Charles Baxter - The Soul Thief

I WAS LYINGon 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.

SOMEONE IN THE CULINARY ALLIANCEcalled 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 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?

THERESA HAS CALLED MEa 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.

THIS PASSAGE ISa 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 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 suspects 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 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.

“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.”

I WENT INTOthat 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.