Charles Baxter - The Soul Thief

I SUPPOSE HE MUST HAVEloved me back then. He must have enjoyed being me for a while, wearing my clothes and my autobiography. And I suppose I must have noticed it, but I never thought of his emotions as particularly consequential to anyone, and certainly not to me — the feelings being unreciprocated — and in those days, brush fires of frustrated eros burned nearly everywhere. Everyone suffered, everyone. I myself burned from them, and when you are burning, you are blinded to the other fires.

Next I knew, we were out on the Santa Monica pier, making our way toward the Ferris wheel, as if we had a rendezvous with it. After the wine and the brandy, I thought the structure had a giant festive beauty, with exuberant red and blue spokes aimed in toward the white burning center. Ezekiel’s wheel, I thought, a space saucer of solar fires. Give me more wine. My emotions had no logic anymore, having been released from linearity, and certainly no relation to the conversation we had just had, Coolberg and I. Multicolored plastic seating devices that looked like toadstools affixed to the Ferris wheel lifted up the passengers until they were suspended above the dull sea-level crowd. Coolberg was speaking; I could register, distantly, as if from my own spaceship, that he was uttering sentences, though their meaning appeared to be comically insubstantial. Slowly the words came into focus. He noted that during the day, the wheel on which we were about to ride was solar-powered, could I imagine that? A solar-powered Ferris wheel! Just as I thought! Energy from the sun lifted this thing. Only in L.A. He bought two tickets. From somewhere he had obtained a bag of popcorn. All around us we now heard Spanish spoken by the eager celebrants, the Ferris wheel being a bit too unsophisticated for your typical pale-faced tourist out on the Santa Monica Pier. This ride was more suited to the illegal immigrant population that understood distance, death, and sweep.

“Mira. Hoy, los latinos,” Coolberg whispered to me. “Mañana, los blanquitos.”

We were ushered onto one of the blue toadstools with an umbrella canopy obligingly suspended over it, and before I could register my objections, Coolberg and I were locked in, a gesture was made, and the wheel scooped us up into the air.

We went up and down, he and I.

“It would be nice to say that I’m asking for your forgiveness,” he was saying, somewhere nearby me, as we swayed in the air, and swooped, “but I’ve tried to eradicate sentimentality from my daily routines, and besides, you’re too drunk. You’re not going to remember any of this, and forgiveness induced by alcohol, from you, is meaningless. What I really want to do is explain something to you.”

The wheel lifted us up again, and I saw Malibu ahead of us, and Venice Beach behind (the toadstools twisted on some sort of pivot), diminish into starfields, in the way that a city, seen at night from an airplane whose cabin has been dimmed, will look, with its spackled pinpoints, like the sky that mirrors it. Directly below us the carnival sounds of the Santa Monica Pier faded into an audible haze, and I could feel my stomach lurch.

“I have admitted nothing,” he said, “and I have confessed to nothing. I haven’t asked for your forgiveness, because forgiveness has a statute of limitations attached to it. If it comes too late, the emotion itself has expired. Pffffft. It only works if it’s fresh, forgiveness; and when it’s stale, it’s rotten and useless. Don’t you agree? But, you know, I was sorry — really I was, horribly sorry, disgusted, mortified, disfigured with regret, oh, just fill in all the adjectives you want to. I’m sure you can do that. What was I saying? I remember. I was sorry about what happened to that girl, that Jamie, your one true love, and if those days could have been taken back, if I could go back there, then I would certainly have taken that journey and taken them back. If I could have gathered all those people in my arms — you and Theresa and Jamie and your sister and your father and all those other people we knew and didn’t know and didn’t even care about — and carry them away to safety, I would have, believe me. And then I’d save the Armenians from the Turks, and the Jews from the Germans and the Poles, and the Tutsis from the Hutus and the Hutus from the Tutsis, and the Native Americans from us, as time is my witness, I’d do that, but, hey, come on, who are we kidding ? That’s marauding sentimentality, there. There’s no protecting anyone once history starts digging in its claws, once real evil has a handhold, and besides, what I did…well, look down. Are you looking down? Nathaniel? Good. Do you suffer from vertigo? I do. But you see what’s down there? I don’t mean the ocean. I don’t mean the salt water. Nothing but idiotic marine life in there. Nothing but the whales and the Portuguese and the penguins. No, I mean the mainland. Everywhere down there, someone, believe me, is clothing himself in the robes of another. Someone is adopting someone else’s personality, to his own advantage. Right? Absolutely right. Of this one truth I am absolutely certain. Somebody’s working out a copycat strategy even now. Identity theft? Please. We’re all copycats. Aren’t we? Of course we are. How do you learn to do any little task? You copy. You model. So I didn’t do anything all that unusual, if I did it. But suppose I did, let’s suppose I managed a little con. So what? So I could be you for a while? And was that so bad? Aside from the collateral damage? Anyway, I may have bought something, but I never paid for a rape. ”

He stared off toward the darkness, and the lights, of Malibu.

“Let the British be the British,” he said, out of nowhere. I was losing the thread. “We know what they’re like, the Brits: stiff upper lip, a nation of shopkeepers, sheepherders, whatever, all the same, the Brits. We know them. But no one knows who we are here, in this country, because we’re all actors, we’ve got the most fluid cards of identity in the world, we’ve got disguises on top of disguises, we’re the best on earth at what we do, which is illusion. We’re all pretenders. Even Tocqueville noticed that. And if I was acting, anyway and after all, so what? I was just being a good American. ”

“Stop talking,” I said. “Shhhhh. Don’t say another word.”

“No?”

I held my finger to my lips. “Shhh.”

The wheel turned in a temporary silence.

“That was a very good speech,” I said. “You were always good at imitating eloquence.”

“Thank you.”

“But I know what this is,” I said. “This is an imitation, isn’t it? All planned out. This is an imitation of Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles in that movie, The Third Man. How clever you are, Jerome, how devious,” I slurred. “Italy, the Borgias and the Renaissance, Switzerland, a thousand years of peace, and cuckoo clocks, Harry Lime’s big speech justifying himself. Everything becomes a reference, to you, doesn’t it? You’re so knowing. What don’t you know? Everything evokes something else, with you. Just as you say.”

His eyes appeared to be wet, but he smiled proudly. I had found him out. He was still pleased to be my friend. He could cry and be pleased with himself at the same time.

“You said you had something to show me,” I told him. “Where is it?”

“I wasn’t sure you’d remember.”

“Oh, I remember,” I said. “You told me over the phone that you had something, and you were going to…give it to me. Where is it?” I waited. “It’s not that old notebook of mine, is it? Because if that’s what it is, I don’t want it back. Or anything else I gave to you, all those years ago, for storage.”