The Book of Dark Souls: A Fiction

 

The 2020 surge in suicides was overshadowed by Covid-19, millions of pandemic deaths masking the thousands who killed themselves for no apparent reason. The trend has been blamed on pandemic isolation, but I propose another cause. Last summer, when travel was restricted and friends were using Zoom to reconnect, I had the good fortune to record a June 28 meeting. Good because otherwise the only evidence would be my memory. Below is an exact account of that meeting.

. . . . .

Brad was in his ad hoc office, an Austin coffee shop that stayed open in the height of the pandemic. I was home as usual, quarantined by the Virginia governor and my own choice. Unlike Brad, I didn't feel immortal. Laura was just back from Trader Joe's in Nashville, Zooming from her studio. At sixteen minutes into the chat, Brad smiled through a silence and changed the subject.

"I should tell y'all I've written a book. It was easiest and hardest thing I've ever done. I've been writing it for fifty years, but it took barely two weeks to type the words. Like once I dared to keystroke what I knew, it poured out of me. The truth about the human soul."

"A whole book?" said Laura.

"Just over a hundred pages. The truth isn't complicated once you see it."

"What's your next book about? The meaning of life?"

"It covers that too. How most people suckle like babies from the Alphabet News and other so-called expert tools of brain manipulation. The hypnosis of popular culture. My working title was Baa Baa, but I figured that wasn't explicit enough. So I added a subtitle: Why Men Are Sheep."

"But not women? That sounds about right."

"Of course, Laura. Women too. Especially women, I'm sorry to say. But, you know, the term man includes all the human species. It always has."

"O-kay," I said. 

There's nothing to be gained by arguing with Brad about this sort of thing. Ideologically, he's a child of the 1950s. I should mention that the three of us are old classmates in every sense, well over seventy. We remember the fifties shockingly well, but I like to think I've moved on.

"So what is the meaning of life?"

"I'll send you the file."

"A summary will do," said Laura.

Maybe she saved me. I might have read it.

"It's the truth, so everybody will hate it. The dark underside that we all deny."

"Life's a bitch, and then you die?"

Brad laughed. He almost never laughs, but he found this funny.

"God, no!" he said. "That's so trivial. Don't you see? That's a joke, and jokes are life-affirming. You can laugh at death, but you can't laugh at the truth. Or you can't help laughing. But I don't laugh. Not at the truth. If you see life as a bitch, you see it as active, engaging. A field of suffering maybe, but you've got illusions to be violated. Life as a bitch is the very false confidence my book disproves."

"So life isn't a bitch?"

"Of course, it is! But that misses the point. Its whole point is missing the point. Bitching is all about things that happen. Shallow trivia. I told you before. My book looks into the human soul."

"And what does does it see?"

"I'll email you a copy."

"Please don't!" said Laura.

I didn't say anything then.

"Maybe that's better," said Brad. "I don't know if you're ready. Either of y'all. I've never seen this in print. I can't be the only person that's seen it. I can't be the first one. I have to wonder how many others have seen what I've seen and kept their mouths shut, that or killed themselves."

"Your truth is that serious?" said Laura.

"I can only imagine what a less cheery person might do." 

         Brad's grin advertised his cheery disposition. 

"Maybe that's why so many artists commit suicide," said Laura.

"I can't speak for artists," he said. "Art is mostly lies."

"But isn't this your own soul?"

Puzzled, he lifted his coffee cup. It was empty.

"This human soul. Isn't your own soul the only human soul available for you to look into, Brad? So how do you know other souls have the same experience? The same darkness."

He sighed at my naïveté.

"I extrapolate," he said. "I'm not some superstitious guru staring at my navel. This is not about introspection, please! Skinner proved that doesn't work. This is analysis of a lifetime of studying human behavior, that kind of soul. Soul in quotation marks if you please. How mental machinery works at its deepest level. It's very deepest, below the clouds of individual and collective self-delusion, where we are animals. People don't understand evolution, the robots it makes of us."

"Okay," I said. "I see one problem here."

"Just one?" Laura smiled.

"It's a syllogism, Brad. You recognize logic. All men are sheep. Brad is a man. Therefore, Brad is a sheep. If we're all deluded, you're deluded about being deluded. What does your soul-truth have to back it up--besides creating a classic Liar's Paradox?"

"This is very different," he said slowly. "It's like seeing your father downtown. The truth, once you see it, is as self-evident as it is shocking."

"And you've seen it?"

"I believe so," he said.

"You've seen the light?"

"The dark," said Laura.

Brad changed the subject, and we've had no contact since. I never saw his book, but it may have spread through the Internet since then, a second deadly pandemic.