The Soul Thief

by Charles Baxter

  Such occasions are so rare that when they occur, we often think I don’t belong here, something is wrong or Why didn’t they inform me? or Let there be someone, anyone, else. But for the duration, when the law of averages no longer applies, we are the sole survivors, the only audience for what reality wishes to show us. This may be what the prophets once felt, this ultimate final aloneness.

  So it was for Nathaniel and Theresa entering the Buffalo Zoo. “It looks like the maintenance hour,” she says, briefly jogging in place. “Nobody’s here.”

  “Nobody’s here,” Nathaniel says, repeating her phrase, stating the obvious out of sheer surprise.

  “And the cages are empty,” she says, pointing. Before them is a large zoological space defined by bars in front and walls on the side, and a small landscape near the back with a water trough, on which float a few haystraws. Where is the rightful inhabitant, the animal?

  “Isn’t there a sign for what’s supposed to be in there?” he asks.

  She looks up. “No.” She turns and with a thin smile seems about to say something. Then she touches her finger to her mouth and shakes her head twice. How complicated, and yet how simple, her inner dialogues must be.

  Nathaniel pivots away from her and walks in a northward direction. Here are other cages, a few with identifying labels, and although some animals are on display, they are, one and all, sleeping. Here is Mika the Tiger, stretched out, eyes closed, possibly tranquilized. Over there is Gottfried the Panther—the name is affixed to the bars—also slumbering. Have all the animals here been given narcotics? He remembers a story about the Cumaen Sybil, who was granted a wish for eternal life but forgot to ask for eternal youth to accompany it, and who was immured in some sort of pen, where she grew older and older and smaller and smaller, until she was no larger than a spot of dust, crying out for death to deliver her.

  Perhaps they have brought her here.

  “I’m not a devil,” Nathaniel says to Theresa.

  “Well, it’s his story,” Theresa informs him, rubbing down her calves, “and he’ll decide what you are. You present various temptations, don’t you? In the meantime he’s wearing your shirts and your shoes.” She takes his hand. “I don’t see why you have a problem with that.”

  “Ever heard of private property? Ever heard of theft? Besides, where has he been? I haven’t seen him lately. It’s as if he’s been hiding,” Nathaniel says, releasing her hand but keeping his eye on her legs, which are ostentatiously long and smooth-muscled. “He doesn’t answer the phone and he doesn’t seem to live in the building where I thought he lived.”

  “Nothing dates like the past,” Theresa says with a slow drag on the word “past,” as if this exposition were all old, tedious information with which she couldn’t be bothered.

  “Well, where is he, then?”

  Theresa points. “Coolberg? He’s right over there.”

  In the distance, through the pedestrian avenue between cages and the shuttered popcorn stand, is a bench on which Coolberg sits, facing them, one arm flung back. Theresa has conjured him out of nothing. When Nathaniel sees him, Coolberg raises his eyes from the book he’s reading and meets Nathaniel’s gaze, quizzically. The gaze turns into another stare. Some sort of telepathy has informed him that now is the moment for the exchange of glances. Under his unzippered jacket, the Brooks Brothers shirt he wears does not quite fit him, and the trousers need alteration, downward, about a half inch. The shoes appear to fit perfectly.

  “You arranged this,” Nathaniel says. “You planned this out and arranged this.”

  “Oh, no,” she replies. “The totally empty zoo? An accident. The bored sleeping animals? A mere coincidence. Don’t call me a bitch before you’re ready to back it up.”

  “I never called you a bitch. I never did that.” The outside air has the enclosed noncirculatory staleness of a cedar closet, and Nathaniel feels his hands closing up into clenched fists. As he runs toward Coolberg, he hears Theresa say something whose exact words he can’t make out. But the sentence sounds like “Don’t hit him.”

  When he arrives in front of Coolberg, Nathaniel says, “Stand up.”

  “Hi, Nathaniel. Ever read this?” He holds up a book entitled The Wandering Beggar.

  “No. Stand up.”

  “Why?” He seems puzzled. “I’m glad to see you.”

  “Stand up so I can slug you.”

  “What good would that do? If you hit me, nothing would really happen.”

  “Something would happen. I’d feel good.”

  “Oh, but you’re not like a character in a movie. Why act like one? That’s a movie line. You keep underestimating yourself. You make yourself into less than you are. Well, you can hit me if you really want to, I suppose. I suppose you have the moxie for it. And by the way, I’m going to return your clothes and this pair of shoes in a few days, you know. I was always going to return them. I just needed them for a while.”

  “Stand up.”

  “Don’t be that way. Ah, here’s Theresa.” Coolberg does indeed stand up as Theresa joins them. She’s humming “Here Comes the Sun” in a high cheerful soprano. For some reason, her hands are crossed over her breasts. Ignoring her, Nathaniel hauls back and swings his fist into Coolberg’s stomach. But Coolberg is an unsatisfactory victim, and the sensation is oddly like punching a Bozo the Clown doll. Nathaniel’s fist meets little or no resistance, as if the fogged-in body it struck had anticipated and already made a place for the fist, accommodating this and every other occasion of physically intrusive violence, with fog. Nevertheless, Coolberg gasps and falls back onto the bench. The strangest part of it is that Theresa does not stop humming the Beatles tune as she reaches around Nathaniel to keep him from swinging his fist again. But how would he hit a man sitting on a park bench anyway? One blow must suffice.

  “Okay…now you’ve done that…sit down.” Coolberg gasps.

  After what seems to be a blank, a blackboard of empty space and time suddenly inscribed with a few chalky words of instruction that vanish as soon as they have appeared, Nathaniel finds himself sitting on the bench next to Coolberg. Despite his intention to leave these confounding people at the zoo and to drive home, here he is nevertheless, their straight man. Around Coolberg, good intentions have a negligible effect. Coolberg, the recipient of Nathaniel’s sudden attack, appears to have resumed reading The Wandering Beggar and now obligingly begins a plot summary. In the meantime Theresa has maneuvered her body, and herself, behind the two men and has one hand on Coolberg’s shoulder and another hand on Nathaniel’s. Her puppeteer fingers—she wears bright maroon nail polish—have him in a controlling grip. They rise and begin to caress his neck.

  I love these stories, Coolberg says. They’re about the adventures of Simple Shmerel, who travels from village to village. It’s almost like The Arabian Nights.

  Theresa kneads Nathaniel’s shoulder. Then her finger-tips move up to his earlobes.

  This story, the one I’m reading now, is about Calman, the rich merchant, and Zalman, his coachman.

  “I’m leaving,” Nathaniel says.

  Zalman is a good coachman, honest and sober. He even goes to bed early. But he has a vice: he imitates his master. For instance, he walks with his hands clasped behind his back in a thoughtful posture, like Calman’s own attitude and bearing when walking, and he imitates his master’s tone of voice and uses many of the same words and expressions.

  “Let go of me,” Nathaniel says.

  One day Zalman steals Calman’s clothes and begins to wear them. Now no one can tell Zalman and Calman apart, so alike do they appear. The two of them, master and man, are indistinguishable even to those who know them. Both have glossy black beards and brown eyes. Zalman begins to give orders to Calman, and Calman protests. He does not take orders! He himself is the merchant, Zalman the mere coachman! To no avail. Everything is upside down.

  “I’m going,” says Nathaniel.

  At last Simple Shmerel is summoned by the befuddled villagers, who
want everything to return to normal. Simple Shmerel considers the puzzling situation, then orders the two men into an adjacent room. After a moment, Simple Shmerel speaks up. “Servant, come here!” he says. Almost instantly, Zalman opens the door and pokes his head in.

  “Yes, sir?” he asks.

  “There’s your Zalman,” points out Simple Shmerel. Apparently the habits of servitude cannot be broken.

  Coolberg closes his book.

  “Fuck you,” Nathaniel says.

  “Obscenities again. So tiresome. Well, maybe,” Coolberg mutters, in an apparent non sequitur. The two men rise from the bench simultaneously as if under orders. Nathaniel feels light-headed, as if he is going under: he is gradually succumbing to some general anesthesia set loose at the zoo, or perhaps a hypnotic spell has been cast upon him. He needs a good night’s sleep. He hasn’t rested well lately. As he and Coolberg walk across the park, Theresa following them, Coolberg begins to narrate another plot summary, this time of the book he is writing, the one that takes place entirely at night, the one with Nathaniel in it, called Shadow.

  In the story a young man, a student, a somewhat fever-brained type, loves two women at the same time. One of these women is a brilliant student, a polyglot, and a reader of Sumerian sacred texts; the other is a painter. Women have always loved this young man; he is gracious to them, considerate and thoughtful, and besides, he is disconcertingly beautiful, athletic, with long blond hair that the women imagine being trailed languorously over their bare skin under the covers as he kisses them, over their breasts and thighs, that is, until the force of Eros flings the covers back. But the strain of loving two women is one that few men can withstand. Even Ezra Pound lost his mind by loving two women. This young man, this character named Ambrose, develops an antipathy to daylight because in his doubleness, his double-heartedness, he fears that he will meet himself on the sidewalk coming toward himself from the opposite direction. At the same time that he is developing a phobia to daylight and the solidity of actual things, he is also receiving phone calls from an ambiguous Iago-like character named Trautwein, who, through brilliance and charm, gradually convinces him that the second woman, the painter he loves, who suffers for her art in poverty, has been cheating on him. There will be an unspecified fire. A violent death is indicated. However, certain parts of the story have only been sketched out; possibilities have presented themselves but have not turned into probabilities, much less inevitabilities.

  “That’s crap,” Nathaniel says. “Sumerian texts? Please.” An implausible detail: it takes decades to learn how to read those texts. Nathaniel’s knees are shaky. Drops of perspiration appear as if by magic on his forehead, and unbidden tears spurt into his eyes. What if something were to happen to Jamie? What if these two sociopaths enacted…one of their fictions on her?

  “I’ve got to go,” he says, taking off toward his car.

  Behind him he hears Theresa shout, “My sweatpants. They’re in your car!”

  What is the expression? Clothes make the man.

  “I made you so beautiful,” the wind says. “And you didn’t thank me.”

  20

  JAMIE IS SLEEPING. She may even be sleeping with another woman. Anyway, she is not answering the phone.

  Nathaniel waits for a day and then shows up on her doorstep, ringing ringing ringing the doorbell until she opens the door and says to him, “What happened to you? You’ve got bags under your eyes. Were you up all night? Well, come in.”

  She shepherds him into the tiny kitchen, takes off his jacket, which she hangs on a wall hook, and sits him down close to a little metallic duck standing guard on the counter. He tells her that he hasn’t eaten today, he hasn’t been able to eat at all, much less sleep, so she pours him a glass of milk and in silence makes him a quick cheese omelet, which he picks at.

  “Your teeth are chattering, and you’re not chewing,” she says. “You’re trembling the food up.”

  “Right. I know.” His fork rattles against the dinnerware.

  “What’s going on? It’s getting late. I have to go to work.”

  “It’s never been later than it is now,” he tells her. He reaches across the kitchenette table and takes her hand. Jamie has a strong woman’s hand, and he touches her fingers one by one, precious humanity, beloved warmth. “There’s something I have to tell you,” he says.

  “What’s that?”

  “I love you.” He squeezes her fingers. “I’ve been in a fever. I love you with all my heart. I know it’s hopeless and crazy, but, uh, I have to say this right now, this minute, this second. I love you, and I’ve just realized it these last days, and everything else is irrelevant, and now I have to tell you. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I can’t think.”

  “You do? You did?” There’s no mistaking her surprise, but at least she doesn’t indicate amusement at statements of helpless emotion. A practical woman, she takes his plate and begins to rinse it in the sink. “What do you mean, ‘last days’?”

  “What? Oh, Jamie.” He likes saying her name, so he says it again. “Jamie. Sit down. Please. Forget about the dishes. Sit down.”

  “Okay.”

  “Dear,” he says. “Darling.” He’s not used to talking like this. The language of love and endearment seems hopelessly outmoded to him. Using such idioms is like walking into a dusty Victorian bedroom where cheap chromos of nymphs and cupids hang on the wall. The side tables and overstuffed armchairs have been degraded from years of abuse. Still, it’s all he has. If he doesn’t say what’s in his heart, he’ll die.

  “What’s come over you?” she asks. She’s wearing her usual work-at-home outfit: t-shirt, bib overalls, tennis shoes, and now a red flannel shirt on top of everything, for warmth in the underheated apartment. She has a few flecks of metal in her hair.

  “I was up all night last night. I couldn’t sleep. I can’t stop thinking about you. This is really love. I’m sure of it now. I’ve been doing inventories of you. I’ve done a checklist. I think about your sculpture, your dancing, your good heart. Your hands. Your eyes. Your hair. I think about you over at the People’s Kitchen. I think about your soul. Your soul! Listen to me. But I can’t help it. The more I think about you, the more…the more I hunger for you. I even love it that you’re a lesbian.”

  “Jesus, Nathaniel.”

  “I know. I know. This is really uncool. But I want someone who’s messed up the way you are, and your eyes, and your everything, I want it all. I know you don’t think you’re beautiful and maybe you’re not, but I think you are. It’s the way you talk when you’re talking, and it’s the little sculptures on your windowsills, and the fact that the world is okay because you’re in it. It’s everything about you. It’s the way you smell. It’s the odor of your soul.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You smell clean,” he tells her. “Like the soap of heaven.” He waits. Her hand in his hand has relaxed a bit, and he holds her palm over his so that he can caress her fingers. Even at this moment, making a complete fool of himself, he recognizes that this is really love, because he could caress her fingers forever. Time would cease. Nothing now, or ever, would present itself as what he would rather do than this.

  “I don’t know what to say,” she tells him.

  “I know that.”

  “I’m not pretty.”

  “I don’t care,” he announces proudly.

  “I’m attracted to other girls,” she insists. “Your father would spin in his grave if he saw me coming home with you.”

  “Oh, let him rotate,” Nathaniel says, in a freeing rush. “Please, honey,” he says, “don’t ever let anything happen to you.”

  “I’m not planning on it,” she laughs, pulling her hand away. He takes it again.

  “This is desperation you’re witnessing,” he says, gripping her. All at once, the thought occurs to him that what he’s expressing is not love but hysteria, rising out of his own emptiness. He is in the grip of inflated speech, exaggeration, all the insincere locutions
of opacity and self-deception. He is becoming, he feels with sudden queasy recognition, like a character in a plot dreamed up by someone like Coolberg. Nevertheless, he goes on, believing that he can explain himself, as his language veers further out of his control, as if he were behind the wheel and the steering had failed in the car—a dirt road, a tree straight ahead of him, an accident resulting in the loss of speech. “I’m a desperate man,” he says, the words coming out of his mouth unaccompanied by inflections. “Oh, I love you. I can’t say it enough. My dear, you’re the one.” Appalled by himself, and triumphant, he waits for her response.

  This time she does pull her hand away firmly. “No, Nathaniel,” she says quietly. “Nathaniel, I am not the one. Listen to yourself.”

  “You are. You are, you are, you are.”

  Sometimes he was insisting what he was sure about and when he was sure about it, he could not stop himself from insisting because it was the thing that he was knowing and by knowing this thing he could be correctly insisting and not stopping what he was telling and saying and telling again and again and again by really knowing. Why did Gertrude Stein continue speaking to him? Why would she not leave him alone? She loved women, too; that was why. She understood.

  “I’m not. Really I’m not, I’m not, I’m not. You’re deluded. Listen: I can’t love you the way you love me. A woman has to love a man all the way down to the root. Otherwise, it’s the usual disaster. A true marriage exists between bodies and souls. And I can’t—I can’t love you that way. I like you. I even love you sometimes, for a man, for what you are. I gave you my bed to lie in and my body, too, because you deserved it. You needed a buddy in bed, and that was me. You’re a good man, maybe the best I’ve known. But we just slept with each other and liked each other a lot, and that’s not love. That’s an arrangement.” She waits. “Did that other girl give you an ultimatum?”