When you get older, your spirit starts to stick inside your body. The inside of a body is textured like unfinished wood and after you’re born a tacky glue starts to seep through the wood grain, very slowly. At first, it’s not enough to stick your spirit to you. So sometimes it flies around and re-enters as it pleases. This is why psychologists say that babies’ brains don’t work like everybody else’s, they don’t recognize people, they don’t understand their individuality. It’s because their spirits are still flying around so much.
I assume that most people’s glue becomes stickiest when they start reaching to the world around them, casting lines to the humans they see, wanting desperately to interact, learning to talk. Maybe the lines they cast are made of this spiritstuff. They are using it to lasso people and so it doesn’t have freedom to wander around anymore like it used to.
***
I had an aunt named Laura. She was burly, square shouldered, and spoke in a way like she was forcing words out in short bursts, past a thicket of brambles in her throat. I remember she had baseball cards in her attic, stacked to the ceiling, an amazing massage chair, and a dog named Gina Marie. I also remember she had clearly demarcated patches of skin on her elbows, rough and dark circles over the pointiest bony protrusion where your elbow comes out – hard like a scab or an elephant. My Aunt Laura told me there is a man in black, who collects souls that aren’t tied down. He can hear souls that are coming loose, and he is attracted to the sound. And if your soul tries to fly out while he is standing there, his two gaping soup can eyes will suck it all the way into him and you can’t get it back. My aunt Laura told me every person has a third eye, but that mine was closed when I had my accident at age six. I snorted at the time, unbelieving, but since have wished I had asked her, will it ever reopen or is it closed forever?
***
I once met someone whose spirit was loose. His name was Mark. And when I came near him, I heard it coming unstuck, and clanking around inside his body. Somehow, imperceptible and slow, the tectonic plates that underlay a relationship between two people were shifting, and grating and sliding. At some point I felt myself throwing lasso after lasso at him, lasso rope made of spiritstuff.
***
When I was little, I found a crayfish. I kept the crayfish in a bucket for a few days. My Aunt Laura told me it was sick and waved her hands over it. I’m not sure if she was healing the crayfish, or if by waving her hands over is how she knew it was sick in the first place. I want to pretend that what happened is the crayfish was droopy, sad, and sick. And she waved her hands over and it sprang back to life and started pumping its legs, waving its eyestalks energetically in the sun and swimming in quick tight circles in the bucket and then I released it into the river to rejoin its family as nature intended. But this is just imagination because I don’t remember if the crayfish got better, and I don’t remember if my aunt waving her hands did anything.
***
When Mark touched me on the arm I felt it all across my breasts and down my stomach.
***
When I saw the man in black Mark and I were naked in my bed and our souls were both rattling so hard inside of us I could hear them pounding and clacking like blood rushing behind my ears. Then the man in black, his shoulders and his head, was outside of the window looking in. When I saw him everything was sucked out like how I imagine a loss of pressure in a submersible – a small crack and the whole thing crumples, and less than a second later it implodes, and your skull crashes inward and yours eyes pop out and all of the oxygen in you freezes simultaneously and you die. My soul, fearful, stopped rattling and clung to me so hard and buried even deeper inside of the glue, gaining purchase on the textured wood inside of me. But I was scared in the same way you are when standing on a very high tower or building and looking down. Your fear is because part of you somewhere just really wants to jump.
***
I wish I could ask Laura if there is a way to ward him off, like garlic for vampires. But when I was little my Aunt Laura’s soul flew out of her, for the first time since she was a baby. She was so surprised her eyes popped open, and her elephant-elbows were thrown back into the arms of her massage chair like the recoil of a gun. I think maybe if the right person waved their hands over her she might get better, but I released the crayfish back into the wild and I don’t know where it went.
Since I don’t have better advice, and Laura is gone, I guess I would say this: If you see the man in black, keep track of your soul. Tack it down like a tarp in the pre-hurricane. Unless you’re searching like my Aunt Laura, and brave, and want to let it fly out to greet the man. To leave your pitiful body and trust whatever he’ll do with you then.
