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

to it. At the moment the car passed, she was looking at Broximon in his basket. She asked herself When did I last hear an AC/DC song? That time I ate pizza with Simon Haden and told him some things about my past because he kept asking. She’d spoken a little about her childhood. She had told him about Brogsma, her imaginary childhood friend. How he was her constant companion back then because she was scared of so many things in life. The Brogsma she created was a fifty-fifty mix of a child her age and an adult. As a result, he always knew how to handle things because he possessed the best qualities of both a grown-up and a child. He gave her the best advice. He was funnier than anyone. No one else could see him but Isabelle so he was always at her side when she needed him. Always there to comfort her and make her feel safe when she was frightened.

Brogsma.

Broximon.

“Oh my God, he got the name wrong! He thought it was Broximon. That’s so unbelievably sweet.”

Putnam looked at her after this unexpected outburst and wondered what she was babbling about. But when she continued to stare at Broximon without saying anything more, Putnam returned to the conversation with Ettrich.

Isabelle had always known Simon Haden cared for her, but never grasped the full extent until this moment. Now she realized that Simon had taken his memories of her childhood stories with him into death and one of the people he had populated his dreamworld with was her Brogsma.

And because Simon was so snobby about what he wore, he gave the same characteristic to her Brogsma. Today he was dressed like a skateboarder for some reason, but in the past whenever she had encountered Broximon he had always been dressed exquisitely—like an English lord or an Italian millionaire. But that was only because Simon dressed that way too.

From the beginning, this beautifully attired Broximon had been there to help. He was the first one to speak to her in Haden’s dreamworld. Later when she met him in real life at Leni’s funeral he had tried to help her but failed.

She looked over at the bench where Leni was sitting next to the false Broximon. What an irony: Isabelle had created him from her memories of the real Broximon, thinking he could help her out of this mess. But now Isabelle understood both Broximons were flawed copies of a being she had invented when she was a girl.

Back then she had created Brogsma to protect and comfort her. Simon had created Broximon, and now Vincent was supposed to create a whole dreamworld where they would all live happily ever after… outside outside outside. Everyone kept feverishly creating outside things to save themselves. But the door opened inward, that she knew for sure.

Isabelle remembered a line she had read recently: “You must find yourself where you already are.” She was thirty-two years old. There were so many different phases in life. So many different Isabelle Neukors had inhabited her days on earth. Why not turn to some of them now for help? Selves that had already lived and prevailed. Why not ask them for help? Why not ask herself for help?

Like sixteen-year-old Isabelle who had walked all night alone across Bombay back to her hotel because she had lost her wallet and had no money for a taxi. That brave, impulsive girl saw the walk as a fun adventure. Never once did it cross her mind that it was dangerous.

So—help me now, sixteen-year-old me. Take my place behind the wheel. Please drive this stretch of dark unknown road because I am too frightened and lost and out of control. The headlights stopped working a while ago and there is no map but that didn’t bother you half my lifetime ago in Bombay.

Or help me, twenty-eight-year-old Isabelle, who had the strength to face the fact she was an alcoholic and then the courage to admit it to the right people who helped her to save herself. Help me now, twenty-eight-year-old me.

She was again looking at the antiaircraft tower while thinking these things. Her mind spinning like a kind of turbine, these thoughts about her different past selves fueling it. Which of them could best help me now? What do I have to do to find her? Can this idea really work?

She needed strength and courage now. She also needed a version of herself who was intimate with this situation, the players and the stakes involved. Her sixteen-year-old self did not know Vincent Ettrich or very much about how life worked, for that matter. How could anyone at sixteen when life is just beginning to show its hand?

Her twenty-eight-year-old self had not gone yet into death to rescue the love of her life. At twenty-eight she fucked too many men, it was a kind of cold sport back then, and love (whatever that was) lived on another planet—definitely not the one she inhabited. What she needed now was an Isabelle her age with her resume and her scars. An Isabelle who knew most of what she knew but was undaunted by it.

While thinking this over, her eyes slid down one long stained side of the cement flakturm, to the tall trees in front of it waving in the wind, and then over to the enclosed children’s playground nearby. The warm breeze had picked up. She felt it over her skin and in her hair. Perhaps it would rain later on. The sounds of rustling leaves and the occasional call of a bird were near.

Two days before her friend Leni Salomon died, Isabelle had gone for a long walk alone around the neighborhood. For no specific reason she had awakened that morning brimming with happiness and expectancy. Breakfast with Vincent was intimate and funny. He told stories she had never heard before that made her laugh, and he kept buttering pieces of toast for her with a jeweler’s precision. Just that gesture