The Soul Thief (8 page)

“And how long is that?” asks Theresa.

“
We
can make it happen,” Coolberg says, chuckling. “History is ours. For example.” He rises from the bench and shambles in his raincoat over to where the water laps against Goat Island. Theresa and Nathaniel follow him. Down below, the Niagara River seems to be calm, but, under the surface, probably isn’t. If you fell in that water, there would be no resisting it. All your earthly choices would be over.

“The gods are in the water,” Coolberg says. “That’s why they have the dynamo over there, down below, to capture them.” He waits for a minute. “People think that the gods are in the air, but they aren’t. They’re pulsating down below.

They’re waterborne. Then they’re pushed by the generators into high power lines. Okay. I have an idea.”

“What’s your idea?” Nathaniel asks.

“I’ll stand here,” Coolberg says. “With my back to you, with me facing the river. And what you do is, you push me, and I’ll start to fall into the river, and then, after I’ve lost my balance but just before I fall, you reach out and you grab me.

You pull me back.”

“I don’t like your idea,” Theresa says.

“Well, it’s a serious idea, and here I am,” Coolberg tells her, walking forward a few steps toward the embankment, where the park service has cleared away the scrub brush for the sake of the view. The distance to the water seems negligible, but it’s impossible to tell how deep the river might be here. He holds his arms out in a gesture of resignation, a shrug, or an imitation of a crucifixion, an homage to the gods 66

c h a r l e s b a x t e r

he has claimed are located in this spot. In front of them, the river flows past, dividing. “Grab on to my coat,” he shouts.

Nathaniel takes a handful of cloth at midlevel in his right fist and another handful, lower, in his left. Then he unclutches his hands, letting Coolberg go.

“Okay,” Coolberg says. “Theresa,” he says, “push me into the river.”

Theresa looks down at her shoes. “Aren’t we too old for this?” she asks. “Aren’t we adults by now?”

“Give me a push.”

There is a moment when everything stops. Nathaniel glances up to see the masses of land in the distance—Grand Island and Navy Island. A late-autumn thunderstorm has opened the heavens with cumulonimbus clouds and lightning. As if in slow motion, Theresa gives Coolberg a tentative push, and Coolberg loses his balance. He appears to tilt forward yearningly toward the water and his own death, and at that point, Nathaniel, almost without thinking, lunges toward him. With one hand he grabs the back of his coat and with his left arm encircles Coolberg’s waist, pulling him back onto safe ground, while in the distance cloud lightning briefly illuminates the scene.

“Thank you. I’ve been saved. Your turn,” Coolberg says to Theresa. He turns to Nathaniel. “See? Something happened.

It’s like a drug that wakes you up.”

Nathaniel expects Theresa to balk, but she doesn’t. She stands exactly where Coolberg stood, though she does not hold her arms out as he did, in the crucifixion shrug.

Nathaniel cannot see her face clearly, but he can tell that her eyes are closed.

“Okay, I’m ready,” she says.

“I’ll do this,” Nathaniel announces, slipping in behind her.

With his right arm, he gives her a slight push but with t h e s ou l t h i e f

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insufficient force to cause her to lose her balance or to fall forward. She does lean over, pantomiming a fall, as his arm clutches her just above the hip as a lover would, whereupon she falls backward into him, as if she knew all along that this stunt was a pretext for some good-natured fun. Somehow both his arms surround her now as if he were embracing her—no, not “as if,” because that’s actually what he’s doing, he realizes, as she squirms. She turns around and lifts her face to kiss him, standing on tiptoes, a quick kiss that he returns. Coolberg is of course watching this.

“Would you kiss her again?” he asks. “I’d like to see that.”

“No,” Nathaniel whispers angrily. “For Christ’s sake.”

“In that case, it’s your turn.”

Reluctantly, in a kind of dream state, Nathaniel releases Theresa to take his place in front of the embankment.
Someone has always saved me,
he thinks as he closes his eyes. When his father died and his sister lost her words, and his beautiful mother seemed about to be as unstable as a canoe in white water, his stepfather took over their care and removed the family to New York, to the sunny apartment on West End Avenue, walking distance to the overpraised Zabar’s. Life settled down long enough for him to grow to be a man and for his mother to regain her steady calm heart. For an instant, he remembers the rug in the doorway of his stepfather’s apartment on the eleventh floor of the building, its deep red weave.

Through his closed eyelids, he stares at the darkness before him. He listens to the water for a five-second eternity. Then two hands push at him, he begins to fall forward, and nothing reaches out at his sweater to pull him back.

Nothing saves him.

12

Life is a series of anticlimaxes until the last one. Standing in the Niagara River with the water up to his waist, Nathaniel turns to see his friends. They are standing on the bank watching him, and Theresa may be screaming in laughter, but in the onrushing river noise, he can’t hear her; Coolberg continues to stare at him, or so it appears when the lightning illuminates the scene. If he loses his balance now, he’ll be gone forever, of course; he’ll be swept away.

Why did they think that the river just off Goat Island would be over their heads? It’s nighttime and the water is dirty—

they couldn’t see.

Nevertheless, he can’t move.

13

In the car heading back to Buffalo, Nathaniel says nothing. He has no observations to make about how he stepped gingerly back to the island, nothing to comment upon to either Coolberg or Theresa about their inability to reach out for him, no sly remarks about their collective intentions.

“Okay,” Coolberg says. “If you’re not going to say anything to us, do you mind if we turn on the radio?”

Theresa twists the knob, and a Buffalo station floats up into the car’s noisy silence. They’re playing the Beach Boys’

“God Only Knows.”

The unearthly beauty of the music fills the car. Nathaniel listens: muted horns, strings, tapped blocks, sleigh bells, a linear vocal line lightly harmonized in thirds until, three-quarters of the way through, the music becomes vertical rather than horizontal, as the voices pile up in a series of increasingly complicated harmonies in a refrain—
God only
knows what I’d be without you
—repeated and repeated and repeated, with a frightening emphasis on the word “what,”

until the voices fade out, having absolutely nowhere to go.

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This is the song, Nathaniel knows, in which Brian Wilson handed over his heart to God and simultaneously lost his mind. The song is Brian Wilson’s favorite, the one he sold his soul for. After “God Only Knows” there were other songs, certainly, “Good Vibrations” and the rest of them, but the spirit had abandoned him: addressed not to a California girl, a sun-bleached surfer-chick, the refrain had been spoken to his own spirit, his genius, which, in one of those ironies of which life is so fond, left him there and then.

“Okay, I’ll talk to you,” Nathaniel says, turning the volume down, and both Coolberg and Theresa sigh with relief.

“So. How did you like the gods?” Coolberg asks.

“Would you stop with this talk about the gods, please?

They were roaring,” he replies. “Anyway, what difference does it make?”

“Oh, hypothetically, it doesn’t make—”

“ ‘Hypothetically.’ That’s an interesting word, considering what we just did. Hypothetically, I could have just died.

Hypothetically, you could have just witnessed my drowning.

Both of you. You’re really hypothetical, Coolberg. I’ve noticed that.”

“But we’re
students.
With students, everything is hypothetical. Besides, we didn’t witness your drowning. We tried to—” Theresa begins.

“And if you had seen me go,” Nathaniel continues, “if I had disappeared, what then?”

“Oh, that’s easy,” Coolberg says from the backseat. “If we had seen you go, we would have been very sad. We would have presented the world with the grim face of tragedy.” His elegiac tone of voice seems distant, avuncular, ironic.

“Sad? Jesus. That’s not much,” Nathaniel says. They drive for another ten minutes until they enter the outskirts of Buffalo. As if he had been thinking about word choices all t h e s ou l t h i e f

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that time, Nathaniel says, finally, “ ‘Sad’ isn’t much of anything. I hate that word.”

“But there’s more,” Coolberg continues. “I wasn’t finished.

You should let me finish. If you had disappeared, if you had died, we would have . . . we would have
become
you. We would have taken you on. We would have
turned into you.
”

He waits. “
You would have lived in us.
”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Nathaniel says.

“Theresa, do you know what he’s talking about?” Theresa shakes her head. “See? Theresa doesn’t know either.”

“When a person dies,” Coolberg says, “the survivors take on the features of the deceased. The most eccentric traits are acquired first—tics, stuttering, shakes of the head. That’s how grieving works. The living reimagine themselves as the one who has gone missing. I would have taken you over.

That’s what we would have done. I guarantee it.”

“Speak for yourself,” Theresa says.

“Oh, I never do that.” Coolberg laughs.

14

For the next two months, as Buffalo descends into winter, Nathaniel often finds himself in one of two sets of arms: Theresa’s or Jamie’s. He does not, for now, think of himself as a hypocrite or a two-timer.

His love for Theresa happens to be contaminated by his doubts about her vaguely empty character. Still, he can’t resist her nervous wit, or her catlike purring when they make love, or the sheer force of her physical attractions—

her narrow waist, her perfect breasts, the knowing smile. As for Jamie, he has never been involved with a lesbian cabdriver before. Who has? The relationship, such as it is, follows no logic. The outcome is predictable. The situation bubbles on its surface with a comic pathos they both recognize:
Please kiss me
typically followed by
Do I have to?
Well, all women feign indifference, he believes. That’s their scene.

Courtly love requires that men must be educated through rejection, patience, and gift-giving.

Jamie’s physical apathy toward Nathaniel gives her a certain distance about his needs, all needs, the human comedy of neediness, including her own. Indifference to him makes t h e s ou l t h i e f

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her into a wise guy. She is unsullied by any desire for him, and yet . . . With her, there are always those ellipses.

Standing on a kitchen stool near her refrigerator, replacing a bulb in the overhead fixture, he tells her, “Uh, you know, Jamie, I’m kind of falling in love with you. I’ve been dreaming about you lately.”

“Oh,” she says, “you are? You have been? And . . . where did that come from? That’s an odd . . .” She tilts her head at him in silent inquiry.

“Yeah, I know,” he tells her, screwing in the bulb and flinching when it suddenly goes on.

“Because . . . well . . . this is awkward,” she says, “and . . .

um, impossible, though not . . . heartrending yet . . . but . . .

yes, certainly impossible . . .”

All the ellipses, the negative space around her responses to him—how could he not notice them? He lowers himself to where she has placed herself, near him. She touches him tenderly on the shoulder in thanks.

“I thought I would break my neck,” he tells her. “If I fell off that stool, I mean.”

Because what else is happening is that on certain other evenings when he lies on the floor of her little studio, surrounded by molded geometrical objects she has fished out of junkyards and altered and made beautiful with her blow-torch, he gazes up at the quasi cylinders, metal Möbius strips, and Styrofoam tetrahedrons hanging by wires and string from the ceiling, and he finds himself aroused and shaken by her talent, her vision of airworthy topological surfaces. Surely, somewhere in the United States another cabdriver is making skeletal flying machines out of Styrofoam and discarded plastic and junked metal, but he doesn’t know where. Only here, on the Niagara Frontier, is such a gifted woman perfecting her art.

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So out of masculine dutifulness and the tribute that love pays to accomplishment, he cooks dinner for her, elaborate three-course concoctions. He prepares the meals like a servant, a slave to love; he does not eat much himself, being enamored. A man in love cannot eat, keyed up as he is for a long journey. He listens to her disquisitions about the soul of materials, the mysteries of negative space, the genius of Giacometti and of David Smith, and the plotlessness of her interestingly fucked-up life, a life she claims she would not trade for anyone else’s. In return, she lets him hold her in preprogrammed ways on certain predetermined nights, and on occasion she takes pity on his luckless erections. Is she beautiful? He hasn’t always paid attention to that; her physical appearance seems irrelevant to his infatuation.

If she loved him the way a woman loves a man, she’d be jealous of Theresa. Or so Nathaniel likes to think. What interests her more (she claims) is Nathaniel’s futile love for a lesbian sculptor, herself, and his nonsensical love for a blandly intelligent Marxist would-be academic and ironist.

These are bad options. She remains intrigued by his waffling, his male duplicity. He is a case study in the problem of the masculine. For the time being, she has suspended her interest in other women, so that she can observe him unimpeded. She asks to hear what Theresa is like in bed, and when he starts to inform her, she abruptly refuses to hear the details. Sex between him and Theresa empties their souls of content, so she claims. Surely he can’t be considering a vanilla life with such a trifling female, this . . . cipher.