The masses of accumulation were piled so thickly in the living room that paths had been made between them to allow passage toward the bedroom and bathroom.
As an apartment, this one was not so unusual, especially for a single man. Cluttered and disorderly, every item indisposable, the spaces filled with the wrack and ruin of a solitary life, this apartment served up an antidote to emptiness with a messy mind-stultifying profusion. The rooms looked like the temporary unsupervised housing of someone with a ravening spiritual hunger, a grandiloquent vacancy that would consume anything to fill up the interior space where a soul should be. Books were piled and stacked everywhere. Behind this craving resided an urge as strong as love. All the furniture was secondhand, scratched—emergency furniture to be used in case a catastrophe occurred, as indeed it had. The dreadful had already happened. The catastrophe had come to pass and would last for a lifetime.
The cat purred, and the monster on the TV set was now attacking a major U.S. metropolis. These rooms were filled up but still empty, as empty as the vacuum of outer space uninhabited by a living being, and yet the place had retained its ability to project a human solitude and loneliness, as did Coolberg, who gazed at his dominion with a resigned expression of deadened appetite.
The clotted and crowded emptiness was so thick that it was almost impossible for me to breathe. The clutter seemed to be using up all the oxygen, as if it were inhaling itself. Coolberg placed a small spice bottle of powdered garlic, and another of arrowroot, on the stained kitchen counter with a slightly theatricalized pathos. Then he looked at me. His expression seemed to be one of ecstatically sorrowful triumph. He reached for something on the counter, couldn’t grasp what he wanted—a box of some sort—so he took a step into the kitchen, scooped up what he had tried to pick up, and brought it back.
“Here,” he said shyly.
I lifted the lid. It was a typed book manuscript. It was entitled The Soul Thief.
“I wrote your story for you,” he said. It began, “He was insufferable, one of those boy geniuses, all nerve and brain.”
Reader, what you hold in your hands is the book he wrote.
45
YOU WILL SAY, this is a trick. You will say, “This is the last twist of the knife that eviscerates the patient.” But a disagreement is offered: this narrative turn contained no trick; it comprised the story itself. And didn’t the details leave you every possible clue? On every page the narrative intentions were plain, even obvious, starting with the reference to Psycho and going on from there. He played by the rules. He played fair.
But the point cannot be that one person can take on another’s life, and in identifying with the other, give life to himself. Such a modest observation! We all know that. The point must lie elsewhere.
The point is that although love may die, what is said on its behalf cannot be consumed by the passage of time, and forgiveness is everything.
PART FOUR
46
NATHANIEL MASON ENTERS the silent house. I can easily imagine it. He drops his suitcase softly on the foyer floor. “Hello?” he calls out. No one returns his greeting, except for the floorboards beneath his feet, creaking happily, pleased to be weighted down. He can see through the door to the kitchen, and, through the kitchen, to the backyard beyond. A dour, cloudy day. Behind him is a shadow. From now on, the shadow will always go with him. The mantel clock, knowing its one set of facts, smugly chimes on the quarter hour for him. Midafternoon: his son Jeremy will be starting his swim practice any minute now, and his son Michael is…well, who knows where Michael is? Michael investigates, in his own way, the multifarious mysteries of the world. And Laura? She is not here, either, it seems, but he calls out to her anyway. “Laura? Honey? I’m home.” The silence of an empty house returns to him. The furnace ignites with a subterranean whoosh and chuckle. Laura has followed the daily schedule and is, even now, watching out for the boys, or she stands in a room, checking with her expert eye the textures of a quilt.
He will tell Michael that, on his advice, he did not accept the bacteria-infested ice cubes on the airplane’s refreshment cart. He will tell Jeremy that Snow White and Darth Vader still ply their trade on Hollywood Boulevard. He will tell his wife that he discussed being on American Evenings but then thought better of it. He will kiss her as she enters the house.
He will not quite say that he has given up everything for this settled domestic life, the one that he cherishes and loves. He will not quite say that his public life is, in its way, a secret inside a secret. That he, in his way, is also a soul thief, and that the soul he has stolen belongs to a lesbian ex-sculptor who lives somewhere far away, and, in all probability, alone. And that he now lives, and will go to his grave, accompanied by another.
Nathaniel has the house to himself. It is his, in temporary solitude, except for his shadow. He ascends the stairway. He pushes aside the door to Jeremy’s room.
Nathaniel Mason approaches the desk cluttered with Jeremy’s litter. Right there, on the left-hand side of the desk, is the draft of an essay for a college admissions form, printed out from Jeremy’s computer. Nathaniel bends down to read it.
The Things We Take for Granted
BY JEREMY MASON
What do we take for granted? And is taking things for granted natural, or a mistake? Or somehow both? When I ride the bus from my home to Emerson High School, which I attend, I know where all the curves in the road are way ahead of time. I can anticipate traffic jams. My fellow students sit in the same seats most days. I even know where there will be dogs barking in the neighborhood. Believe it or not, I know the names of some of the dogs because I have walked them, as a summer job! Thank goodness we, as humans, are capable of anticipating some events! That way, we are able to make plans. We can save money for a rainy day. We can outline a strategy, a plan of action. Otherwise we would be in the dark all the time, experiencing surprises each and every minute. Surprises are good but not when they are eternal. But there are some things that we must not ever take for granted, three above all. We should not take for granted our families, our beliefs, and our [strengths and weaknesses? loved ones? health?]
No one should ever take his or her family for granted. For example, my younger brother is weird, but he is always surprising me by how fearless he is. Last week he said to the family that he is planning to travel to India alone this coming summer to be “enlightened” by a guru he found on the Web, which I know for a fact he is not. He likes to attract attention to himself but he is basically harmless and courageous. He has said he is gay, but that was grandstanding. For example, I have seen him staring long and hard at Playboy magazine. My mother is quiet but she is always there for me and is always rooting for me in my athletic endeavors and academic achievements and is always in my corner. She keeps on me to study carefully and to give everything I can to academics and athletics. My dad too is quiet, but just as the old saying is that still waters run deep, I know that he
Nathaniel turns away from the page. In its cage to the side of the desk, Jeremy’s pet white rat, Amos, sticks its nose out from its bedding to see if anything is going on. Outside, a car may be pulling up in the driveway. Whatever his son has written about him can wait for his inspection. Soon they will all be home, his wife and his two children, and Nathaniel will have prepared a salad, peeled the potatoes and boiled them for mashing, and he will have laid the steaks tenderly on the grill. Will green beans be served? That depends. The front and back doors will rattle open, and tumult will fill the house as it does every evening. Laura has left him a note informing him where the dishes are hidden away in the refrigerator, and how he should prepare them. “Welcome home, sweetie,” the note begins, and it continues, “Were you on the radio? If you’re clueless about the dinner dishes, you should start by…”
(In the basement, near his worktable, where he is assembling a small blue birdhouse to be hung on the apple tree in the backyard, stands a compact companionable metallic duck, sturdily upright on its two metal legs. In th
e drawer of his worktable rests a sealed envelope. And inside the envelope is a folded message, surely a benediction, he believes—this hope constitutes his last article of faith, which he will clutch until the end of his days.)
Blessings, he thinks, on my family, on the poor and helpless, the brokenhearted, on the victims of violence and on its perpetrators. May they all be undestroyed. Blessings on everybody. Blessings without limit.
A last visit from Gertrude Stein, as she waves good-bye: For a long time, she too had been one being living.
Minutes later, in the kitchen, he takes the dishes out from the refrigerator one by one. He begins the preparations for dinner.
NOTES
This is a work of fictions.
In this novel about thievery, I am happy to acknowledge some borrowed gifts. Theresa is correct about Coolberg’s dream: it does not belong to him but to Diane Arbus and can be found in her 1959 notebook #1, as printed in Revelations. Coolberg also has a habit of quoting, without attribution, passages from Joseph Stefano’s script for Psycho, along with other passages from the novels of E. M. Forster. The quotations from Gertrude Stein are largely paraphrases of her portrait of Matisse. The translation into English of Kleist’s The Marquise of O—— is by David Luke and Nigel Reeves.
For certain details about Los Angeles flora and fauna I am grateful to Francesca Delbanco and Arden Reed. My grateful thanks also to Michael Collier and Louise Glück. The story of Simple Shmerel is derived from The Adventures of Simple Shmerel as told by Solomon Simon. My thanks to Carl Dennis for bringing these stories to my attention.
As always, thanks to Liz Darhansoff, Carol Houck Smith, Dan Frank, and Martha and Daniel Baxter.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Charles Baxter is the author of eight other works of fiction, including Believers, Harmony of the World, and Through the Safety Net. The Feast of Love was a finalist for the National Book Award. He teaches at the University of Minnesota.
ALSO BY CHARLES BAXTER
FICTION
Saul and Patsy
The Feast of Love
Believers
Shadow Play
A Relative Stranger
First Light
Through the Safety Net
Harmony of the World
POETRY
Imaginary Paintings
ESSAYS
Beyond Plot
Burning Down the House
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2008 by Charles Baxter
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: George Braziller, Inc.: Excerpt from “Golden State” from Golden State by Frank Bidart (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1973). Reprinted by permission of George Braziller, Inc. Oxford University Press: Excerpt from “The Census-Takers” from Selected Poems by Conrad Aiken (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Baxter, Charles, [date]
The soul thief / Charles Baxter.
p. cm.
1. Graduate students—Fiction. 2. Buffalo (N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3552.A854S68 2007
813'.54—dc22
2007018119
www.pantheonbooks.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-37709-8
v3.0
The Soul Thief Page 16
