The Soul Thief

by Charles Baxter

  “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.

  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 assemblage 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, exquisite 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-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 tremulous 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?”

  “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 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…”

  Just beyond his apartment window an old woman who is pushing a grocery cart stops and stands on the sidewalk, staring in toward him.

  “What the gods are, I mean. I thought they were all gone. Aren’t they?”

  A thought: What if this is not his sister on the phone? What if he’s talking and telling all this to someone else, not his sister at all, a terribly wrong number, someone who has happened to call him deliberately or by mistake, someone who doesn’t say “Hello” or identify himself when you answer?

  But Nathaniel continues to narrate the story of his recent life, into what he thinks is his sister’s silence. After all, she needs his stories. She needs him to talk. The stories keep her alive, or so he believes.

  10

  ON THE WAY to Niagara Falls, at dusk, to see the gods come out, they cross Grand Island. Coolberg sits in the backseat, Theresa reclines on the passenger side, Nathaniel is hunched behind the wheel. They pass a little abandoned amusement park. The humble roller coaster is oxidizing gradually into scrap metal, and one loop-de-loop lies dead on the ground. Nathaniel imagines the joyful screams of yesteryear. Above the roar of the VW’s engine, and to pass the time, Coolberg begins to describe a trip he apparently made last summer to a country whose name, when he says it, sounds like “Quolbernya,” one of those rarely visited Eastern European locales at the edge of, or just off, the map.

  “In that country,” Coolberg says, in a voice that gradually gains momentum, “the houses are all built of white stone. They’re sepulchral, these houses, like those in a Bergman movie, and although they have huge drooping gutters and oversized windows, nothing about them seems particularly knowable. The people there don’t believe in directional signs, to begin with. They think you should know how to get where you’re going, and you should always know where you already are. But by law, they require homeowners to plant decorative purple lilacs in their backyards, which will bloom throughout the seasons, lilacs engineered in the local laboratories so that not even snow will kill them. Another thing I noticed was that families no longer go down to the docks to welcome the passengers, because people have become, without anyone knowing why, too much trouble. The waves flatten out oddly in the central harbor, which is obscurely brokenhearted, like Lisbon. It’s one of those places that history currently ignores. The sights extrude a kind of nineteenth-century pain. There is nevertheless much actuality. The state planning makes everyone feel like a miniature, and though I found a few maps printed on high-quality paper, the maps themselves were fictional, and comically inaccurate. And, after all, people were indifferent to exact location—or they didn’t ‘care,’ if that’s the word—and I noticed that at dinnertime they bent down to their plates, where invariably food was located, and most of them ate and didn’t remark upon where they were.”

  He takes a breath and makes a sound like a giggle. Nathaniel feels rage, a rare emotion for him, rising up at this mockery of eloquence and distinction-making, this travelogue through a massive cognitive disorder, this manic word-spinning, but before he can interrupt, Coolberg starts in again.

  “Everyone’s very loyal to the directives, for example, about eating the food. It’s one of those countries where people are particularly loyal to loyalty. Also, there’s the business of sleeping, how much dreaming has to be done, who has to love whom, that sort of thing. Their murders are elaborately planned and executed. Nothing is left to chance. As they like to say there, ‘You certainly have to dream a lot of dreams to get through a lifetime.’ In the capital city, I went to the pavilion of end-of-the-world horticulture. The plain-faced plant-woman sprinkled powerful dust on the flowers for my benefit and explained that the long fields where nothing will grow that we had spied from the tourist buses, and the rivers that had turned to the color of cough drops, were not really manifestations of anything disarrayed in the organic world, understood as such. She said everything was demonstrably mending. She was almost alone in the pavilion. Her voice echoed, in that bottom-of-the-well manner. Trust me, the plain-faced woman said. And then in French, Oui, je la connais. But if I was supposed to trust her, to acknowledge that she knew something, then why were all the children in the neighboring playground so frightened, their mouths making those terrible O’s? Why wouldn’t the lilacs stop blooming? Why did the gifts hurt long after they’d been given? Those were the questions. One morning I knew, finally, that the lists of examples wouldn’t do any longer, but examples were all that I had. In that country, they speak prose. And not only do they speak it, they live it. They didn’t ban poetry—they still encourage it, officially—but they did get rid of the insides of things, the interiors that poetry once, in another era, before the fall, referred to. In that sense, they are like us.” He says the last sentence almost in a whisper, a loud whisper over the engine noise, as if confiding his single precious insight.

  “Would you please shut the fuck up?” Nathaniel shouts.

  “Oh, okay,” Coolberg says, smilingly exhausted after his riff. “I just wanted to tell you about the Quolbernyans.” He waits for a moment before saying, “And about those lilacs? The ones that never die.”

  “Jeez,” Theresa says. “Where did you get that routine? I thought I knew them all.”

  “I was reciting a poem,” Coolberg says modestly. “Almost.”

  “Well, don’t ever do it again,” warns Nathaniel, gripping the steering wheel. “It’s like vomiting in front of people.” They pass over the second bridge from Grand Island and turn onto Buffalo Avenue, running parallel to the Robert Moses Parkway, which leads to Niagara Falls on the American side.

  “Who’s been out here?” Nathaniel asks. “To the falls?”

  “Well, I never have,” Theresa informs him.

  “Me neither,” Coolberg tells them quietly, seemingly miffed.

  “How’d you know about the gods, then? That was the whole point of this expedition. ‘Gods’ are what you promised,” Theresa says.

  “I had heard about them,” Coolberg explains. “From someone. Someone who had seen them. Besides, look.” He points ahead. A smell from the atmosphere invades the car’s interior, filling the little Volkswagen with the odor of petro-chemical solvents. On the left-hand side along Buffalo Avenue is an array of chemical plants, visible ahead along the river for miles: DuPont, Carborundum, Olin, Dow, Occidental Chemical, others, all brightly lit in gold by sodium-vapor lamps. The plants’ complicated tubular pipes look like giant industrial webbing connected to enormous black-and-gray fortress-refineries and processing machinery, their smokestacks decorated with evenly spaced vertical lights and red blinking stars at the top—lighthouses that beckon the chemical storm and resist it. Close to them are gas flares. This display is the triumph of something that does not want to be named. No humans are visible, no cars are parked. Nothing appears to be moving except for the smoke that wafts like a little industrial storm cloud toward the parkway, the Niagara River, and the car in which they are traveling. A background hum is audible. This entire complex operates without any human intervention and could continue forever without anyone turning a dial or throwing a switch. Nevertheless, Coolberg is correct: some presence is here. You can hear it.

  “Valhalla,” Coolberg says, from the backseat.

  “Should we stop?” Theresa asks.

  “Stop? Stop where?”

  “Well, anywhere.” She shakes her head. “To go in. Nobody works here, that’s obvious. These factories are all automatized. Is that the word? Automated. That’s the word. They run themselves. No one’s been here in years.” She puts her hands under her armpits for warmth. She shivers and grins. She is so beautiful when she shivers; she shivers and trembles when she comes.

  “There are fences and barriers and
guard shacks. The lights have to be replaced. See those KEEP OUT signs?” Nathaniel asks, ever the practical soul.

  “Xanadu,” Coolberg says from the backseat. “Stately pleasure domes.”

  Nathaniel takes an angry left turn onto a service drive, downshifts into second, then takes another turn into a mostly vacant parking lot bordering a squat brick building over whose doorway are the words THE CARBORVNDVM COMPANY. Behind them, and at a distance, a ghostly train consisting of chemical tankers chugs forward into the darkness. In the lot where they have parked, tanker trucks rumble, their engines still running as they do at freeway rest stops, though Nathaniel cannot see their drivers. In the distance, a siren wails, then abruptly cuts off in mid-shriek.

  “Want to get out of the car?” Nathaniel asks. “Take a tour?”

  “What do they make here?” Theresa asks him.

  “Snack food.”

  “Polyester fire-retardant snack food.”

  “All right, all right. That’s enough of that duet.” Nathaniel’s foot taps nervously on the brake pedal. “Do we get out? Do we take a safari into one of these places?”

  Theresa looks straight at him. “You’re kidding, right? Listen, I just changed my mind. If they found us here, they’d kill us. They’d douse us with their chemical compounds and set us on fire. No, no, this isn’t where we’re supposed to be. This place is creepy, Nathaniel. We must exit. We must drive away.”

  As they are talking, a night watchman wearing a blue Pinkerton uniform emerges from a small shed attached to one of the larger buildings. The door he opens is rusty, as is the shed, and a red rust attaches itself to the gravel he steps on. His red hair leaves the impression that rust has attached itself to his body as well, slowly burning him from the inside out and from the top down. He makes his way in a leisurely cop-saunter over to where their car is idling. He has perfected the tough coolness of an enforcer, even though he seems to have no gun, only a billyclub. When he reaches their car, Nathaniel lowers his window, and the guard, whose hair is even rustier when viewed close-up, and whose face has the humid florid flush of youthful high blood pressure, bends down to ask, “What’re you folks doing here? This is private property. You got business here?”