Paul Kohler - The Borrowed Souls, A Novel

“What the hell?” I said. Again, my stomach felt a little queasy, but I didn’t retch this time.

Wilson’s body continued to sit and stare at the faded billboard, his eyes beginning to develop a white fog. Freaked out by his bizarre, zombie-like eyes, I dropped my hand over his line of sight and tried to force them closed. But rigor mortis had set in and they were fixed open. I had a crazy idea to put sunglasses on him. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a pair with me, so I began to check Wilson’s pockets. In the first pocket I searched, I found a vintage pair of horn-rimmed shades and slid them onto his face. I leaned back and smiled. “When you’re cool, Wilson, the sun never stops shining.”

Satisfied with my attempt at lightening the mood, I sat down next to the dead body. “What’s going on, Wilson? I thought I was making progress this morning, but when I tried to take Cyndi’s soul, nothing happened. I opened the box and struggled to get her mouth open, but zilch. Does she need to be awake? Does she need to say something? What?” I leaned back and tried to figure out what I might have missed, but I couldn’t focus on any one thing. So many thoughts were galloping through my mind. “And another thing. I seem to keep mysteriously beaming, or whatever it’s called, from place to place,” I said. I leaned back and looked up into the cloudless sky.

There was no response. The only sounds present were those echoing through the bustling city streets. That, and the sound of an approaching car.

I looked up the street and caught site of a police cruiser approaching slowly from the left. “Shit,” I said in a low voice.

Before I could get up from the bench, the cop car stopped directly in front of our park bench and the passenger window rolled down.

“Hey, buddy. Wake up. It’s time to move along now.” Wilson didn’t respond. I laughed.

“Hey. I said it’s time go!” the cop yelled from his cruiser. Moments later he got out of the passenger seat and slowly approached the park bench, his hand on his holster.

“What do you think this is? Let’s get a move on before I haul you in.” The cop stopped directly in front of Wilson, leaned down, and shook his lifeless shoulder. “Hey, buddy, are you all right?”

Wilson’s body drooped.

“Hey, hold yourself up now,” the cop said, but it was too late. Wilson’s body continued to slide to the right, nearly rolling off the edge of the bench. The cop touched Wilson’s neck, most likely searching for a pulse.

“Hey, Pete,” he said to his partner still seated behind the wheel of the cruiser. “I think we’ve got a dead one here. His body is cold, and I can’t find a pulse. You better call for a bus. I’ll see if he has an ID.”

The cop began to turn out Wilson’s pockets, starting with his back pockets first, but Wilson didn’t have a billfold. Next he checked the front pockets of Wilson’s trousers, and again he came up empty. Finally he opened up Wilson’s suit jacket and pulled a rosary from the inside pocket. After examining it for a few moments, the cop placed it in Wilson’s shirt pocket.

“He’s got nothin’, Pete. No ID, no wallet. He’s a John Doe,” the cop said as he returned to the cruiser. He leaned into the open door window to converse with his partner.

As he did so, I looked back at Wilson and could see the rosary slightly visible over the edge of his pocket. I knew then it might be more beneficial to me than it would be to the cops or the morgue. I reached over and tried to remove it from his pocket, but it was stuck. It actually felt like it was cemented in place. I looked back at the cop car, and both officers were staring in my direction. I tried again, but the rosary was still firmly in place. I wondered if while the cops looked at Wilson’s body, it somehow prevented me from taking the rosary from his pocket.

I stood up and stepped behind the park bench. As I did so, the cops turned their attention to something on the dash of their cruiser. At that moment, I quickly reached into Wilson’s pocket and pulled the rosary out effortlessly. It’d been quite some time since I’d practiced any form of religion, but I recognized the rosary as a Chaplet of Divine Mercy, just like the one my grandmother had. I slipped it in my pocket and walked away.

“Good-bye, Wilson. I hope you have a peaceful afterlife,” I said as I walked directly in front of the idling car. The cops paid me no attention.

As I crossed the street, I tried to figure out how it was that I could travel in jumps, or whatever it was. I thought back to the sidewalk in front of the park where I had just been, recalling what it was that I was thinking of at the time, and then I vanished once again.

“Shit!” I said as I appeared on that very same sidewalk near the park entrance. At least the nausea wasn’t accompanying the travel jolt any more.

Once I regained my bearings, I again looked around for the guy who had bumped into me earlier. I knew it was a long shot to find that one person in a city full of millions of active people, but I knew I wasn’t imagining things. Or was I? Did he really bump into me?

Concluding that the guy was long gone by now, I decided to see if I could hone the transport thing a little more. I figured it was controlled somehow by my thoughts. When I traveled to Cyndi’s hospital earlier and then when I was beamed back to where Wilson was, I had been thinking about them individually just before I jumped. Then, just now, I was thinking about being right here in front of the park entrance, and poof.

I wondered… I thought of a new place, somewhere that I hadn’t yet visited by the mystical transportation technique. Then, I vanished.

When I rematerialized, I stood in front of my own apartment. The door was open, but a wide strip of yellow crime scene tape crossed the opening. I ducked under the tape and walked in. Nothing appeared to have been disturbed in the past thirty-plus hours. Cyndi’s heels were still on the kitchen floor, and the dirty dishes still sat in the sink. I moved farther into the apartment and down the hall.

As I approached the bedroom, visions of the previous day came flooding back. I pushed the detestable act from my mind and walked in. The curtains were now drawn, and there was a lab technician analyzing the room. He was taking samples from the bed and nightstand. This must have been the crime scene, I surmised. I wondered if Cyndi had been beaten. I wanted to ask the tech, but I knew he couldn’t see or hear me.

I moved past him and into the bathroom, looking up at the mirror in an attempt to see my own reflection. I could in fact see myself, but only faintly, like I was an apparition. I was transparent, as was everything that was on me. I looked at my business suit and noticed that the lapels were stained with vomit. If I were to change, I wondered, would my new clothes be translucent as well?

I darted from the bathroom and into the closet. I quickly flipped through the stack of hats on the top shelf and grabbed my favorite Yankees ball cap before returning to the mirror. The hat was just as transparent as the rest of me. I took the hat off and it remained transparent, but as soon as I placed it on the vanity, it became solid once again. Curious, I reached over and picked up the hand towel from the counter, and as I did so, it blinked into transparency in the reflection.

“Cool.”

I tossed the hand towel back on the vanity and headed back into the closet. Although nobody could see me, I could see myself, and I didn’t want to walk around wearing barf-stained clothing for the rest of eternity. As I browsed through my clothes, I realized that my choices were rather mundane. I thought of what Wilson had worn when we met and wondered if that was what he had been wearing when he became a soul collector or if it was a style that he’d adopted along the way. Either way, I felt I needed a new look. But until I could arrange some alone time in a menswear store, I’d have to choose something from my own collection.