The Soul Thief (2 page)

“Look at that,” he says, pointing to a building opposite them. Through the second-floor window of a huge run-10

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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 des-tiny, 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.

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•

•

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 Stan-ley 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 Mar-cuse correct about repressive tolerance or is ‘repressive tolerance’ another example of the collapse of that particular and once viable Frankfurt Institut für 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 12

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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.”

The party carries with it a mood of heady desperation held in check by the usual energies of youth. When Nathaniel looks at his friends, they remind him of puppies in a cardboard box. What is Nixon, what is Vietnam, what is double-digit inflation and mounting unemployment and a life with no prospects compared to a woman sitting on a broken sofa with a guy whose beard hair is still unassertively spawning, the two of them arguing about
The Eighteenth Bru-maire of Louis Bonaparte
? Can the middle class fall outside of history, and, if it does, will actors take over public roles? Sure they will. They already have.

Nathaniel moves away from this group and finds himself in the hallway, where a student composer in the music school—he has been identified as somebody’s boyfriend—is describing his latest composition, an overture for strings, clarinets, and percussion entitled
Holiday in Israel.

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“Yeah,” the composer says to the ceiling, “klezmer music interrupted by glissando runs on the strings for the missiles and bass drum hits for the explosions.”

Nathaniel nods semi-affably. Although he lived for several years in Manhattan, his origins are in Milwaukee, and he has never known a composer before, although he has been forced to listen to highbrow music all his life. The composer says that he hasn’t actually written the music down and has yet to decide whether he’ll bother. Like concept art, his compositions are still hypothesis music, and
concepts may be more interesting, more varied, and more challenging than the
actualities they give rise to.
“For example, you take Leverkühn’s music,” he says, inhaling so deeply from his unfiltered Egyptian oval that his voice is changed to swamp-speech.

“Leverkühn’s music,” the composer claims, gasping with arrogance, “which is unwritten, is considerably better than Schönberg’s, which happens to exist.” Who is Leverkühn?

Nathaniel shrugs inwardly. The composer announces that he may be forced to stage a première of his work at a nonsense-concert, a noncert, in the Buffalo Noncert Series.

All of the noncerts on campus are unannounced and, in effect, unscheduled; instead, they are rumored, until the rumors force them to happen. Noncerts, according to their own motto, “happen to happen.”

Annoyed, Nathaniel wanders down the hallway, enveloped by his would-be confidants. Hysterical intellectualism is the norm at parties like this one. The Vietnam War has forced everyone to take up an ideology, to seek a conversion.

Everyone needs to be saved, right now, instantly saved from history itself, the factuality of it.

Where is his beer? He has misplaced it. Someone hands him a bottle of vodka. He takes a swig, and the ice-cold iri-descent fire leaps in two directions, downward into his 14

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stomach and upward into his brain.
A bad idea,
he realizes, with italics, first to drink beer and then vodka. He hands back the vodka bottle to an anonymous and genderless recipient.
Thank you.
The floor’s wood feels pleasantly gritty, almost reassuring, on the soles of his bare wet feet, though this floor swells a bit like the ocean, and then the party’s hysteria and gloom and desperation suddenly overtake him, while simultaneously a flickering lightbulb in a table lamp separates into two lightbulbs, and Nathaniel realizes that he has ingested a bit too much of the vodka bottle’s contents in those two mouthfuls. He is quite instantaneously bleary and vague and half sick. A large head appears before him in the hallway, supported by a body too small for it, the body and the head belonging to Bob Rimjsky, always recognizable because in this crowd of daily informality expressed in jeans and tatters, Rimjsky invariably wears a three-piece suit with a watch chain, another irony, though of what kind—political or personal or horological—it is impossible to guess. On his delicate small feet are tasseled loafers. Not for him the shed-ding of footwear out in the foyer. For him, the revolution will take the form of ubiquitous formality. Something about him resembles the owl. Like almost all the men here, he has a beard, though unlike the others, his baritone voice is monotonously fixed to one tone, creating a comic drone effect, a vaudeville owl, or a bored investment counselor among the unwashed, playing his 33 rpm statements at 16 rpm. Unlike the beautiful Theresa, Rimjsky never empha-sizes a single word in his sentences, and the mad stare common to this time and place that Rimjsky uses when he begins speaking simply adds to his steadfast personal monotony.

“You’re wet,” he observes in a scholarly manner. “Is that deliberate?”

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Nathaniel nods before looking down the hallway.

“Don’t go in there, Mason.” Rimjsky nods toward another room, a bedroom. “I wouldn’t go in there if I were you.”

“Why?” Nathaniel asks. The door to the bedroom stands half open.

“Coolberg’s in there. He’s talking about his dreams. Stay away from that.”

“So what’s the matter with dreams?”

“Everything. Don’t you know Coolberg?” The noise of the party seems to reach a crescendo before dying away.

Nathaniel feels a fingernail on his back. Theresa has passed by and has touched him. “I thought everyone knew him.”

“No. I’ve just heard of him. You’re the second person tonight who’s mentioned the guy.” Nathaniel is about to excuse himself to pursue Theresa when Rimjsky grabs his arm in a laconic gesture.

“Coolberg’s always striking one pose or another. But listen, Mason, he’s dangerous. And that’s an adjective I have never in my life used until now. You’ll think at first that he has no known location, but he’s as real as we are,”

Rimjsky drones, conversation-as-hypnosis, a monotonality that makes Nathaniel sleepy. “He’s the first person I’ve known who can be in two places at once. He’s dislocated.

Not a joint or a knee—the whole person.”

Rimjsky scratches his beard to prevent interruption or response.

“Of course he’s brilliant. He’s a virtuoso of cast-off ideas,”

he continues. “And he may be a genius. I don’t care. Genius doesn’t impress me. You’ll notice that he doesn’t assert own-ership over his ideas. He’s in some kind of Artaudian condition where all the ideas are unoriginated and unsourced; that’s how he can claim anybody else’s ideas as his own.

Really all he wants to do is acquire everyone’s inner life. I’d 16

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use the word ‘soul,’ but I don’t believe in souls. Still, it’s like a Russian novel, what he does. He inhabits a dense spiritual vacuum. I apologize for the phrase, but that’s what it is.

Don’t go in there.”

When Nathaniel glances again inside the room, he sees, through the crack of the door opening, Theresa sitting on the floor. She’s attentively watching someone out of Nathaniel’s view. “Aw, come on. Don’t be melodramatic,” Nathaniel says to Rimjsky, whose eyes, he now notices, do not ever blink, although they are wide and predatory. Glancing down at the floor, he urges the door to the left with his knee, but before entering the room, he pauses to listen to the voice emanat-ing from it.

The tone of the voice he hears is calmly agitated, as if it had lived with its own agitation for so long that it had grown slightly bored with the ongoing crisis of its condition, a crisis so complex and multilayered that no effort could possibly repair it or even define the nature of its own apparent suffering. The voice has a pleading note, halfway between seduction and distress, and an intelligent gentleness that is all the more alarming for its measured calm, its burnt-over benumbed despair. It sounds, Nathaniel realizes, like a ther-apist’s voice, thick with overeager compassion, but it also seems at almost any moment about to modulate into mad spattering giggles. The voice performs code-switching out of apparent sincerity into malevolent amusement and then into excited despair.

The voice, it seems,
is
reporting a recent dream.

“I was in a gigantic white lavish hotel that was on fire, done for,” the voice behind the door claims with comic mournfulness, “but the fire was consuming the hotel so t h e s ou l t h i e f

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gradually and deliberately that people were still permitted to arrive and depart freely. The fire wasn’t visible, but I knew the hotel was burning because smoke was hanging thinly everywhere, especially around the lights. Very beautiful, that smoke. I returned to my room to save my valuables, and I couldn’t find them, whatever they were. I didn’t know what to search for, what I had to save, how soon the building would collapse, what I had to do. Everyone was busy and wandering around but it was quiet and a little slowed.” The voice pauses. “The elevators were golden. There were cupids carved into the ceiling. I was strangely alone although people were all around. They kept disappearing. No one told me what to do, but I worried because, after all, I was neglecting them or not doing something I was supposed to do. It was like an emergency in slow motion.”

“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.”