris Feldman. You are the drifting remains of his genetic memory that became curious about its antecedents and went back to try to experience touch, taste, sorrow, and all
those other things. However, you inadvertently took on the limited memory capacity of your ancestor. So when it was time to leave, you couldn’t remember how, and as a result you’ve created a loop, one that has begun to contract. I’m here to remind you. To get you the hell out of here before you’re permanently stuck.”

  Morris listened, and understood. And smiled. Who are you, really? he asked, already knowing.

  The woman grinned back at him. “I’m your alarm clock,” she told him.

  Well, why didn’t you say so in the first place? It was certainly time to go, well past time. Without any further hesitation, will-be Morris peeled then-Morris away and arranged him carefully on the seat of the Civic, discarding with him the car trips and the disease, the anxieties and depression and death. It reincorporated the alarm clock, checked to make sure everything was neat and clean and without paradox, and left for home. That was interesting, it thought, in the last few milliseconds when words were still possible. But uncomfortable.

  The remains of what was Morris blinked, looked around, and shrugged. “Must have dozed off,” he said to the empty car. He checked the traffic and pulled back onto the parkway. It was time to go home.

  The Ladder-Back Chair

  A story of Joan Feldman, Chana’s granddaughter-in-law

  2001

  Morris died on September 11, 2001. At home.

  It happened while Joan was sitting in the study that they had turned into a hospital room, watching the coverage of the World Trade Towers collapse on the small TV that they had put in her husband’s room.

  Most days, after all her morning tasks were completed, Joan would take out a knitting project and find an old movie—preferably one that she hadn’t seen for a long time—and sit and work and watch, stopping when it was time to administer medication, try to get Morris to take a few spoonfuls of warm soup, or change the sheets or his diapers. She’d stopped talking to him much—the combination of the cancer and the pain medications had burned something out in Morris’ brain, and he no longer responded to much anymore. However, as she watched the towers burn and then fall, she couldn’t bear not to talk about it to someone, so she pretended that he was still there, watching with her, concerned about things outside the sickroom.