Crossroads

As he was getting into the Fury, a single, floppy snowflake, the first of the multitude the sky had promised all day, came to rest on his forearm and dissolved in itself. Frances, climbing in from the other side, said, “That’s a great old coat. Where’d you get it?”

Resolved: that the soul is independent of the body and immutable. First affirmative speaker: Perry Hildebrandt, New Prospect Township High School.

Ahem.

Tempting though it may be, let’s not make the mistake of misreading the experience, familiar to any pothead worthy of the name, of being in one place, doing one thing—say, struggling to tear open a bag of marshmallows in Ansel Roder’s kitchen—and then, the very next instant, finding one’s bodily self performing an entirely different task in a wholly different setting. Such spatio-temporal elisions or (in common but misleading parlance) “blackouts” need not suggest a division of soul and body; any decent mechanistic theory of mind can account for them. Let’s begin, instead, by considering a question that may at first glance seem trivial or unanswerable or even nonsensicaclass="underline" Why am I me and not someone else? Let’s peer into the dizzying depths of this question …

It was curious the way time slowed, almost stopped, when he was feeling welclass="underline" wonderful (but also not, because of the sleepless night it augured) the number of laps his mind could run in the seconds it took him to climb one staircase. The pulsing nowness of it all, body and soul in sync, his skin registering each degree of falling temperature as he approached the third floor of the Crappier Parsonage, his nose the mustiness of the cold air flowing down toward the door at the bottom of the stairs, which he’d left open in case his mother came home unexpectedly; his ears the assurance that she hadn’t, his retinas the slightly less gloomy December light in windows nearer to the sky, less shaded by trees, his soul the almost déjà vu familiarity of climbing these stairs alone.

He had once (only once) asked the higher powers if one of the third-floor rooms could be his, or really not so much asked as rationally pointed out the third floor’s suitability for the third child he ineluctably was, and when the answer had come down from on maternal high—no, sweetie, it’s too cold in the winter, too hot in the summer, and Judson likes sharing a room with you—he’d accepted it without protest or renewed entreaty, because, by his own rational assessment, he was the one child in the family with no rightful claim to a room of his own, being neither the oldest nor the youngest nor the prettiest, and he was used to operating at a level of rationality inaccessible to others.

Nevertheless, in his mind, the third floor belonged to him. Many a lungful of depleted smoke had been puffed out the storage-room window, many an ash smudged into the polleny dust on the outer sill, and the Reverend Father’s home office, which he now brazenly entered, had no secrets from him. He had read, partly out of curiosity, partly to gauge just how miserable a worm he could be, the entirety of his mother’s premarital correspondence with his father, except for two letters that his father himself had never opened. Searching, with little optimism, for Playboys, he’d exhumed his father’s stacks of The Other Side and The Witness, the fruit of minds so woody that not a drop of sweetness could be pressed from them, along with a year’s worth of Psychology Todays, in one of which he’d dwelled on the words clitoris and clitoral orgasm, sadly not illustrated. (Ansel Roder’s father stored his collection of Playboys in hinged archival cardboard boxes, labeled by calendar year, which was impressive but discouraged pilferage.) The Reverend’s jazz and blues recordings were so much mute plastic and moldering sleeve, and the old coats in the slope-ceilinged closet weren’t covetable, cut as they were for a man much bigger than Perry, who could feel, literally in his bones, that he would end up as the physical runt of the Hildebrandt litter, his growth spurt, the year before, having resembled the bottle rocket that goes off at a faltering angle and dies with a dull pop. The closet interested him only in December, when the floor of it filled up with presents.

A noteworthy fact, possibly bearing on the question of the soul’s immutability, was that a person named Perry Hildebrandt had existed on earth for nine Christmases, his consciousness alive and functioning on five of them, before it occurred to him that the presents that appeared under the tree on Christmas Eve must have been in the house, not yet wrapped, for some days or even weeks before their appearance. His blindness had had nothing to do with Santa Claus. Of Santa the Hildebrandts had always said, Bah, humbug. And yet somehow, long past the age of understanding that presents don’t just buy and wrap themselves, he’d accepted their sudden annual appearance as, if not a miraculous provision, then a phenomenon like his bladder filling with urine, part of the normal course of things. How had he not grasped at nine a truth so obvious to him at ten? The epistemological disjunction was absolute. His nine-year-old self seemed to him a total stranger, and not in a good way. It was a figure of vague menace to the older Perry, who couldn’t escape the suspicion that, although the cherubic face in photos from 1965 was identifiably his own, the two Perrys did not have the same soul. That somehow there had been a switcheroo. In which case, where had his current soul come from? And where had the other one gone?