“One certainly has a soul; but how it came to allow itself to be enclosed in a body is more than I can imagine.” – Lord Byron

"Saving Your Soul (For Later)"

Excerpt from FreeTime New York

You’ve had your morning yoga lessons, your midday spa session and your afternoon therapy... so why are you still on edge? It may be time to try something a little different. At The Soul Storage Company, they won’t try to heal your soul, but they will help you remove it. For a fee that is more affordable than I anticipated they will "disembody" your soul and store it until you want back, if you ever do. And if that’s not mind-blowing enough for you, you can also try someone else’s soul on for size. Nothing says "relaxing weekend" like housing the soul of a tortured Russian novelist!

"SOUL STORAGE - Are New Yorkers tired of carrying their souls?"

Excerpt from The Gotham Reader

Tobias Wainwright was the gloomiest mechanic at Herblock Motors. While his co-workers replaced mufflers and rotated tires, they told off-color jokes, or ribald stories of their sexual exploits. Tobias never took part. Their banter seemed childish to him. Worse, it reminded him that he was, like them, undereducated, unsophisticated and doomed to a life toiling in the lower castes of American society. Was he doing what he should with his life? Did it even matter, trapped as he was in his average life?

Rebecca, his fiancé, suggested therapy. It was a failure. It was the same with meditation, kickboxing, and primal scream therapy. It seemed that nothing would be able to chase away his congenital angst.

It was one of his co-workers who inadvertently provided the solution to Tobias’s troubles. As a joke, the woman who answered the phones gave him a small ad torn out of the morning’s newspaper, for The Soul Storage Company in New York City. "Lighten up your life!" it said. "Have your soul removed!"

Tobias made an appointment that day. By the weekend, he was at their offices, holding a glass jar containing what looked like a small pile of orange quartz crystals. It was his soul. Dr. David Flintstein, the founder of the company, asked him how he felt. "Empty," he said. "Totally empty." It was, he would later say, the best day of his life.

"SOUL MAN - Has David Flintstein discovered the secrets of the human soul?"

Excerpt from U.S. Scientist

Dr. David Flintstein stands at the lectern, smiling as his colleagues ask one openly hostile question after another. "Each of these harvested deposits has completely different properties," says one neurologist. "How can you say that they’re different manifestations of the same thing?"

"What’s the difference between this and a chemical lobotomy?" asks another.

"Theologists and philosophers can’t even agree on what a soul is, if there even is such a thing," adds a philosophy professor. "What makes you think that that" - he points to a slide projection of what looks like a termite mound made of Play-Doh - "is a soul?"

Most of the questions follow this same basic theme. How can you...? How dare you...? What makes you think...?

Dr. Flintstein answers every question confidently. "Arterial plaque is not made of the same material in every artery, but we know what it is, and we have a name for it. - All of our patients retain the ability to think clearly and function as they always have. In fact, most say that they think more clearly, and are happier. - I’ve always said that the soul is a colloquial term. What we are doing is removing the by-products of years of emotional overload. It’s like chronic neuralgia, only instead of physical pain we’re dealing with emotional pain."

This is how he talks to his colleagues. He explains the chemistry, the mechanics, and the anatomy involved in his new science. To his customers, however, he puts it all into layman’s terms: We will remove your soul, and store it in a jar.