It’s not your first step off the bus but your second that finds the ice, though it’s crushed, of course, since it’s pretty late in the day and plenty of people have visited this stop in the meantime (and one, or rather many of them have one by one crunched their way over the crisp autumn ice covering the puddle’s surface); all that’s left is a crusty, dull, sugarlike coating around the edges, but it still crunches beneath your weight. You’d have thought the puddle ice would surely melt during the day, but obviously it didn’t, which, you think, is a definite sign of late fall, early winter. You reach up to tighten your scarf, but find you don’t have a scarf. Your tie doesn’t help at all. As a result, your throat is doomed to stay cold on your walk across the big, mostly empty parking lot (it’s nearly always empty, you don’t know why it’s even here, every now and then it gets used by a driving school, which sets up a row of blinking plastic cones that look like witch hats for future motorists to drive slalom through at a slow, almost walking pace). The lot seems bigger than usual. Cold increases distance, you think; the colder you are, the farther you’ve got to go. Enormous rayon brushes, like electric, Brobdingnagian dish scrubbers, are separated into festive colors: yellow, red, blue, black, though now they’re hanging idle, a fact you observe on your route past the car wash. Although the sliding glass doors leading into the garage are also closed, you see a couple of mechanics inside, one bends over and points with a tool, the other makes a dismissive gesture. It’s not snowing yet.
Still, every ape, every goat, every frog is conceived and born, every one of them started out as a clump of cells, a little gob of life, you don’t have to be mammalian to begin life as a clump of cells, you think, continuing your train of thought, everything’s conceived and born unmetaphysically, in the most vulgar biological way possible, ergo, on the most basic level, there’s nothing separating a human being’s conception and birth from, say, an ape’s, or a goat’s, or a frog’s. (Animals are only interesting to you insofar as they can be used as examples in this argument.) Furthermore (and this is an incontrovertible fact), life has evolved from simple forms to increasingly complex ones over billions of years, though the complex ones are made up of the same basic material as the simple ones, they’re made up of cells, that is, where life, so to speak, is housed, and to make a long story short, you think, everything that now exists came from something that existed before, every complicated life-form from simpler life-forms, all intelligent life from unintelligent life. Given that apelike creatures, the so-called primates, emerged along with other mammals after a good hundred million years had passed, you summarize to yourself, while you see (without seeing) a stack of motor-oil cans (SALE ON OIL), and these primates developed into primitive man, and these into modern men (physiologically speaking), one encounters a real brainteaser, namely: when, at what stage was the immortal soul suddenly and without warning implanted, or better yet, injected by divine syringe into human beings, probably into their brains; at what stage in the evolutionary game did this happen, since evolution implies biological continuity? On the other hand, if the soul wasn’t suddenly, miraculously injected into the more or less apelike, mortal human body, then how can the soul be free and immortal, if, that is, it evolved with brain cells? At exactly what point did human beings become immortal? Is Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, for example, doomed to bite the big one for all time like any hyena or louse, while Homo sapiens sapiens has divine, immortal substance and will enjoy eternal life? Therefore, you conclude (once again), human beings don’t have immortal souls, it’s flat-out impossible, which means she can’t be in hell.
To you, a gas station is a foreign country. You’ve never learned to drive so-called motor vehicles, and if you don’t actually enter the gas station as an illegal alien, you certainly do so as a rather nervous guest (you remember with discomfort the time someone asked you, even though you were only a passenger, to put gas in their car; you didn’t even know how to hang the nozzle, or whatever it’s called, back on the pump, it wouldn’t fit, and you just stood there holding it, like it was some kind of exotic life-form, feeling ridiculous). Once you’re inside the store, you’re on more solid ground. You know you don’t want hubcaps, windshield wipers, sponges, ice scrapers, first-aid kits, warning triangles, chains, battery chargers, roof racks, rear-view mirrors, seat covers, window shades, steering-wheel locks, gas cans, jacks, or exhaust-pipe repair kits, hell no, but you also don’t want milk, porno mags, Phillips screwdrivers, Swiss cheese, boxes of chocolate, applesauce, backsaws, ice cream, tiger-striped lap rugs, badminton sets, comic books, key rings, ballpoint pens, coffee mugs, adhesive yellow letters, flashlights, rice cream, clamps, oranges, snuff, baseball caps, or breath mints. You walk up to the cash register and get in line. You see (without seeing) a shelf with chewing tobacco, and while you wait you decide (once again) that you don’t believe that dreams contain any signs or portents, although you can’t get the fat man’s dictum out of your head, which can be interpreted in two contradictory ways, namely, 1) that once things are gone, they’re gone, and that once people are dead, they’re dead, and that what’s dead and gone is beyond all meaning, and has, therefore, entered into the realm of the meaningless, and therein lies the solution to the problem; or else 2) that the most absurd, most meaningless thing a person can dream up is that there actually is such a thing as an immortal soul and that that soul can go to hell.
The dream trolley. It’s got the following association for you: you were standing at a trolley stop (a real one, not a dream one), it was a sun-warmed and robust summer evening, you were on your way to town to meet some friends, and the young woman (was she young? it was hard to tell, you think, she might’ve been in her early thirties, like you are right now) next to you, who had a scarf wrapped around her head (maybe because she had lost her hair?) and an odd dark, reddish-brown cast to her face, had suddenly turned toward the wall and vomited, once, twice, three times, then had simply wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and continued to wait for the trolley. She didn’t speak, didn’t sway, didn’t tremble, didn’t smile. She’d just turned around and vomited. She seemed silent and grave, but it wasn’t the gravity of deep thought or true conviction, she was simply solemn, as if she was in a lot of pain. You pay for two blank, ninety-minute cassettes with exact change.
Someone is standing motionless on the footbridge. As you get closer you see that it’s a middle-aged woman in a gray coat, and that she’s thrown something, it’s impossible to say what, over the rail, and that now she’s following it with her eyes. Afterward, she turns around and walks toward you. As you pass one another, you seem to see a secret smile of forbidden pleasure playing across her face. Since you aren’t wearing a scarf, you tighten your tie and turn up your jacket collar, it’s especially cold in the middle of the bridge where you’re now standing, since it’s unprotected from the natural wind, and since the cars perpetually passing beneath you create a kind of artificial wind, an intermittent breeze, as you continue to lean against the railing, positioned almost dead center on the bridge, right where the arc reaches its apex, as if the bridge were made of elegantly carved marble with lion sculptures adorning either end, instead of concrete, steel, and asphalt, and as if the highway beneath you were a peaceful river winding through some famous tourist town.
She doesn’t have a soul, she’s dead, she’s not in any pain. The kicker, though, is that you can’t be sure, you can never be sure, it’s a perpetual uncertainty on both the universal and the individual levels, you think, and not only can’t you be absolutely certain she doesn’t have an immortal soul (that’s the crux of the matter, isn’t it: if you said there was a faraway planet with aliens who’ve got anthills for heads, and every ant is omniscient and eternal, and each ant has a smaller anthill for a head, and every ant is omniscient and eternal, and so on, no one could disprove it; oh well), you also don’t even know if she’s really dead; even now, with the two year anniversary of her disappearance coming right up (you don’t have to look at the calendar to know it’s coming up, you think, like it’s tattooed across on your brain in red ink, like it’s been written in bright neon letters that never quit, that glow day and night). Theoretically, she could just reappear out of nowhere, she could return from adventuring in an exotic land, she could come back from a steaming jungle chockfull of cackling beasts and strangling vines, and be exactly the same, just two years older, the same exact person, large as life, herself, exactly the same.