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time in 1883, and no one knows for certain why she is at the institute. At the time she was
committed, it was known as the Columbus State Institute for the Feeble-Minded. ‘She never had a
chance,’ said Dr. A. Z. Soforenko, appointed two months ago as superintendent of the institution. He
said she was probably a victim of ‘eugenic alarm,’ which he said was common in the late 1800s. At
that time some felt that because humans were made ‘in God’s image’ the retarded must be evil or
children of the devil, because they were not whole human beings. ‘During that time,’ Dr. Soforenko
said, ‘it was believed if you moved feeble-minded people out of a community and into an institution,
the taint would never return to the community.’ He went on to add, ‘She was apparently trapped in
that system of thought. No one can ever be sure if she actually was feeble-minded; it is a wasted life.
She is quite coherent for her age. She has no known relatives and has had no contact with anybody
but Institution staff for the last 78 or 80 years.’ “
Talbot sat silently in the small boat, the sail hanging like a forlorn ornament from its single
centerpole.
“I’ve cried more since I got inside you, Talbot, than I have in my whole life,” he said, but
could not stop. Thoughts of Martha Nelson, a woman of whom he had never before heard, of whom
he would never have heard had it not been by chance by chance by chance he had heard by chance,
by chance thoughts of her skirled through his mind like cold winds.
And the cold winds rose, and the sail filled, and he was no longer adrift, but was driven
straight for the shore of the nearest islet. By chance.
He stood over the spot where Demeter’s map had indicated he would find his soul. For a
wild moment he chuckled, at the realization he had been expecting an enormous Maltese Cross or
Captain Kidd’s “X” to mark the location. But it was only soft green sands, gentle as talc, blowing in
dust-devils toward the blood-red pancreatic sea. The spot was midway between the low-tide line and
the enormous Bedlam-like structure that dominated the islet.
He looked once more, uneasily, at the fortress rising in the center of the tiny blemish of land.
It was built square, seemingly carved from a single monstrous black rock...perhaps from a cliff that
had been thrust up during some natural disaster. It had no windows, no opening he could see, though
two sides of its bulk were exposed to his view. It troubled him. It was 11 dark god presiding over an
empty kingdom. He thought of the fish that would not die, and remembered Nietzsche’s contention
that gods died when they lost their supplicants.
He dropped to his knees and, recalling the moment months before when he had dropped to
his knees to tear at the flesh of his atrophied umbilical cord, he began digging in the green and
powdery sand.
The more he dug, the faster the sand ran back into the shallow bowl. He stepped into the
middle of the depression and began slinging dirt back between his legs with both hands, a human
dog excavating for a bone.
When his fingertips encountered the edge of the box, he yelped with pain as his nails broke.
He dug around the outline of the box, and then forced his bleeding fingers down through the
sand to gain purchase under the buried shape. He wrenched at it, and it came loose. Heaving with
tensed muscles, he freed it, and it came up.
He took it to the edge of the beach and sat down.
It was just a box. A plain wooden box, very much like an old cigar box, but larger. He turned
it over and over and was not at all surprised to find it bore no arcane hieroglyphics or occult
symbols. It wasn’t that kind of treasure. Then he turned it right side up and pried open the lid. His
soul was inside. It was not what he had expected to find, not at all. But it was what had been missing
from the cache.
Holding it tightly in his fist, he walked up past the fast-filling hole in the green sand, toward
the bastion on the high ground.
