The Soul Thief (15 page)

When Jeremy was six years old and Laura was driving him home from day care, she hit a pedestrian who was crossing a street downtown. She had been adjusting the radio to get a better station, and Jeremy had been yelling, and she was distracted. Baby Michael was home with me. This guy was where he shouldn’t have been (no intersection and no crosswalk), but Laura didn’t see him, and the impact of the car threw him several feet into the air. He went unconscious for an hour or two, had a concussion and multiple fractures, and was in the hospital for over a month. He turned out to be one of those litigious Americans, a real bastard, a pain profiteer. Also an electrician and a drunk, but his alcoholism didn’t get into the trial. He sued, of course. It’s true that Laura hadn’t had her eyes on the road, and it’s also true that t h e s ou l t h i e f

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our Chevy needed brake work. Our insurance was paid up, thank God, but the whole process went on for a couple of years. We were destroyed in some of the ordinary ways, and when it was over, you couldn’t find either of us for a while; we had become vague and insulated. I could feel internally the parts of myself that had dried up and withered. Laura said I looked like a tree hit by lightning. I never said to her what she looked like. When lawyers stay calm but keep on talking to you and won’t stop, it’s as if they’re screaming and screaming.

But we’re lucky. We got over it. Our next-door neighbors have had the whole menu. Their daughter ran away a couple of times, mismanaged a major cocaine addiction, and was turning tricks in Atlantic City by the age of sixteen. She even had her own pimp. The parents were nice middle-class Americans, churchgoers. They didn’t know what was happening to them, or how it had started. Poor American parents: so easily confused. This same daughter got herself enrolled in a recovery program, emerged from it, began cut-ting herself for fun, then ran away again, this time to San Francisco, where she resumed her career in prostitution.

This time she refused help. She accompanied her pimp/

boyfriend on a drugstore holdup, was caught and jailed. Her brother, inspired by her behavior, developed a liking for Vicodin. He started stealing prescription pads. He earned his own jail time. Etc. Two kids in the slammer. The father commenced drinking, and why wouldn’t he? Catastrophe is contagious. Everyone knows stories like this.

My point is that middle-class life in this country seems to be operating on a contingency basis. It can change on you at any moment. They can pull the rug out from under you. You can be thrown into the street without appeal. Your furniture is carted away; your clothes are tossed on the front lawn; 138

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your children are ground up by a crazy commercial culture.

Catastrophe lurks; ruination prospers. As the guy in that movie said,
Ask people for help, watch them fly
.

I went into the den and gazed down at Coolberg’s phone number. The numbers in that particular combination had a terrible frightening appearance to me. My hands were shaking, and of course I didn’t want to go back there, into that world.

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Ultimately I was removed from Buffalo, but the stages of my breakdown have a montage-like quality to them, and by now they’re mixed up with what I have dreamed. My memories of those events were adulterated by the nightly visitations from those people and occasions after the major scenes were over. A sorcerer ruled my imaginings. The music of Mahler served as the background audio sound track. My visitors walked through walls toward me the way Marley’s Ghost seeped past the door on his errand to Ebenezer Scrooge. My dreamcallers carried their dead-ness around with them. Chains clanked. I can’t sort out what actually happened from what didn’t, and I can’t get the dreamstuff out of the narrative. Even though I don’t think about that time period often anymore, it accompanies me.

My soul was mortgaged. I paid it off through regularity, routine, and hard work, until it was mine again. My history is what it is. Anyway, my crisis occurred decades ago, and I 140

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have a life to get on with. So I apologize now for this recon -

struction, which is only an outline, a foggy sketchy thing, and for its necessary unreality. Also for its fragmentation. I don’t perceive the beauty in brokenness these days, though I once did. But I can acknowledge its truth.

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I was lying on the floor of my bedroom, praying to God to save Jamie, whom I adored, from all harm. When I came to, someone seemed to have taken away most of my furniture. I was in a blank space unbounded by dimension or time. The apartment had been almost entirely emptied.

A mattress remained on the floor, and one book remained, the
Brownstone Eclogues.
No: over there, a book of translations of a German poet, whose name disappears on me every time I read it, sits on the windowsill. The rest of my books had performed a vanishing act. I went to the mirror. Coolberg’s face looked back at me. As in a Cocteau film, I fell into the mirror and swam in the glass.

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Someone in the culinary alliance called me, and I drove my VW down to Allentown where the People’s Kitchen was burning to the ground. I was surrounded by my friends from the Allentown Artists’ & Culinary Alliance.

The firemen went about their work with deliberation. Joyous flames shot out from the windows the way they do whenever a particularly effective job of arson has been ordered and set into motion. I was weeping, first, and then violent sobs overtook me. This fire signaled the end of collective generosity in this our country, America. Bent over with sorrow, I was grieving for all our broken promises, for the loss of charity and loving-kindness. Someone reached down for me and ordered me to stand up, someone who looked like Jesus. In the early 1970s, many men in their twenties looked like that. Jesus had broken out on their faces. There was an epidemic of Jesus. What was Jesus doing
here
? I despised him; I had said so. He spoke to me. To this day, I remember that among other instructions, he told me t h e s ou l t h i e f

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to be a man. Then he vanished into the crowd. Most of his words disappeared from my head almost as soon as he uttered them because Jesus lives solely in the world of dreams. But not the part about being a man. Why did he care about that?

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Theresa has called me a devil again and apparently I have hit her. Or tried to. She blocked my fist. I might have hurt her. Probably not: she seems
pleased
by my gestural violence. How is this possible? It cannot be possible. She’s a feminist. She has been giving me more of her typical knowing smiles. She recognizes that I have been two-timing her and that I do not love her or her irony or her great body.

Nevertheless, she continues to ask me for sex, to demand that I fuck her. When I am tender with her, she becomes impatient and angry—that’s pretend-love, she says, and from you, it’s sickening. We start to get rough with each other in bed. We begin to cross the borders that you shouldn’t cross. With her, love is complicated by its opposite, contempt. On the other side of the border is pain and the promise of clarity, but in our case there is no clarity, just more pain.

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This passage is a palindrome.

My adored, my beloved. My life. Why did I love her? No explanation is ever satisfactory. How could it be? Jamie had finished her night’s rounds, had returned the cab to the central dispatcher, clocked out, and was waiting for the bus in a shelter downtown when she was set upon by a gang.

What were they doing out on the streets at that time, five thirty a.m., before dawn? Were they under orders? Why had Coolberg predicted something like this, in
Shadow
? A coincidence, of course, that was all it was, a mere coincidence, a narrative necessity, a required episode of violence against a woman to keep readers awake and alert.

I sat beside her bed in Buffalo General day and night. She would live, they said. A kind nurse named Mary kept us company for several hours, I remember that. Sometimes Jamie would come back to consciousness and look over at me. She whispered from underneath her bandages.
Where
was her family?
Where were her girlfriends? Wherever they were, they didn’t visit us, though a few of them called, and 146

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when I answered the hospital phone, they asked questions, their voices full of concern. But people don’t like to visit hospitals, I know, and even an assault can be regarded as infectious. The police questioned her, of course, but her assailants, by striking her, had blurred themselves into nothingness, and she could not detail them. What I finally said was that
I
was her family, and when I did, Jamie whispered to me to take any of the pieces that I wanted, the birds and the dirigibles, from her apartment; she had never made out a will, she confessed.
Am I still alive?
she kept demanding of me, in whispers, as if both the question and the answer were secrets.
It feels like I’m dying.
And I told her she wasn’t, and she couldn’t; I wouldn’t permit it. I saw her pursing her lips, so I kissed her, and she winced.

In the rape, she’d been hollowed out and emptied and smashed up, her broken pieces carelessly glued together in the aftermath, and when she was released, she couldn’t bear to be touched or even looked at. She would scream upon being observed. She came to regard her little metallic birds and blimps and tetrahedrons with utter contempt. Junk, trash, leavings, waste. If I wanted them, I could have them all. She hated herself, she hated her work, she especially hated art: sentimental frivolities, all of them, part of a gone world. Life was not like that anymore. Her hatred poured out in a flood, and of course her hatred included me.

Because she could not identify her assailants, who had been wearing ski masks, the case remained unsolved, and no sus-pects were ever arraigned. It took on the phantom existence of something so terrible as to be almost imaginary.

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 t h e s ou l t h i e f

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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.

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“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.”

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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-150

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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.