The Soul Thief (7 page)

Just beyond his apartment window an old woman who is pushing a grocery cart stops and stands on the sidewalk, staring in toward him.

“What the gods are, I mean. I thought they were all gone.

Aren’t they?”

A thought: What if this is not his sister on the phone?

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What if he’s talking and telling all this to someone else, not his sister at all, a terribly wrong number, someone who has happened to call him deliberately or by mistake, someone who doesn’t say “Hello” or identify himself when you answer?

But Nathaniel continues to narrate the story of his recent life, into what he thinks is his sister’s silence. After all, she needs his stories. She needs him to talk. The stories keep her alive, or so he believes.

10

On the way to Niagara Falls, at dusk, to see the gods come out, they cross Grand Island. Coolberg sits in the backseat, Theresa reclines on the passenger side, Nathaniel is hunched behind the wheel. They pass a little abandoned amusement park. The humble roller coaster is oxidizing gradually into scrap metal, and one loop-de-loop lies dead on the ground. Nathaniel imagines the joyful screams of yesteryear. Above the roar of the VW’s engine, and to pass the time, Coolberg begins to describe a trip he apparently made last summer to a country whose name, when he says it, sounds like “Quolbernya,” one of those rarely visited Eastern European locales at the edge of, or just off, the map.

“In that country,” Coolberg says, in a voice that gradually gains momentum, “the houses are all built of white stone.

They’re sepulchral, these houses, like those in a Bergman movie, and although they have huge drooping gutters and oversized windows, nothing about them seems particularly
knowable.
The people there don’t believe in directional signs, to begin with. They think you should know how to get where you’re going, and you should always know where you 58

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already are. But by law, they require homeowners to plant decorative purple lilacs in their backyards, which will bloom throughout the seasons, lilacs engineered in the local laboratories so that not even snow will kill them. Another thing I noticed was that families no longer go down to the docks to welcome the passengers, because people have become, without anyone knowing why, too much trouble. The waves flatten out oddly in the central harbor, which is obscurely brokenhearted, like Lisbon. It’s one of those places that history currently ignores. The sights extrude a kind of nineteenth-century pain. There is nevertheless much actuality. The state planning makes everyone feel like a minia-ture, and though I found a few maps printed on high-quality paper, the maps themselves were fictional, and comically inaccurate. And, after all, people were indifferent to exact location—or they didn’t ‘care,’ if that’s the word—and I noticed that at dinnertime they bent down to their plates, where invariably food was located, and most of them ate and didn’t remark upon where they were.”

He takes a breath and makes a sound like a giggle.

Nathaniel feels rage, a rare emotion for him, rising up at this mockery of eloquence and distinction-making, this trav-elogue through a massive cognitive disorder, this manic word-spinning, but before he can interrupt, Coolberg starts in again.

“Everyone’s very loyal to the directives, for example, about eating the food. It’s one of those countries where people are particularly loyal to
loyalty.
Also, there’s the business of sleeping, how much dreaming has to be done, who has to love whom, that sort of thing. Their murders are elaborately planned and executed. Nothing is left to chance. As they like to say there, ‘You certainly have to dream a lot of dreams to get through a lifetime.’ In the capital city, I went t h e s ou l t h i e f

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to the pavilion of end-of-the-world horticulture. The plain-faced plant-woman sprinkled powerful dust on the flowers for my benefit and explained that the long fields where nothing will grow that we had spied from the tourist buses, and the rivers that had turned to the color of cough drops, were not really manifestations of anything disarrayed in the organic world, understood as such. She said everything was demonstrably mending. She was almost alone in the pavilion. Her voice echoed, in that bottom-of-the-well manner.

Trust me,
the plain-faced woman said. And then in French,
Oui, je la connais.
But if I was supposed to trust her, to acknowledge that she knew something, then why were all the children in the neighboring playground so frightened, their mouths making those terrible O’s? Why wouldn’t the lilacs stop blooming? Why did the gifts hurt long after they’d been given?
Those
were the questions. One morning I knew, finally, that the lists of examples wouldn’t do any longer, but
examples were all that I had.
In that country, they speak prose. And not only do they speak it, they live it. They didn’t ban poetry—they still encourage it, officially—but they did get rid of the insides of things, the interiors that poetry once, in another era, before the fall, referred to. In that sense, they are like us.” He says the last sentence almost in a whisper, a loud whisper over the engine noise, as if confiding his single precious insight.

“Would you please shut the fuck up?” Nathaniel shouts.

“Oh, okay,” Coolberg says, smilingly exhausted after his riff. “I just wanted to tell you about the Quolbernyans.” He waits for a moment before saying, “And about those lilacs?

The ones that never die.”

“Jeez,” Theresa says. “Where did you get
that
routine? I thought I knew them all.”

“I was reciting a poem,” Coolberg says modestly. “Almost.”

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“Well, don’t ever do it again,” warns Nathaniel, gripping the steering wheel. “It’s like vomiting in front of people.”

They pass over the second bridge from Grand Island and turn onto Buffalo Avenue, running parallel to the Robert Moses Parkway, which leads to Niagara Falls on the American side.

“Who’s been out here?” Nathaniel asks. “To the falls?”

“Well, I never have,” Theresa informs him.

“Me neither,” Coolberg tells them quietly, seemingly miffed.

“How’d you know about the gods, then? That was the whole
point
of this expedition. ‘Gods’ are what you promised,” Theresa says.

“I had heard about them,” Coolberg explains. “From someone. Someone who had seen them. Besides, look.” He points ahead. A smell from the atmosphere invades the car’s interior, filling the little Volkswagen with the odor of petro-chemical solvents. On the left-hand side along Buffalo Avenue is an array of chemical plants, visible ahead along the river for miles: DuPont, Carborundum, Olin, Dow, Occidental Chemical, others, all brightly lit in gold by sodium-vapor lamps. The plants’ complicated tubular pipes look like giant industrial webbing connected to enormous black-and-gray fortress-refineries and processing machin-ery, their smokestacks decorated with evenly spaced vertical lights and red blinking stars at the top—lighthouses that beckon the chemical storm and resist it. Close to them are gas flares. This display is the triumph of something that does not want to be named. No humans are visible, no cars are parked. Nothing appears to be moving except for the smoke that wafts like a little industrial storm cloud toward the parkway, the Niagara River, and the car in which they are traveling. A background hum is audible. This entire com-t h e s ou l t h i e f

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plex operates without any human intervention and could continue forever without anyone turning a dial or throwing a switch. Nevertheless, Coolberg is correct: some presence is here. You can hear it.

“Valhalla,” Coolberg says, from the backseat.

“Should we stop?” Theresa asks.

“Stop? Stop where?”

“Well, anywhere.” She shakes her head. “To go in. Nobody works here, that’s obvious. These factories are all automa-tized. Is that the word? Automated.
That’s
the word. They run themselves. No one’s been here in years.” She puts her hands under her armpits for warmth. She shivers and grins.

She is so beautiful when she shivers; she shivers and trembles when she comes.

“There are fences and barriers and guard shacks. The lights have to be replaced. See those keep out signs?”

Nathaniel asks, ever the practical soul.

“Xanadu,” Coolberg says from the backseat. “Stately pleasure domes.”

Nathaniel takes an angry left turn onto a service drive, downshifts into second, then takes another turn into a mostly vacant parking lot bordering a squat brick building over whose doorway are the words the carborvndvm company. Behind them, and at a distance, a ghostly train consisting of chemical tankers chugs forward into the darkness. In the lot where they have parked, tanker trucks rumble, their engines still running as they do at freeway rest stops, though Nathaniel cannot see their drivers. In the distance, a siren wails, then abruptly cuts off in mid-shriek.

“Want to get out of the car?” Nathaniel asks. “Take a tour?”

“What do they make here?” Theresa asks him.

“Snack food.”

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“Polyester fire-retardant snack food.”

“All right, all right. That’s enough of that duet.” Nathaniel’s foot taps nervously on the brake pedal. “Do we get out? Do we take a safari into one of these places?”

Theresa looks straight at him. “You’re kidding, right?

Listen, I just changed my mind. If they found us here, they’d kill us. They’d douse us with their chemical compounds and set us on fire. No, no, this isn’t where we’re supposed to be. This place is creepy, Nathaniel. We must
exit.
We must drive
away.
”

As they are talking, a night watchman wearing a blue Pinkerton uniform emerges from a small shed attached to one of the larger buildings. The door he opens is rusty, as is the shed, and a red rust attaches itself to the gravel he steps on. His red hair leaves the impression that rust has attached itself to his body as well, slowly burning him from the inside out and from the top down. He makes his way in a leisurely cop-saunter over to where their car is idling. He has perfected the tough coolness of an enforcer, even though he seems to have no gun, only a billyclub. When he reaches their car, Nathaniel lowers his window, and the guard, whose hair is even rustier when viewed close-up, and whose face has the humid florid flush of youthful high blood pres-sure, bends down to ask, “What’re you folks doing here?

This is private property. You got business here?”

“That’s not the god,” Coolberg says. “He’s a fake.”

The night watchman glances at him, or, rather, one eye does. The other eye does not move. It appears to be made of glass.

“We were just leaving,” Nathaniel says, starting the car and then throwing it into reverse. He backs out, narrowly missing one of the snoring semi-trailer trucks, and returns to Buffalo Avenue.

11

After parking the VW, they make their way across a footbridge to Goat Island, Nathaniel in the lead like a Boy Scout. The park closes at eleven, according to a sign they have passed near a vacant squad car that has the words park anger on it, the decal r in ranger having been removed or painted over by some vandal. On the east tip of the island, they find a bench and sit down, Theresa in the middle, facing the Niagara River as it divides on their left toward the American rapids and on their right toward Horseshoe Falls.

A few scraggly leafless maples stand on either side of them, the falls roaring melodramatically just out of sight behind them.

In the wind, the streetlights vibrate and chatter.

“What are we doing here?” Theresa asks, her voice coming out in a nervous squeak. “Here in this stupid park?” She waits, and when neither of the men answers, she says,

“Don’t say ‘gods.’ That’s just the cover story.”

“Of course the gods are here,” Coolberg says. “Why do you think newlyweds come to this place?” He pauses. “They want to partake. They want to share in the god-stuff.” He 64

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turns his head to stare at Nathaniel, who is gazing out at the water.

In the midst of his reverie, Nathaniel does not remember why he agreed to this expedition. Following the path to this part of the island, they had walked past the statue of Nikola Tesla, inventor of alternating current and the death ray, who claimed, late in his madness, that he could split the earth in half like an apple. Behind their bench on the other side of Goat Island are the modest tourist traps for visitors: Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! Museum, the Daredevil Museum, and Louis Tussaud’s Waxworks. The bench is uncomfortable and gives him a slatted pain in his shoulder blades. Someday, he thinks, he’ll chalk this trip up to the adventurousness of youth and high spirits. But for now . . . what? Gradually his eyes adjust to the darkness. A small crowd of Japanese tourists passes behind them, snapping flash photos in the dark.

Something terrible is about to happen.
The thought drifts downward over him like a veil over a face. And at that moment, he reflects that some people, like Coolberg, simply have a talent that he himself lacks—a talent for creating hypothetical narratives out of the air, out of nothing.
Gods.
If you play a tune, a few suckers will always dance to it. But first you have to play the tune and, even before that, advertise the concert.

No tune, no dancing. What an innocent I am, he thinks.

The fact of water rushing past in the river; the fact of the rich fetid darkness in this park, at night; the fact of a few storm clouds and a bit of lightning; the fact of beautiful, anxiously intelligent Theresa sitting next to him, who may or may not now be his adoring lover—all these facts make him uneasy. Ease? Ease is elsewhere. Ease is for others.

When, Nathaniel wonders, will I ever get free of these narratives in which the gods are promised? When will anybody?

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“Nothing is going to happen,” he says glumly. “Nothing is ever going to happen.”

“Oh, yes,” Coolberg says, his voice coming out of the dark. “Something will. Something will always happen. You just have to wait patiently until it does.”