Charles Baxter - The Soul Thief

“That’s not your dream!” Theresa tells him. “That’s someone else’s dream. You took it.”

“Why do you say that?” Coolberg asks. “Why do you say that it’s not mine?”

“Because…you can’t have a dream like that,” she informs him. “Men don’t have burning-hotel dreams. That’s a woman’s dream.” Coolberg starts laughing as if caught out, and Nathaniel chooses at this moment to enter the room, just as Coolberg is saying, “Well, all right, then tell me what dreams a man is supposed to have.”

In the room five people glance at Nathaniel, their expressions ranging from indifference to curiosity. Two people whisper to each other near the bookcase, and, closer to the doorway, Theresa and Coolberg and an albino dwarfish man sit together on the floor by the bed. They share a beer, the bottle moving around from hand to hand. The albino gets up to leave. A certain intimacy at once falls between Coolberg and Theresa; they have the appearance of unindicted co-conspirators who share a complicated system of signals — lifted eyebrows, glances, finger flicks — all seemingly worked out in advance. Coolberg glances at Nathaniel, and Theresa says, “Well, look who’s here. It’s Nathaniel. My soaked twin.”

“Hello,” Coolberg says. “Oh, yes. You’re Nathaniel Mason. I’ve heard a lot about you. But they’re perfunctory things. Sit down.” Theresa pats the floor next to her. Nathaniel notices a small puddle of water under her jeans. From the rain. Soon a small puddle of water will form under himself, as he drains onto the floor.

Nathaniel gamely lowers himself to their level. Coolberg smiles at him menacingly. Years later he will realize that Coolberg’s first words to him consisted of a false claim, followed by a command, a pattern for their friendship, and that this charade was acted out in front of Theresa, who, like an accommodating audience member, encouraged the show. Once again, and equally thoughtlessly, she puts her hand on his — Nathaniel’s — leg. Coolberg sees her do it. “Nathaniel, you’re so cute when you’re wet,” she says. “You’re flagrant.”

“What is this, the state fair?” Coolberg asks.

Nathaniel takes in Coolberg’s face, stricken by a kind of internalized warfare. In one moment he appears to be a sickly child in a room through whose one window a winter sun shines in, briefly, at twilight, giving the child the farewell gift of its fading rusty light on the snow; in the next moment the expression diagnoses itself, disintegrates, and recombines into one of all-encompassing sympathy, before it turns bewilderingly into an Asia-Minorish sedulous gaze from one of the booths at the bazaar. The eyes miss nothing, but they are spectacularly dead.

“I don’t know anything about you,” Nathaniel says. “Except what people tell me.”

“Oh, what do they tell you?” Coolberg asks, delightedly, mockingly, dolorously, sweetly.

“See, that would be telling. What do you do, when you’re doing things?”

“You’re quoting The Prisoner. ‘That would be telling.’ As for me, I do everything,” Coolberg says, clumsily lighting up a Lucky.

“Guys, guys!” Theresa interrupts, very pleased to pretend that the two men are engaged in combat rather than verbal trickery, as she looks around the bedroom for an ashtray.

“I do everything,” Coolberg repeats. And then he starts singing.

“I’ve made a path

as a polymath

that no one else has trod!”

Theresa perks up. “ He’s made a path as a polymath that no one else has trod! ” She gives a whoop of laughter. “Siggie, you’re so Broadway.”

Who is Siggie? Coolberg ashes his cigarette into a beer bottle. These are juvenile tiresome antics; the anxious high spirits have a depressing effect. To hell with these people, the vodka says to Nathaniel, whereupon he stands up. He feels a bit unsteady, like a bird on a branch whipped by winds. Being upright is a continuous struggle. There must be others at this party to whom he can talk about something, or nothing. He experiences wanly the need for quiet and sincerity, some antidote to cleverness. He could go back to wherever he parked his car, drive home to his empty apartment, and then read until sleep takes him over just before dawn. In all-out verbal gamesmanship, he will be seriously overmatched here. He can’t keep up with these people. Half the time, he regards himself as a hayseed among city slickers. A sudden heavy hayseed loneliness envelops him, as it often does at parties, like the onset of an illness. His limbs feel weighted down, and objects take on the burden of hopelessness. The other faces at the party look as if they had been painted on the sides of balloons, and from the books on the floor he thinks he hears an angry buzzing like the sound of insects.

“What’s the matter? Don’t you like it?” Coolberg asks.

“No,” Nathaniel says, having forgotten what the “it” refers to. Then he remembers. “Oh, it’s all right. By the way, who’s Siggie?”

“Sigmund Romberg. The composer of Blossom Time. ”

Theresa reaches for Nathaniel’s hand. “Don’t leave,” she says. “Sit? Please? Here, beside me?”

Perhaps she likes him. Maybe she’ll heal him of his solitude. And then, as if he had been reading Nathaniel’s mind, Coolberg says, “You know, there’s something heartsick about parties like this. Look at us. We’re all pretending to be smart, as if intelligence were the cure for our anguish. We’re all making this verbal clatter. We cluck our thick tongues…and speak oh so very politely. Aren’t you cold? Your clothes are soaked. Theresa’s, too. Did you take a shower together? Fully clothed? Why would anyone do that?”

“Oh, I’ll survive.”

“That wasn’t my question.”

What was his question? Nathaniel can’t remember it. He sits down again and leans his damp self against Theresa. She is as warm as a radiator filling with steam.

TWO OR MOREhours later (Nathaniel does not wear a watch on principle — he refuses to be a slave to any clock), still damp, and now thoroughly bleary with alcohol, behind the wheel of his rusting dark-butterscotch-colored VW Beetle, Nathaniel maneuvers around the streets of Buffalo in an effort to take Coolberg back to his apartment and Theresa back to hers. When Theresa asks him whether he’s drunk and thus unfit to drive, Nathaniel shouts proudly, “I’ve been driving drunk since the age of sixteen.” He must shout. No intimate conversation has ever been carried on in a VW Beetle; the motor’s chain drive creates too much commotion for reflective conversation. Talking in such a car is like orating into the surf.

At a street corner, as they stop at a red light, Nathaniel sees a woman standing and staring at him mutely. No doubt the look she is giving him has nothing behind it, no intention beyond curiosity. And yet he feels accused. These people follow him around.

The implementation of the favor that he is performing has grown complicated: Coolberg lives farther away from Nathaniel’s apartment than Theresa does, but it is essential that the boy genius be disposed of quickly in case Theresa wants to prolong the evening. Meanwhile, Coolberg has taken up the subject of solitude again, quite loudly. “You know what I think? I think we’re all in our private traps, clamped in them. We scratch and claw, but only at the air, only at each other, and for all of it, we never budge an inch.”

Theresa suddenly barks a command from the tiny backseat. “Stop making speeches,” she shouts over the noise of the engine. “Stop quoting. You don’t believe that! That’s not you.”