Clarity

I love spending my afternoons inside J’s study. It’s been my favourite time and place since my tenure as his house guest. Right now, though, I am just a visitor. It’s as fascinating to me as it was the first time he and Kiara took us on a tour of the house. Kiara was the great love of his life until she wasn’t. Relics from their marriage are still on display in their two-storied home on the outskirts of the city, starting right at the driveway lined with white ceramic pots – she was the one with the green thumb. It’s an explosion of Anthuriums, Philendrons and Spider Plants all the way to their verandah with the cane hammock.

I can’t imagine J watering and mulching. Perhaps a gardener swings by every now and then. But I am sure he does it all himself because he can’t keep househelp of any kind around. It’s the nature of his craft. Something about the “psychosphere” within the compound. The realm of consciousness, he says, is a delicate one, and thus, easily disturbed by lingering souls saturating the balance. “If they’re around me, I have to read them to know if they’re ‘clear’. And it’s unethical to pry on one’s employees,” he explained once, casually revealing that all visitors shed their privacy at his doorway.

Despite his professional finesse at it, J doesn’t read souls for a living. He collects them. He is not an exorcist, he insists. I understand why some might say he is one. He draws out the immaterial from its material encasement. His services are usually solicited by bereaved families. They like to make sure their lives are cleared of any residue spirit matter belonging to the departed. His work comes days after the funeral rites, when mourners find bits of otherworldly static interrupting the quiet mundane. But he doesn’t offer safe passage into the afterlife. The powers he commands are limited to trapping the essence, not delivering it from damnation. Here, in this world, it continues to exist in some earthly vessel of his choosing. Beautiful crystal goblets and orbs with tightly screwed caps line the Mahogany shelves of his study, wall to wall. When the light hits them at a certain angle, they’re majestically iridiscent. That’s what makes the afternoons so magical in that room on the roof.

J says he stopped counting after his 365th. But I suspect he lies. There is a ledger that holds a record of every successful trapping. He’s never shown it to me but I deduced that from the serial numbers on each unit. Not all of them are numbers. There are also alphabets and sometimes heiroglyphical scribbles on the labels. They’re not arranged in numerical order either. You’ll see a 76 smushed between an L and a spiral that is either a spider or the Sun. But there must be some order to it. I wonder if he arranges these souls by zodiac. Being curious about his work is natural, but it doesn’t bode well to ask him questions. He is very private about his professional transactions. All I know is that it pays well. And frequently. That’s how many people linger on after death, clinging to their earthly associations.

I never heard Kiara complain about it, perhaps because they both owed their comfortable living to his line of work. She was looking forward to being a mother. But not enough to stay on. She let him keep all the relics of the marriage as long as she could keep the baby. In her third trimester, out of nowhere, she took off. At least that’s what it seemed like considering they never came across as a doomed couple. Last I heard, they were planning names with inside jokes – “If only we were U and V, we’d make a W, but J and K can only bring in L.”

Kiara is coming over for tea today though. “It’s a clean break, then?” I tried to offer, optimistically. He grunted back a response that summarised she was visiting for some paperwork. Just like the inner workings of his craft, his marriage and its dissolution remain a mystery to me. I don’t ask. He doesn’t tell. We’re friends.

———

Kiara is here. I want to tell her how lovely she looks in her silk skirt and cream blouse. But it’s not going to register. It’s my first time seeing a woman so desperate to look bigger than she really is. But try as she might, the bulk of the generous silhouette doesn’t camouflage the fact that she’s lost the baby. I want to ask her about it, but my propriety gets the better of my curiosity; we’re friends. J hasn’t commented on it either. He is nonplussed in the North American sense of the term, barely touching his cucumber sandwiches and tea.

I am trying to focus on what they’re saying. There is no mention of the unborn, perhaps for my benefit. But they shouldn’t bother because my mind keeps wandering to the study that I love so much with its lusciously curved, almost pregnant glass baubles. Could he have… Is it possible… One can’t say. It hasn’t escaped me that there is an especially voluptuous transcluscent teal jar, about the size of a lemon, bearing a tiny label with a freshly scribbled L. A recent addition.