“Starting to get it? I am your fucking ‘Association'! Just me…"
Possible? Certainly. What kind of evidence did I ever have? Only bits and pieces. I had put the picture together. I had assumed a massive criminal organization pulled the strings. I had never dreamed one man could do so much.
“But I'm drifting from my original point,” said Brad. “You see, the key was having two separate lives, so utterly distinct that one could never, ever, lead to the other. In one life, I was Brad Larsen, college professor in training, with a Masters in 17th Century English Literature, and working towards my doctorate at the University of California, Bakersfield. I was married to the beautiful Alison Larsen, nee Langtree, and we lived in a gorgeous two-bedroom bungalow three blocks away from campus. She was a hairdresser. And she never asked where all the ‘grant money’ came from."
I interrupted-merely to inject myself back into the flow of things. “And in your other life, you were this J.P. Bafoures, bloodthirsty crime boss, willing to kill anyone-man, woman, child-as long as it put dollars in your pocket."
“I only killed two women. And no children,” Brad said.
“So I'm to believe you've been working the Susannah Winston case? In effect, babysitting your own murderer?"
“Not exactly,” Brad said. “This ‘Paul After’ is not technically me. He's a fragment of my own psyche, sheared off the moment you absorbed my soul."
“Not possible,” I said. “I absorbed him months after I absorbed your soul."
“No, you only thought you absorbed him then. It was a fabricated memory we put in place months ago."
“I can explain this, Collective,” said Fieldman. “Your programming-that is, the processor that is your mind-is only equipped to handle one identity per chip. Once it encountered Brad, who had a brain disorder known as a ‘split personality,’ it did the only thing it could: it assigned each disparate identity its own chip, with a new, fabricated personal history."
“Paul even gave himself a new last name,” said Brad. “Bafoures became After."
“Understand, Collective?” Fieldman asked.
“Thank you, Mr. Wizard,” I said. The ghost never gave up. “If he's a separate “psyche,” why can't he leap to my defense right now?"
“Simple,” Brad said. “I erased him."
“You erased him?” I didn't know whether to believe him or not, but at that point, it didn't seem to matter. The Ghost of Fieldman walked up to me, and softly applied his hand to my cheek. “You've had enough suffering for one lifetime. It is time to rest."
“How can you ‘erase’ a soul?"
Fieldman held his gizmo up to my face and tapped it with his index finger. “Interesting you should ask, Collective."
And then it was over.
I spent an agonizing length of time between planes of reality. (Only later did I realize I'd traveled in a fraction of a second, and had spent 20 hours trying to piece my mind back together.) I didn't appreciate what I'd had until it was rudely snatched away from me. For years, I had the companionship of other souls, whenever I wanted it. I had a building full of unique individuals, each with stories to tell, emotions to vent. And, during those same years, I had souls to reach out to.
Now, all that was gone. The only physical sensation left was tumbling: endless, nauseating tumbling. No sense of up, down, left or right; no depth. It was like being jettisoned into outer space, only without the blessed quick death of decompression and body implosion. This tumbling went on forever. Every time I tried to figure out how they did it, how they wrenched my soul from its home inside my brain, I'd start to spin more violently, unable to think on an intellectual level any longer. I would have vomited, but I feared I'd spend eternity spinning in an ocean of my own bile and whatever my last meal happened to have been-probably fast food of some kind and a gallon of tequila. No… must stop riffing on food and drink, I thought to myself. Me? Who was me, anyway?
And then, as quickly as my spinning hell began, it ground to a halt.
A sturdy, white porcelain halt.
My God, I realized after a few moments. My name is Del Farmer, and my soul is trapped in a toilet.
I knew I was a toilet just as you, sitting there, know you are a human being. There is an undeniable, irrefutable awareness of self.
Frankly, I was amazed how fast my soul adapted to its new prison. And what is flesh-and-blood body but a prison? I was aware of my functional parts just as a human being is aware of his arms and legs. The core of my being was a wide, deep bowl, but I could feel extensions reaching deep into the floor, down into the great and ancient sewer system of Philadelphia itself. Somewhere along the way, my Self faded. What used to be my left arm was now the flushing mechanism. It made perfect sense; I'd always been left-handed. I didn't seem to have a right arm or hand equivalent, but my sense of “face” sure had found a new home. It was the seat and lid. Those diabolical bastards.
Sure, I'd always joked about sending uppity souls to a city trash can, or a public toilet. But that had been tough-guy hyperbole. I'd never considered doing something as downright evil as ejecting a unique, feeling life-force into something so dead and repellent. However, it seemed Brad Larsen had no such reservations. Because here I was. A toilet.
As much as I hated to admit it, my current situation lent a great deal of credence to the Ghost of Fieldman's spaced-out dialogues. Here I was, a living entity, contained in an artificial environment. At least it explained the “poltergeist” phenomena folks have been reporting for years. The most I could hope for was that this apartment would go un-rented for a few months, during which time I could possibly find a way to kill myself. Maybe, eventually, some compassionate soul would clog me full of toilet paper, and let me choke in peace.
Don't misunderstand. I wasn't feeling suicidal. But this was the first time in my entire life-from womb to death to soul absorption to current status-I'd felt completely and irrevocably lost. And then a thought occurred to me.
Was I completely powerless? Or did the abilities I'd been given transfer to my mind, and not the architecture of my physical reality? Could I still absorb-and transfer-a soul?
If the Ghost of Fieldman were to be believed, the powers lay within my physical Brain. Which he called a computer of sorts. I refused to accept that model of my brain, of course. Anybody would. It reduced my core being to a machine.
But if I were to be believed, my powers still remained within me. Which would mean I could still shuttle souls-including my own-back and forth between objects as easily as a four-year-old arranges alphabet blocks. My mind possessed those powers-not my physical brain.
The only problem: I only knew one way to transfer a soul, and that way required direct eye contact. Nothing in my bathroom had eyes: not my toothbrush, razor, washrag, bar of Ivory soap… not a damn thing. Come to think of it, if you had to be any object in a modern bathroom, the toilet's pretty much King Daddy. The bathtub is important, of course, but with public baths and YMCA pools, you could technically live without one. Let's face it: the toilet was essential to 20th century life.
God-what was I doing? Already rationalizing my new state of existence?
At any rate, I realized I had to transfer into something alive. And having bumped into some of the sad-sack residents of this apartment complex in the past couple of weeks, finding a living being was not going to be easy.