Mary Gaitskill - Don't Cry

Still — he was not indecent — he felt tenderly toward her body and toward his own body, too, and he held her close while she buried her face against him. He could sense her diminishment, and that made him feel protective toward her. He meant it when he kissed her good night and told her he'd call her. But out in the hall (which still smelled of onions), he changed his mind. He weighed her good qualities as he walked home in the interesting light of 4:00 a.m., but he did it like a man counting pocket change, yawning and half-interested. When he got home, Hunger yawned, too. He dropped her soul on the floor, where it quickly became invisible to him. He forgot her.

Because the dark-haired elfin girl was also a secular-minded person, she didn't know he'd taken a part of her soul any more than he did. But she knew she would not hear from him again. And she knew something was gone. She woke the next day feeling bereft and heartsick. She sulked and drooped around her flat while her roommates exchanged knowing glances. She vacillated between anger and contempt and terrible longing, and a sense that she must see the young man again no matter what. Because she was a rational person, she was sure that her feelings were illusory Because she was a proud person, she was determined that she should not act on her feelings and call him. Rational and proud, she controlled her feelings by categorizing them in terms of obsession and projection. “I don't even know him,” she said. “I'll get over it.” And she waited for it to pass, much as she might wait for the end of a flu.

What made it worse: Her soul was connected to her through her brain. This was not a fault or a virtue; she was just born that way Heart, viscera, genitals, brain — none is better than the other; it's a matter of where the soul has found a place to cling. The brain is not higher in moral or celestial terms, nor is a person with a soul connected to the brain always unusually bright. But such connection can give the soul a kind of shocking electricity that will make it stay up talking its head off for nights on end. Now he had it and it was talking to him.

He did not understand where the talking was coming from and he did not like it. The soul spoke in images of sight and sound that were quick and multiple, and which changed form by blending into one another. Because the young man had seized a piece of the soul linked to Ardor, many of these images were about love. But the glowing unknown attached to Ardor was, in the soul of this girl, Effacement. And so the pure, exquisite voice of her soul's love could flowingly transform, for instance, into the shape of a naked woman on her hands and knees, holding a knife in her hand, poised as if to cut her own face. In the physical world, a picture like this would describe insanity and suicide. In the world of this particular soul, it described a mystery of Ardor and Effacement, a mystery the girl was expressing in human form on the night she invited the boy to have her. The soul addressed itself to the girl, innocently and literally mirroring her actions — and she could still hear it, albeit dimly. She did not hear it with her conscious mind; she heard it like she heard her own breath, without being aware of it. And because the young man had possession of it, he heard it, too— and it was not like his breath.

He did not see the naked woman in his mind's eye; he would never have allowed himself to become conscious of something so violently ugly. But he sensed it in his body, and sensed why it was there. Thoughts of the girl came to him, and with those thoughts, fear that he didn't understand. Because he didn't want to be afraid, he had contempt for her. He thought that would work.

The girl tried to feel contempt for the boy too, but it is hard to have contempt for a person who's made off with part of your soul. She went about her life — her job at a used-clothing store, her once-a-week volunteer stint at the Outreach Center for homeless youth, her evenings out with friends. Outwardly, she did not appear much changed by the misalignment; the first layer of her thoughts was more or less the same, logical and competent enough to get her through the day But the next layer down, her mind was slowly becoming disintegrated and febrile, unstable on its primary support. Her perception was both heightened and dulled; she would suddenly weep at the sight of an old woman on the bus, or bewilder a friend with her excited analysis of a television character. But the intensity of feeling was misplaced and did not satisfy her. Her mind seized on triviality and substance without being able to tell the difference between the two; she went through it all like a computer on a search, looking tirelessly for what she lacked without knowing what it was.

And constant through it all was the memory of the boy she had so casually taken into her body. He was now always present for her, more overtly than she was present for him. She thought of him against a vast, open sky, with a halo of piercing white. She thought of him astride a leopard, light and graceful in mid-leap. She thought of him moving in an aura of electrical fire, his heart huge and glowing with blue fire. She did not realize that these pictures came from her own soul, which was steadfastly signaling her from the boy's room. She thought she was seeing the boy's fantastical nature. And so she overruled her pride and called him. In two weeks, she left two messages on his answering machine. They went unreturned. She thought, I was very stupid just to have sex with him. I loved him, and I degraded us both. I am a terrible woman. I love him and now I will never see him again. Tears ran down her face.

Meanwhile, the young man was having his own difficulties. Although he was quick to be insulted by a girl who didn't seem to take him seriously, he generally didn't take girls seriously. But serious or not, he'd regularly made off with prize bits of their souls: One (Gentleness) sat quietly, chewing its cud, one (Forbearance) grew up his wall like ivy, and one (Instinct) blundered dazedly around in the closet, looking for release. They were pacific and untroublesome, subtle feminine presences that soothed and grounded him — until now. The newly stolen soul was so talkative, so increasingly restless, that it had gotten all the others going; if he could've seen the female souls clustered in his room, they might've looked like sexy juvenile delinquents hanging around a street corner, smoking and muttering. It wasn't just the girls, either. His soul was starting to get in on it, too. The new captive was talking to it and it was beginning to talk back — or at least half of it was. For this was a young man with a soul in two parts; he'd split it up so it would be harder to get.

Hed done this when he was about two. He'D done it at his mother's advice; she had done it early in life herself. She advised her son to follow her example after his father had walked away and left them in their small brick house. His mother was glad she had kept part of her soul back from her former husband, and she thought her son should learn to do the same. When she sat on his bed at night, singing lullabies and pop songs, he heard her advice, not in the songs, but in her supple voice. Her words would say “You've got to hide your love away,” but he understood that meant “hide your soul.” Not all of it, just the vulnerable part. And, as he lay on the verge of dreams and sleep, she would show him how. One half of her smiled and bent to kiss him, and the other vanished in the dark like a cat. And, in the moment between waking and sleep, he followed her lead. The bright, strong half of his soul smiled back at his mother and received her kiss, and the weak part of him withdrew, even deeper than she. For although he took after his mother enough to follow her advice, he could not split so easily His fragile soul hid too deep inside itself. It made the darkness into which it fled a thing of shape and substance: a tiny model of his childhood home, except the model had no windows and only one door, which was always locked. The strong soul, out in the world of light and movement, forgot his fragile brother. The dark house became a prison and the soul inside a shapeless, nearly voiceless mass of pain that did not stir except in the young man's deepest dreams.