The Soul Thief

by Charles Baxter

  Old women approached me in the street to offer their advice. They flapped their lips silently.

  One night Jamie packed up and left her apartment. In a cloud of unknowing, I let myself in the next morning and discovered that she had moved out. On the table just inside the door she had placed an envelope with a note enclosed addressed to me. I could not open it. I still have it.

  My life. My adored. My beloved.

  32

  “MR. MASON, do you have a view concerning this particular image in the last stanza?”

  Yes, I do, yes, actually. Indeed yes. The cold hill’s side is a place of spiritual hangover is a place of the pale burning loitering soul is the place of rubble and ash following the fire, the fire that leaves I mean evokes the sweet moan referred to in the hemistich of the concluding line of the stanza, causing the reader to bang his head against the wall, and this is where the knight awakens only to find that he has awakened into yet another dream from which he cannot awaken this time, in a garden of blackened flowers. There has been a rape and an assault, and they have shut her wild wild eyes with kisses four and those dilated eyes have stayed closed.

  Everything went dark again, and when I opened my own eyes, from my sprawled position there on the floor of the English department seminar room in Annex B, I saw my fellow students gazing down at me, some with concern, others with curiosity, and I heard a woman saying, “Get help.”

  33

  I WENT INTO that timeless and spaceless realm. Voices circled around me in rooms that were infinitely wide and unfathomably deep. I lived inside the moaning green infinity of my own mirrored existence, where geometrical atrocity reigned, spaces and rooms with boundaries carved out of the air by a diabolical architect. Certain horrors have a strict, dreadful geometry, and I came to know their angles and cosines and tangents. Day and night exchanged their features. Demons favored me. I felt myself sobbing. I lost all desire for the things of this world.

  At last, from the chair I sat in, I saw the Hudson River in the distance, and, out of the air of the alcove where I sat, a voice spoke. The voice reverberated from my childhood. I could hardly recognize it. On my windowsill stood a small metallic duck, and from the ceiling hung a little blimp. I found myself in my own bedroom in my parents’ apartment on West End Avenue, and when I turned my head, I saw my sister, Catherine, sitting close to me and yet far away. She was dressed in a black turtleneck sweater and a black skirt. The expression on her face was solidly prim, though fierce-ness lay in it somewhere, and, also, beauty, at a distance. She wore a pair of running shoes.

  Her voice emerged from her throat and mouth with a rusty sound like cold water rising up in an antiquated pump. In her hands she held a paperback book. Her general appearance was that of a rather sleek funeral director, but in fact she had clawed her way back to life, and she was dragging me back with her. She had become a force, my sister, on a mission.

  Is there anything more restorative than the act of one person reading a beloved book to another person, also beloved? Slowly I returned to my senses.

  The rusty unused voice began another narrative. “‘About thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward, of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet’s lady, with all the comforts and consequences of an handsome house and large income.’” She took me all the way through Mansfield Park, and as she did, the Hudson River acquired a particular color (blue, in sunlight), as did the buildings on this side of it, in Manhattan, and on that side, in Jersey. I noticed people coming and going in my room, and I observed citizens walking to and fro down at ground level, rushing about their business. On stormy days I heard the wind panting against the window glass. In that room, voices became identifiable instead of hallucinatory and generic. Miss Fanny Price eventually disposed of handsome and shallow Henry Crawford and found her match in Edmund. The book ended; my sister started another.

  “‘In M——,’” my sister intoned, “‘an important town in northern Italy, the widowed Marquise of O——, a lady of unblemished reputation and the mother of several well-brought-up children, inserted the following announcement in the newspapers: that she had, without knowledge of the cause, come to find herself in a certain situation; that she would like the father of the child she was expecting to disclose his identity to her; and that she was resolved, out of consideration for her family, to marry him.’” This was “The Marquise of O——,” which I’d never read. How had my sister discovered this genius, Heinrich von Kleist? I would have to ask her.

  Her readings restored me to life. Gradually I shed the residual toxins of where I had been and what I had done. I moved about in the apartment and prepared my own meals. I toasted bread and put jam on it. I took showers, washed myself, shaved: the little miracles of everyday existence. I tidied up. I avoided reading poetry, and when music came on the radio, I shut it off. Music and poetry both felt disabling to me, part of a world closed and shuttered. Besides, I couldn’t bear the stuff in any form. My mother took me down to the shops on Amsterdam Avenue, where I bought new clothes. She left me at the various doors, knowing better than to accompany her adult son into a haberdashery.

  From his calm altitudes, my stepfather gazed down at me with mild benevolent confusion. He had adult children of his own from his first marriage. He was under no requirement to love me, his strange irresolute stepchild. So why did he?

  34

  BUT IT WAS MY SISTER who had become a wonder and a marvel. When the reports of what had happened to me in Buffalo made their way to the Milwaukee halfway house where she lived, she spoke up. Words came from her mouth. She issued a demand: “Take me there.” Meaning: to him. To me. My mother flew out on the next nonstop to get her and brought her back to West End Avenue. Catherine—this was reported to me later—saw me sitting in my room, my personhood having been drained out, leaving behind this smeary blotch of nothingness, and, with a cure in mind, she marched over to the bookshelf in the living room. She chose a novel. (I learned later that she happened upon Flaubert’s Sentimental Education—not where I would have started.) I don’t remember the thread of the story, though I do remember hearing her voice; for me, the journey was like coming out of an ether dream, accompanied by a woman telling a coming-of-age tale of someone named Frédéric. And somewhere, toward the end of that book, the ether dispersed, or, to use another metaphor, the muddlement in my head began, ever so slightly, to lift, and I saw people and things in the room where I sat, and I heard a story being told to me, and I could tell the difference between the actual things and the imaginary ones.

  Later, much later, she told me, “I just wasn’t going to let both of us go down the drain.”

  Her recovery was sometimes referred to as “a miracle,” more miraculous than mine, but I don’t believe in miracles, just the force of compassion, which under certain circumstances can bring the dead to life. Nor do I believe that to say so is to be a sentimentalist. Though a prejudice exists in our culture against compassion, there being little profit in it, the emotion itself is ineradicable.

  After I had come to, I made an effort to talk to Catherine, but she didn’t enjoy conversations as much as reading aloud. In fact, she didn’t care for conversations at all. Small talk irked her and touched her in the site of her wound. She read to me for another few months, until I was on my feet, whereupon she returned to Milwaukee, eventually found a job, and got herself an apartment. By saving me she saved herself. My stepfather landed me a temp position as a clerk downtown in an East Village sundry shop, where I shelved and restocked shampoos and soaps and condoms. Then I applied for a job at a post office over on Staten Island. I got it. My adult life began. My parents let me go. They released me to the perils and rewards of the world. I moved to another city. I went to work for Amalgamated Gas and Electric, where I met Laura. She had an innocence that moved me. After she gave me a quilt as a token of her love, I married her.r />
  Meanwhile, Catherine thrived, if you can call it that, in Milwaukee, where she resides now. She currently works in a hospice. She plumps pillows and talks softly and reads and actively cares for people she hardly knows. She has never married.

  I call her sometimes. I have unanswered questions.

  “Why didn’t you speak after the accident?”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “But when you came home, and you started reading to me, you could.”

  “That was different.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It just was.”

  “Because I was in such bad shape?”

  “Maybe. I wasn’t going to let you go.” There was a pause. “Also.”

  “Also what?”

  “You used to call me. Remember? You used to tell me about your life. Stories. Serials.” Another pause. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

  “Okay.” I had one more question that I had to ask her. “How does the world look to you now?”

  “It looks all right.”

  “You don’t think about Dad ever anymore?”

  “Sometimes. But, you know, I did all that.”

  “What was it like, when you weren’t speaking?”

  “Nate, I have to go.”

  “All right,” I say. “Talk to you next week.”

  “Right.” And then she always says, “Love from here.”

  And I answer, “Love to you, from us.”

  35

  LAURA SLIPPED INTO the den, where I had retreated clutching the slip of paper with Coolberg’s phone number on it. My hand continued to shake. Sometimes the telephone can look like an instrument of studied malevolence.

  “Coolberg,” she said. “You know, I think I’ve heard of him. I just can’t think of where.”

  My wife hadn’t quite put two and two together. If she had, she would have recognized his name as the host of a program on public radio, American Evenings. Although the program’s format resembled, in some small respects, other personal-testimony-and-narrative programs on NPR, it had a unique verbal texture and a distinctive angle: Coolberg would begin the program by introducing his guest for that week, a man or a woman with a story to tell—a woman who worked as a writer of inspirational church pamphlets, for example, or perhaps a single father with two children, a man who fixed computers and drove a snowplow in Fair-banks—and although the program would start as an interview, gradually the guest’s story would take off, would soar, and at last would reach a moment of disillusion or epiphany that constituted one of those rare moments of clarity, a life-changing instance at first aided by the host’s ravening promptings, which gradually diminished and finally disappeared as the show reached its conclusion and the guest found his or her own voice, which was simultaneously the discovery of the story’s secret heart. But the show always began as a duet between the interviewer and the guest; the guest could not ascend, it seemed, without Coolberg’s help in running ahead and lifting the kite of the narrative. Sometimes American Evenings sounded like therapy or a church confessional and sometimes like a radio drama in which the tension arose both from the story’s conflicts and from the interaction between interviewer and guest. I always found the program funny and enlightening and even moving whenever I could bear to listen to it. My trouble was that I also found the initial parts of the interview peculiar, as if Coolberg sought to make himself invisible week after week by enabling someone else’s narrative into existence. He had a hunger, a neediness, to lift someone else up and thus to perform an audio vanishing act for himself, by himself. The story allowed him to make a life into art, and then disappear before taking a bow.

  One other subtext in the show became apparent every week: as the title, American Evenings, intimated, all the stories, all the narrators, somehow pointed toward the phenomenon of disappearances, things and emotions and rituals and forms that had once existed and no longer did, or soon would not. They constituted tales of a twilight as experienced by this culture’s citizens. As a result, the show gave off an air of hip nostalgia. People listened to it and wiped away tears while they sipped their martinis or got high.

  The format could not have existed without Coolberg, who had an uncanny ability to get under his guests’ skins, as if he knew what it was like to be them better than they themselves did. He gave their narratives a structure, understood their gains and losses, and sometimes offered them the key to what they were struggling to say, so that they blossomed into suddenly articulate observers of their own lives, they who had been wordless shadows and subalterns before. He nourished them into a form of knowing. He inhabited them by parsing their tales. He squirmed inside their stories and their anonymous selves. Meanwhile, he himself, the unmoved mover, on each of these American Evenings, faded, until his voice returned at the very end of the show when he listed the credits for the show’s producers, technicians, and corporate sponsors. Underneath his soothing closing words rested a layer of astonishing becalmed rage. You always felt a slight static shock when you heard his voice come on again. You didn’t think he could still exist. Where had he gone to? Was his doom always to live inside the stories of others?

  “He was a guy I knew,” I told Laura. “Back in Buffalo. I’ve told you about him. He’s got that radio show now.” I reminded her of it.

  After my prompting, she did indeed remember it. He had become quite a personage out there in Los Angeles, by putting his disappearing acts front and center. He had become famously insubstantial.

  “Are you going to call him?” she asked me.

  “I guess so.” I nodded, so that I could agree with myself.

  “Your hand is shaking.” She reached out and gripped me.

  “I’m all right.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Well.” I tried to find the right words. “You know: it’s hard to find the right words when you’re about to talk to someone you once knew when you were someone else, someone you no longer are.”

  She nodded. The quilt she had given me a few months after we had met each other, her love’s token, was up on the wall close to the phone. It had been stitched together, as some quilts are, from rags and cast-off clothes and found fabrics, and the pattern had been set in a series of tiny squares that evoked a child’s world of curlicues and stars and snowflakes. What I had always loved about Laura had been her kindness and innocence in the face of the world’s sophisticated cruelty. She was almost frighteningly guileless. This meant that about sixty percent of human behavior was simply beyond her comprehension. She had never wised up, and she never would. And yet—I insist on this, too—she was not a child. She just had a permanent immunity to evil. It baffled her.

  “All right, I have to call him,” I said. “I have to do this myself now. I guess I need to be alone with this.”

  She nodded and left the room as I dialed the number. “Dialed”! There are no dials on telephones anymore. Nevertheless, the verb lives on in its ghostly phantom way.

  A briny-sounding woman answered after two rings, as if from an underwater world. “Mr. Coolberg’s office,” she gurgled. Background music at her end of the connection could be construed: Bill Evans, one of the solo keyboard albums, where he sounds like a jazz Debussy contemplating which form of addiction he’ll try next.

  A pause, as I collected myself. “May I speak to…” I couldn’t say “Jerome,” and I couldn’t say “Mr. Coolberg,” and I couldn’t say “Jerome Coolberg,” and deciding that I couldn’t use any of these terms required an unhealthy and embarrassing amount of time; I was stymied. Finally I said, “Couldn’t I speak to him?”

  She laughed at the grotesque phrase. “Whom shall I say is calling?”

  I gave her my name.

  She put me on hold, and a recorded voice came on urging me to contribute to my local NPR affiliate. This was followed by a blip on the wire and the sound of something breathing asthmatically into the mouthpiece one full continent away.

  “Nathaniel,” he
said at last.

  “Jerome.”

  “Thank you for calling back.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “How are you?”

  “Oh, I’m fine, I guess. You?”

  He continued to take short stabbing breaths. It was him, all right. “I’m frightened,” he said.

  “Of what?”

  “Of talking to you. This is like swimming across a lake in the middle of the forest and trying to see someone who has been reported as missing, and who may well have drowned. You keep swimming and searching, but you don’t want to see what you’re supposed to be looking for.” Coolberg hadn’t lost his taste for epic similes. I had no idea what he was talking about. Sometimes his brilliance just sounded like garble, a form of pre-cognition.

  “Uh, right,” I said agreeably. It wasn’t as if I could answer such a statement. “Is that why you called?”

  “No.”

  “Did you want to talk? About—”

  “No. Well, yes and no. I’ve done something. And I need to…well, I’m sorry to be so unclear, so vague. I can’t really talk about it over the phone. But I need to tell you about it by showing it to you. It’s important.” Indefinite reference always had a way of proliferating with him, as it did in the fiction of Henry James. After a while, you just lost the thread. Everything turned into “it.” At least on the page you could search through the previous paragraphs for what was being alluded to.

  “Yes? How? What’s this ‘something’?”

  “I have an idea, Nathaniel. I have an idea of what you should do. A bit of unfinished business that we can finish, you and I. Don’t say ‘no’ until you’ve heard it.”