The Soul Thief (5 page)

After her father’s death, Catherine, silent and spectral, would sleepwalk into Nathaniel’s bedroom. She would clear 36

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away his discarded clothes on the floor. Then she would descend, convulsed with sobs, and curl up like a dog. Already half a ghost herself, she brought herself to her brother’s room so that he might witness her grief. If there had been consolation to be offered, Nathaniel had no idea where to find it. Their father, a genial guy they had taken for granted, was now fully absent and had taken all comfort with him.

What was there to say? Nothing much. Nathaniel resorted to patting his sister on the back as she lay there on the floor beside his bed.

She had been a strong solid smart girl, with brilliant blue eyes that had ice traces in them. As a field hockey player and a rock singer fronting a high school band called Strep Throat, she had been good at raising her voice. With her particular appetites and raucousness, she would have been loved early on in the ordinary course of things by some brave boy who might have noticed and admired her. She was an inventory-taker, a psychic accountant, habitually noting quantities and qualities in rooms and in people. But after her father’s death, a single inventory took over the others.

“There was only one of him,” she would sigh, over and over again.

She formed a new appetite for oblivion.

Nathaniel had not guessed that his sister could be furtive, brazenness having been her usual tactic, but, freed from stability, she developed a gift for secrecy. She joyfully took up drinking, a habit for which she had a calling. Alcoholism brought out her stealthy side, the midnight joy of beer from the refrigerator and whiskey from the cupboard.

Nothingness called to her and she answered. At first she drank alone or with strangers. Her mother concealed all the liquor bottles—a guileless woman, she first tried hiding them behind the detergent boxes in the laundry room, t h e s ou l t h i e f

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where they were as obvious as Easter eggs—before throwing all of them out.

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 col-laborating cars and weaving their way back.

On a Friday night in early November in Catherine’s sen-ior 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.

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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 surveil-lance. 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 40

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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, t h e s ou l t h i e f

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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.”

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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 mornings, 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 t h e s ou l t h i e f

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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.”

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“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.