The Soul Thief

by Charles Baxter

  “Yes? What?”

  “If I sent you a round-trip ticket to Los Angeles, would you come out here? For a couple of days? I need to see you in person.”

  “For what? I don’t get it.”

  “Would you agree to be on American Evenings?”

  “No.”

  “That’s what I thought you’d say. Yes, that’s right. You don’t have to agree to it now. I wouldn’t expect you to. Think it over. The show can send you tickets anyway, whether you’re on the program or not. I could say that I brought you out as a consultant. We have enough in the budget for that. We could put you up in a hotel. You could stay on Sunset Boulevard. It’s a well-known hotel we could put you in. Celebrities have died there,” he said with a tone of morbid cheer. “The famous Fatal Hotel! Could you come out? Or is the timing inopportune?”

  Such talk, thick with unreality, had gone out of my life. I could hear Jeremy upstairs murmuring on his cell phone. No, I couldn’t hear him murmuring, not actually, but I could imagine him crooning his love and longings to a girl who would be crooning them back to him. I could see Michael trying to rig up some new use for Coca-Cola concentrated syrup, sold behind the drugstore pharmaceutical counter but not yet properly exploited by the adventuresome early-adolescent set. I could hear my wife talking to a quilter about a purchase on her own cell. “Cell”! That’s the word, all right. Everyone else was deeply engaged in his own variety of life. Everyone else inhabited a world. What was I going to do? Spend the rest of my days as a time-server in suburban New Jersey? And never revisit this particular corner of my past, now, in the present, out there in the Golden State?

  “No, it isn’t,” I said. “Okay.”

  “Okay, you’ll come?”

  “Okay, Jerome, I’ll come.”

  After arranging where and when we would meet, we said good-bye. How would I manage my absence from the job? I would take two personal days. After I had hung up, I turned to see Laura standing in the doorway, the back of her hand against her forehead, rubbing some irritant away, her eyes fixed on me.

  PART THREE

  36

  THE DAY OF my departure on a very early flight out of Newark, I kissed my wife good-bye as I left the house. She had always been a deep sleeper and barely managed to rouse herself when I leaned down to give her a peck on the forehead. She smiled vaguely at me—at the idea of me—and placed her hand briefly on my cheek and then was quickly asleep again, as if she had been visited by a ghost. She muttered, as she always did when she was dropping back into dreams. In Jeremy’s bedroom, I saw my older son lost to the world, with his face buried under a blanket, his big feet poking up uncovered at the base of the bed. The room smelled of residual chlorine. After crossing the hallway, I knocked softly at Michael’s door. Light streamed out from underneath it.

  “Come on in,” he said, as if he were expecting me. Did he ever sleep? He was sitting up in bed reading. What would it be this time? The Anarchist Cookbook? No: The Iliad. You could never tell with Michael. You could never predict the next turn his road would take. On the floor were two CliffsNotes guides, one for the Bible and one for the Koran.

  “You should be sleeping,” I said quietly, a near-whisper so as not to wake the others across the hall.

  “I know,” he whispered back. “You should be sleeping, too.” He gave me one of his wolf-cub expressions. As a pack animal, he was always happy to see me, the older wolf. “When’s your flight?”

  “Couple hours from now.”

  “Dad? When you drink the beverages they give you? Don’t ask for ice. Refuse the ice, okay? I read this thing about it. The ice on airplanes has, like, cesspools of bacteria in it. The ice’ll make you real sick.” He scratched his hair and rubbed at his eyes. “And if you can spot any of those Sky Marshals, those FBI guys, let me know. I’d hate that job, sitting on a plane all day, waiting for a terrorist to start the terror show.”

  “They’re not FBI.”

  “I know. I just said that. It’s really TSA. See if you can spot them, though, okay? I bet you can.”

  “Bye,” I said.

  “Bye, Dad.” I went over to his bed, gave him a brief halfhearted hug (he was at an age when hugs threatened virtually every form of personal stability, but he raised himself up to hug me in return), and was about to go back out when he asked me, “When do you get back home?”

  “Day after tomorrow, probably.”

  “Are you going to be on that radio show?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  He went back to The Iliad. “You should get on it. You’d blow them away. You’re really good at making stuff up.”

  I was? That was news to me. I shut the door softly behind me. I walked past the hallway table just beyond the bathroom whose light I had carelessly left on, down the stairs on whose lower landing I inspected a framed picture of a high school girl whom Jeremy had sketched in art class, out onto the street where the morning papers were being delivered, thrown from the passenger-side window of a creeping car. I greeted the dawn before getting into my car and starting the engine to drive myself to the airport. I remembered a prayer I had said years ago on behalf of Jamie, before I had blacked out. These days, I had lost the ability to pray or to bless. That gift had abandoned me. It was like throwing words down into a ditch filled with corpses.

  On the airplane, I was seated far back in steerage class, two rows up from a disabled lavatory smelling of caustic lye. Before boarding, I had eaten a hasty breakfast in the airport restaurant, ominously named the Afterburner Lounge. I was just now beginning to feel the consequences. The food I had ordered—scrambled eggs that looked concocted from powder out of a tin—had been served with ill-disguised jocular contempt. The eggs had disagreed with me, so that when I sat down in my assigned seat, I was almost immediately afflicted. My gut gushed and gubbled.

  My seat was next to that of a young mother accompanied by her squalling son, who appeared to be about a year old. He clutched a teddy bear with a music box inside. The bear’s head rotated, demonlike, as the music played. Several nearby seatmates gazed steadily at the teddy bear as if they planned to dismember it. Meanwhile, the screaming child, in the full flower of his own hysteria, grew as red as a turnip and as loud as a megaphone.

  The child’s mother seemed powerless to stop the sheets of sound produced by her son. Indeed, she seemed charmed and surprised by his decibel production.

  “Noisy, isn’t he?” she laughed. She tried to plug her son’s mouth with a pacifier. He spat it out onto the floor as the plane banked to the left, and the pacifier tumbled out of reach.

  “Well, they do scream at that age,” I said. This was a lie: Jeremy and Michael had never screamed in this infant-sadistic manner; their cries had always been pointed and specific. The child screamed again, an infant Pavarotti bellowing up to the third balcony.

  “Do you have kids?”

  “Two sons,” I said. “Mostly grown.”

  The flight attendants pushed the drink carts up the aisle. I kept my attention on the ice cubes. “What did you do with your boys when they were crying?” she asked. “You must have done something. Back then? Men always seem to know about these things. The fun things. How did you make them stop?” I assumed she meant the child’s outraged cries.

  “Oh,” I shrugged. “The usual. I dandled them. I bounced them on my knee. I did some peekaboo. I did some bleeump-bleeump.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Bleeump-bleeump? Oh, what you do is, you hum the William Tell Overture and you bounce them on your knee like they were the Lone Ranger, on Silver.”

  “Show me?” She lifted up her son and dropped him into my lap. So surprised was this child at finding himself in a stranger’s care that his face took on an expression of shock, and he instantly grew silent. I took his hands, positioned him on my knee, and began bouncing him.

  To the side, his mother watched this dumb show with admiration. I wondered whether she was pretty. I hadn’t really looked at her. I played with her wicked
toddler for another few minutes, and when I glanced over at her, I saw that, out of sheer exhaustion, she’d fallen asleep on me.

  37

  ALTHOUGH MOST AIRPORTS seem to have been designed by committees made up of subcommittees, and are inevitably unattractive and unsightly, Los Angeles International has an exuberant ugliness all its own. The atmosphere of non-invitation is quite distinctive, as if the city’s first representative, its airport, is already disgusted, perhaps even repelled, by the traveler. The recent arrival might well imagine that he has landed on the set of a low-budget futuristic film, most of whose main characters will die horribly within the first forty minutes. The pods, as they are called, are carelessly maintained, and an odor of perfumed urine wafts here and there through the bleary air.

  My fellow passengers trudged out of the plane, blinking like moles exposed to sunshine. The demon-child I had entertained slept, now, in his mother’s frontpack. One woman, clearly a tourist, pulled her luggage-slop (beach bag, reticule, cosmetics kit) out of the overhead bin and staggered toward the exit. As soon as she reached the gate, she uttered a disappointed “Huh?” at the ceiling.

  It was a common response; several of my fellow passengers sighed with dismay. The airport’s unwelcoming skeletal failed postmodernism put most outsiders into a condition of uneasiness. All this way to the end of the continent, all the trouble we went to, for this? In every interior nook and cranny, TV sets, hanging like huge spiders from the ceiling, boomed down disinformation from the Airport Channel. You stumble toward your luggage. Downstairs, attendants just past the baggage claim flash expressions of carnivorous appetite at you, estimating the size of your wallet. If you are not a native, the message is, Welcome to L.A. You’re in for it. If you are a native, the message is, Ah, one of us. Welcome back.

  Having been to L.A. once on business and once with the family on a vacation, I had armored myself against the ritualistic hostility of LAX. I grabbed my suitcase, made my way past the carnivores to the rental car lot, fumbled with the map, and poked my way out into the hot prettiness of a Los Angeles morning.

  Quickly I was drowsy and lost on the freeway, but my disorientation made no difference to anyone. Behind the wheel, I enjoyed a Zen indifference to destinations. Everyone else in L.A. seemed to suffer from a form of permanent distraction anyway, as if, just above the horizon line of their attention, they were all watching a movie in which they played the starring role as they meanwhile meandered about their actual humdrum earthbound lives. Imaginary qualities of actual things predominated here. The spectacular golden sunshine, the hint of salt air and the morning mist rolling in from the Pacific, the occasional views of the hills and mountains upon the lifting of the smog, and the omnipresent aura of dreamy stoned hopefulness—you might as well have been lost on the freeways or caught in traffic, because you were half dead and dazed with it all, the hot petulant loveliness. What possible goal could you have had that might have been better than where, and who, you were now?

  And then there were the cars, alongside of which you could ignore the speed limits or sit waiting for the jams to clear. The captains of industry zoomed past in their pink Bentleys, blue Maseratis, and white Porsches, or in their smoked-glass limos with vanity plates (SILKY was one, DIRECTOR another), and the upper-level drones sported about in their ordinarily luxurious Audis and BMWs. Lower-level types, at the bottom of the food chain, drove the humiliated Fords and humble Chevys, mere shark bait. The street stylists had their lowriders and their bass-driven hubbub. But there was also this museum aspect to L.A. traffic: sitting in a seemingly full-stopped backup, I noticed in front of me a perfectly maintained candy-apple green AMC Gremlin, clown car par excellence, and behind me a blindingly white ’64 Ford Mustang. This city, after all, was the North American capital of whimsicality, and if Angelenos wanted campy remnants from the ridiculous past, they would find them. Here you could spot antique Peugeots and Citroëns and Fiats, Kaisers and Frasers and Morris Minors, Austins and Vauxhalls, rescued from junkyards and given a shine.

  The Gremlin, engaged in serious multitasking, talked on his cell phone with his right hand while he electric-shaved his neck hairs with his left. Behind me, the beautiful blond Mustang read the paper and applied lip gloss.

  Eventually I found my way to Sunset Boulevard and proceeded toward the Fatal Hotel, where I had arranged to meet Coolberg later in the afternoon. I had always liked the twists and turns of Sunset, its deluxe corridors like roped-off walkways outside of which you might spy distant palazzos whose turrets peeked up above the tactically planted topiary that no drudge was permitted to approach. After living for so long in New Jersey, I simply stared at the palm trees, the bougainvillea, the nature-conservatory greenhouse luxuriance, as I motored past. I didn’t want any of it. I just wanted to look, from a safe distance.

  When I reached the hotel, a bored valet removed my luggage, gave it to an equally bored bellman, and sped off somewhere in my contemptible rental car. I was ushered into the lobby. For such a famous place, known for its hospitality to louche celebrities of every stripe, the Fatal seemed rather drab, even seedy. It advertised its own cool indifference to everything by means of dim Art Deco lamps and shabby antique rugs. Indifference constituted its most prized form of discretion. To the left of the entryway sat an ice plant. A dusty standing pot with a sunlit cactus in it, close to the elevators, matched the ice plant for pure floral forlornness. They were emblems of four-star neglect. In front of me, and to the right of the front desk, was a brown Art Deco sofa that looked as if it could have used a thorough cleaning. Scandalized, I saw stains. In the sofa’s dead center, a model with a high, soft laugh sat talking to a deeply tanned predatory type in a safari outfit who perched on an arm-rest. His teeth gave off a glare of whiteness, and his huge panopticon eyeglasses—an hommage to Lew Wasserman—seemed to cover the upper half of his face. He had probably trapped the object of his attention out in the wilds of Malibu and would soon sell her to the slavers. Meanwhile, the half-lit lobby seemed to be recovering from a recent binge. The pale yellow stucco walls radiated the weltschmerz of hangover.

  Perhaps, of course, all this feverish registry of impressions was just that—the fever I typically fell into when visiting L.A. I approached the front desk. The clerk sized me up instantly and smiled a shimmering, vacant smile full of patronizing friendliness. He would be polite, dealing with a nonentity such as myself, the smile proclaimed. My banal debaucheries (if I could rise to even that level) would be cosmically inane, however, and laughably conventional. The universe was running down because of people like me. He was already stupendously tired of my existence, and I hadn’t yet said a word. On his face was the blasé expression of a young professional who has exactly calibrated which drugs, and in what quantities, are required to get him through the day.

  “Yes?” He gave me an affable thousand-mile stare.

  “I’m checking in.”

  The clerk impatiently examined his prizewinning watch. “I’m sorry, sir, but no rooms are ready yet. Check-in time here is three p.m.” Well, yes: major-league fun leaves a big mess behind, and didn’t I know that? Coolberg would not be meeting me until three.

  “Well,” I said, “maybe I could check in and turn my luggage over to the bell captain, and take a walk?”

  Take a walk! What an idea! Now the clerk actually grinned. An enthusiastic happy disdain flared out of him like the scent of a strong cologne. One did not walk away from this hotel. One was driven away, after being loaded into a limo or a hearse. Although he had the random good looks of a would-be actor, the clerk’s overbite now protruded slightly when he smiled. Handsomeness gave way to his latent provincialism and failed orthodontics. He would never get more than one line per movie, if that, but what fun I was turning out to be. “Yes,” he said. “You could take a stroll. Also,” he said, remembering his manners, “the hotel has a restaurant. We serve,” he said, then paused, unsure of how to finish the sentence, having lost the thread, before catching his thought again, “all
day.” He licked his upper teeth with his tongue.

  “No,” I said, “I’ll take a walk. By the way, my reservation here was called in, possibly under the name Coolberg. Jerome Coolberg.”

  “Ah.” Sudden recognition; his face brightened slightly, as if a rheostat had been turned to about twenty-five watts. “American Evenings.”

  “Yes,” I lied. “I’m one of them. I’m one of the evenings.”

  His lips tightened patronizingly, as if at last he had to acknowledge my minuscule somebody-ness. “Congratulations,” he said.

  Outside the hotel, I walked in what I thought was a westerly direction.

  38

  ACTUALLY, I KNEW perfectly well where I was going. I ignored the somnolent junkies on the sidewalk and got out of the way of the roller girls zipping past me in the opposite direction. I was intent on my destination. Tempted as I was by the neighborhood record store, still in business and, I could see, patronized by clueless middle-aged men who didn’t know how to steal music files from the Web, I nevertheless continued to stride at a soldierly pace, peering in quickly at the tattoo parlors and the magazine racks as I advanced toward the shrine. At last I found it.

  Angelyne. There it was, the billboard, dedicated to totally meaningless celebrity. Just as historic literary Long Island had its eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg, so L.A. had Angelyne. She was completely admirable. She had her blowsy showgirl beauty and had peddled it for years in these primary-colored billboards mounted on the roofs of the neighborhood buildings: and in this particularly characteristic one—traditional, just her picture and her name, ANGELYNE—her hazardous giant breasts were on display, though miserably confined by a tight dress of plastic, or was it laminated vinyl? She sported black elbow-length evening gloves, a junk-jewelry bracelet, a cigarette holder, and her aging blond-bombshell hair tumbled on either side of the weather-beaten eyes. Supposedly, according to legend, she drove a chartreuse Corvette. She had once run for mayor.