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

they had been going for more than an hour she finally said, “I don’t get it.”

Leni knew exactly what she meant. “Me neither.”

“I thought—”

“Me too.” Feeling sorry for her, and sharing her deep sense of disappointment that nothing had changed, Leni reached over and took Isabelle’s hand. It was unexpected but the perfect thing to do. The two friends had often held hands. They had been doing it along with Flora since they were kids.

When Isabelle looked over, she saw that Leni was crying.

“Hey, what’s up?”

Leni impatiently pushed her free hand across her wet eyes to wipe the tears away. “Nothing. I was just hoping you’d be able to go home now. That’s all.” She let go of Isabelle’s hand. For want of something to do, she bent down and picked a stone up off the road. Feeling its heft, she tossed it up and down while she spoke. “I want you to go back home and have your baby and live happily ever after.” Angrily, with all of her might she flung the rock away. “Tell me about the greatest time you ever had with Vincent. Tell me about the time you loved him most.”

Isabelle did not hesitate. As they began walking again, she recounted the night she met Vincent and how they had visited both the Kyselak signature and Petras Urbsys’s store. Both of them had their eyes down while she spoke. It was a nice story and they concentrated their full attention on it.

Leni was the first one to look up, but did so only because she heard something impossible three separate times and that third was just too much to resist. She had to take a look because damn it, she was certain she heard a seagull. In the middle of this wherever-they-were desolate landlocked countryside, Leni heard a seagull call out. She knew the sound well because her parents’ apartment was near the river in Vienna. She had grown up hearing gulls squawk and talk to each other.

When she looked up now, she saw that they were passing the bench next to the Danube Canal where she had been found dead. They were back in Vienna. A large seagull was flying directly overhead. She said quietly, “Isabelle, look up.”

She did and her first reaction was to reach for Leni’s hand. “What happened?”

“I do not know, but we’re here.”

“I want to go to our apartment. I want to see Vincent.”

“That’s fine, but I think we’d better walk there. Who knows how things work here for us and I would truly hate to get stuck on the subway for all eternity.”

The city was at its most beautiful. Summer afternoon sunlight poured across the buildings, illuminating the gargoyles, busts, and stone wreaths on their facades. They were among many details, many visual treasures one didn’t notice normally but couldn’t miss on this sublimely sunny, clear day. It reminded them once again of how generous much of the Viennese architecture was; it offered so much to see and take in.

The outdoor cafés they passed were full of tanned bare skin, extravagant cakes with schlag and everyone wearing sunglasses. Horse-drawn carriages clopped slowly around the Ringstrasse, indifferent to the cars whizzing by them. In the Burggarten families ambled around eating ice cream cones. Lovers lay sleeping on the grass in each other’s arms. At a sidewalk fruit stand peaches the size of grapefruits were for sale.

The women met the first dead person they knew at the corner of the Getreidemarkt and Mariahilferstrasse. One of their high school classmates, Uschi Stein, had died in an airplane crash the year after they graduated. When Isabelle and Leni reached a busy intersection just a few blocks from the Secession Museum, they saw her walking toward them and smiling.

“Uschi?”

“Hey you two. Where’s Flora?” She looked exactly as she had in high school; exactly as she had the day she died.

Trying to keep her voice under control, Isabelle asked her, “What are you doing here?”

“Looking for my stupid mother; she’s never on time for anything. We had a date for lunch. You’d think it would be easy to find your own mother when you’d arranged a time to meet, but not today.”

Uschi had been dead fifteen years.

“Look, I’ve got to go find my mom. I’ll see you guys around, huh? Let’s have coffee or something.” She walked toward Mariahilferstrasse without looking back.

When she was far enough away, Isabelle murmured, “She doesn’t know! She doesn’t know she’s dead.”

Unfazed, Leni agreed. “No, and she never will. She’s a ghost; ghosts never know they’re dead. They’re only confused forever. That’s why she’s still hanging around here looking for her mother.”

“But what about you and Simon? Why aren’t you like her?”

“Because Chaos got to her first after she died. We were lucky. Chaos creates ghosts; that’s where they come from. One of its more modern and clever inventions; only a few thousand years old. If you totally confuse a soul, it’ll never be able to find its way to the mosaic.”

Walking down through the Naschmarkt on their way to Isabelle’s apartment, they passed eleven more ghosts. Among them was a transvestite, an old woman sitting by a window in an apartment house directly across from the open market, a bum who somehow managed to stay drunk even in death, and a Turkish child who had died a week before of encephalitis. These dead and more were part of the crowd they passed. Leni could distinguish them from the living, Isabelle could not. The only Vienna the friends could see now was the Vienna they had experienced together.

They were talking about coffee when the accident occurred almost directly in front of them. They had just walked past the Café Odeon. Leni saw the place and mentioned the night the three of them had ended up there very late after a party. They drank one Irish coffee after another and talked talked talked until the place closed.

“I had so much caffeine that night; I don’t think I slept for a week.”

There