Chapter One
He was insufferable, one of those boy geniuses, all nerve and brain.
Before I encountered him in person, I heard the stories. They told me he was
aberrant (“abnormal” is too plain an adjective to apply to him), a whiz-kid sage
with a wide range of affectations. He was given to public performative thinking.
When his college friends lounged in the rathskeller, drinking coffee and
debating Nietzsche, he sipped tea through a sugar cube and undermined their
arguments with quotations from Fichte. The quotations were not to be found,
however, in the volumes where he said they were. They were not anywhere.
He performed intellectual surgery using hairsplitting distinctions. At the age
of nineteen, during spring break, he took up strolling through Prospect Park
with a walking stick and a fedora. Even the pigeons stared at him. Not for him
the beaches in Florida, or nudity in its physical form, or the vulgarity of joy.
He did not often change clothes, preferring to wear the same shirt until it had
become ostentatiously threadbare. He carried around the old-fashioned odor of
bohemia. He was homely. His teachers feared him. Sometimes, while thinking, he
appeared to daven like an Orthodox Jew.
He was an adept in both classical and popular cultures. For example, he had
argued that after the shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho, Marion Crane isn’t
dead, but she isn’t not-dead either, because the iris in her eyeball is
constricted in that gigantic close-up matching the close-up of the shower drain.
The irises of the dead are dilated. Hers are not. So, in some sense, she’s still
alive, though the blood is pouring out of her wounds.
When Norman Bates carries Marion Crane’s body, wrapped in a shower curtain, to
deposit in the trunk of her car for disposal, they cross the threshold together
like a newly married couple, but in a backwards form, in reverse, a psychotic
transvestite (as cross-dressers were then called) and a murdered woman leaving
the room, having consummated something. The boy genius wouldn’t stop to explain
what a backwards-form marriage might consist of with such a couple, what its
shared mortal occasion might have been. With him, you had to consider such
categories carefully and conjure them up for yourself, alone, later, lying in
bed, sleepless.
Here I have to perform a tricky maneuver, because I am implicated in everything
that happened. The maneuver’s logic may become clear before my story is over. I
must turn myself into a “he” and give myself a bland Anglo-Saxon Protestant
name. Any one of them will do as long as the name recedes into a kind of
anonymity. The surname that I will therefore give myself is “Mason.” An equally
inconspicuous given name is also required. Here it is: “Nathaniel.” So that is
who I am: Nathaniel Mason. He once said that the name “Nathaniel” was cursed, as
“Ahab” and “Judas” and “Lee Harvey” were cursed, and that my imagination had
been poisoned at its source by what people called me. “Or else it could be, you
know, that your imagination heaves about like a broken algorithm,” he said, “and
that wouldn’t be so bad, if you could find another algorithm at the horizon of
your, um, limitations.”
He himself was Jerome Coolberg. A preposterous moniker, nonfictional, uninvented
by him, an old man’s name, someone who totters through Prospect Park stabilized
with a cane. No one ever called him “Jerry.” It was always “Jerome” or
“Coolberg.” He insisted on both for visibility and because as names they were as
dowdy as a soiled woolen overcoat. Still, like the coat, the name seemed
borrowed from somewhere. All his appearances had an illusionary but powerful
electrical charge. But the electricity was static electricity and went nowhere,
though it could maim and injure. By “illusionary” I mean to say that he was a
thief. And what he tried to do was to steal souls, including mine. He appeared
to have no identity of his own. From this wound, he bled to death, like Marion
Crane, although for him death was not fatal.
Chapter Two
On a cool autumn night in Buffalo, New York, the rain has diminished to a mere
streetlight-hallucinating drizzle, and Nathaniel Mason has taken off his sandals
and carries them in one hand, the other hand holding a six-pack of Iroquois Beer
sheltered against his stomach like a marsupial’s pouch. He advances across an
anonymous park toward a party whose address was given to him over the phone an
hour ago by genially drunk would-be scholars. On Richmond? Somewhere near
Richmond. Or Chenango. These young people his own age, graduate students like
himself, have gathered to drink and to socialize in one of this neighborhood’s
gigantic old houses now subdivided into apartments. It is the early 1970s, days
of ecstatic bitterness and joyfully articulated rage, along with fear, which is
unarticulated. Life Against Death stands upright on every bookshelf.
The spokes of the impossibly laid-out streets defy logic. Maps are no help.
Nathaniel is lost, being new to the baroque brokenness of this city. He holds
the address of the apartment on a sopping piece of paper in his right hand, the
hand that is also holding the beer, as he tries to read the directions and the
street names. The building (or house-he doesn’t know which it is) he searches
for is somewhere near Kleinhans Music Hall-north or south, the directions being
contradictory. His long hair falls over his eyes as he peers down at the
nonsensical address.
The city, as a local wit has said, gives off the phosphorescence of decay.
Buffalo runs on spare parts. Zoning is a joke; residential housing finds itself
next to machine shops and factories for windshield wipers, and, given even the
mildest wind, the mephitic air smells of burnt wiring and sweat. Rubbish piles
up in plain view. What is apparent everywhere here is the noble shabbiness of
industrial decline. The old apartment buildings huddle against one another,
their bricks collapsing together companionably. Nathaniel, walking barefoot
through the tiny park as he clutches his beer, his sandals, and the address,
imagines a city of this sort abandoned by the common folk and taken over by
radicals and students and intellectuals like himself-Melvillians, Hawthornians,
Shakespeareans, young Hegelians-all of whom understand the mysteries and
metaphors of finality, the poetry of lastness, ultimaticity-the architecture
here is unusually fin de something, though not è, certainly not that-who
are capable, these youths, of turning ruination inside out. Their young minds,
subtly productive, might convert anything, including this city, into brilliance.
The poison turns as if by magic into the antidote. From the resources of
imagination, decline, and night, they will build a new economy, these youths,
never before seen.
The criminal naïveté of these ideas amuses him. Why not be criminally naïve?
Ambition requires hubris. So does idealism. Why not live in a state of
historical contradiction? What possible harm can there be in such intellectual
narcissism, in the Faustian overreaching of radical reform?
Even the upstate New York place-names seem designed for transformative pathos
and comedy: “Parkside” where there is no real park, streets and cemeteries in
honor of the thirteenth president, Millard Fillmore, best known for having
introduced the flush toilet into the White House, and … ah, here is a young
woman, dressed as he himself is, in jeans and t-shirt, though she is also
wearing an Army surplus flak jacket, which fits her rather well and is
accessorized with Soviet medals probably picked up from a European student black
market. Near the curb, she holds her hand to her forehead as she checks the
street addresses. She is, fortunately, also lost, and gorgeous in an
intellectual manner, with delicate features and piercing eyes. Her brown hair is
held back in a sort of Ph.D. ponytail.
They introduce themselves. They are both graduate students, both looking for the
same mal-addressed party, a party in hiding. In homage to his gesture, she takes
off her footwear and puts her arm in his. This is the epoch of bare feet in
public life; it is also the epoch of instantaneous bondings. Nathaniel quickly
reminds her-her name is Theresa, which she pronounces Teraysa, as if she were
French, or otherwise foreign-that they have met before here in Buffalo, at a
political meeting whose agenda had to do with resistance to the draft and the
war. But with her flashing eyes, she has no interest in his drabby small talk,
and she playfully mocks his Midwestern accent, particularly the nasalized
vowels. This is an odd strategy, because her Midwestern accent is as broad and
flat as his own. She presents herself with enthusiasm; she has made her banality
exotic. She has met everyone; she knows everyone. Her anarchy is perfectly
balanced with her hyperacuity about tone and timbre and atmosphere and drift.
With her, the time of day is either high noon or midnight. But right now, she
simply wants to find the locale of this damn party.
Again the rain starts.
Nathaniel and Theresa pass a park bench. “Let’s sit down here for a sec,” she
says, pointing. She grins. Maybe she doesn’t want to find the party after all.
“Let’s sit down in the rain. We’ll get soaked. You’ll be the Yin and I’ll be …
the other one. The Yang.” She points her index finger at him, assigning him a
role.
“What? Why?” Nathaniel has no idea what she is talking about.
“Why? Because it’s so Gene Kelly, that’s why. Because it’s not done. No sensible
person sits down in the rain.” She salts the word “sensible” with cheerful
derision. “It’s not, I don’t know, wise. There’s the possibility of viral
pneumonia, right? You’d have to be a character in a Hollywood musical to sit
down in the rain. Anyway, we’ll arrive at the party soaking wet. Our clothes
will be attached to our skin, and we’ll be visible.” She seems to inflect all
her adjectives unnecessarily. Also, she has a habit of laughing subvocally after
every other sentence, as if she were monitoring her own conversation and found
herself wickedly amusing. Together they do as she suggests, and she takes his
hand in a moment of what seems to be spontaneous fellow feeling. “I can stand a
little rain,” she says quietly, fingering his fingers, quoting from somewhere.
She leans back on the park bench to let the droplets fall into her eyes. To see
her is heaven, Nathaniel thinks. No wonder she wears a flak jacket. They wait
there. A minute passes. “Boompadoop-boom ba da boompadoopboom,” she sings,
Comden-and-Greenishly.
“Look at that,” he says, pointing to a building opposite them. Through the
second-floor window of a huge run-down house, the party that they have been
seeking is visible. The nondifferentiated uproar of conversation floods out onto
the street and makes its way to them in the drizzle. To his left, he sees a bum
standing under a diseased elm, eyeing them. “That’s it. That’s us. There’s the
party. We found it.”
Theresa straightens, squints, wiping water from her eyes. “Yes. You’re right.
There’s the place. What a wreck. I hope it has a fire escape. Hey, I think I see
that kid, Coolberg,” she says. “Right there. Near the second window. On the
right. See him?”
“Who?”
“Coolberg? Oh, he’s a … something. Nobody knows what he is, actually. He
hangs out. He has some grand destiny, he says, which he’s trying to discover. On
Tuesday last week he was going around saying that art is the pond scum on the
stream of commerce, but on Thursday he was saying that art is not
superstructural but constitutes the base. Well, he’d better decide which it is.
He changes his mind a lot. He’s a genius but very queer.”
“Queer how?”
“Well, in the good way,” Theresa says. She thoughtlessly puts her hand on his
thigh and strokes it. “Maybe he’ll tell you how he’s being blackmailed. That’s
one of his best stories. Come on,” she says.
After standing up, she twirls around a lamppost and then dances barefoot into
the street, neatly avoiding a car before managing a splashing two-step into a
puddle, holding out her sandals as props, a serious Marxist hoofer, this girl,
and Nathaniel, who can’t match her steps with his own, is stricken, as who would
not be, by love-lightning for her. He follows her. The bum stays outside under
the elm, watching them go.
In the apartment doorway everyone gets it. “You’re soaked! That is so cool. This
is very MGM, you two. Did you just kiss out there? Standing up or sitting down?
Do you even know each other? Did you just meet? Are you guys in a Stanley Donen
movie or a Vincente Minnelli movie? Have you been introduced? Do you need to be?
Do you want to dry off or is that soaked look a thing that you’d like to keep
going for a while? Want a joint, want a beer? The beer’s in the kitchen and
there’s more out on the fire escape unless someone stole it or squirreled it
away. Why not sit down right here, on this floor? There’s whiskey if you want
it. Is Marcuse correct about repressive tolerance or is ‘repressive tolerance’
another example of the collapse of that particular and once-viable Frankfurt
Institut fur Sozialforschung nonsense? Buying off the masses with material
goods? Well, everyone knows the answer to that question. Don’t stand out there.
Come in. Dry off. Join the party.”
They do come in, they do attempt to dry off with kitchen rags, they drop their
sandals in a pile of sneakers and boots and sandals by the door. Almost
immediately, while Nathaniel is recalibrating his emotions in relation to the
woman he has just partnered across the street, she disappears into another room.
Holding a beer bottle (he has misplaced the six-pack that he himself had
brought-perhaps it is still out on the bench in the park and is now being
consumed by the elm-bum), he damply threads his way through the corridors of the
party, long dreamlike hallways of grouped couples, trios, and quartets. His
clothes stick to his skin. The smell of dope and cigarette smoke, the pollution
produced by thought, mingles with the aroma of whatever is cooking in the tiny
kitchen, where a whitish semi-liquid chive dip has been laid out on a gouged
table, bread crusts of some sort piled on a plate nearby, and after he leans
over for a bite of whatever it is, Nathaniel stops, pauses, before a disembodied
conversation about Joseph Conrad’s Eastern gaze on Western eyes-the novelist is
treated with friendly condescension for writing a variety of Polish in English
that mistakes particularity for substance-a conversation that transitions into
the weekend’s football game and the prospects of the Buffalo Bills. Someone in
another room is singing “Which Side Are You On?” in a good tenor voice. Soon,
having wandered in front of a phonograph, he hears, first Joe Cocker and,
quickly after that, Edith Piaf, the turntable being of the old-fashioned type
with a spindle and a stack of LPs slapping down, one after the other, a vinyl
collage, “Non, je ne regrette rien,” followed several minutes later by the
Mahavishnu Orchestra, out of tune as usual, playing “Open Country Joy.”
(Continues…)
Excerpted from The Soul Thief
by Charles Baxter
Copyright © 2008 by Charles Baxter.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Pantheon
Copyright © 2008
Charles Baxter
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-375-42252-2
