Clara’s name needed nine letters to spell it correctly. For her
eighteenth birthday her parents gifted her an official name change,
an embossed letter of apology, and the family’s hand-me-down Opel
Station wagon.
The name change
didn’t have much effect. She’d been using the simple spelling
since she was old enough to realize that nobody cared to enforce her
spelling, outside the first day of third grade when the teacher
insisted on using the full spelling. That only lasted a few days.
The freedom from the
tyranny of her archaic spelling didn’t have the expected effect.
Though it was nice to have her own car, even the least cool car ever
built. However, there was still something wrong. Something she had
always felt. Something she thought was part of her name.
It was still there.
The “something” she carried was inside her and was nowhere. It
wasn’t imagination. It wasn’t a tumor. She felt the weight of
something with presence, but no mass or substance. Something that
interfered with her being a normal human being.
She went to a string
of doctors, physical and mental, but none offered any assistance. She
slowly drifted from conventional to the spiritual. On a dare from her
friend she went to see a native shaman. As she described her problem
to him his smile grew.
She finally asked
him what he was smiling at. He responded with a series of questions
about things she’d seen and felt. He knew her answers before she
could say them. He finally stopped the questions and told her that
her problem was that she had one soul too many.
For the next hour
the shaman was unable to answer any of Clara’s questions, mostly
relating to where did this soul come from? He kept saying things
like, “Where did the penny on the ground come from? Who put it
there?” He finally, she thinks he was enjoying this game, told her
that she was the only one who could identify the soul’s origin and
purpose.
Carla had been so
busy worrying about how, she hadn’t considered the why. Then all
the questions flooded her head. Who, what, why, when and how. So
basically, all the questions.
She waited a few
days to let the weirdness sink in. At first she tried to deny it, but
somehow she knew it was true. Later she realized that knowing made it
easier to deal with. Accepting this she started working backwards and
suspected that it must have happened sometime between conception to
just after birth.
It took the length
of Sunday dinner and a couple after dinner drinks to work up the
courage to discuss her spare soul with her parents. They were
surprisingly unsurprised. They knew nothing of the spare soul, but
admitted that something happened just after her birth.
She was born a
normal crying baby, but a couple hours later the crying suddenly
stopped. Everyone told the parents they were lucky, but they were
worried. The doctors said that Carla was perfectly healthy. As she
grew, she progressed as normal. She just cried less than the other
kids.
She still didn’t
cry as much as other people. At least that’s what people tell her.
Having only need her for her whole life she really had no other
experience to go by. She always thought her friends to be the
unstable ones. Perhaps the other soul comforts her.
Carla made the
rounds again. Therapists, gurus, kooks and quacks. Nobody could help
her. Most chose not to believe her. Finally, two years after the
Shaman’s revelation she started looking for answers internally.
Meditation did not come easy. Clearing her mind took several months
to go from pretending, to trying, to achieving.
One day across the
void of her empty consciousness came a voice. It startled her out of
her trance. After that she went from meditating for an hour to
meditating for hours. She took time off from work, told her family
she was skipping Sunday dinner.
It was a tiny voice.
Very far away, or rather, very deep inside. It said two words. Always
the same. She started whispering what she thought the words might be.
She assumed it was a name. She tried for a week till she whispered,
“Paul Watson.” Her brain exploded like she was being
electrocuted.
She woke up to her
mother shaking her. Carla asked her who Paul Watson was. Her mother
didn’t know. Her father did, or at least his friend who was a cop
did. Paul was Carla’s age but was too crazy to go to school, so she
never knew him. He finally killed a guy and was sentenced to the
mental hospital.
Carla did not tell
anyone her plans to visit Paul. She was sure that have her committed
right alongside him if she did. It took some talking to get by the
receptionist, but she was finally allowed to see Paul’s doctor. He
was odd receptive so she figured she should be open with him. She
told him the whole tale and when she was done he nodded hi head and
said, “Fits.”
The doctor called
and had Paul taken to a visiting room. On the walk down he explained
that Paul, who insisted they call him Edgar, had always complained
about his missing soul. Carla nearly fainted when he said that. The
orderly at the door unlocked it and told the doctor that Edgar was
calm today.
The man sitting at
the table was calm, well dressed and almost handsome. Nothing like
what Carla had expected. He greeted the doctor then smiled at Carla.
He started to say something when he froze. Carla felt the need to
flee. The tiny voice inside her was screaming for help.
(to be continued...)
