Charles Baxter - The Soul Thief

“Right.” And then she always says, “Love from here.”

And I answer, “Love to you, from us.”

LAURA SLIPPED INTOthe den, where I had retreated clutching the slip of paper with Coolberg’s phone number on it. My hand continued to shake. Sometimes the telephone can look like an instrument of studied malevolence.

“Coolberg,” she said. “You know, I think I’ve heard of him. I just can’t think of where.”

My wife hadn’t quite put two and two together. If she had, she would have recognized his name as the host of a program on public radio, American Evenings. Although the program’s format resembled, in some small respects, other personal-testimony-and-narrative programs on NPR, it had a unique verbal texture and a distinctive angle: Coolberg would begin the program by introducing his guest for that week, a man or a woman with a story to tell — a woman who worked as a writer of inspirational church pamphlets, for example, or perhaps a single father with two children, a man who fixed computers and drove a snowplow in Fair-banks — and although the program would start as an interview, gradually the guest’s story would take off, would soar, and at last would reach a moment of disillusion or epiphany that constituted one of those rare moments of clarity, a life-changing instance at first aided by the host’s ravening promptings, which gradually diminished and finally disappeared as the show reached its conclusion and the guest found his or her own voice, which was simultaneously the discovery of the story’s secret heart. But the show always began as a duet between the interviewer and the guest; the guest could not ascend, it seemed, without Coolberg’s help in running ahead and lifting the kite of the narrative. Sometimes American Evening s sounded like therapy or a church confessional and sometimes like a radio drama in which the tension arose both from the story’s conflicts and from the interaction between interviewer and guest. I always found the program funny and enlightening and even moving whenever I could bear to listen to it. My trouble was that I also found the initial parts of the interview peculiar, as if Coolberg sought to make himself invisible week after week by enabling someone else’s narrative into existence. He had a hunger, a neediness, to lift someone else up and thus to perform an audio vanishing act for himself, by himself. The story allowed him to make a life into art, and then disappear before taking a bow.

One other subtext in the show became apparent every week: as the title, American Evenings, intimated, all the stories, all the narrators, somehow pointed toward the phenomenon of disappearances, things and emotions and rituals and forms that had once existed and no longer did, or soon would not. They constituted tales of a twilight as experienced by this culture’s citizens. As a result, the show gave off an air of hip nostalgia. People listened to it and wiped away tears while they sipped their martinis or got high.

The format could not have existed without Coolberg, who had an uncanny ability to get under his guests’ skins, as if he knew what it was like to be them better than they themselves did. He gave their narratives a structure, understood their gains and losses, and sometimes offered them the key to what they were struggling to say, so that they blossomed into suddenly articulate observers of their own lives, they who had been wordless shadows and subalterns before. He nourished them into a form of knowing. He inhabited them by parsing their tales. He squirmed inside their stories and their anonymous selves. Meanwhile, he himself, the unmoved mover, on each of these American Evenings, faded, until his voice returned at the very end of the show when he listed the credits for the show’s producers, technicians, and corporate sponsors. Underneath his soothing closing words rested a layer of astonishing becalmed rage. You always felt a slight static shock when you heard his voice come on again. You didn’t think he could still exist. Where had he gone to? Was his doom always to live inside the stories of others?

“He was a guy I knew,” I told Laura. “Back in Buffalo. I’ve told you about him. He’s got that radio show now.” I reminded her of it.

After my prompting, she did indeed remember it. He had become quite a personage out there in Los Angeles, by putting his disappearing acts front and center. He had become famously insubstantial.

“Are you going to call him?” she asked me.

“I guess so.” I nodded, so that I could agree with myself.

“Your hand is shaking.” She reached out and gripped me.

“I’m all right.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Well.” I tried to find the right words. “You know: it’s hard to find the right words when you’re about to talk to someone you once knew when you were someone else, someone you no longer are.”

She nodded. The quilt she had given me a few months after we had met each other, her love’s token, was up on the wall close to the phone. It had been stitched together, as some quilts are, from rags and cast-off clothes and found fabrics, and the pattern had been set in a series of tiny squares that evoked a child’s world of curlicues and stars and snowflakes. What I had always loved about Laura had been her kindness and innocence in the face of the world’s sophisticated cruelty. She was almost frighteningly guileless. This meant that about sixty percent of human behavior was simply beyond her comprehension. She had never wised up, and she never would. And yet — I insist on this, too — she was not a child. She just had a permanent immunity to evil. It baffled her.

“All right, I have to call him,” I said. “I have to do this myself now. I guess I need to be alone with this.”

She nodded and left the room as I dialed the number. “Dialed”! There are no dials on telephones anymore. Nevertheless, the verb lives on in its ghostly phantom way.

A briny-sounding woman answered after two rings, as if from an underwater world. “Mr. Coolberg’s office,” she gurgled. Background music at her end of the connection could be construed: Bill Evans, one of the solo keyboard albums, where he sounds like a jazz Debussy contemplating which form of addiction he’ll try next.

A pause, as I collected myself. “May I speak to…” I couldn’t say “Jerome,” and I couldn’t say “Mr. Coolberg,” and I couldn’t say “Jerome Coolberg,” and deciding that I couldn’t use any of these terms required an unhealthy and embarrassing amount of time; I was stymied. Finally I said, “Couldn’t I speak to him?”

She laughed at the grotesque phrase. “Whom shall I say is calling?”

I gave her my name.

She put me on hold, and a recorded voice came on urging me to contribute to my local NPR affiliate. This was followed by a blip on the wire and the sound of something breathing asthmatically into the mouthpiece one full continent away.

“Nathaniel,” he said at last.

“Jerome.”

“Thank you for calling back.”

“You’re welcome.”

“How are you?”

“Oh, I’m fine, I guess. You?”

He continued to take short stabbing breaths. It was him, all right. “I’m frightened,” he said.

“Of what?”

“Of talking to you. This is like swimming across a lake in the middle of the forest and trying to see someone who has been reported as missing, and who may well have drowned. You keep swimming and searching, but you don’t want to see what you’re supposed to be looking for.” Coolberg hadn’t lost his taste for epic similes. I had no idea what he was talking about. Sometimes his brilliance just sounded like garble, a form of pre-cognition.