The Soul Thief

by Charles Baxter

  “Who’s yours? You seem to know about mine,” I said.

  “What does it matter? Are you trying to take a moral inventory? It wouldn’t be anyone you know. Love is generic. Besides, that’s not what you’re really interested in.”

  “What am I really interested in? Since you seem to be the expert.”

  “Well, okay, to start with, here’s a subject of interest: What am I doing with your notebook from years ago? Why was it reposing on the floor of my car? Which you surely took note of, that notebook, when I was in the supermarket buying garlic and arrowroot?”

  “I did.”

  “Isn’t it interesting?” he asked. “So far, we haven’t talked about those days. You never asked me back then, or ever, why I had your clothes stolen or why I was wearing them. You went around with that expression on your face as if you understood each and every one of my actions, as if you understood everything and accepted all of it. No one will ever tell you this except me, so I’ll say it: that expression appeared to comprehend everything that anybody could present to it. Your tolerance was positively grotesque in its limitlessness. What didn’t you accept? It was your greatest weapon. No: your second-greatest weapon.”

  “What was the first?”

  “Want another bottle of wine?”

  “I’ve had enough.”

  “So what? Who cares? You’re not driving anywhere.” He made a gesture at the waiter, and instead of wine ordered brandy. Then he began teasing his lower lip with his index finger. “Why do you care about that sculptor so much, that Jamie person? Why did you care?”

  I reached for my wineglass. “Because I loved her. Because I never got over her.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “Yes. About that I am very sure.” My syntax had acquired the stately formality of the truly inebriated. I was still wondering what he thought my greatest weapon was. “And by the way, who are you to be interrogating me about any of this?”

  He smiled an impish smile. “The host of American Evenings, that’s who. And look. That’s exactly what we’ve been presented with.” He pointed in the general direction of the Pacific Ocean. “A pleasantly wonderful American evening for the consumers of twilight and our national metaphysical ruin, as played out here, in the best of all possible worlds, in SoCal.”

  I wasn’t sure that I had heard him correctly. “‘SoCal’?” Had he really employed that usage? “So this is another one of your American Evenings? You don’t have your tape recorder on, do you?”

  “Oh, no, Nathaniel, that would be illegal, immoral, and, what’s worse, impractical. You can’t pick up an adequate—”

  “What did you do to her?” I interrupted him.

  “To whom?”

  “To Jamie.”

  “To Jamie? I didn’t do anything to her.” He leaned back. “She was set upon. By dogs.”

  “But you predicted it. You told me that day in the zoo. You said you were writing something called Shadow, whose story contained an Iago-like character named Trautwein, I remember that, who is tormenting another character, I think his name—and it was truly a ridiculous name, an affectedly literary name—was Ambrose, who loves this woman, an artist, and Ambrose…well, the person he loves is harmed, not directly, but by hired-out third parties. It’s not Othello, but it’s a third cousin once removed to that story. Trautwein sees to the harm.” I winced at my own alcoholic repetitions, but they were essential to the case I was making.

  Somehow, coffee had appeared on the table. Coolberg picked up his cup. “It might have been a coincidence.”

  “Okay,” I replied to him. “But what if it wasn’t? What if…let’s just say…hypothetically…what if you, or, um, someone like you, not you exactly, not you as you are now, what if this hypothetical past-tense person had hired…what if you had hired some young men, some thugs, for example, that you found hanging around the People’s Kitchen or some place like that, to beat her up, to do terrible violence to her? Well, no. Strike that. I take that back. Maybe all they were supposed to do was threaten her a little. A teeny-weeny act of intimidation, motivated by jealousy, let’s say. That’s all. They would walk up to her at the bus stop and slyly put the fear into her. And this…prank would scare her right out of town. Off she would go, to another…what? Venue. That was the goal. You know: give her a little 12-volt shock. Affright her with their boyish street-thug menace, which is, I might add, celebrated now on all the major screen media. We can’t get enough of that, can we? Sweet, sweet violence. So, anyway, with this plan, she’d leave town, pack up herself along with her few minor bruises, if she had any, and move, taking her little birds and blimps with her. But maybe the plan goes awry. Let’s suppose that the guys who are hired are not just sly. They’re criminal sociopaths instead. The 12-volt shock turns out to be 120 volts. And then it gets European and goes up to 240 volts. And what if…let’s just say…they got into it, these thugs that’d been hired, or were maybe just doing a favor—well, you’d only need a couple of them, and they couldn’t stop what they had started, their specialty not being staying within limits set for them by authority figures, after all, and they hate women anyway, and they sort of raped her, because it was possible, you know how one thing leads to another, don’t you, Jerome? I know I do. And she was raped. And after it happened, she couldn’t remember much of anything, so there were no arrests and no trials because she couldn’t identify anybody and the police were helpless, and she left town soon afterward, clearing the field, so to speak. What if that had happened?”

  He looked directly at me. “Then I would have been a monster.” He glanced at the sky. “Then I would have been unable to live with myself.”

  “But you had already hired a burglar. You had hired a burglar to steal clothes, my clothes, and then he got into his tasks, and he couldn’t stop, and he stole everything from my apartment, until nothing was left, only a book or two. And a mattress.” I leaned back. I felt like repeating myself. “You had already hired a burglar. It’s what you do. You’re still a burglar. You still steal clothes. I’ve listened to your show.”

  “Is that what you think happened?” he asked me. “Is that really what you think?”

  “Sometimes I think it,” I said. We were both speaking calmly, like gentlemen, over the coffee and the dessert.

  “You think your apartment was being emptied by burglars?”

  “Sure it was.”

  “Oh, you poor guy,” he said. “It wasn’t being emptied by burglars. It was being emptied by you. You were moving out, or trying to. Don’t be such an innocent. You were trying to move in with her. With that Jamie person. This hopeless hopeless stupid idiotic romance you thought you had going on with her. It was making you crazy, you poor guy. We could all see it. Anybody who loved you could see it. And of course she wouldn’t let you take anything over there, into her place. Because there was no room, to start with. And because she didn’t love you the way you loved her and…she didn’t really want you over there. So you were storing your stuff somewhere else, in the meantime, until she would come around, as we used to say, come around to being the benign woman you believed she could be, the heterosexual wife or whatever she was that you had envisioned. You had assigned a certain set of emotions to her and were just waiting for her to have them, and meanwhile you were reading that soggy Romantic poetry and dragging the spectacle of your broken heart across the Niagara Frontier. Love? You were offering something you didn’t have to someone who didn’t want it.”

  “I was storing my stuff somewhere else?”

  “Of course you were.”

  “If she was refusing me, why wasn’t I taking my stuff back to my own place?”

  “Because that would have been an admission of defeat. You were always good at denial.”

  “So where was I taking everything?”

  He gave me that look again. “You poor guy,” he said again. “You persist in your habits, don’t you? Your ingrained habits of incomprehension. Willful incomprehension. And convenient amn
esia. You’re just like this country. You’re a champion of strategic forgetting. You really can’t give up your innocence, can you? That sort of surprises me.” He glanced down at my glass of brandy as if it were responsible for my faults. “You can’t live without your disavowals. You told me that Jamie left you a letter behind in her apartment after she took off. It was addressed to you.”

  “Yes.”

  “What did it say?”

  “I never opened it,” I admitted.

  “I rest my case,” Coolberg said, signaling for the check. “Let’s go down to the pier.”

  42

  I SUPPOSE HE MUST HAVE loved me back then. He must have enjoyed being me for a while, wearing my clothes and my autobiography. And I suppose I must have noticed it, but I never thought of his emotions as particularly consequential to anyone, and certainly not to me—the feelings being unreciprocated—and in those days, brush fires of frustrated eros burned nearly everywhere. Everyone suffered, everyone. I myself burned from them, and when you are burning, you are blinded to the other fires.

  Next I knew, we were out on the Santa Monica pier, making our way toward the Ferris wheel, as if we had a rendezvous with it. After the wine and the brandy, I thought the structure had a giant festive beauty, with exuberant red and blue spokes aimed in toward the white burning center. Ezekiel’s wheel, I thought, a space saucer of solar fires. Give me more wine. My emotions had no logic anymore, having been released from linearity, and certainly no relation to the conversation we had just had, Coolberg and I. Multicolored plastic seating devices that looked like toadstools affixed to the Ferris wheel lifted up the passengers until they were suspended above the dull sea-level crowd. Coolberg was speaking; I could register, distantly, as if from my own spaceship, that he was uttering sentences, though their meaning appeared to be comically insubstantial. Slowly the words came into focus. He noted that during the day, the wheel on which we were about to ride was solar-powered, could I imagine that? A solar-powered Ferris wheel! Just as I thought! Energy from the sun lifted this thing. Only in L.A. He bought two tickets. From somewhere he had obtained a bag of popcorn. All around us we now heard Spanish spoken by the eager celebrants, the Ferris wheel being a bit too unsophisticated for your typical pale-faced tourist out on the Santa Monica Pier. This ride was more suited to the illegal immigrant population that understood distance, death, and sweep.

  “Mira. Hoy, los latinos,” Coolberg whispered to me. “Mañana, los blanquitos.”

  We were ushered onto one of the blue toadstools with an umbrella canopy obligingly suspended over it, and before I could register my objections, Coolberg and I were locked in, a gesture was made, and the wheel scooped us up into the air.

  We went up and down, he and I.

  “It would be nice to say that I’m asking for your forgiveness,” he was saying, somewhere nearby me, as we swayed in the air, and swooped, “but I’ve tried to eradicate sentimentality from my daily routines, and besides, you’re too drunk. You’re not going to remember any of this, and forgiveness induced by alcohol, from you, is meaningless. What I really want to do is explain something to you.”

  The wheel lifted us up again, and I saw Malibu ahead of us, and Venice Beach behind (the toadstools twisted on some sort of pivot), diminish into starfields, in the way that a city, seen at night from an airplane whose cabin has been dimmed, will look, with its spackled pinpoints, like the sky that mirrors it. Directly below us the carnival sounds of the Santa Monica Pier faded into an audible haze, and I could feel my stomach lurch.

  “I have admitted nothing,” he said, “and I have confessed to nothing. I haven’t asked for your forgiveness, because forgiveness has a statute of limitations attached to it. If it comes too late, the emotion itself has expired. Pffffft. It only works if it’s fresh, forgiveness; and when it’s stale, it’s rotten and useless. Don’t you agree? But, you know, I was sorry—really I was, horribly sorry, disgusted, mortified, disfigured with regret, oh, just fill in all the adjectives you want to. I’m sure you can do that. What was I saying? I remember. I was sorry about what happened to that girl, that Jamie, your one true love, and if those days could have been taken back, if I could go back there, then I would certainly have taken that journey and taken them back. If I could have gathered all those people in my arms—you and Theresa and Jamie and your sister and your father and all those other people we knew and didn’t know and didn’t even care about—and carry them away to safety, I would have, believe me. And then I’d save the Armenians from the Turks, and the Jews from the Germans and the Poles, and the Tutsis from the Hutus and the Hutus from the Tutsis, and the Native Americans from us, as time is my witness, I’d do that, but, hey, come on, who are we kidding? That’s marauding sentimentality, there. There’s no protecting anyone once history starts digging in its claws, once real evil has a handhold, and besides, what I did…well, look down. Are you looking down? Nathaniel? Good. Do you suffer from vertigo? I do. But you see what’s down there? I don’t mean the ocean. I don’t mean the salt water. Nothing but idiotic marine life in there. Nothing but the whales and the Portuguese and the penguins. No, I mean the mainland. Everywhere down there, someone, believe me, is clothing himself in the robes of another. Someone is adopting someone else’s personality, to his own advantage. Right? Absolutely right. Of this one truth I am absolutely certain. Somebody’s working out a copycat strategy even now. Identity theft? Please. We’re all copycats. Aren’t we? Of course we are. How do you learn to do any little task? You copy. You model. So I didn’t do anything all that unusual, if I did it. But suppose I did, let’s suppose I managed a little con. So what? So I could be you for a while? And was that so bad? Aside from the collateral damage? Anyway, I may have bought something, but I never paid for a rape.”

  He stared off toward the darkness, and the lights, of Malibu.

  “Let the British be the British,” he said, out of nowhere. I was losing the thread. “We know what they’re like, the Brits: stiff upper lip, a nation of shopkeepers, sheepherders, whatever, all the same, the Brits. We know them. But no one knows who we are here, in this country, because we’re all actors, we’ve got the most fluid cards of identity in the world, we’ve got disguises on top of disguises, we’re the best on earth at what we do, which is illusion. We’re all pretenders. Even Tocqueville noticed that. And if I was acting, anyway and after all, so what? I was just being a good American.”

  “Stop talking,” I said. “Shhhhh. Don’t say another word.”

  “No?”

  I held my finger to my lips. “Shhh.”

  The wheel turned in a temporary silence.

  “That was a very good speech,” I said. “You were always good at imitating eloquence.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But I know what this is,” I said. “This is an imitation, isn’t it? All planned out. This is an imitation of Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles in that movie, The Third Man. How clever you are, Jerome, how devious,” I slurred. “Italy, the Borgias and the Renaissance, Switzerland, a thousand years of peace, and cuckoo clocks, Harry Lime’s big speech justifying himself. Everything becomes a reference, to you, doesn’t it? You’re so knowing. What don’t you know? Everything evokes something else, with you. Just as you say.”

  His eyes appeared to be wet, but he smiled proudly. I had found him out. He was still pleased to be my friend. He could cry and be pleased with himself at the same time.

  “You said you had something to show me,” I told him. “Where is it?”

  “I wasn’t sure you’d remember.”

  “Oh, I remember,” I said. “You told me over the phone that you had something, and you were going to…give it to me. Where is it?” I waited. “It’s not that old notebook of mine, is it? Because if that’s what it is, I don’t want it back. Or anything else I gave to you, all those years ago, for storage.”

  He leaned over. His popcorn spilled out onto the floor. I think he was about to kiss me on the forehead. I leaned back, and he made a gestural
lunge. The Ferris wheel’s toad-stool swung back and forth.

  “None of that,” I said. “Too late now.”

  “Oh, okay,” he said.

  “So where’s this thing you have for me?” I asked again.

  43

  THE WALK BACK to his car seemed to prolong itself almost into infinity, as some experiences do on the wrong side of marijuana or alcohol. Some distortion or injury had occurred to my sense of time, and I could not get back into the easy clocklike passing of one moment into another. All he had told me was that the gift he had for me, whatever it might be, was back in his apartment. I think I died on the way to that car.

  Somehow—it seemed to be many years later—we arrived at his Toyota. He unlocked it. I sat down on the passenger side.

  44

  AFTER A DRIVE whose duration in time I could not have estimated in either minutes or days, we entered, he and I, the infested interior of his apartment. The curtains, thick with grease, had turned from white to gray. Just inside the door, a three-legged cat hobbled over toward him and propped itself against his leg while the two of us examined the newspapers, magazines, books, and framed pictures scattered on the floor, the bookshelves and kitchenette table, and the sofa cushions. Elsewhere, VHS tapes and DVDs had been piled up along the wall, arranged by genre and alphabetized. Outside the window, the lights from passing cars swerved dimly in and out of view, leaving shadows on the ceiling. A calendar near the doorway had been thumbtacked to the wall and showed the month of December from three years ago; the accompanying picture, in faded colors, was that of a sleigh followed distantly by wolves. Through the doorway facing me, a kitchen sink was visible, illuminated by a 1950s-style overhead fixture; the sink’s faucet dripped softly and steadily, leaving a slime trail of rust. Green wallpaper adorned the kitchen. A silenced German clock hung at eye level; the time, it claimed, was nine fifteen. In a corner a TV set had been left on, though the sound had been muted. On the screen, a gigantic blue monster—the TV’s picture tube needed to be replaced—with fish-like scales and a long ropy tongue ripped its claws silently into human flesh. Blood spurted terribly against a suburban home; children ran screaming away. No doubt people were shouting, and frightening music would have been blaring on the sound track if only the volume had been turned up. Over in another corner, a radio, tuned to an FM classical station, played one of the piano pieces Schumann had written late in his madness when he claimed the angels were singing to him.