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for the consumers of twilight and our national metaphysical
ruin, as played out here, in the best of all possible worlds, in
SoCal.
I wasn t sure that I had heard him correctly.   SoCal ?
Had he really employed that usage?  So this is another one
of your American Evenings? You don t have your tape recorder
on, do you?
 Oh, no, Nathaniel, that would be illegal, immoral, and,
what s worse, impractical. You can t pick up an adequate 
 What did you do to her? I interrupted him.
 To whom?
 To Jamie.
 To Jamie? I didn t do anything to her. He leaned back.
 She was set upon. By dogs.
 But you predicted it. You told me that day in the zoo.
You said you were writing something called Shadow, whose
story contained an Iago-like character named Trautwein,
I remember that, who is tormenting another character, I
think his name and it was truly a ridiculous name, an
affectedly literary name was Ambrose, who loves this
woman, an artist, and Ambrose . . . well, the person he loves
is harmed, not directly, but by hired-out third parties. It s
not Othello, but it s a third cousin once removed to that story.
Trautwein sees to the harm. I winced at my own alcoholic
repetitions, but they were essential to the case I was making.
the soul thief 191
Somehow, coffee had appeared on the table. Coolberg
picked up his cup.  It might have been a coincidence.
 Okay, I replied to him.  But what if it wasn t? What
if . . . let s just say . . . hypothetically . . . what if you, or, um,
someone like you, not you exactly, not you as you are now,
what if this hypothetical past-tense person had hired . . .
what if you had hired some young men, some thugs, for
example, that you found hanging around the People s
Kitchen or some place like that, to beat her up, to do terrible
violence to her? Well, no. Strike that. I take that back.
Maybe all they were supposed to do was threaten her a little.
A teeny-weeny act of intimidation, motivated by jealousy,
let s say. That s all. They would walk up to her at the bus stop
and slyly put the fear into her. And this . . . prank would
scare her right out of town. Off she would go, to another . . .
what? Venue. That was the goal. You know: give her a little
12-volt shock. Affright her with their boyish street-thug
menace, which is, I might add, celebrated now on all the
major screen media. We can t get enough of that, can we?
Sweet, sweet violence. So, anyway, with this plan, she d leave
town, pack up herself along with her few minor bruises, if
she had any, and move, taking her little birds and blimps
with her. But maybe the plan goes awry. Let s suppose that
the guys who are hired are not just sly. They re criminal
sociopaths instead. The 12-volt shock turns out to be 120
volts. And then it gets European and goes up to 240 volts.
And what if . . . let s just say . . . they got into it, these thugs
that d been hired, or were maybe just doing a favor well,
you d only need a couple of them, and they couldn t stop
what they had started, their specialty not being staying
within limits set for them by authority figures, after all, and
they hate women anyway, and they sort of raped her, because
192 charles baxter
it was possible, you know how one thing leads to another,
don t you, Jerome? I know I do. And she was raped. And
after it happened, she couldn t remember much of anything,
so there were no arrests and no trials because she couldn t
identify anybody and the police were helpless, and she left
town soon afterward, clearing the field, so to speak. What if
that had happened?
He looked directly at me.  Then I would have been a
monster. He glanced at the sky.  Then I would have been
unable to live with myself.
 But you had already hired a burglar. You had hired a bur-
glar to steal clothes, my clothes, and then he got into his
tasks, and he couldn t stop, and he stole everything from my
apartment, until nothing was left, only a book or two. And a
mattress. I leaned back. I felt like repeating myself.  You
had already hired a burglar. It s what you do. You re still a
burglar. You still steal clothes. I ve listened to your show.
 Is that what you think happened? he asked me.  Is that
really what you think?
 Sometimes I think it, I said. We were both speaking
calmly, like gentlemen, over the coffee and the dessert.
 You think your apartment was being emptied by
burglars?
 Sure it was.
 Oh, you poor guy, he said.  It wasn t being emptied by
burglars. It was being emptied by you. You were moving out,
or trying to. Don t be such an innocent. You were trying to
move in with her. With that Jamie person. This hopeless
hopeless stupid idiotic romance you thought you had going
on with her. It was making you crazy, you poor guy. We could
all see it. Anybody who loved you could see it. And of course
she wouldn t let you take anything over there, into her place.
Because there was no room, to start with. And because she
the soul thief 193
didn t love you the way you loved her and . . . she didn t
really want you over there. So you were storing your stuff
somewhere else, in the meantime, until she would come
around, as we used to say, come around to being the benign
woman you believed she could be, the heterosexual wife or
whatever she was that you had envisioned. You had assigned
a certain set of emotions to her and were just waiting for her
to have them, and meanwhile you were reading that soggy
Romantic poetry and dragging the spectacle of your broken
heart across the Niagara Frontier. Love? You were offering
something you didn t have to someone who didn t want it.
 I was storing my stuff somewhere else?
 Of course you were.
 If she was refusing me, why wasn t I taking my stuff back
to my own place?
 Because that would have been an admission of defeat.
You were always good at denial.
 So where was I taking everything?
He gave me that look again.  You poor guy, he said again.
 You persist in your habits, don t you? Your ingrained habits
of incomprehension. Willful incomprehension. And conve-
nient amnesia. You re just like this country. You re a cham-
pion of strategic forgetting. You really can t give up your
innocence, can you? That sort of surprises me. He glanced
down at my glass of brandy as if it were responsible for my
faults.  You can t live without your disavowals. You told me
that Jamie left you a letter behind in her apartment after she
took off. It was addressed to you.
 Yes.
 What did it say?
 I never opened it, I admitted.
 I rest my case, Coolberg said, signaling for the check.
 Let s go down to the pier.
42
Isupposehemusthaveloved 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 conse-
quential to anyone, and certainly not to me the feelings
being unreciprocated and in those days, brush fires of
frustrated eros burned nearly everywhere. Everyone suf-
fered, 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 struc-
ture 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 con-
versation we had just had, Coolberg and I. Multicolored
the soul thief 195
plastic seating devices that looked like toadstools affixed to
the Ferris wheel lifted up the passengers until they were sus-
pended above the dull sea-level crowd. Coolberg was speak-
ing; I could register, distantly, as if from my own spaceship,
that he was uttering sentences, though their meaning [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]