Soulmates

by Ralph Pullmann

“How strange a thing this is! The Priest telleth me that the Soul is worth all the gold in the world, and the merchants say that it is not worth a clipped piece of silver.” ~ Oscar Wilde

Prologue

Grace was dying. Herman had little time left to finish setting up his machine.

His machine looked like a metallic spider’s web with a fractal arrangement of ever smaller strands focusing to a small pea-sized pod at the center.

Herman Mills was a popular volunteer at the hospice center. Patients asked for him to be with them at the end.  He spent long hours talking to the patients, getting them to tell their life stories, listening to their lost hopes and dreams, coaxing them to relive the best parts of their lives. When the end came, he knew they were ready and that they had no more interest in this world, so he would just hold their hand, singing, talking, reading to them softly.

Grace’s roommate, Louise, watched Herman set up his machine. She was suspicious. Louise had been a nurse before her aggressive cancer progressed to hospice care. She had never before seen anything like Herman’s machine.

“What’s it do?” she asked.

“It calms them,” he lied. 

Herman finished making delicate adjustments to his strange machine and sat down next to Grace. He held her hand.

 He held her hand  as he told her what he remembered about what she had. told him of her life, about how he would remind her family of the value she had brought to them, about those that admired what she had done in her life. Never had he felt as close to any other patient as he did to Grace.

She was now wizened with age but she must once have been a beauty. Her lively intelligence and humor in the face of her deteriorating health had won Herman over.

Outcast from her parents’ home life because of the daring lifestyle decisions she had made, she continued into several stormy relationships before she decided the settled life was not for her. Her illegitimate son and daughter had been raised primarily in foster homes for the first few years of life, but finally Grace had taken control of her life and theirs. She made a concerted effort to make up for the difficulties she had caused her children and provided a warm, caring home life.

The children never completely forgave her the early neglect but they had both graduated from college with advanced degrees and had successful careers, Nancy in pharmaceutical research and William in cryptography. It wasn’t easy for either of them. The early neglect had made school difficult and they needed tutoring and a great deal of counseling.

But Herman saw things differently from Grace’s children. Of course, he hadn’t had to deal with the difficulties, but he realized that Grace had had little choice in some of her decisions. In an age before easy birth control, sexual indiscretions often led to a shotgun wedding but if the father chose not to be found, the wedding plans were thwarted. Then, with a family unwilling to live with the disgrace of such lack of moral turpitude, Grace found herself homeless, jobless, pregnant, and unable to make peace with the bigotry of small town America during its “golden years.”

She moved to California where she found what work she could but found her Midwest gullibility no match for the promises of other young men and before long she found herself with another child and another unfound father. The trials of motherhood and underpaid jobs led to a spiral of despair followed by further poor decisions before she was finally able to overcome her difficulties.

As Herman continued to calm his patient, her breathing became labored and finally culminated in a deep sigh as she expelled her last breath. A few seconds later Herman’s machine glowed briefly and he had captured another soul.

The light was dim in the room and the glow from Herman’s machine was not bright enough or long lasting enough to have ever been noticed before, but the sharp-eyed Louise had seen it. “What you doin’ to her?” she shouted. “This man’s done somthin’ to Gracie!”

The monitors hooked to Grace had already brought the nurses down the corridor and they turned on lights, looked around, and tried to calm Louise. “That there web killed Grace. He done it,” she kept repeating. 

When the nurses and Herman approached her, she shrank back and screamed, “He’s gonna kill me too! Get him outa here.”

The nurses finally pushed Herman out of the room and at the insistence of Louise followed by carrying his machine out after him. He took it to the waiting room at the end of the hall, popped out the small smooth pod at the center, and waited for the inevitable questioning he knew was to follow.

It was nearly an hour before the head nurse came to find him. “What was all that about?” she asked. 

“I don’t know. Maybe she’s never been with someone who’s died before. She just went nuts when Grace died.”

“She said she saw your machine kill her. A light came out of it and killed her.”

Herman showed her the antenna. “It’s just a pretty pattern made from steel. You can see there’s no light, no power source, nothing but an intricate pattern cut out of thin sheet steel. There’s no way it could have killed Grace. Why would I want to do that anyway? I thought the world of Grace.”

“I know, but I had to get your side of the story. Why don’t you just leave that thing at home for a few weeks? I’m sure half the patients on this floor heard the commotion.”

“OK.” He rubbed his finger along the smooth pod containing Grace’s soul. He didn’t need anything more for the night.