The Soul Thief

by Charles Baxter

  Annoyed, Nathaniel wanders down the hallway, enveloped by his would-be confidants. Hysterical intellectualism is the norm at parties like this one. The Vietnam War has forced everyone to take up an ideology, to seek a conversion. Everyone needs to be saved, right now, instantly saved from history itself, the factuality of it.

  Where is his beer? He has misplaced it. Someone hands him a bottle of vodka. He takes a swig, and the ice-cold iri-descent fire leaps in two directions, downward into his stomach and upward into his brain. A bad idea, he realizes, with italics, first to drink beer and then vodka. He hands back the vodka bottle to an anonymous and genderless recipient. Thank you. The floor’s wood feels pleasantly gritty, almost reassuring, on the soles of his bare wet feet, though this floor swells a bit like the ocean, and then the party’s hysteria and gloom and desperation suddenly overtake him, while simultaneously a flickering lightbulb in a table lamp separates into two lightbulbs, and Nathaniel realizes that he has ingested a bit too much of the vodka bottle’s contents in those two mouthfuls. He is quite instantaneously bleary and vague and half sick. A large head appears before him in the hallway, supported by a body too small for it, the body and the head belonging to Bob Rimjsky, always recognizable because in this crowd of daily informality expressed in jeans and tatters, Rimjsky invariably wears a three-piece suit with a watch chain, another irony, though of what kind—political or personal or horological—it is impossible to guess. On his delicate small feet are tasseled loafers. Not for him the shedding of footwear out in the foyer. For him, the revolution will take the form of ubiquitous formality. Something about him resembles the owl. Like almost all the men here, he has a beard, though unlike the others, his baritone voice is monotonously fixed to one tone, creating a comic drone effect, a vaudeville owl, or a bored investment counselor among the unwashed, playing his 33 rpm statements at 16 rpm. Unlike the beautiful Theresa, Rimjsky never emphasizes a single word in his sentences, and the mad stare common to this time and place that Rimjsky uses when he begins speaking simply adds to his steadfast personal monotony.

  “You’re wet,” he observes in a scholarly manner. “Is that deliberate?”

  Nathaniel nods before looking down the hallway.

  “Don’t go in there, Mason.” Rimjsky nods toward another room, a bedroom. “I wouldn’t go in there if I were you.”

  “Why?” Nathaniel asks. The door to the bedroom stands half open.

  “Coolberg’s in there. He’s talking about his dreams. Stay away from that.”

  “So what’s the matter with dreams?”

  “Everything. Don’t you know Coolberg?” The noise of the party seems to reach a crescendo before dying away. Nathaniel feels a fingernail on his back. Theresa has passed by and has touched him. “I thought everyone knew him.”

  “No. I’ve just heard of him. You’re the second person tonight who’s mentioned the guy.” Nathaniel is about to excuse himself to pursue Theresa when Rimjsky grabs his arm in a laconic gesture.

  “Coolberg’s always striking one pose or another. But listen, Mason, he’s dangerous. And that’s an adjective I have never in my life used until now. You’ll think at first that he has no known location, but he’s as real as we are,” Rimjsky drones, conversation-as-hypnosis, a monotonality that makes Nathaniel sleepy. “He’s the first person I’ve known who can be in two places at once. He’s dislocated. Not a joint or a knee—the whole person.”

  Rimjsky scratches his beard to prevent interruption or response.

  “Of course he’s brilliant. He’s a virtuoso of cast-off ideas,” he continues. “And he may be a genius. I don’t care. Genius doesn’t impress me. You’ll notice that he doesn’t assert ownership over his ideas. He’s in some kind of Artaudian condition where all the ideas are unoriginated and unsourced; that’s how he can claim anybody else’s ideas as his own. Really all he wants to do is acquire everyone’s inner life. I’d use the word ‘soul,’ but I don’t believe in souls. Still, it’s like a Russian novel, what he does. He inhabits a dense spiritual vacuum. I apologize for the phrase, but that’s what it is. Don’t go in there.”

  When Nathaniel glances again inside the room, he sees, through the crack of the door opening, Theresa sitting on the floor. She’s attentively watching someone out of Nathaniel’s view. “Aw, come on. Don’t be melodramatic,” Nathaniel says to Rimjsky, whose eyes, he now notices, do not ever blink, although they are wide and predatory. Glancing down at the floor, he urges the door to the left with his knee, but before entering the room, he pauses to listen to the voice emanating from it.

  The tone of the voice he hears is calmly agitated, as if it had lived with its own agitation for so long that it had grown slightly bored with the ongoing crisis of its condition, a crisis so complex and multilayered that no effort could possibly repair it or even define the nature of its own apparent suffering. The voice has a pleading note, halfway between seduction and distress, and an intelligent gentleness that is all the more alarming for its measured calm, its burnt-over benumbed despair. It sounds, Nathaniel realizes, like a therapist’s voice, thick with overeager compassion, but it also seems at almost any moment about to modulate into mad spattering giggles. The voice performs code-switching out of apparent sincerity into malevolent amusement and then into excited despair.

  The voice, it seems, is reporting a recent dream.

  “I was in a gigantic white lavish hotel that was on fire, done for,” the voice behind the door claims with comic mournfulness, “but the fire was consuming the hotel so gradually and deliberately that people were still permitted to arrive and depart freely. The fire wasn’t visible, but I knew the hotel was burning because smoke was hanging thinly everywhere, especially around the lights. Very beautiful, that smoke. I returned to my room to save my valuables, and I couldn’t find them, whatever they were. I didn’t know what to search for, what I had to save, how soon the building would collapse, what I had to do. Everyone was busy and wandering around but it was quiet and a little slowed.” The voice pauses. “The elevators were golden. There were cupids carved into the ceiling. I was strangely alone although people were all around. They kept disappearing. No one told me what to do, but I worried because, after all, I was neglecting them or not doing something I was supposed to do. It was like an emergency in slow motion.”

  “That’s not your dream!” Theresa tells him. “That’s someone else’s dream. You took it.”

  “Why do you say that?” Coolberg asks. “Why do you say that it’s not mine?”

  “Because…you can’t have a dream like that,” she informs him. “Men don’t have burning-hotel dreams. That’s a woman’s dream.” Coolberg starts laughing as if caught out, and Nathaniel chooses at this moment to enter the room, just as Coolberg is saying, “Well, all right, then tell me what dreams a man is supposed to have.”

  In the room five people glance at Nathaniel, their expressions ranging from indifference to curiosity. Two people whisper to each other near the bookcase, and, closer to the doorway, Theresa and Coolberg and an albino dwarfish man sit together on the floor by the bed. They share a beer, the bottle moving around from hand to hand. The albino gets up to leave. A certain intimacy at once falls between Coolberg and Theresa; they have the appearance of unindicted co-conspirators who share a complicated system of signals—lifted eyebrows, glances, finger flicks—all seemingly worked out in advance. Coolberg glances at Nathaniel, and Theresa says, “Well, look who’s here. It’s Nathaniel. My soaked twin.”

  “Hello,” Coolberg says. “Oh, yes. You’re Nathaniel Mason. I’ve heard a lot about you. But they’re perfunctory things. Sit down.” Theresa pats the floor next to her. Nathaniel notices a small puddle of water under her jeans. From the rain. Soon a small puddle of water will form under himself, as he drains onto the floor.

  Nathaniel gamely lowers himself to their level. Coolberg smiles at him menacingly. Years later he will realize that Coolberg’s first words to him consisted of a false claim, followed by a command, a pattern
for their friendship, and that this charade was acted out in front of Theresa, who, like an accommodating audience member, encouraged the show. Once again, and equally thoughtlessly, she puts her hand on his—Nathaniel’s—leg. Coolberg sees her do it. “Nathaniel, you’re so cute when you’re wet,” she says. “You’re flagrant.”

  “What is this, the state fair?” Coolberg asks.

  Nathaniel takes in Coolberg’s face, stricken by a kind of internalized warfare. In one moment he appears to be a sickly child in a room through whose one window a winter sun shines in, briefly, at twilight, giving the child the farewell gift of its fading rusty light on the snow; in the next moment the expression diagnoses itself, disintegrates, and recombines into one of all-encompassing sympathy, before it turns bewilderingly into an Asia-Minorish sedulous gaze from one of the booths at the bazaar. The eyes miss nothing, but they are spectacularly dead.

  “I don’t know anything about you,” Nathaniel says. “Except what people tell me.”

  “Oh, what do they tell you?” Coolberg asks, delightedly, mockingly, dolorously, sweetly.

  “See, that would be telling. What do you do, when you’re doing things?”

  “You’re quoting The Prisoner. ‘That would be telling.’ As for me, I do everything,” Coolberg says, clumsily lighting up a Lucky.

  “Guys, guys!” Theresa interrupts, very pleased to pretend that the two men are engaged in combat rather than verbal trickery, as she looks around the bedroom for an ashtray.

  “I do everything,” Coolberg repeats. And then he starts singing.

  “I’ve made a path

  as a polymath

  that no one else has trod!”

  Theresa perks up. “He’s made a path as a polymath that no one else has trod!” She gives a whoop of laughter. “Siggie, you’re so Broadway.”

  Who is Siggie? Coolberg ashes his cigarette into a beer bottle. These are juvenile tiresome antics; the anxious high spirits have a depressing effect. To hell with these people, the vodka says to Nathaniel, whereupon he stands up. He feels a bit unsteady, like a bird on a branch whipped by winds. Being upright is a continuous struggle. There must be others at this party to whom he can talk about something, or nothing. He experiences wanly the need for quiet and sincerity, some antidote to cleverness. He could go back to wherever he parked his car, drive home to his empty apartment, and then read until sleep takes him over just before dawn. In all-out verbal gamesmanship, he will be seriously overmatched here. He can’t keep up with these people. Half the time, he regards himself as a hayseed among city slickers. A sudden heavy hayseed loneliness envelops him, as it often does at parties, like the onset of an illness. His limbs feel weighted down, and objects take on the burden of hopelessness. The other faces at the party look as if they had been painted on the sides of balloons, and from the books on the floor he thinks he hears an angry buzzing like the sound of insects.

  “What’s the matter? Don’t you like it?” Coolberg asks.

  “No,” Nathaniel says, having forgotten what the “it” refers to. Then he remembers. “Oh, it’s all right. By the way, who’s Siggie?”

  “Sigmund Romberg. The composer of Blossom Time.”

  Theresa reaches for Nathaniel’s hand. “Don’t leave,” she says. “Sit? Please? Here, beside me?”

  Perhaps she likes him. Maybe she’ll heal him of his solitude. And then, as if he had been reading Nathaniel’s mind, Coolberg says, “You know, there’s something heartsick about parties like this. Look at us. We’re all pretending to be smart, as if intelligence were the cure for our anguish. We’re all making this verbal clatter. We cluck our thick tongues…and speak oh so very politely. Aren’t you cold? Your clothes are soaked. Theresa’s, too. Did you take a shower together? Fully clothed? Why would anyone do that?”

  “Oh, I’ll survive.”

  “That wasn’t my question.”

  What was his question? Nathaniel can’t remember it. He sits down again and leans his damp self against Theresa. She is as warm as a radiator filling with steam.

  3

  TWO OR MORE hours later (Nathaniel does not wear a watch on principle—he refuses to be a slave to any clock), still damp, and now thoroughly bleary with alcohol, behind the wheel of his rusting dark-butterscotch-colored VW Beetle, Nathaniel maneuvers around the streets of Buffalo in an effort to take Coolberg back to his apartment and Theresa back to hers. When Theresa asks him whether he’s drunk and thus unfit to drive, Nathaniel shouts proudly, “I’ve been driving drunk since the age of sixteen.” He must shout. No intimate conversation has ever been carried on in a VW Beetle; the motor’s chain drive creates too much commotion for reflective conversation. Talking in such a car is like orating into the surf.

  At a street corner, as they stop at a red light, Nathaniel sees a woman standing and staring at him mutely. No doubt the look she is giving him has nothing behind it, no intention beyond curiosity. And yet he feels accused. These people follow him around.

  The implementation of the favor that he is performing has grown complicated: Coolberg lives farther away from Nathaniel’s apartment than Theresa does, but it is essential that the boy genius be disposed of quickly in case Theresa wants to prolong the evening. Meanwhile, Coolberg has taken up the subject of solitude again, quite loudly. “You know what I think? I think we’re all in our private traps, clamped in them. We scratch and claw, but only at the air, only at each other, and for all of it, we never budge an inch.”

  Theresa suddenly barks a command from the tiny backseat. “Stop making speeches,” she shouts over the noise of the engine. “Stop quoting. You don’t believe that! That’s not you.”

  Coolberg laughs. “Nothing is me.” He looks over at Nathaniel with a boyish expectancy. “Nathaniel, I liked what you said about polio and iron lungs.” Nathaniel tries to remember what he has said about that subject. He doesn’t recall having any opinions about polio. “Let’s talk again. Let’s go to Niagara Falls or something. Have you ever been to the falls at night? The gods come out there in the dark. Really, they do. Or we could go to the Mirrored Room.” The Mirrored Room, by Lucas Samaras, is a well-known fixture of the local art museum. In this room, the floor, ceiling, and walls are made of mirrors; the body dissolves there. “You can let me out right now,” he says unexpectedly. “This is my place. I’ll call you.”

  The building outside of which they have stopped is yet another Buffalo structure, a large upstate New York house on a tiny lot, the front lawn so small that it could be mowed in two minutes. Nothing separates this house from the one next to it except a driveway. The neighborhood is cluttered and congested with houses; in this jungle of domiciles, trees have been forced out, to live elsewhere. Coolberg scrambles out of the car and walks in a slouching ramble toward the front door. Nathaniel would like to see him enter the house—he is not completely sure that Coolberg actually resides here—but in the meantime, Theresa has clambered into the front seat and has closed the door.

  “Onward and upward,” she says, smiling briskly, as she loosens the rubber band from her ponytail so that her hair drops onto her shoulders. She puts the rubber band in her mouth and chews it as she fluffs out her hair. Suddenly she looks very naked.

  Nathaniel drives to the end of the block. “Where to?” he asks. “Want to come back to my place?” With some effort, he creates a likely scenario. “We could talk. I could make scrambled eggs and coffee, and we could watch the sun come up.”

  Theresa smiles, amused by him. “No, not tonight.” She touches the back of his neck in a seemingly tender gesture, though it feels more like a tease than affection. “I’m too gone. I’m much too gone to have breakfast with you.”

  “We don’t have to do anything,” he says, not wanting to sound desperate. “We don’t have to have a meal together.”

  “Take a right here,” she tells him, pointing at a streetlight up ahead. He signals a turn and follows her next instructions for another minute or so. Someone half a block away shouts or screams. City soun
ds.

  “I want to call you. I want to see you again. Is that okay?”

  “I guess so.” She sighs. “Just not tonight. We should be…I don’t know, alert. If I ever sleep with you, I want to be stone-cold sober. Besides, I already have somebody.” She takes out a slip of paper from her damp flak jacket and writes down her phone number. “Even though he’s not important and can be disposed of, I’ve got him. He’s not here, but he is somewhere. He exists, I mean. He has a residence. Anyway, I haven’t thought through the whole monogamy thing”—she shouts over the noise of the motor—“so I don’t have a position on sleeping with you. Yet.” She puts the slip of paper into his shirt’s front pocket. “Do you have somebody? You’re so cute you should never be alone.” In the noise created by the VW’s acceleration, the question seems loud and rhetorical, unanswerable, and a bit mean-spirited, coming from this beautiful woman who twice (or was it three times?) placed her hand on Nathaniel’s thigh. Does Theresa enjoy creating desire in him just to see herself doing it? To establish that she herself is unmoved? Like a laboratory scientist? Or a sleepy cat with its prey? That she can cast spells, that she is powerful? A rash of questions.

  He therefore does not answer her inquiry about whether he has someone because the answer is “No, not now,” and those words are not the ones he wishes to utter as he shifts into second gear, sober from the intensity of loneliness and arousal and late-night animal longing. His hands are sweaty and he can’t think straight, and he feels sick with alcoholic lust, damp clothes, desolation, and maybe even neon-lighted love. Right now he would sleep with anything beautiful, if only beauty would sleep with him, this beauty or any other.