The Soul Thief (21 page)

Through the doorway facing me, a kitchen sink was visible, illuminated by a 1950s-style overhead fixture; the sink’s faucet dripped softly and steadily, leaving a slime trail of rust. Green wallpaper adorned the kitchen. A silenced Gert h e s ou l t h i e f

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man clock hung at eye level; the time, it claimed, was nine fifteen. In a corner a TV set had been left on, though the sound had been muted. On the screen, a gigantic blue monster—the TV’s picture tube needed to be replaced—with fish-like scales and a long ropy tongue ripped its claws silently into human flesh. Blood spurted terribly against a suburban home; children ran screaming away. No doubt people were shouting, and frightening music would have been blaring on the sound track if only the volume had been turned up. Over in another corner, a radio, tuned to an FM

classical station, played one of the piano pieces Schumann had written late in his madness when he claimed the angels were singing to him.

The masses of accumulation were piled so thickly in the living room that paths had been made between them to allow passage toward the bedroom and bathroom.

As an apartment, this one was not so unusual, especially for a single man. Cluttered and disorderly, every item indisposable, the spaces filled with the wrack and ruin of a soli-tary life, this apartment served up an antidote to emptiness with a messy mind-stultifying profusion. The rooms looked like the temporary unsupervised housing of someone with a ravening spiritual hunger, a grandiloquent vacancy that would consume anything to fill up the interior space where a soul should be. Books were piled and stacked everywhere.

Behind this craving resided an urge as strong as love. All the furniture was secondhand, scratched—emergency furniture to be used in case a catastrophe occurred, as indeed it had.

The dreadful had already happened. The catastrophe had come to pass and would last for a lifetime.

The cat purred, and the monster on the TV set was now attacking a major U.S. metropolis. These rooms were filled up but still empty, as empty as the vacuum of outer space 202

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uninhabited by a living being, and yet the place had retained its ability to project a human solitude and loneliness, as did Coolberg, who gazed at his dominion with a resigned expression of deadened appetite.

The clotted and crowded emptiness was so thick that it was almost impossible for me to breathe. The clutter seemed to be using up all the oxygen, as if it were inhaling itself. Coolberg placed a small spice bottle of powdered garlic, and another of arrowroot, on the stained kitchen counter with a slightly theatricalized pathos. Then he looked at me. His expression seemed to be one of ecstati-cally sorrowful triumph. He reached for something on the counter, couldn’t grasp what he wanted—a box of some sort—so he took a step into the kitchen, scooped up what he had tried to pick up, and brought it back.

“Here,” he said shyly.

I lifted the lid. It was a typed book manuscript. It was entitled
The Soul Thief.

“I wrote your story for you,” he said. It began, “He was insufferable, one of those boy geniuses, all nerve and brain.”

Reader, what you hold in your hands is the book he wrote.

45

You will say, this is a trick. You will say, “This is the last twist of the knife that eviscerates the patient.” But a disagreement is offered: this narrative turn contained no trick; it comprised the story itself. And didn’t the details leave you every possible clue? On every page the narrative intentions were plain, even obvious, starting with the reference to
Psycho
and going on from there. He played by the rules. He played fair.

But the point cannot be that one person can take on another’s life, and in identifying with the other, give life to himself. Such a modest observation! We all know that. The point must lie elsewhere.

The point is that although love may die, what is said on its behalf cannot be consumed by the passage of time, and forgiveness is everything.

Nathaniel Mason enters the silent house. I can easily imagine it. He drops his suitcase softly on the foyer floor. “Hello?” he calls out. No one returns his greeting, except for the floorboards beneath his feet, creaking happily, pleased to be weighted down. He can see through the door to the kitchen, and, through the kitchen, to the backyard beyond. A dour, cloudy day. Behind him is a shadow. From now on, the shadow will always go with him. The mantel clock, knowing its one set of facts, smugly chimes on the quarter hour for him. Midafternoon: his son Jeremy will be starting his swim practice any minute now, and his son Michael is . . . well, who knows where Michael is? Michael investigates, in his own way, the multifarious mysteries of the world. And Laura? She is not here, either, it seems, but he calls out to her anyway. “Laura? Honey? I’m home.” The silence of an empty house returns to him. The furnace ignites with a subterranean whoosh and chuckle. Laura has followed the daily schedule and is, even now, watching out for the boys, or she stands in a room, checking with her expert eye the textures of a quilt.

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He will tell Michael that, on his advice, he did not accept the bacteria-infested ice cubes on the airplane’s refreshment cart. He will tell Jeremy that Snow White and Darth Vader still ply their trade on Hollywood Boulevard. He will tell his wife that he discussed being on
American Evenings
but then thought better of it. He will kiss her as she enters the house.

He will not quite say that he has given up everything for this settled domestic life, the one that he cherishes and loves. He will not quite say that his public life is, in its way, a secret inside a secret. That he, in his way, is also a soul thief, and that the soul he has stolen belongs to a lesbian ex-sculptor who lives somewhere far away, and, in all probability, alone. And that he now lives, and will go to his grave, accompanied by another.

Nathaniel has the house to himself. It is his, in temporary solitude, except for his shadow. He ascends the stairway. He pushes aside the door to Jeremy’s room.

Nathaniel Mason approaches the desk cluttered with Jeremy’s litter. Right there, on the left-hand side of the desk, is the draft of an essay for a college admissions form, printed out from Jeremy’s computer. Nathaniel bends down to read it.

The Things We Take for Granted

by j e r e m y m a s o n

What do we take for granted? And is taking things for granted natural, or a mistake? Or somehow both?

When I ride the bus from my home to Emerson High School, which I attend, I know where all the curves in the road are way ahead of time. I can anticipate traffic jams. My fellow students sit in the same seats most days. I even know where there will be dogs barking in the neighborhood. Believe it or not, I know the names t h e s ou l t h i e f

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of some of the dogs because I have walked them, as a summer job! Thank goodness we, as humans, are capable of anticipating some events! That way, we are able to make plans. We can save money for a rainy day.

We can outline a strategy, a plan of action. Otherwise we would be in the dark all the time, experiencing surprises each and every minute. Surprises are good but not when they are eternal. But there are some things that we must not ever take for granted, three above all. We should not take for granted our families, our beliefs, and our [strengths and weaknesses? loved ones?

health?]

No one should ever take his or her family for granted. For example, my younger brother is weird, but he is always surprising me by how fearless he is.

Last week he said to the family that he is planning to travel to India alone this coming summer to be

“enlightened” by a guru he found on the Web, which I know for a fact he is not. He likes to attract attention to himself but he is basically harmless and courageous.

He has said he is gay, but that was grandstanding. For example, I have seen him staring long and hard at
Play-boy
magazine. My mother is quiet but she is always there for me and is always rooting for me in my athletic endeavors and academic achievements and is always in my corner. She keeps on me to study carefully and to give everything I can to academics and athletics. My dad too is quiet, but just as the old saying is that still waters run deep, I know that he Nathaniel turns away from the page. In its cage to the side of the desk, Jeremy’s pet white rat, Amos, sticks its nose out from its bedding to see if anything is going on. Outside, 210

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a car may be pulling up in the driveway. Whatever his son has written about him can wait for his inspection. Soon they will all be home, his wife and his two children, and Nathaniel will have prepared a salad, peeled the potatoes and boiled them for mashing, and he will have laid the steaks tenderly on the grill. Will green beans be served? That depends. The front and back doors will rattle open, and tumult will fill the house as it does every evening. Laura has left him a note informing him where the dishes are hidden away in the refrigerator, and how he should prepare them.

“Welcome home, sweetie,” the note begins, and it continues,

“Were you on the radio? If you’re clueless about the dinner dishes, you should start by . . .”

(In the basement, near his worktable, where he is assembling a small blue birdhouse to be hung on the apple tree in the backyard, stands a compact companionable metallic duck, sturdily upright on its two metal legs. In the drawer of his worktable rests a sealed envelope. And inside the envelope is a folded message, surely a benediction, he believes—

this hope constitutes his last article of faith, which he will clutch until the end of his days.)

Blessings, he thinks, on my family, on the poor and helpless, the brokenhearted, on the victims of violence and on its perpetrators. May they all be undestroyed. Blessings on everybody. Blessings without limit.

A last visit from Gertrude Stein, as she waves good-bye:
For a long time, she too had been one being living.

Minutes later, in the kitchen, he takes the dishes out from the refrigerator one by one. He begins the preparations for dinner.

NOTES

This is a work of fictions.

In this novel about thievery, I am happy to acknowledge some borrowed gifts. Theresa is correct about Coolberg’s dream: it does not belong to him but to Diane Arbus and can be found in her 1959 notebook #1, as printed in
Revela-tions.
Coolberg also has a habit of quoting, without attribu-tion, passages from Joseph Stefano’s script for
Psycho,
along with other passages from the novels of E. M. Forster. The quotations from Gertrude Stein are largely paraphrases of her portrait of Matisse. The translation into English of Kleist’s
The Marquise of O
—— is by David Luke and Nigel Reeves.

For certain details about Los Angeles flora and fauna I am grateful to Francesca Delbanco and Arden Reed. My grateful thanks also to Michael Collier and Louise Glück.

The story of Simple Shmerel is derived from
The Adventures of
Simple Shmerel
as told by Solomon Simon. My thanks to Carl Dennis for bringing these stories to my attention.

As always, thanks to Liz Darhansoff, Carol Houck Smith, Dan Frank, and Martha and Daniel Baxter.

a b ou t t h e a u t h o r

Charles Baxter is the author of eight other works of fiction, including
Believers, Harmony of the World,
and
Through the Safety
Net. The Feast of Love
was a finalist for the National Book Award. He teaches at the University of Minnesota.

a n ot e o n t h e t y p e

The text of this book was set in Requiem, a typeface designed by Jonathan Hoefler ( born 1970) and released in the late 1990s by the Hoefler Type Foundry. It was derived from a set of inscriptional capitals appearing in Ludovico Vicentino degli Arrighi’s 1523 writing manual,
Il Modo de Tem-perare le Penne.

Composed by Stratford Publishing Services, Brattleboro, Vermont

Designed by Wesley Gott