Chapter 8
Eight
The decision to share Samantha’s Soulmail—and thus, that the universe dictated that not only were soulmates real, but they
also could be platonic—was thankfully the bite AP News and Reuters had picked up, instead of focusing on the image of me chatting
amiably to a camera off-lens.
Theories flew in forums, on social media, in the news cycles, in suburban streets and coffee shops, but most Americans had
realized before lunch that you had to be eighteen to receive a Soulmail. But that wasn’t a universal truth. It was mostly true in America (except in Nebraska and Alabama, where you had to be nineteen, and
Mississippi, twenty-one), and everywhere else where the age of majority was eighteen. By dinnertime, it became common knowledge
that people in Scotland and Cuba who were sixteen and up had received it, and fifteen and up in places like Indonesia and
Iran. One of the staff writers cracked the answer by using Wikipedia, of all things.
Soulmails came to those at and above the age of majority in their home countries. Immediately, parents of parent-child soulmated
pairs were learning a new kind of consent: whether to reveal they were soulmates to their child, who had no say in the matter.
There was no script for telling your child you were their soulmate, no self-help books for explaining that one relationship
in your family had been highlighted as something universally more than the others within. Yet.
As possibly the only reader of Per Diem’s employee handbook in its one-hundred-eighty-two-page entirety, I was unsurprised when I was booked into a hotel that evening, thanks to working more than fourteen hours and living more than two miles from our office.
Thus, due to company policy surrounding the number of hours the network could legally keep someone at work without paying for meals and putting them up for four-plus star lodging, combined with the flight delays and hotel overbookings, I wound up in a room on the Upper East Side.
It was a famous hotel, one with historical detail and black-and-white floors and staff who seemed terribly interested in how your day was going.
The black town car driving me there was blissfully devoid of Samantha, Dola, and Al. For the first time since that morning,
I was alone, except for the silent driver and the local radio, which had extended its popular morning show hosts for the entire
day.
“Do you know it’s been near-record temps today and no one has even mentioned the heat?” the main host asked. “It’s all we would’ve been talking about if it weren’t for this Soulmail thing.”
“I did get an email with the use of the phrase ‘unprecedented times,’ which I haven’t seen since 2020,” the co-host answered.
“And my brother texted that the grocery stores are all emptied of bread, milk—”
I cut him off by popping my noise canceling AirPods in my ears.
My viral post was still going strong, and my Instagram had so many notifications that my screen buffered every time I opened
the app. When I finally cleared the red bubbles, I assumed there’d been a major mistake.
I now had over one hundred fifty thousand new followers. Dozens of recognizable accounts, including both Beyoncé and someone
identifying as Betty White’s Ghost. My other apps told the same baffling story.
Entertainment agencies, scouts, and talent agents flooded my DMs asking if I had representation, punting requests to chat. Bots rained on my past posts with the ask to promote my work and invitations to view them naked. Maybe I should forward them to Wells.
The sensation of disbelief knotted in my neck. Right as I was about to close the app, I landed on a name so familiar my stomach
contracted with surprise.
Caleb Mariner
is that you?
Caleb. The boy next door and down West Labyrinth Street. We had grown up barefoot on beaches, tiptoeing barnacle-clad jetties
to jump where the sea was clear of stringy, red-brown Irish moss and mermaid hair weeds. Afternoons flavored with salted caramel
ice cream, our mouths sticky with it, our breath heady and sweet. My parents were nicer than his, and his house was nicer
than ours. At least twice as big, even though we lived on the same street—as Cape neighborhoods can go, with mansions beside
one-room summer shacks beside stubborn original cottages like my own.
Shock rained into my fingertips. His was the last name I had ever expected to see in my DMs. When I was a teenager, I had
believed we would be in each other’s lives forever. I spent my college years mourning the untruth of that fact, thanks to
one huge, grievous, permanently undoable mistake.
My few hundred new emails included one from Wells’s mother (“Please call my son back”), an effusive chain with my college
group both shouting about my star appearance on Per Diem and breaking down their Soulmail pairs. At the bottom of my new inbox
sat my unread Soulmail, a questionable pearl in a very dirty oyster.
On the sidewalks, New York had rumbled halfway back to life. The car inched forward, someone on an electric hoverboard whooshing past.
I opened a browser and began to scroll. While I was live on air, Soulmail had become a lit match against gasoline. Across
the world, people had to confront their emails, texts, or notes. Some people checked social media for the news or read texts
from concerned family and friends before they got to their email accounts. Those people had prior knowledge of what was going on, or that there was at least a rumor that it was going on.
On the other hand, many people who hadn’t received texts or read (or watched!) the news didn’t open their emails. Besides,
most humans who had access to the internet when it started knew to be wary of suspicious-looking emails. No sender? Must mean
a virus. Those people tried to delete their Soulmails. When it wouldn’t delete, they went searching for information, for confirmation,
for doubt.
As we rode through the city, I read stories of lovers tangled in sheets who received one another’s names; of others who planned
to wait, wondering what they would do if their partner’s information was not presented to them as fact; of those who dove
straight into their emails, tapping into every emotion known to humankind: relief, fear, adoration, excitement, wonder.
In a world where still some measure of the population had seen the invention of television and where the current picture was
as real as it had ever been, mostly everyone agreed the emails were visually sharper than most of their ordinary emails. The
font was crisp, intense, more saturated than real life. You felt like you were looking at something exclusive, something expensive,
something you were never supposed to see, but it was undeniably yours. Sent to your email, addressed to you and you alone.
The New York Times was interviewing the couriers who had hand-delivered Soulmail telegrams. One in the city reported being paid in crypto; another in Shirakawa-go said his account balance had climbed with no ability to trace the deposit.
Predictably, Reddit had exploded. The same people who believed the conspiracy theory of birds not being real quickly latched
on to Soulmails as being an elaborate hoax, which meant the rest of the internet-connected world bought into their veracity.
Outside, a line of people holding duffel bags spilled from subway stairs on the corner. Wells, Per Diem, Soulmail: it was
all too much, and too hard to know where to begin with any of it. Instead, I retreated into my somewhat-annual secret social
media search on my old neighbor, newly in my messages.
Caleb Mariner had only a handful posts on his grid, shots of his brunch order and a Scrabble board and one that was our street
back home, which made my throat ache with nostalgia. No frames of him. I scanned each post for clues.
Is that you, he had asked.
It’s me, I answered now. I can’t believe it’s you
Beyond the not-soundproofed window glass, sirens sang into the night, pedicab pedalers shouted twofer specials if you could
prove you were with your Soulmail, the clogged sooty haze so unlike the ocean air of our childhood. Uniformed men lifted bowls
of water to the horses attached to big-wheeled carriages lining Central Park. A fresh poster board advertised LOVE PACKAGES
WITH PROOF OF SOULMAIL.
Caleb Mariner’s reappearance in my life made me low-level panic. I closed my eyes, trying to let the sounds of the city lull
me on the evening of this ridiculous, ridiculous day that had begun with someone else’s nude selfie. I considered then dismissed
texting Cambrey, filed away the possibility of finding her husband’s contact info for later.
At the hotel, I thanked the driver and stepped back into the oppressive night air.
Beside the entrance was the most popular singles’ bar that summer, which was devoid of its usual line.
I followed the bellman through the oily heat tunneling beneath construction scaffolding, then glanced at the sidewalk.
New Yorkers were no strangers to the majestic, the unbelievable, the juxtaposition of beauty and sadness. It was, they’d argue,
part of what gave the city its magic. A rat falling from the subway rafters and landing in a baby’s stroller. A fat, luscious
pumpkin growing from a crack in a tenement district. A saleswoman feeding pomegranate seeds to a peacock outside of a bodega.
I liked these moments, even when they repulsed me. But I was unprepared for what I saw beside my white mule shoe, as I tried
to subtly shake out a sticky point in my injured knee.
An egg was on the sidewalk. A broken one, to be more precise, the brown shell crinkled beside it. Rooster’s confetti. Its
yolk intact, the white opalescent and viscous, curled up at the edges like a child’s summer science experiment. No one paid
attention to it, so I followed the bellhop onto the black-and-white-striped floor inside.
After I inhaled room service and coughed my way through a steam shower that worked so ludicrously well I could barely tell
the difference between shampoo and conditioner, I unpacked the order a two-hour delivery service had left outside the door.
I was desperate for calmness, for facts, for something to latch on to. For safety, maybe. So naturally, I called my mother.
“Sweetheart,” Mom answered. “I can’t believe today. You’re famous! Everything okay? Are you all right?”
It was always this: everything okay? My mother had the nose of an anxious beagle. Unblameable. Once a significant enough trauma happened, control issues were
both unfortunate and not entirely irrational.
The underlying message was are you sick or hurt or sad?
for every milestone of my life. I bit my lip, retied the hotel bathrobe ribbon.
I’d dialed with the intention of telling my parents about Wells, because I’d read you were more likely to go back to someone who had betrayed you if you didn’t tell the people in your life about said betrayal.
“I’m okay, but I have something to tell you. Can you ask Dad to pick up, too?”
But my mother was already yelling for my father. This way, both of my parents could listen in, like something out of a nineties
movie. I’d only have to explain once.
At the news, my mother was predictably positive; my father unpredictably taciturn. They offered condolences, then venom, then
the assurance that I could come home anytime, followed by a demand for my hotel address and room number for safety.
“Anyway, it’s over between me and Wells,” I said after a lull. “Thank you for letting me completely monopolize this conversation.”
“That’s your new job, isn’t it?” Dad said, his teasing only partially forced.
“Ha. Very funny.” I put them on speaker and placed the room service tray littered with a half-eaten Cobb salad and toast crumbs
outside, the remnants of the strangest day of my life thus far. “Did you—did either of you look at yours?” I sank onto the
bed, tugging a wet lock of hair from its twist behind my neck. “You two there?”
Silence. And then, from Dad: “We opened ours. We’re each other’s, as you’d expect.”
A blanket of relief sprawled over me. One thing, at least, I wouldn’t have to worry about, though that feeling came with a
tiny pang of observation: neither of my parents would be mine. One-for-one. “Of course.”
“What about you?” Mom asked. “You said you didn’t open it. Is that true?”
“Yeah. I’m not ready.”
“That’s not like you,” Mom said lightly. “You like to know . . .”
“Everything?” I supplied.
Dad laughed. “At least you know yourself. We did one thing right.”
“Give yourself some credit. You did at least two things right,” I teased.
When I hung up, I let out a huge sigh. Whoever said telling people about a betrayal meant there would be no going back was
right. This felt permanent, and there was something about permanence that was both comforting and sad.
I straightened in bed, wincing against the snarl of pain in my knee. The angle of the anchor stool had rendered my joint stiff.
Typically, I felt no soreness when holding still, but everything else regularly ignited it. Bending, straightening, rolling
over in my sleep. Walking. Running. I plucked the clear flimsy bag from the ice bucket, then palmed a loose baby aspirin from
my purse and dry-swallowed it.
“Nice,” I commented to my reflection in the mirror. A bathrobe and wet hair was a vulnerable look, but the ice machine was
only two doors down. Bag and key in hand, I pulled open the heavy hotel door.
In the hallway, Natalie smirked beneath sconce light. Her eyeliner was impeccable, her lips nude, her beautiful hair untamed.
“I leave you for one week, and this is what I get?” she said, and then her face changed when she saw mine.
I burst into tears and folded myself into my best friend.