Charles Baxter - The Soul Thief

The fact of water rushing past in the river; the fact of the rich fetid darkness in this park, at night; the fact of a few storm clouds and a bit of lightning; the fact of beautiful, anxiously intelligent Theresa sitting next to him, who may or may not now be his adoring lover — all these facts make him uneasy. Ease? Ease is elsewhere. Ease is for others.

When, Nathaniel wonders, will I ever get free of these narratives in which the gods are promised? When will anybody?

“Nothing is going to happen,” he says glumly. “Nothing is ever going to happen.”

“Oh, yes,” Coolberg says, his voice coming out of the dark. “Something will. Something will always happen. You just have to wait patiently until it does.”

“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 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 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.

LIFE IS A SERIESof 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.

IN THE CARheading 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. 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.