The Soul Without a Name

He was a silhouette like the rest of them, which is to say he was an absence with a certain shape.

The faceless dead of the Between all look alike at first glance, the way a crowd of candles looks alike from across a field, and it takes a long time and a certain tenderness before you learn to tell one flame from another. But this one I would have known anywhere, because the outline of him was wrong in a way that had nothing to do with the death he had died. His arms were too long. His neck bent at an angle that no human neck could have kept without complaint. There was something in the set of his shoulders that suggested they had once been designed for a different kind of weight, a different kind of air. He was the ghost of a body that had never been built for the ground.

I found him in a low colonnade where contracts were sold, at the hour when the crowds thin and the sellers begin to look tired. He was sitting on the plinth of a broken pillar with a single seal balanced on his knee, turning it over and over with fingers that had one joint too many, and he looked, if a man with no face can be said to look like anything, like someone who had been waiting a very long time for a customer he did not expect.

I should say now that I will not give you his name.

You will notice this about me if you know me well. I do not say the names of certain souls, and I did not ask his, and I have never once allowed myself to wonder. It is not rudeness. It is a discipline I learned early, and it is very simple. In the Between, a name is a rope. When you name a soul, you tie something to it, and the other end of that something is tied to you. It does not matter how lightly you knot it. The Between remembers knots. It pulls on them in the dark, and it brings the two ends back together long after you have forgotten why you cared.

I had enough ropes. I had, in fact, exactly as many as I could carry.

So I did not ask, and he did not offer, and he passed through my life like a warm draft through a corridor, and left. There is a courtesy in that. It is the courtesy we pay to passersby, the ones who are meant to be only that, and I would like to believe that he would have wanted it. I would like to believe he did not want to be remembered by name. I would like to believe he wanted to be remembered for what he gave me.

"You have the look of someone who has come to buy," he said.

His voice was dry and light, like paper turning in a draft. It had a curious lilt at the end of each sentence, a small lift, as though every statement had a question folded inside it that he did not quite intend to ask.

"I have," I said. "I was told you carry something called Leap of Faith."

The silhouette went very still.

"Ah," he said. "You were told."

"I was told."

"By whom?"

I did not answer, because I did not have an answer that would not have embarrassed me. I had heard the name in a whisper, passed from one silhouette to another across three markets, a rumor rather than a recommendation. There is a mission that pays what you most want, the rumor said. No one who has taken it has been heard from again, but no one who has taken it has been found dead either. I had followed that rumor across half a continent like a dog following a scent that belonged to no animal. I could not explain it. I did not try.

He seemed to take my silence as the answer it was.

"Sit," he said, and shifted along the plinth, and I sat.

For a while we did nothing. There is a long, unhurried politeness to the trade in missions, a kind of ritual approach, like two animals circling a waterhole. You do not begin with the price. You do not begin with the mission. You begin by allowing the other soul to decide whether you are the kind of person who ought to be trusted with the weight of his past.

"Do you know what I was?" he asked at last.

"No."

"No. You wouldn't. I don't remember all of it myself." He lifted the seal from his knee and held it between us, and inside the wax something moved, slow and pale, like a fish rising under ice. "I remember where I lived, though. That part stayed. It's the part that always stays, they tell me. The rest goes, but the where stays."

"Where did you live?"

"In the clouds."

He said it simply, and then he said nothing for a moment, and I waited.

"I don't mean above them," he said. "I mean in them. There was no ground where I came from. There may have been once, before my people learned to live without it, but I don't remember it, and neither did anyone I ever met. The clouds were the floor. They were firm enough to stand on if you knew how to stand on them, and soft enough to sleep in if you knew how to sleep. We grew things in them. We built things out of them. We fell in love in them, and we died in them, and when we died we were folded into them, and the clouds took us and held us, and nothing was ever lost." He turned the seal. "It was a paradise. I don't think I knew that until I had lost it, which I suppose is what paradise is."

"What was it called?"

"It wasn't called anything. You don't name the place you're standing in." He tilted his head, and I saw the too-long neck bend like a heron's. "You'd understand that, I think. You look like someone who has stood in a place that had no name."

He was right, and he did not know how right.

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"Tell me about yours," he said.

"My world?"

"Your world. I'll tell you the price of the mission when I've heard where you're from. It's a custom of mine." A small dry laugh, a paper rustle. "Or it's a superstition. I forget which."

So I thought about it.

I want you to appreciate what a strange thing it is to be asked that question when you are made the way I am. I did not have a world in the way that a man has a village, or a sailor a coast. I had a memory, and the memory was mostly a color, and the color was green, and it was silent. But there was one thing inside it that had a shape, and I reached for that.

"It was a very quiet place," I said. "I think it was the quietest place there has ever been. There was no one else there. There was only me, and one other, a figure who took care of me."

"A figure."

"A woman." I hesitated. "I think she was a woman. She was the shape of what I mean when I use the word care. She came every day, or what I thought of as every day, and she stayed with me, and she looked after me, and I did not have a word for what she was to me except that she was the reason the place was not empty."

"Your mother," said the silhouette.

"I don't know what that word means. But something like it."

He was quiet, and I felt him look at me, in the manner of the faceless, which is a kind of leaning.

"And what were you, in this quiet place?" he asked. "What were you when she cared for you?"

There are questions that lift the roof off a person, and this was not one of them. It was a small question, asked lightly, in the shade of a broken pillar by a stranger who had no reason to want the answer. But I had never said it aloud before. I had never had to. I looked at the seal turning in his fingers, and the pale thing rising and sinking in the wax, and I heard myself say it in a voice that seemed to come from somewhere very far below me.

"A plant."

The silhouette did not move.

"A plant," I said again, because I could not stop, now that the door was open. "But not the good kind. I was the kind that kills what stands near it. Anything that grew beside me withered. Anything she tried to plant close to me died. So she stopped trying. She never planted anything around me, not one seed, in all the time I knew her, and I have wondered ever since whether it was because she did not want to, or because she did not not want to. I don't think it was either. I think I was simply an anomaly. A mistake in the soil that she tended anyway."

I stopped. I had said more than I meant to. The colonnade was very quiet.

And then the man threw back his head and laughed.

It was not cruel laughter. That is important. It was helpless, delighted laughter, the kind that gets away from the person doing it, and it shook his whole outline, from the long arms to the bent neck, the way a rush of wind shakes a field of tall grass. He laughed so hard that the seal slipped from his knee and rolled across the stone, and I caught it without thinking, and he was still laughing when I gave it back.

"A plant," he wheezed. "Oh, stars. A plant. You've come all this way, with that look on your face, with your terrible secret, to tell me you're a plant."

"I don't understand."

"Friend." He wiped at the place where his eyes would have been. "This is the Between. Do you know how many plants there are here? There are more plants than anything else. More than the bipeds. More than the beasts. Every second soul I've met is something with roots or leaves or a grievance about the light. You can't throw a stone in the Between without hitting a fern with a tragic past."

I looked at him.

He stopped laughing. He seemed to realize that I had not laughed with him, and that I was not going to, and something in the set of his shoulders gentled.

"Ah," he said. "You thought it was a great confession."

"I did not think about it at all."

"No. I think that's the trouble with you." He said it kindly. "It was a great confession, for you. I see that. It just wasn't a rare one."

Now, I expect you are waiting for the conversation to turn here. You expect the silhouette to say something profound, to lay a hand on my shoulder, to reveal that my loneliness was shared and my anomaly was a gift. I expect it, too. I have waited for it for eons.

There is nothing more.

The man laughed, and I sat, and he stopped laughing, and the light shifted in the colonnade, and a few silhouettes passed in the lane outside and did not look in. That was all. The great confession sat between us on the plinth like a small stone, and neither of us picked it up. And it is odd, but I have come to think that this was the kindest thing anyone could have done. He did not make it larger than it was. He did not make me carry it.

We haggled, after that.

It was a gentle haggle, more like two people agreeing to be surprised by a number. He named a price. I named a lower one. He sighed and named one in between, and I found that I could not meet it, and I said so, and he tilted his neck and considered me for a long moment and then said, "You'll pay the rest later, then," as though it were nothing, and I knew that it was not nothing, and that he knew it too.

"What does it do?" I asked, when the seal was in my palm and the weight of it was already sinking into my hand. "The mission. What happens?"

"You jump."

"From where?"

"From a high place, into the clouds." He moved his long fingers. "That's the whole of it. You stand at the top, and you go over, and how far you fall depends on chance. The odds. Something like that. It might be a hand's breadth or it might be a very long way. If you survive it, you get what you wanted most, while you were in the air."

"What I wanted most."

"At the moment of the jump. Not before. Not after. In the air." He seemed to be searching for something in his memory, and finding only the edge of it. "It's how we did it, you understand. It was a rite, where I'm from. Every one of us leapt, once. I remember the leaping. I remember the wind. I remember the moment just before the... before the..." His voice trailed off. "It's gone. The rest of it's gone. I can tell you what it was for, but I can't tell you how it worked."

"What was it for?"

He was silent, and when he answered, there was something in his voice that I had not heard before, thin and old and very tired.

"I think it was for finding out who we were tied to."

The colonnade was very still.

"I don't know what happens," he said, "if you don't survive it. I've looked, and there's nothing there. I don't think we had a word for it." Then, more lightly, because I think he could not bear to leave the silence standing, "But I'm told the view is wonderful."

I paid him. I took the seal. I thanked him, and I meant it, and I did not ask his name.

He did not ask mine.

He was already turning the empty place in his hands, in the shadow of the broken pillar, looking a little lighter than he had when I found him, a man who had put down a heavy thing and was surprised to find that his arms still knew how to swing. I think about him sometimes. I think about the long arms and the bent neck and the paper laugh, and I hope that wherever he has gone, the ground is very far away, and that there is always someone waiting below.