The Soul Thief (6 page)

When Nathaniel approaches them, the burglar glares at 46

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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 some-place. 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 mo-mentarily 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, t h e s ou l t h i e f

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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 citizen-ship 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 prefab-ricated 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 48

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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 were 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, improvis-ing. “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.”

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“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?”

“No, no, don’t ask me. I don’t care. Uh, wait: I
do
care.

Last night, you said something about the Mirrored Room.

The one in the Albright-Knox? Floors, ceilings, walls—all mirrors? That Lucas Samaras piece. We could do a trip over there. We need a break. We could be trapped in infinity.

That’d be cool. Come get me in that strange little car of yours and take me to the Mirrored Room, all right? You remember where I live?”

“Yeah,” he says, hanging up in so much of a rush that he forgets to say good-bye to her, which is just what Coolberg does.

8

Inside Lucas Samaras’s Mirrored Room, in his socks—once again, shoes must be left outside, and only two people can inhabit the room at one time—Nathaniel takes Theresa’s hand. He is making an effort to think, but this site itself disposes of ideas quickly, leaving the visitor empty and somehow impaired. The question of whether this assembly is “art” seems somehow beside the point, though what that point may actually be recedes and dissolves like all other points, into the mirrors. The air in the Mirrored Room smells rank, a soiled and not-at-all-friendly unventilated stenchy atmosphere in three cavernous dimensions. This eight-foot cube has a table and chair inside, placed against the opposing wall, both objects with mirrored surfaces, opposite which the only available light trickles in from the doorway, and either the glass has been tinted, or infinity itself, as revealed by the mirrors, is green, a color that in this particular case has been emptied of all hope. The mirrored chair appears to be a joke and affords no rest to the visitor.

Light inside the room, dog-tired, bounces off the surfaces until it drops.

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Nathaniel has been warned by a friend: the visitor to this room returns to the rest of the museum uncertain whether he has had an interesting experience or a dull one or any experience at all. Nothing attaches to the room, and visitors are usually eager to escape its confines.

Looking down, Nathaniel sees himself and Theresa, holding hands, reflected so that they stand underneath the floor, balanced upside down on the images of themselves, as if under a layering of lake ice, the two of them submerged, immersed in glass, duplicating themselves in an arc traveling farther downward toward the lake’s bottom, and, past that, into the earth’s core. Above them and to the sides, their images pile up on top of each other, daisy-chained into a green velvety vertical sky-darkness. Everywhere he looks, Nathaniel sees himself—t-shirt, jeans, jacket, socks—

attached by hand and thus umbilicaled to Theresa, similarly t-shirted, jeaned, jacketed, socked, their eyes perfectly aligned. He is looking at the mirrors, and Theresa trades that look with hers, and he looks at her looking at him looking at the mirrors.

But if mirrors multiply space, they must also multiply time. Nathaniel peers into the visual soup created by the green mirrorglass. There he is. He sees himself, having aged, eighteen reflections down, eighteen/twenty/thirty years from now, holding Theresa’s hand. There he is, with her, in the disenchanted darkness, smaller, faded, old, a tiny bent nonagenarian. There he is, there
they
are, a particled assem-blage of atoms and molecules; there they will be, aged, aging, in the mirrors, growing dark and gray and small, and, somewhere off in the temporal distance, pinpointed, exqui-site human nebulae, dying and dead and then gone. He approaches the mirror to see what the expression on that person’s face is years from now, that person being him-52

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self, though he can’t see it—him—because the closer he approaches the mirror, the more the distant images recede into nothingness, blanked out by himself. He can see these echoing images only if he stands away from them. From there, they are like almost invisible light from distant stars fueled by stone, flickering out.

“Nathaniel?” Theresa asks, grinning. The mirrors please her. She makes a sudden little guttural noise.

He can’t stand being in here; he can’t breathe. This room-sized speculum involves the domestication of the infinite. And that’s the least of it—the room feels disagreeable and really quite monstrous, meant to undermine the soul by wrapping it in reflections. And yet he smiles at her and picks her up as if they had consummated a joyous occasion in this room, and he carries her out, back into the adjoining day, a gray gallery of paintings safely held in their two dimensions. He lowers her, and she touches him quickly on the earlobe.

“That place made me wet. I started to come in there,” she says quietly, and it takes Nathaniel a moment before he understands what she means and then another moment before he can believe it, but when she offers him her tremu-lous hand, the skin gives him a faint but distinct erotic shock.

Unable to speak, he accompanies her to the car, takes her home, walks her to her apartment above the ice-cream shop, staying behind her as she seemingly floats up the stairs, his hand snuggled in the back pocket of her jeans while she unlocks the door and makes her way past the old vinyl-covered chair near the phone, where he kisses her.

When he breaks the kiss, he says, “A burglar was in my apartment last night.”

She seems unmoved. “Did he take anything?”

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“No,” Nathaniel tells her. “I made him a cup of coffee.

Anyway, he was only a burglar.” Strips of paper have indeed been scattered everywhere in her despair, and beyond the window, the afternoon sun is sputtering out. The room has caught the odors of the waffle cones on the first floor, and the vanilla-candy confectionery smell is on Theresa’s breath. Her cat, lying on top of a book of crossword puzzles, eyes Nathaniel with autistic worry and suspicion. Theresa leads him into the bedroom, where they spend the rest of the day and the evening. They forget to eat until long after dark.

“Don’t get any ideas,” she says, drowsy, her voice a flat-line, just before midnight, a few minutes after her last orgasm, when she has called out to Jesus again. “This doesn’t mean that I like you. Let’s not be sentimental.” She smiles and pats him on the cheek. “But I sure did like our field trip.

Time for you to go home, honey.”

9

The next morning while he is making poached eggs for himself, his sister calls, as she always does on Sunday morning around ten o’clock. He knows Catherine’s calls from everyone else’s because she never speaks. She just listens while he talks. He does his best to fill his sister in on his life. The phone rings; he answers it. Silence from her. That’s their tradition.

“Hi, Catherine,” he says into the dead roar of long distance. He never asks her anything because there’s no point in asking; she can’t speak. How she can comprehend human speech but not be able to speak herself? A neurological mystery. In any case, every Sunday he has to concoct a newsy monologue for her. “So. I had a pretty good week. The classes are going well. Nothing to complain about there, really. It’s been raining. Friday night I went to a party and met this girl. Actually I’d met her before but we bumped into each other again outside the party, and we went in together. I took her home. And there was somebody else there, at this party, this guy named Coolberg . . . I don’t really know who he is, but he claims to know all about me. I t h e s ou l t h i e f

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don’t know how he knows. Yesterday afternoon I played basketball with these guys who are usually at this park, and in the morning I worked in the People’s Kitchen and . . .

oh, I almost forgot to tell you. On Friday night I came home and there was a burglar in my apartment, but he was an okay guy and was stoned out of his mind and so I made coffee for him, and believe it or not, we almost became friends, maybe. So, anyway, yesterday I was working at the People’s Kitchen, the one I’ve told you about, and the burglar and his wife came in, Ben and Luceel—that’s their names. They introduced themselves. Funny coincidence. I don’t know, Sis, sometimes I think my life is full of these strange . . .

happenings,
these weird events that just drop on me. They remind me of what Jung wrote about concerning coincidences. Carl Jung, the psychologist?
He
talked about how there are no real accidents. He could be right. And so anyway yesterday afternoon this girl I met on Friday—I called her, her name’s Theresa, and we went over to the art museum here in town and went into a room that was made of mirrors, floor to ceiling. It made me feel, I don’t know, sort of woozy, like I would pass out, like I’d disappear somehow. Then I took her back to her place. I have to study this afternoon, but tonight this girl, Theresa, and I are going out to Niagara Falls, with Coolberg, the one who says he knows me, to see the gods come out. Well, I mean, that’s what he
calls
it. I don’t really know what he means by that, but I guess I’ll find out . . .”