The Soul Thief (17 page)

“I have an idea, Nathaniel. I have an idea of what you should do. A bit of unfinished business that we can finish, you and I. Don’t say ‘no’ until you’ve heard it.”

“Yes? What?”

“If I sent you a round-trip ticket to Los Angeles, would you come out here? For a couple of days? I need to see you in person.”

“For what? I don’t get it.”

“Would you agree to be on
American Evenings
?”

“No.”

“That’s what I thought you’d say. Yes, that’s right. You don’t have to agree to it now. I wouldn’t expect you to. Think it over. The show can send you tickets anyway, whether you’re on the program or not. I could say that I brought you out as a consultant. We have enough in the budget for that.

We could put you up in a hotel. You could stay on Sunset Boulevard. It’s a well-known hotel we could put you in.

Celebrities have died there,” he said with a tone of morbid cheer. “The famous Fatal Hotel! Could you come out? Or is the timing inopportune?”

Such talk, thick with unreality, had gone out of my life. I could hear Jeremy upstairs murmuring on his cell phone.

No, I couldn’t hear him murmuring, not actually, but I could imagine him crooning his love and longings to a girl who would be crooning them back to him. I could see Michael trying to rig up some new use for Coca-Cola concentrated syrup, sold behind the drugstore pharmaceutical counter but not yet properly exploited by the adventuresome early-adolescent set. I could hear my wife talking to a quilter t h e s ou l t h i e f

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about a purchase on her own cell. “Cell”! That’s the word, all right. Everyone else was deeply engaged in his own variety of life. Everyone else inhabited a world. What was I going to do? Spend the rest of my days as a time-server in suburban New Jersey? And never revisit this particular corner of my past, now, in the present, out there in the Golden State?

“No, it isn’t,” I said. “Okay.”

“Okay, you’ll come?”

“Okay, Jerome, I’ll come.”

After arranging where and when we would meet, we said good-bye. How would I manage my absence from the job? I would take two personal days. After I had hung up, I turned to see Laura standing in the doorway, the back of her hand against her forehead, rubbing some irritant away, her eyes fixed on me.

The day of my departure on a very early flight out of Newark, I kissed my wife good-bye as I left the house. She had always been a deep sleeper and barely managed to rouse herself when I leaned down to give her a peck on the forehead. She smiled vaguely at me—at the
idea
of me—and placed her hand briefly on my cheek and then was quickly asleep again, as if she had been visited by a ghost. She muttered, as she always did when she was dropping back into dreams. In Jeremy’s bedroom, I saw my older son lost to the world, with his face buried under a blanket, his big feet poking up uncovered at the base of the bed. The room smelled of residual chlorine. After crossing the hallway, I knocked softly at Michael’s door. Light streamed out from underneath it.

“Come on in,” he said, as if he were expecting me. Did he ever sleep? He was sitting up in bed reading. What would it be this time?
The Anarchist Cookbook?
No:
The Iliad.
You could never tell with Michael. You could never predict the next turn his road would take. On the floor were two CliffsNotes guides, one for the Bible and one for the Koran.

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“You should be sleeping,” I said quietly, a near-whisper so as not to wake the others across the hall.

“I know,” he whispered back. “You should be sleeping, too.” He gave me one of his wolf-cub expressions. As a pack animal, he was always happy to see me, the older wolf.

“When’s your flight?”

“Couple hours from now.”

“Dad? When you drink the beverages they give you?

Don’t ask for ice. Refuse the ice, okay? I read this thing about it. The ice on airplanes has, like,
cesspools
of bacteria in it. The ice’ll make you real sick.” He scratched his hair and rubbed at his eyes. “And if you can spot any of those Sky Marshals, those FBI guys, let me know. I’d hate that job, sitting on a plane all day, waiting for a terrorist to start the terror show.”

“They’re not FBI.”

“I know. I just said that. It’s really TSA. See if you can spot them, though, okay? I bet you can.”

“Bye,” I said.

“Bye, Dad.” I went over to his bed, gave him a brief halfhearted hug (he was at an age when hugs threatened virtu-ally every form of personal stability, but he raised himself up to hug me in return), and was about to go back out when he asked me, “When do you get back home?”

“Day after tomorrow, probably.”

“Are you going to be on that radio show?”

“No, I’m not.”

He went back to
The Iliad.
“You should get on it. You’d blow them away. You’re really good at making stuff up.”

I was? That was news to me. I shut the door softly behind me. I walked past the hallway table just beyond the bathroom whose light I had carelessly left on, down the stairs on whose lower landing I inspected a framed picture of a high t h e s ou l t h i e f

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school girl whom Jeremy had sketched in art class, out onto the street where the morning papers were being delivered, thrown from the passenger-side window of a creeping car. I greeted the dawn before getting into my car and starting the engine to drive myself to the airport. I remembered a prayer I had said years ago on behalf of Jamie, before I had blacked out. These days, I had lost the ability to pray or to bless.

That gift had abandoned me. It was like throwing words down into a ditch filled with corpses.

On the airplane, I was seated far back in steerage class, two rows up from a disabled lavatory smelling of caustic lye.

Before boarding, I had eaten a hasty breakfast in the airport restaurant, ominously named the Afterburner Lounge. I was just now beginning to feel the consequences. The food I had ordered—scrambled eggs that looked concocted from powder out of a tin—had been served with ill-disguised joc-ular contempt. The eggs had disagreed with me, so that when I sat down in my assigned seat, I was almost immediately afflicted. My gut gushed and gubbled.

My seat was next to that of a young mother accompanied by her squalling son, who appeared to be about a year old.

He clutched a teddy bear with a music box inside. The bear’s head rotated, demonlike, as the music played. Several nearby seatmates gazed steadily at the teddy bear as if they planned to dismember it. Meanwhile, the screaming child, in the full flower of his own hysteria, grew as red as a turnip and as loud as a megaphone.

The child’s mother seemed powerless to stop the sheets of sound produced by her son. Indeed, she seemed charmed and surprised by his decibel production.

“Noisy, isn’t he?” she laughed. She tried to plug her son’s 168

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mouth with a pacifier. He spat it out onto the floor as the plane banked to the left, and the pacifier tumbled out of reach.

“Well, they do scream at that age,” I said. This was a lie: Jeremy and Michael had never screamed in this infant-sadistic manner; their cries had always been pointed and specific. The child screamed again, an infant Pavarotti bel-lowing up to the third balcony.

“Do you have kids?”

“Two sons,” I said. “Mostly grown.”

The flight attendants pushed the drink carts up the aisle.

I kept my attention on the ice cubes. “What did you do with your boys when they were crying?” she asked. “You must have done something. Back then? Men always seem to know about these things. The
fun
things. How did you make them stop?” I assumed she meant the child’s outraged cries.

“Oh,” I shrugged. “The usual. I dandled them. I bounced them on my knee. I did some peekaboo. I did some bleeump-bleeump.”

“What’s that?”

“Bleeump-bleeump? Oh, what you do is, you hum the
William Tell
Overture and you bounce them on your knee like they were the Lone Ranger, on Silver.”

“Show me?” She lifted up her son and dropped him into my lap. So surprised was this child at finding himself in a stranger’s care that his face took on an expression of shock, and he instantly grew silent. I took his hands, positioned him on my knee, and began bouncing him.

To the side, his mother watched this dumb show with admiration. I wondered whether she was pretty. I hadn’t really looked at her. I played with her wicked toddler for another few minutes, and when I glanced over at her, I saw that, out of sheer exhaustion, she’d fallen asleep on me.

37

Although most airports seem to have been designed by committees made up of subcommittees, and are inevitably unattractive and unsightly, Los Angeles International has an exuberant ugliness all its own. The atmosphere of non-invitation is quite distinctive, as if the city’s first representative, its airport, is already disgusted, perhaps even repelled, by the traveler. The recent arrival might well imagine that he has landed on the set of a low-budget futur-istic film, most of whose main characters will die horribly within the first forty minutes. The pods, as they are called, are carelessly maintained, and an odor of perfumed urine wafts here and there through the bleary air.

My fellow passengers trudged out of the plane, blinking like moles exposed to sunshine. The demon-child I had entertained slept, now, in his mother’s frontpack. One woman, clearly a tourist, pulled her luggage-slop (beach bag, reticule, cosmetics kit) out of the overhead bin and staggered toward the exit. As soon as she reached the gate, she uttered a disappointed “Huh?” at the ceiling.

It was a common response; several of my fellow passen-170

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gers sighed with dismay. The airport’s unwelcoming skeletal failed postmodernism put most outsiders into a condition of uneasiness.
All this way to the end of the continent, all the trouble we
went to, for this?
In every interior nook and cranny, TV sets, hanging like huge spiders from the ceiling, boomed down disinformation from the Airport Channel. You stumble toward your luggage. Downstairs, attendants just past the baggage claim flash expressions of carnivorous appetite at you, estimating the size of your wallet. If you are not a native, the message is,
Welcome to L.A. You’re in for it.
If you are a native, the message is,
Ah, one of us. Welcome back.

Having been to L.A. once on business and once with the family on a vacation, I had armored myself against the ritualistic hostility of LAX. I grabbed my suitcase, made my way past the carnivores to the rental car lot, fumbled with the map, and poked my way out into the hot prettiness of a Los Angeles morning.

Quickly I was drowsy and lost on the freeway, but my disorientation made no difference to anyone. Behind the wheel, I enjoyed a Zen indifference to destinations. Everyone else in L.A. seemed to suffer from a form of permanent distraction anyway, as if, just above the horizon line of their attention, they were all watching a movie in which they played the starring role as they meanwhile meandered about their actual humdrum earthbound lives. Imaginary qualities of actual things predominated here. The spectacular golden sunshine, the hint of salt air and the morning mist rolling in from the Pacific, the occasional views of the hills and moun-tains upon the lifting of the smog, and the omnipresent aura of dreamy stoned hopefulness—you might as well have been lost on the freeways or caught in traffic, because you were half dead and dazed with it all, the hot petulant loveliness.

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What possible goal could you have had that might have been better than where, and who, you were now?

And then there were the cars, alongside of which you could ignore the speed limits or sit waiting for the jams to clear. The captains of industry zoomed past in their pink Bentleys, blue Maseratis, and white Porsches, or in their smoked-glass limos with vanity plates (silky was one, director another), and the upper-level drones sported about in their ordinarily luxurious Audis and BMWs.

Lower-level types, at the bottom of the food chain, drove the humiliated Fords and humble Chevys, mere shark bait.

The street stylists had their lowriders and their bass-driven hubbub. But there was also this museum aspect to L.A.

traffic: sitting in a seemingly full-stopped backup, I noticed in front of me a perfectly maintained candy-apple green AMC Gremlin, clown car par excellence, and behind me a blindingly white ’64 Ford Mustang. This city, after all, was the North American capital of whimsicality, and if Angele-nos wanted campy remnants from the ridiculous past, they would find them. Here you could spot antique Peugeots and Citroëns and Fiats, Kaisers and Frasers and Morris Minors, Austins and Vauxhalls, rescued from junkyards and given a shine.

The Gremlin, engaged in serious multitasking, talked on his cell phone with his right hand while he electric-shaved his neck hairs with his left. Behind me, the beautiful blond Mustang read the paper and applied lip gloss.

Eventually I found my way to Sunset Boulevard and pro-ceeded toward the Fatal Hotel, where I had arranged to meet Coolberg later in the afternoon. I had always liked the 172

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twists and turns of Sunset, its deluxe corridors like roped-off walkways outside of which you might spy distant palaz-zos whose turrets peeked up above the tactically planted topiary that no drudge was permitted to approach. After living for so long in New Jersey, I simply stared at the palm trees, the bougainvillea, the nature-conservatory green-house luxuriance, as I motored past. I didn’t want any of it. I just wanted to look, from a safe distance.

When I reached the hotel, a bored valet removed my luggage, gave it to an equally bored bellman, and sped off somewhere in my contemptible rental car. I was ushered into the lobby. For such a famous place, known for its hospitality to louche celebrities of every stripe, the Fatal seemed rather drab, even seedy. It advertised its own cool indifference to everything by means of dim Art Deco lamps and shabby antique rugs. Indifference constituted its most prized form of discretion. To the left of the entryway sat an ice plant. A dusty standing pot with a sunlit cactus in it, close to the elevators, matched the ice plant for pure floral forlornness.