Catherine quickly found a community of like-minded high school classmates who drank, a whole crowd of fellow students who loved getting wasted as much as she herself did. They drank and drove and staggered around the woodsy Wisconsin off-road locales they found, cursing the sky, vomiting, laughing, falling down, passing out, waking up, and crawling behind the wheel before starting up the collaborating cars and weaving their way back.
On a Friday night in early November in Catherine’s senior year, one of these boys, on a mission to take Catherine home, drove off the road into a patiently waiting tree. The impact threw her forward into the dashboard. When she came to, wrapped in swaddling clothes after several days of unconsciousness, all her words had been wiped clean from her brain’s left hemisphere. She had sustained a skull fracture, a broken arm, and her body seemed to be one large bruise. The driver, a boy contemptuous of the future, had successfully canceled his own, but she had been saved—that is, her physical life had been saved—and before very long she was up and about, seemingly as beautiful as ever, except for her eyes, which had gone blank. The neurologists claimed that something had happened in her posterior temporal lobe, and they engaged in professional mumbling about the prognosis, saying that there would certainly be more tests until that stage when they could discover the source of her asymptomatic verbal aphasia. The tests, they said to Nathaniel and his mother, were very good these days. We have excellent tests, they said proudly, brain injury is no longer the grave mystery it once was, we will figure it out. And we have therapies, many of which have been proven to work. We are scientists; this is a science.
With her light dimmed, Catherine came home. She took up her life, almost, where it had been left off.
Around that time, Nathaniel began to notice ghost-women watching him from street corners, alleyways, from behind jewelry displays, ash-women, silent, mute, and unmoving, women trying on hats, women before mirrors, women deep in shadows, called forth in some manner by his sister’s silence, called forth by the song of her injury to surround him and stare at him and accompany him everywhere. What did they want of him? They seemed ready to ask him a crucial question, these familiars, but they never got around to it. All through his college years, they kept up their surveillance. They stayed on their street corners with their hooded beautiful eyes, women-beggars made of mist and fog. They had moved into his world for good, it seemed, but they could not be spoken to—they always disappeared when he approached them. Often they opened their mouths to sing to him, though nothing audible ever came out. They were frequently bent over, human question marks, first in Milwaukee and then in New York, after his mother remarried.
6
NATHANIEL LOOKS UP. There’s one of them, right out in front, in broad sunlight. A woman wearing a blue denim cap, and a hideous pink cardigan sweater over a blouse with a printed pattern of marsh grass and bamboo, and purple slacks with threads of string for a belt—this apparition is staring in through the front window at him, her accusing eyes crazily fixed. She reaches up and takes out her teeth. She waves the dental plate at him. Hi! Hi hi hi hi hi. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. She flashes a startling bedlamite grin through the glass. She screams a fun-house laugh. Sometimes they do these stunts just to scare him, to watch the hair on the back of his neck stand up, to give him goose bumps. They like that. But they also have some other, undiscovered, agenda. He looks down at the table, where he has been chopping onions. Another pair of hands has joined his, another member of the Allentown Artists’ & Culinary Alliance here in the People’s Kitchen, one of his favorites, Jamie the Catholic—apparently she snuck in while he was hypnotized by that ghoul out there on the sidewalk. Having tied her apron on over a t-shirt and jeans, Jamie has set to work on shelling peas. Gold dangles from her earlobes. She is a lesbian and a sculptor and a dancer who lives in the neighborhood, and she drives a taxi for Queen City Cab at night to pay the bills, and Nathaniel loves her strong tanned forearms and blond flyaway frizzy hair poking out from under the contrivance of her head scarf (he also loves her soul), and he says in a formally affectionate tone, “Sweet Jamie. Good morning. How you doing?”
“How I doing? I doing all right. It’s almost afternoon, dummy,” she tells him, knocking her hip gently against Nathaniel’s. “You should buy a watch. I slept late. I’m so bad. I’m a bad bad girl. Where’s the rosemary?”
“Up on the shelf.” He nods. “Close to the garlic. You know where it is.” She reaches up to a shelf underneath a sign that says ANARCHISTS, PLEASE WASH YOUR HANDS! Tears squeeze out of his eyes. “Fucking onions. Always do this to me.”
“Fucking onions,” she agrees, shaking her head so that her earrings glitter. “You know what causes all that crying, don’t you? Sulfur. Sulfur in the onion’s oil. The devil’s molecule. Aren’t you going to ask me why I slept late?”
“Okay. Jamie, why’d you sleep late?”
“None of your damn business, Nathaniel.” She grins. “I got lucky. So how come you didn’t sleep late?”
“I didn’t get lucky.” He’s about to tell her about the burglar but decides not to; she’d be alarmed on his behalf.
“You poor child. Why didn’t you get lucky?”
He stops slicing for a moment. “Is there accounting for luck? Anyway, this girl said that if she was ever going to go to bed with me, she wanted to be sober.”
“Sober! To sleep with a man, you’d have to be drunk. What a crock. Sober! Don’t believe her. Girls are such liars. Well, maybe she wants to know you better. Maybe she wants to know your sign. Your horoscope. If you love cats. If you can commit. Hey, aren’t you going to ask me,” she asks, “about who made me late?”
“So, Jamie,” he says, “who made you late?”
“None of your business.” She laughs loudly. “Check the society pages. Jesus, I wonder if we have mice in here. I saw rodent leavings when I came in. Back there near the door, while you were staring at the front window? Somebody should clean up the rear entryway. You, probably. It’s your assignment today, isn’t it? Man, I think this is serious, the mice problem, I mean.”
“Of course we have mice.” He glances at the front window, where the toothless woman has dissolved into the noontime air of Buffalo. “And, yeah, I ought to put out some traps before the city shuts us down.”
“They’ll shut us down anyway. Any day now. Pronto. They hate us. Free food is a thumb in the eye of free enterprise, is what they think. People hate charity; they really do. It insults the worker. The city will come in with inspectors and cops and tear gas, and it’ll be curtains for us.” Jamie looks down at his crotch, hidden by his own apron. “You know, babycakes, you’re kinda cute, for a guy,” she says. “Listen. Don’t take this wrong. I’m serious. If you’re lonely and need a sleepmate,” she says quietly, almost in a whisper, “give me a call. I’m not kidding. I wouldn’t mind holding you all night. You have virtues, and virtues,” she says, slicing into another carrot, “should be rewarded, occasionally, with kindness.”
“You’re so romantic,” Nathaniel says.
“Romance is in my nature.” After a pause of chopping and seasoning, Jamie asks, “What was her name? Is her name?”
“Theresa. We were at a party.”
Jamie nods twice, frowning, and seems ready to speak up when the phone rings. Nathaniel wipes his hands before answering it. “Thank you,” the voice says without benefit of a greeting, “for taking me home.” For a moment, Nathaniel can’t place the voice as young or old, male or female, or even human, can’t place it at all until he realizes that it belongs, if that’s the word, to Coolberg.
“Ah. Jerome,” Nathaniel says, as the Vaughan Williams on the radio behind him embarks on its finale, a very British passacaglia with brave launching-into-the-void sentiments. “How’d you know I was here?”
“Don’t you remember last night?” Coolberg asks. “I told you: I know everything about you. You were a little drunk and got…I don’t know, confessional. You said you worked at the People’s Kitchen on Saturday mo
rnings, preparing meals for the poor. Very admirable. That’s what you said. So I called. Don’t you remember? That was right after you told me about your sister and your father…”
“I did? I talked about them? I don’t think I said anything about them.”
“Well, I certainly thought you did.” A pause. “Your father’s death? From a stroke? Your sister’s muteness? How she slept on the floor beside your bed after your dad died? Your mother’s brief spell of unreason?”
Nathaniel waits. Someone in the world claims, on very little evidence, to know everything about him. Despite his doubts, he feels flattered. He notices that Jamie has turned around and is watching him, studying him as if he needs protection from something scratching through the wall.
“It’s just that I was thinking,” says Coolberg, “that we should do something together. I mentioned this to you. Possibly you forgot. We should go see the gods come out. At night. At Niagara Falls. Have you ever done that? Ever seen the gods come out? You should. They’re quite a sight, the gods.”
“No, I haven’t.” He waits. “What’s this about the gods? I never heard of any. Besides God, I mean.”
“Oh, skepticism is so easy, Nathaniel. And lazy. Lazily uninteresting. This excursion—we should do it. The pagan gods have a new boldness. They desire to be seen. The name of God is changing in our time. Really. Don’t you agree? Besides, you have a car. I don’t drive. I have never driven. With me, practice doesn’t make perfect. I have no sense of direction.”
“Okay. But we should bring Theresa along, you know? If I’m going to take an excursion, it should be the three of us.”
In the long silence that follows, Jamie has shrugged and returned to washing and chopping and tossing vegetables into the stewpot. “Yes,” Coolberg says at last. “What a good idea. You call her. When do you want to go?”
“How about tomorrow night? It’s Sunday. The gods come out on Sunday, don’t they? It’s their day, Sunday. Right?”
“Fine,” Coolberg says angrily. Nathaniel hears the telltale click of the disconnection. Apparently Coolberg never says hello or good-bye.
When he returns to Jamie’s side, she asks him who it was, and when he tells her, she puts down her knife, drops her hands to her sides, and slowly leans sideways into him, a gesture of affection and, it seems—Nathaniel can’t be sure—protection. “I should be your guardian angel,” she says. “I think you need one.” She drops her head on his shoulder for a split second. Under the protective chef’s head scarf, her blond hair brushes against his neck. It feels blond.
“Do you know that guy who called me? Coolberg?”
“No,” she tells him. “It was the look on your face I recognized.”
“What look?”
“Like you were being pickpocketed. Or, I dunno, taken. You make me nervous,” Jamie tells him. “You’re too available. You need to be more vigilant. Close yourself down a little. Men shouldn’t be like you. Give me a call, if you ever think of it.”
7
JUST BEFORE HE LEAVES in the early afternoon, Nathaniel, who has finished mopping and disinfecting the floor near the kitchen drain, sees a guy escorting a pregnant woman, evidently his wife, through the front door and then to one of the long community tables. She walks past the entryway in deliberate stages, first limping from a bad left knee, then waving brokenly with her right arm for balance, as if she were directing traffic. Her progress comes in physical-therapy steps. Apparently she doubts that she will stay upright. Regaining her dignity, she sits down slowly before gazing at the dining area with the abstracted air of a queen about to announce a decree. Her husband—they are both wearing wedding rings—is white, and she is black, though their facial features are rather similar, with dark widely spaced eyes, Italian, as if they had both descended from the Medicis, one side in Italy, the other in Africa. It is the burglar and his wife, and when the burglar sees Nathaniel he nods, very quickly, a hi-but-don’t-come-over-here look.
When Nathaniel approaches them, the burglar glares at him, resisting. Nathaniel walks through his resistance. He says, “Hi. I’m Nathaniel.” He holds out his hand.
“Um, it’s Ben,” the burglar says, referring to himself. He gestures in his wife’s direction. “This here’s Luceel.”
“Hi, Luceel,” Nathaniel says. Luceel gazes at him before studying her hands in her lap. She has great physical beauty and will not exchange more than a quick once-over with just anybody. She is one of those women who rations out her glances. Maybe she is just shy.
“Um, hi. You two know each other?” she asks, looking at her fingers.
“We’ve met,” Ben says. “That’s all it is. We met someplace. He remembers me from a thing we did.” He sighs loudly, examining the traffic passing outside and shaking his head, as if the mere fact of the cars oppresses him, all those Buicks, Chevrolets, and Fords, with their purposeful owners.
“Right,” Nathaniel says. “Well. See you later. Nice to meet you, Luceel. Have a good afternoon, you guys.”
As he walks out the front door, he notices that they are conferring together, heads lowered, this topic having momentarily taken precedence over food and hunger.
In the afternoon he plays basketball in a city park with a group of guys he’s seen here before, most of them about his size, their elbows as aggressive as his own, their collective breath visibly rising above them in the cold autumn air, their sweat soaking through their shirts. One basket has a chain net hanging from the hoop; the other hoop, on the opposite court, is naked, with an unpadded support pole holding up the backboard—a funky urban playground for adults, inmates of the city. Nathaniel plays slowly and distractedly, but the other players, too, have strangely mournful expressions on their weekend faces, like the little men bowling in “Rip Van Winkle” who were unable to smile. Despite their gloom they all make self-encouraging male noises, and the noises free them. Doing a lay-up, Nathaniel allows himself a loud triumphant outcry.
The ball falls neatly through the hoop.
Back in his apartment after his shower, he gets Theresa on the line, and her apologies begin, one by one. Apologies? For what? She launches in with her mistakes in tone, advances to mistakes in behavior, and ends with the full self-indictment. “I’m a total fraud. Somebody should arrest me,” she says calmly. “Last night? That wasn’t me.” The confession of fraudulence sounds fraudulent, though it has charm. Nathaniel notices that she speaks quietly, intimately. Listening to her is like being in a sensual confessional booth across the hall from a hot steamy bedroom. Her statements emerge from her full of self-doubt, the sweetly narcissistic self-censorious note struck again and again, as if she is surprised to find that she actually likes him a bit more than she likes herself and is evoking her own dubious flaws so that he can refute her, thus showering her with praise and returning the conversation to the subject of her wonderful, winning self.
“See, the thing is,” she tells him, and then trails off into strategic mumbling. She admits her yearning to inhabit an intellectual realm that she has not by rights acquired citizenship to. “Oh, everyone else around here is so smart,” she confesses, “and all I can do is to put on an act.” Really, she says, she is just a simple girl brought up in buttfuck Iowa, the daughter of a manufacturer’s rep who sold prefabricated silos. She’s afraid of being dumb, a silo salesman’s daughter—that’s her breathy assertion.
She has mastered somehow a tonal mixture of the bogus and the seductive, so Nathaniel interrupts. “But you were quoting Valéry last night!” he says. “Who else does that?”
“That line, that’s the one line I know,” she says. “That one. I always quote it. ‘Beau ciel, vrai ciel, regard-moi qui change!’ That gets me in the door, that line, it’s the key to the city.”
“Okay. Enough. You know something? When we came in last night,” Nathaniel says, before a coughing fit takes him over, “everyone thought we were a couple.”
“Yeah? You think so? Why?”
“Because they said so. Because we w
ere both soaked. Because we looked it. There was a perception there. Of, what’s that word? Togetherness. That we were mated.”
“Yeah?” She waits. “Well, who knows? It could happen. You and me, I mean. I’d just have to dump my boyfriend. I’d have to cheat on him. Of course, that’s always a possibility. Sometimes I do despise him. He lives in Berkeley, half a million miles away. And, after all, he’s an out-and-out android, this guy. Robby. Robby the Robot.”
“So let me ask you a question,” Nathaniel says, improvising. “There’s something I can’t remember about what happened when I drove you home. Did I talk about my father and my sister last night? Coolberg said I did.”
“Oh, him. Hell, I don’t know. I didn’t hear you saying anything like that. Forget him, all right?”
“All right. Sure. But I can’t forget him—he just called. Listen: he wants to go to Niagara Falls tomorrow evening. To see the gods come out, is what he says. I told him I wouldn’t go unless I brought you along. Can you come?” To break the pause that follows, he asks, “Will you come? You’ve got to.”
“All right,” she says. “Yes. But what’s all this about the gods? What gods?”
“How should I know? I’m not acquainted with them. You should ask him.”
“Nathaniel,” she says.
“What?”
“Take me somewhere. Right now. Okay? Come get me and take me somewhere. I’m alone here and I can’t stand it and I need to be delivered. I’ve been drinking stale burned coffee and having a breakdown. The kind where you tear paper into little strips and then stare at the phone? And you watch the sun crossing the sky? A day with no future? That kind.”
“Where do you want to go?”
The Soul Thief Page 4