GLASS SOUP by Jonathan Carroll (funny books to read .txt) 📕

she looked at Haden and said to him in exactly the same tone of voice, “Go away.”

“Forget it, Leni. I’m real, not part of your dream.”

“You can’t be real, Simon—you’re dead.”

“Both of us are and that’s why I’m here, not because you dreamed me.”

Each struggled to process their different information. But it was like trying to eat a whole loaf of bread as fast as you could. No matter how quickly you chewed, your cheeks stayed full, your throat grew dry, and your jaw got tired. But still there was so much more left to eat.

Rational even in death, Leni wasn’t having it. She did not believe or accept what Haden had just told her—that he was not part of her dreamworld. Having learned to conjure here, that’s what she did now. She conjured the Simon Haden she remembered and been together with in life. The lover who treated her well for a while but also the bad guy he later became when he jumped ship.

Leni’s conjured Haden materialized standing where the Troodon had been minutes before. This second Simon was dressed beautifully. His shirt was the thick lustrous white of milk fresh out of a bottle. His fingernails shone from a recent perfect manicure. He smiled and his teeth looked like old turnips and uprooted gravestones. They looked like they hadn’t been brushed or worked on by a dentist since the invention of the drill.

“Damn!” the real Haden said for a second time. He knew what she had just done but seeing his face on another man didn’t bother him. Seeing a brown graveyard in “his” mouth did. “What happened to my teeth? They don’t look like that.” He wished he had a hand mirror right then so he could check them. Surely they weren’t so ugly.

Haden #2 said nothing and only continued smiling, unfortunately. He slipped his hands into his pockets and tipped his head jauntily to the side in a Gene Kelly/Hollywood way that said I can wait all day—I know who I am.

“You have terrible teeth, Simon. I kept telling you that.”

“Yes, okay, but not that bad. Jesus, Leni, do you really remember me that way?”

She would not look at him; only at her imagined Haden. Her brain was working fast. In this place there could be two of anything if that’s what you wanted. She could have created five Simon Hadens in five different colors if that had been her wish. So two of them in front of her was okay. But what she couldn’t understand was #1 not disappearing when she told him to. It was as if one of her dreams had a mind of its own. That was disturbing. Until now, death had not been a hard place for Leni to figure out. This was the first time she had hit a speed bump here and banged her head hard on the roof. Was this a test?

The real Haden walked over to #2 and examined him carefully. “What’s that cologne you’re wearing?”

“Sandalwood,” #2 said in a voice slightly deeper than the original.

“Sandalwood? I never used sandalwood cologne in my life.”

Leni sat back on the bench, her elbows out to either side to support her. “I like sandalwood on a man, if you don’t mind. Is it all right with you if he wears cologne that I like?”

The real Haden would have protested if he were somewhere else. To him, cologne was like a person’s signature; one of the ways of telling the world who you were. Wearing disgusting sandalwood cologne was like signing your name with the wrong hand.

Number Two was a few inches shorter than him too, but Haden did not bring that discrepancy to Leni’s attention. He just kept looking at his clone that was not a clone but close enough so that most people would have had a tough time telling them apart. The real Haden had no such trouble. Those vile teeth, the nose-wilting cologne, the wrong height… He noticed more and more details that were wrong about this imposter and they made him mad. Leni’s imagined version of him was simply not him.

His frustration spilled over when #2 asked for something to eat—maybe an avocado? Haden loathed avocados. Those strange green things that always reminded him of legless frogs…

“I hate avocados! I would never ask for one.”

When he said that, Leni looked at him with outraged, hurt eyes and immediately began to cry. Why? What had he said?

She put her head in her hands and wept. Haden’s clone looked at him and tsk-tsked its disapproval.

“What? What’d I say?”

“You fucked up now, brother. Look what you did to her.”

“All I said was I don’t like avocados.”

Leni looked up from the wet bowl of her hands. Her eyes were shiny. “You bastard. You told me you loved avocados. That was one of the nicest afternoons I can remember. Now it turns out you were lying. Thank you very much, Simon. You are a bastard.”

“What the hell are you talking about, Leni?”

She wouldn’t answer him, so the other Haden did.

“Don’t you remember the day you two went shopping together and you stole her avocados?”

Flummoxed, Haden looked at the ground and tried to match these words to a memory. Shopping? Stolen avocados? When she was sure he wasn’t looking, Leni peeked up to see if his expression showed any kind of recognition. He dug deep in his memory but that first attempt came up with nothing. Digging deeper he saw something but it was vague and amorphous—a ghost of a memory, ectoplasmic at best. Leni watched him trying to remember but finding nothing. Tears welled in her eyes again.

One of life’s (and death’s) nastier lessons: what’s important to us is not necessarily important to others, no matter how close we are to them. What we love or hate, they don’t. What we hold to be true is not often their truth. How could Simon forget? How could a day that lovely have slid through his memory like water and fallen away