Charles Baxter - The Soul Thief

“So let me ask you a question,” Nathaniel says, improvising. “There’s something I can’t remember about what happened when I drove you home. Did I talk about my father and my sister last night? Coolberg said I did.”

“Oh, him. Hell, I don’t know. I didn’t hear you saying anything like that. Forget him, all right?”

“All right. Sure. But I can’t forget him — he just called. Listen: he wants to go to Niagara Falls tomorrow evening. To see the gods come out, is what he says. I told him I wouldn’t go unless I brought you along. Can you come?” To break the pause that follows, he asks, “ Will you come? You’ve got to.”

“All right,” she says. “Yes. But what’s all this about the gods? What gods?”

“How should I know? I’m not acquainted with them. You should ask him.”

“Nathaniel,” she says.

“What?”

“Take me somewhere. Right now. Okay? Come get me and take me somewhere. I’m alone here and I can’t stand it and I need to be delivered. I’ve been drinking stale burned coffee and having a breakdown. The kind where you tear paper into little strips and then stare at the phone? And you watch the sun crossing the sky? A day with no future? That kind.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“No, no, don’t ask me. I don’t care. Uh, wait: I do care. Last night, you said something about the Mirrored Room. The one in the Albright-Knox? Floors, ceilings, walls — all mirrors? That Lucas Samaras piece. We could do a trip over there. We need a break. We could be trapped in infinity. That’d be cool. Come get me in that strange little car of yours and take me to the Mirrored Room, all right? You remember where I live?”

“Yeah,” he says, hanging up in so much of a rush that he forgets to say good-bye to her, which is just what Coolberg does.

INSIDE LUCAS SAMARAS’SMirrored Room, in his socks — once again, shoes must be left outside, and only two people can inhabit the room at one time — Nathaniel takes Theresa’s hand. He is making an effort to think, but this site itself disposes of ideas quickly, leaving the visitor empty and somehow impaired. The question of whether this assembly is “art” seems somehow beside the point, though what that point may actually be recedes and dissolves like all other points, into the mirrors. The air in the Mirrored Room smells rank, a soiled and not-at-all-friendly unventilated stenchy atmosphere in three cavernous dimensions. This eight-foot cube has a table and chair inside, placed against the opposing wall, both objects with mirrored surfaces, opposite which the only available light trickles in from the doorway, and either the glass has been tinted, or infinity itself, as revealed by the mirrors, is green, a color that in this particular case has been emptied of all hope. The mirrored chair appears to be a joke and affords no rest to the visitor. Light inside the room, dog-tired, bounces off the surfaces until it drops.

Nathaniel has been warned by a friend: the visitor to this room returns to the rest of the museum uncertain whether he has had an interesting experience or a dull one or any experience at all. Nothing attaches to the room, and visitors are usually eager to escape its confines.

Looking down, Nathaniel sees himself and Theresa, holding hands, reflected so that they stand underneath the floor, balanced upside down on the images of themselves, as if under a layering of lake ice, the two of them submerged, immersed in glass, duplicating themselves in an arc traveling farther downward toward the lake’s bottom, and, past that, into the earth’s core. Above them and to the sides, their images pile up on top of each other, daisy-chained into a green velvety vertical sky-darkness. Everywhere he looks, Nathaniel sees himself — t-shirt, jeans, jacket, socks — attached by hand and thus umbilicaled to Theresa, similarly t-shirted, jeaned, jacketed, socked, their eyes perfectly aligned. He is looking at the mirrors, and Theresa trades that look with hers, and he looks at her looking at him looking at the mirrors.

But if mirrors multiply space, they must also multiply time. Nathaniel peers into the visual soup created by the green mirrorglass. There he is. He sees himself, having aged, eighteen reflections down, eighteen/twenty/thirty years from now, holding Theresa’s hand. There he is, with her, in the disenchanted darkness, smaller, faded, old, a tiny bent nonagenarian. There he is, there they are, a particled assemblage of atoms and molecules; there they will be, aged, aging, in the mirrors, growing dark and gray and small, and, somewhere off in the temporal distance, pinpointed, exquisite human nebulae, dying and dead and then gone. He approaches the mirror to see what the expression on that person’s face is years from now, that person being him-self, though he can’t see it — him — because the closer he approaches the mirror, the more the distant images recede into nothingness, blanked out by himself. He can see these echoing images only if he stands away from them. From there, they are like almost invisible light from distant stars fueled by stone, flickering out.

“Nathaniel?” Theresa asks, grinning. The mirrors please her. She makes a sudden little guttural noise.

He can’t stand being in here; he can’t breathe. This room-sized speculum involves the domestication of the infinite. And that’s the least of it — the room feels disagreeable and really quite monstrous, meant to undermine the soul by wrapping it in reflections. And yet he smiles at her and picks her up as if they had consummated a joyous occasion in this room, and he carries her out, back into the adjoining day, a gray gallery of paintings safely held in their two dimensions. He lowers her, and she touches him quickly on the earlobe.

“That place made me wet. I started to come in there,” she says quietly, and it takes Nathaniel a moment before he understands what she means and then another moment before he can believe it, but when she offers him her tremulous hand, the skin gives him a faint but distinct erotic shock.

Unable to speak, he accompanies her to the car, takes her home, walks her to her apartment above the ice-cream shop, staying behind her as she seemingly floats up the stairs, his hand snuggled in the back pocket of her jeans while she unlocks the door and makes her way past the old vinyl-covered chair near the phone, where he kisses her.

When he breaks the kiss, he says, “A burglar was in my apartment last night.”

She seems unmoved. “Did he take anything?”

“No,” Nathaniel tells her. “I made him a cup of coffee. Anyway, he was only a burglar.” Strips of paper have indeed been scattered everywhere in her despair, and beyond the window, the afternoon sun is sputtering out. The room has caught the odors of the waffle cones on the first floor, and the vanilla-candy confectionery smell is on Theresa’s breath. Her cat, lying on top of a book of crossword puzzles, eyes Nathaniel with autistic worry and suspicion. Theresa leads him into the bedroom, where they spend the rest of the day and the evening. They forget to eat until long after dark.

“Don’t get any ideas,” she says, drowsy, her voice a flat-line, just before midnight, a few minutes after her last orgasm, when she has called out to Jesus again. “This doesn’t mean that I like you. Let’s not be sentimental.” She smiles and pats him on the cheek. “But I sure did like our field trip. Time for you to go home, honey.”

THE NEXT MORNINGwhile he is making poached eggs for himself, his sister calls, as she always does on Sunday morning around ten o’clock. He knows Catherine’s calls from everyone else’s because she never speaks. She just listens while he talks. He does his best to fill his sister in on his life. The phone rings; he answers it. Silence from her. That’s their tradition.