Charles Baxter - The Soul Thief

“Oh, Jamie, not now,” he says. He turns around and kisses her, then breaks the embrace to put his clothes on.

The metallic bird hanging to the side of the door sways back and forth, given life by his rushed departure.

NO ONE ANSWERSat the Coolberg residence. Nor does he respond to pressed call buttons in the apartment building where, numerous times, Nathaniel has dropped him off. On the callboard are six names:

Wendego

Highsmith

Augenblick

H. Jones

Bürger-Wilson

Golyadkin

In Nathaniel’s current state, they all feel like bogus names invented by a mad postmaster. No Coolberg here. Is there a Coolberg anywhere? The name itself sounds fictional and implausible, a poor effort at whimsy.

He calls Coolberg’s number all night. No one answers.

At home the next morning, he stares at the telephone before calling his stepfather at his New York office on Water Street, near the East River with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge. On warm days when the wind is right, his stepfather claims, he can get a whiff of the Fulton Fish Market. Nathaniel hates to disturb him, but he needs some advice from a fully qualified adult. His stepfather is a “semi-pro capitalist,” as he calls himself. An investor in start-up companies, he’s an easygoing, charming moneymaker unafflicted by true greed. He doesn’t mind being disturbed at work. He’s placid and detached, observing with disinterested attention the tidal flow of capital. All he wants is to get his hands in that water from time to time and scoop out a few cupfuls of cash. The system continues to function thanks to coolheaded minor players like him. The raptors come and go on huge reptilian wings. Nothing surprises this man; nothing shocks him. His worldliness is a perpetual relief from everyone else’s naïveté.

After chatting for a minute or so, his stepfather says, “So. Buddy boy. Something on your mind?” Nathaniel tells him that he has a problem. “Tell me,” his stepfather says quietly, and Nathaniel hears an audible creak as his stepfather leans back in his leather chair. All successful middle-aged males love to listen to stories and to give advice, Nathaniel has noticed. They feel that mere survival has given them the right to pontificate. It’s the Polonius syndrome; they all have it. But this one, this man, adores narratives; he is, by nature, an anecdotalist.

Nathaniel explains the intricacies concerning Coolberg to his stepfather, presenting the story as straightforwardly as possible. When he is finished, his stepfather clears his throat. He is going to respond to Nathaniel’s story with another story. It is his way.

During his junior year in college in Maine, his stepfather says, a particularly bad winter dropped itself down over the community: colossal snows, day after day of subzero temperatures, radiators clanking all day, students coughing and getting frostbite and pneumonia. “Imagine the silences. Everything muffled. You couldn’t even see outside,” he says. “The frost and snow blocked the windows.” No one could go anywhere. No one wanted to risk driving off the roads into a slow demise from disorientation and hypothermia. The roads were more or less impassable, but because most of the college faculty lived nearby, classes went on as scheduled. The sidewalks had snow piled on either side as high as your head — it was like walking through a tunnel just to get to calculus class. Old men died shoveling out their driveways. Their wives began talking to their cats on a daily, hourly basis. People had the feeling that the snows would never stop, that the flakes would continue to drift downward forever, lazily and implacably covering everything in a terrible white stupor.

“An old-fashioned winter. So we all burrowed in and found various occupations.” The college bookworms curled up with their books; the basketball players played endless rounds in the gym; the lovers stayed in their beds, making love nonstop in the hope of reviving spring. Some slept together naked with their doors open, on display — modesty, for some reason, having abandoned them, the terrible privacy of a perpetual snowstorm calling forth its opposite, prideful noisy exhibitionism and shamelessness more often associated with the exposed skin of the tropics than with New England. Such cohabitation wasn’t allowed in those days, but all the rules were being ignored. But for everyone else, those not completely erased by studiousness or by the fortunes visited by love, the snows became a spiritual and psychological problem — how to be distracted from the maddening iron chill, the accumulating white silences falling out of the sky?

Somehow, an idea was born, no one knew from where, one of those ideas that arises like bacteria spreading overnight in spoiled food. A bunch of guys formed a social club, the Merry Andrews. Six of them at first, then a dozen, then more, including a few women. They met surreptitiously. They called each other “Andrew” everybody was an Andrew. Everybody dressed in identical clothing as the snows fell hour by hour outside. Women became Andrews and were invited into the drunken meetings filled with absurdist bureaucratic business about whom to admit and what protocols to follow. “Hello, Andrew,” they said to each other. They affected the same speech patterns, they acquired identical tics during their encounters — the parties began in the afternoons and went through the nights into the following days until the beer and cigarettes inevitably ran out, when they would discuss the future: the future generally, and the future of the Andrews, and where to obtain more beer, more Scotch, more cigarettes, more drugs. All the Andrews seemed to get drunk at about the same time, and they all seemed to share the same tastes in the same songs, which they sang or played repetitively on their phonographs. They disappeared into each other; they vanished into a collectivity. Then the phenomenon spread to the college at large, at a slightly higher voltage. For two weeks, all the undergraduates called themselves “Andrew” in this epidemic folly, and a general breakdown in morals followed, as Andrews mated with other Andrews. The snow had induced this. The Southerners lost their drawls, the Midwesterners their flat vowels — everyone began to speak alike, except for the athletes, and the lovers, and the bookworms, who paid no attention.

“Then what happened?” Nathaniel asks.

“Then the sun came out,” his stepfather says, “and everything returned to normal. Individuals became themselves again.”

Nathaniel does not believe this story, but he appreciates his stepfather having taken the trouble to think it up and to tell it. The narrative seems like a mask covering over another actual story that his stepfather will never tell, so Nathaniel asks, “Did anyone kill anybody else?”

His stepfather, puzzled, says that of course no one killed anyone else. Why would he ask such a question? “Why do you ask? People like us don’t kill each other,” he says. “We don’t do that. But, now that I think about it,” he adds, as an afterthought, “two people, two of these Andrews, did try to kill themselves.”

“Each other?”

“No, themselves, ” his stepfather insists. “You know, suicide.” He waits. “But they didn’t succeed.” Then he says something that sounds like his verdict on this particular history. “You know, few people really want to become individuals,” he says. “People claim that they do, but they don’t. They want to retain the invisibility of childhood anonymity forever. But that’s not possible except in a police state. In an ordinary life, you have to become yourself.” He takes a deep breath. “So. Classes going well?”