9. Sam Vital
. . . . .
Those first days, the first weeks that I was his guest, I had trouble getting settled. As him, I mean. I did not know who I was. Rather, who he was as a result of all that he had lived. Let’s say, I did a lot of swimming. Half the time I was busy reliving moments—trace and memory of moments—from his earlier life as they flashed through me. Especially moments in that house of theirs, of his. Yelling up two flights of stairs for the kids to hurry or they’ll be late for school. Seducing his wife on the living room couch one morning when the children were all out. Cooking dinner, cooking many dinners. By inhabiting this old man--Samuel Vital, born and raised in Boston, resident of Manhattan since 1951, a full fifty years—I was learning to inhabit all those other times as well.
A new experience for me was to find myself such an orphan, more than I had ever been. He lost both his parents over thirty years ago; later, a sister too, and several good friends. He had a habit of living with absences. Everywhere I looked in the house, no one was there. And yet, just a moment ago, there seemed to be.
Many faces I recalled, fleeting thoughts, as he poured his cereal in the morning, or while he made his phone calls after lunch. The scent of summer wildflowers by the beach, the smoke and whistles of train stations—numerous were the impressions of other places that visited his days. I dare say, I may have been more receptive than he was to those distant echoes.
Indeed, he did not dwell much on his personal past. So it was left to me to linger over the sympathetic chords sounded by a glance, by the merest gesture. If he was intent not to stray too far from the rudder of the present, I had to hang on for dear life or get lost amid the multiple paths of his memories. Soon, though, parry as I might, I was confronting the same questions that dogged him. Was he really untroubled by the prospect of his own demise?
I would not presume to say that I knew him best. But what did he see when he thought of death? Cessation, release, the body in sweet freefall. And the faces of those who went before him, those he knew and loved.
Why was he not afraid of death as I was? It seemed to me that he had more to lose. And yet the longer I lived with him, I understood that he did not clutch onto comforts or loved ones. On the contrary, he believed that slowly he was constructing his own absence in the world.
But what about me? Was this gentleman to be my final resting place? I had met no one of my kind who ever said what would happen to me in the event of his death. Sure, I had heard that traveling souls may die too, extinguished like a flame. Yet I knew the strongest instinct was to seek any outlet, when the moment comes, through which to perpetuate the hope of living on. If I were still with him, why should I also expire? Upon his last breath, I might well be released into the air, ready to alight where I pleased and to make my own mistakes.
Besides, when all we’re made of is voice, spirit, restless consciousness, what was left to die? Did we float back, vanquished, to our source? Or were we buried somewhere, if indeed there was no more of us finally? It made me nervous just to contemplate these questions.
The problem was, I had no one to talk to. Each day when Sam went out, I thought, all these people on the street, who will speak to me in here? But the weeks went by and I remained alone.
One morning while he was shaving, however, I must have been fretting about this or that, because it really flipped my wig to hear him say out loud, like it couldn’t be more natural, “It does no good to worry so.”
Who, me? Was he talking to me? I had never seen such a thing and if he was talking to himself, it was quite unprovoked.
“No point in being shy,” he continued, gazing more closely in the mirror. “I’ve known you were in there for some time.”
How long had I yearned to be recognized, to make contact with my host? Had I not dreamed of gaining some influence? Instead, I felt embarrassed, like a peeping Tom who’s been found out, the curtain yanked open.
How did you know? Were you not afraid to find me there inside you? I restrained myself from blurting out a thousand questions, I didn’t want to overwhelm him.
“Oh, I’m used to you by now,” he said with a laugh. “And don’t think it’s so unheard of. Why should I be afraid? It’s not in your interest to do me harm.”
Even while I hoped to break through, I had always thought that if I were discovered, it might be dangerous in a way. My host could start to feel haunted, unstable. Wasn’t that the nature of hearing voices? You think you have to have your head examined.
“Not me, no.” He rinsed his face, patted it with a towel. I never subscribed to “normal,” see. How boring! My attitude was more like “why not?” That was how I got ahead in advertising.
I didn’t know what he meant. I considered myself normal, just that it took me a long time to understand what that was for a traveling soul. Suddenly I realized, he wasn’t talking out loud anymore. So why now, I thought, why is it only now that you started talking to me?
“Because you wouldn’t shut up,” he declared frankly and the words echoed in the room. “Haven’t you noticed how often I just start whistling while I go about my business? So that I can’t hear your thoughts buzzing around inside me.”
My pride, I admit, was a little wounded. All I wanted was to help. Of course, I was curious about things, too. Like, here I was in an old man’s body, what about when he--
“All you have to do is remember. I remember, shouldn’t be difficult for you.”
Oh, but I had. And I did again. There he was, a year ago or more, in bed with Magdalena, he had mounted her from behind, they were both breathing heavily, and I thought, why that old rascal, look at them go. Then, I don’t know how, over the rhythm of the creaking bedsprings, I glimpsed a sequence of precise locations throughout the house, slowly, as if I should examine them for their quiet secrets. The rustic kitchen table, its smooth wood, the shiny rounded corner. The carpeted stairs up on the second floor, five steps from the bottom a faded stain almost imperceptible in the shadow. The sun porch in back, a fraying towel hanging off the chaise longue. I wasn’t sure what had happened in such spots, or with whom, or if nothing but his imagination animated them.
“Satisfied?” he asked after a while, dressed now and preparing to go out.
I was, but like it had happened in a dream. I wanted to experience his pleasures directly. I wanted him to find someone new.
Sorry, he replied unconcerned. I’m just not in the mood these days. Don’t know if I ever will be again.
Oh, don’t think like that. Sure you will. Go for a younger woman. We’ll have a marvelous time.
It was the beginning of summer and the day promised to be lively on the street, with bicyclists and skateboarders sailing past us.
Did it ever occur to you, he said in a parting comment, that we can’t go on like this? Not all the time. You’d drive me nuts.
Gosh, that wasn’t my intention. I just wanted to make some human contact. Where was the harm in that?
I liked to do my errands in the morning, before the day got too hot. The shops were less busy then, and it gave me a chance to chat with the shopkeepers. They all knew me. Even to flirt with the housewives and the diffident au pairs was a pleasant pastime. What did I have to lose? I learned a lot about a woman’s marriage, or the relations of a household, by such brief exchanges. Ever since I stopped going to the office, I had discovered life to be endlessly rich, the hours full of small events. I wondered how could I have been so unaware of them all those years?
Magdalena was the one who knew. There is the visible world, she liked to say, and the less visible world. So much around us nowadays trains us not to see. We end up not realizing that we’ve effectively gone blind. Your money won’t help you then, she would warn. But one morning over breakfast, she told me about something else. I suppose it was one of those secrets that just comes out sooner or later, unplanned. She explained how she used to have a little friend, that’s what she called it. I thought she was offering a sexual confession, which amused me since my late wife had never really been able to talk about sex. However, that wasn’t the matter at all. It sounded very mysterious, and since I didn’t understand, I kept asking questions. She cautioned against making easy judgments, I mustn’t act like she was mad. I laughed at that, saying you’re one of the sanest people I know, so she began to tell me about him. Or about her, she was never certain.
A kind of inner voice, it materialized one day with a clarity and pacing that was quite unlike the blurred and endless stream of her own thoughts. At first, she did worry that she was losing her grip. But soon, her little friend calmed her fears and for the next year they engaged in many happy conversations as she went on with her life, not daring of course to mention anything to those around her, until he, it, vanished without a trace.
I trusted her, and I believed what she said. Yet, how was I to take her story? Were there others who had had the experience? Why did no one speak of it? So she had prepared me, but only a long time after.
I have often wondered if traveling souls arose in this world as a balance to human arrogance. Made of nothing almost, not even dust, they ask only to stay with us a while. In return, they go where we cannot. Mine—I thought of her as mine—was young, full of curiosity, a real talker. I had an idea what I was in for that morning when at last I spoke up. By so doing, I thought to better keep a lid on her. But she was so delighted to have broken through, it made her giddy. That day as we walked along the vibrant streets, she couldn’t help it, she had to comment on everyone around us—the pedestrians with their airs, the bad drivers, the silly dogs with their pathetic owners, some of whom were my neighbors for many years.
If this was an indication, how was I to contain her? I found just the ticket in a contraption I had been loathe to ever use. Eli, my older son, had left one behind. We came to an agreement, she and I, when out of the house: if she wanted to talk, she was to let me know as much, and I would promptly take out my cell phone, which was dead of course. Walking down the street, I looked like any other person with a phone to my ear, chatting away to the voice inside my head. It occurred to me that the proof was right before my eyes. Indeed, I tended to think that was everyone’s big secret, since so many people had these devices, as if heaven forbid the secret should get out: instead of having someone on the other end of the line, most were engaged in far more interesting conversations with traveling souls perched right inside them. It was nice to give people the benefit of the doubt, was it not?
. . . . .
. . . . .
Those first days, the first weeks that I was his guest, I had trouble getting settled. As him, I mean. I did not know who I was. Rather, who he was as a result of all that he had lived. Let’s say, I did a lot of swimming. Half the time I was busy reliving moments—trace and memory of moments—from his earlier life as they flashed through me. Especially moments in that house of theirs, of his. Yelling up two flights of stairs for the kids to hurry or they’ll be late for school. Seducing his wife on the living room couch one morning when the children were all out. Cooking dinner, cooking many dinners. By inhabiting this old man--Samuel Vital, born and raised in Boston, resident of Manhattan since 1951, a full fifty years—I was learning to inhabit all those other times as well.
A new experience for me was to find myself such an orphan, more than I had ever been. He lost both his parents over thirty years ago; later, a sister too, and several good friends. He had a habit of living with absences. Everywhere I looked in the house, no one was there. And yet, just a moment ago, there seemed to be.
Many faces I recalled, fleeting thoughts, as he poured his cereal in the morning, or while he made his phone calls after lunch. The scent of summer wildflowers by the beach, the smoke and whistles of train stations—numerous were the impressions of other places that visited his days. I dare say, I may have been more receptive than he was to those distant echoes.
Indeed, he did not dwell much on his personal past. So it was left to me to linger over the sympathetic chords sounded by a glance, by the merest gesture. If he was intent not to stray too far from the rudder of the present, I had to hang on for dear life or get lost amid the multiple paths of his memories. Soon, though, parry as I might, I was confronting the same questions that dogged him. Was he really untroubled by the prospect of his own demise?
I would not presume to say that I knew him best. But what did he see when he thought of death? Cessation, release, the body in sweet freefall. And the faces of those who went before him, those he knew and loved.
Why was he not afraid of death as I was? It seemed to me that he had more to lose. And yet the longer I lived with him, I understood that he did not clutch onto comforts or loved ones. On the contrary, he believed that slowly he was constructing his own absence in the world.
But what about me? Was this gentleman to be my final resting place? I had met no one of my kind who ever said what would happen to me in the event of his death. Sure, I had heard that traveling souls may die too, extinguished like a flame. Yet I knew the strongest instinct was to seek any outlet, when the moment comes, through which to perpetuate the hope of living on. If I were still with him, why should I also expire? Upon his last breath, I might well be released into the air, ready to alight where I pleased and to make my own mistakes.
Besides, when all we’re made of is voice, spirit, restless consciousness, what was left to die? Did we float back, vanquished, to our source? Or were we buried somewhere, if indeed there was no more of us finally? It made me nervous just to contemplate these questions.
The problem was, I had no one to talk to. Each day when Sam went out, I thought, all these people on the street, who will speak to me in here? But the weeks went by and I remained alone.
One morning while he was shaving, however, I must have been fretting about this or that, because it really flipped my wig to hear him say out loud, like it couldn’t be more natural, “It does no good to worry so.”
Who, me? Was he talking to me? I had never seen such a thing and if he was talking to himself, it was quite unprovoked.
“No point in being shy,” he continued, gazing more closely in the mirror. “I’ve known you were in there for some time.”
How long had I yearned to be recognized, to make contact with my host? Had I not dreamed of gaining some influence? Instead, I felt embarrassed, like a peeping Tom who’s been found out, the curtain yanked open.
How did you know? Were you not afraid to find me there inside you? I restrained myself from blurting out a thousand questions, I didn’t want to overwhelm him.
“Oh, I’m used to you by now,” he said with a laugh. “And don’t think it’s so unheard of. Why should I be afraid? It’s not in your interest to do me harm.”
Even while I hoped to break through, I had always thought that if I were discovered, it might be dangerous in a way. My host could start to feel haunted, unstable. Wasn’t that the nature of hearing voices? You think you have to have your head examined.
“Not me, no.” He rinsed his face, patted it with a towel. I never subscribed to “normal,” see. How boring! My attitude was more like “why not?” That was how I got ahead in advertising.
I didn’t know what he meant. I considered myself normal, just that it took me a long time to understand what that was for a traveling soul. Suddenly I realized, he wasn’t talking out loud anymore. So why now, I thought, why is it only now that you started talking to me?
“Because you wouldn’t shut up,” he declared frankly and the words echoed in the room. “Haven’t you noticed how often I just start whistling while I go about my business? So that I can’t hear your thoughts buzzing around inside me.”
My pride, I admit, was a little wounded. All I wanted was to help. Of course, I was curious about things, too. Like, here I was in an old man’s body, what about when he--
“All you have to do is remember. I remember, shouldn’t be difficult for you.”
Oh, but I had. And I did again. There he was, a year ago or more, in bed with Magdalena, he had mounted her from behind, they were both breathing heavily, and I thought, why that old rascal, look at them go. Then, I don’t know how, over the rhythm of the creaking bedsprings, I glimpsed a sequence of precise locations throughout the house, slowly, as if I should examine them for their quiet secrets. The rustic kitchen table, its smooth wood, the shiny rounded corner. The carpeted stairs up on the second floor, five steps from the bottom a faded stain almost imperceptible in the shadow. The sun porch in back, a fraying towel hanging off the chaise longue. I wasn’t sure what had happened in such spots, or with whom, or if nothing but his imagination animated them.
“Satisfied?” he asked after a while, dressed now and preparing to go out.
I was, but like it had happened in a dream. I wanted to experience his pleasures directly. I wanted him to find someone new.
Sorry, he replied unconcerned. I’m just not in the mood these days. Don’t know if I ever will be again.
Oh, don’t think like that. Sure you will. Go for a younger woman. We’ll have a marvelous time.
It was the beginning of summer and the day promised to be lively on the street, with bicyclists and skateboarders sailing past us.
Did it ever occur to you, he said in a parting comment, that we can’t go on like this? Not all the time. You’d drive me nuts.
Gosh, that wasn’t my intention. I just wanted to make some human contact. Where was the harm in that?
I liked to do my errands in the morning, before the day got too hot. The shops were less busy then, and it gave me a chance to chat with the shopkeepers. They all knew me. Even to flirt with the housewives and the diffident au pairs was a pleasant pastime. What did I have to lose? I learned a lot about a woman’s marriage, or the relations of a household, by such brief exchanges. Ever since I stopped going to the office, I had discovered life to be endlessly rich, the hours full of small events. I wondered how could I have been so unaware of them all those years?
Magdalena was the one who knew. There is the visible world, she liked to say, and the less visible world. So much around us nowadays trains us not to see. We end up not realizing that we’ve effectively gone blind. Your money won’t help you then, she would warn. But one morning over breakfast, she told me about something else. I suppose it was one of those secrets that just comes out sooner or later, unplanned. She explained how she used to have a little friend, that’s what she called it. I thought she was offering a sexual confession, which amused me since my late wife had never really been able to talk about sex. However, that wasn’t the matter at all. It sounded very mysterious, and since I didn’t understand, I kept asking questions. She cautioned against making easy judgments, I mustn’t act like she was mad. I laughed at that, saying you’re one of the sanest people I know, so she began to tell me about him. Or about her, she was never certain.
A kind of inner voice, it materialized one day with a clarity and pacing that was quite unlike the blurred and endless stream of her own thoughts. At first, she did worry that she was losing her grip. But soon, her little friend calmed her fears and for the next year they engaged in many happy conversations as she went on with her life, not daring of course to mention anything to those around her, until he, it, vanished without a trace.
I trusted her, and I believed what she said. Yet, how was I to take her story? Were there others who had had the experience? Why did no one speak of it? So she had prepared me, but only a long time after.
I have often wondered if traveling souls arose in this world as a balance to human arrogance. Made of nothing almost, not even dust, they ask only to stay with us a while. In return, they go where we cannot. Mine—I thought of her as mine—was young, full of curiosity, a real talker. I had an idea what I was in for that morning when at last I spoke up. By so doing, I thought to better keep a lid on her. But she was so delighted to have broken through, it made her giddy. That day as we walked along the vibrant streets, she couldn’t help it, she had to comment on everyone around us—the pedestrians with their airs, the bad drivers, the silly dogs with their pathetic owners, some of whom were my neighbors for many years.
If this was an indication, how was I to contain her? I found just the ticket in a contraption I had been loathe to ever use. Eli, my older son, had left one behind. We came to an agreement, she and I, when out of the house: if she wanted to talk, she was to let me know as much, and I would promptly take out my cell phone, which was dead of course. Walking down the street, I looked like any other person with a phone to my ear, chatting away to the voice inside my head. It occurred to me that the proof was right before my eyes. Indeed, I tended to think that was everyone’s big secret, since so many people had these devices, as if heaven forbid the secret should get out: instead of having someone on the other end of the line, most were engaged in far more interesting conversations with traveling souls perched right inside them. It was nice to give people the benefit of the doubt, was it not?
. . . . .