The Soul Thief

1

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.

2

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 siècle, 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 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 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 Brumaire 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.

“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 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 shedding 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 emphasizes 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?”

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 ownership 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 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 emanating 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 therapist’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 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.”

In the room five people glance at Nathaniel, their expressions ranging from indifference to curiosity. Two people whisper to each other near the bookcase, and, closer to the doorway, Theresa and Coolberg and an albino dwarfish man sit together on the floor by the bed. They share a beer, the bottle moving around from hand to hand. The albino gets up to leave. A certain intimacy at once falls between Coolberg and Theresa; they have the appearance of unindicted co-conspirators who share a complicated system of signals — lifted eyebrows, glances, finger flicks — all seemingly worked out in advance. Coolberg glances at Nathaniel, and Theresa says, “Well, look who’s here. It’s Nathaniel. My soaked twin.”

“Hello,” Coolberg says. “Oh, yes. You’re Nathaniel Mason. I’ve heard a lot about you. But they’re perfunctory things. Sit down.” Theresa pats the floor next to her. Nathaniel notices a small puddle of water under her jeans. From the rain. Soon a small puddle of water will form under himself, as he drains onto the floor.

Nathaniel gamely lowers himself to their level. Coolberg smiles at him menacingly. Years later he will realize that Coolberg’s first words to him consisted of a false claim, followed by a command, a pattern for their friendship, and that this charade was acted out in front of Theresa, who, like an accommodating audience member, encouraged the show. Once again, and equally thoughtlessly, she puts her hand on his — Nathaniel’s — leg. Coolberg sees her do it. “Nathaniel, you’re so cute when you’re wet,” she says. “You’re flagrant.”

“What is this, the state fair?” Coolberg asks.

Nathaniel takes in Coolberg’s face, stricken by a kind of internalized warfare. In one moment he appears to be a sickly child in a room through whose one window a winter sun shines in, briefly, at twilight, giving the child the farewell gift of its fading rusty light on the snow; in the next moment the expression diagnoses itself, disintegrates, and recombines into one of all-encompassing sympathy, before it turns bewilderingly into an Asia-Minorish sedulous gaze from one of the booths at the bazaar. The eyes miss nothing, but they are spectacularly dead.

“I don’t know anything about you,” Nathaniel says. “Except what people tell me.”

“Oh, what do they tell you?” Coolberg asks, delightedly, mockingly, dolorously, sweetly.

“See, that would be telling. What do you do, when you’re doing things?”

“You’re quoting The Prisoner. ‘That would be telling.’ As for me, I do everything,” Coolberg says, clumsily lighting up a Lucky.

“Guys, guys!” Theresa interrupts, very pleased to pretend that the two men are engaged in combat rather than verbal trickery, as she looks around the bedroom for an ashtray.

“I do everything,” Coolberg repeats. And then he starts singing.

“I’ve made a path

as a polymath

that no one else has trod!”

Theresa perks up. “He’s made a path as a polymath that no one else has trod!” She gives a whoop of laughter. “Siggie, you’re so Broadway.”

Who is Siggie? Coolberg ashes his cigarette into a beer bottle. These are juvenile tiresome antics; the anxious high spirits have a depressing effect. To hell with these people, the vodka says to Nathaniel, whereupon he stands up. He feels a bit unsteady, like a bird on a branch whipped by winds. Being upright is a continuous struggle. There must be others at this party to whom he can talk about something, or nothing. He experiences wanly the need for quiet and sincerity, some antidote to cleverness. He could go back to wherever he parked his car, drive home to his empty apartment, and then read until sleep takes him over just before dawn. In all-out verbal gamesmanship, he will be seriously overmatched here. He can’t keep up with these people. Half the time, he regards himself as a hayseed among city slickers. A sudden heavy hayseed loneliness envelops him, as it often does at parties, like the onset of an illness. His limbs feel weighted down, and objects take on the burden of hopelessness. The other faces at the party look as if they had been painted on the sides of balloons, and from the books on the floor he thinks he hears an angry buzzing like the sound of insects.

“What’s the matter? Don’t you like it?” Coolberg asks.

“No,” Nathaniel says, having forgotten what the “it” refers to. Then he remembers. “Oh, it’s all right. By the way, who’s Siggie?”

“Sigmund Romberg. The composer of Blossom Time.”

Theresa reaches for Nathaniel’s hand. “Don’t leave,” she says. “Sit? Please? Here, beside me?”

Perhaps she likes him. Maybe she’ll heal him of his solitude. And then, as if he had been reading Nathaniel’s mind, Coolberg says, “You know, there’s something heartsick about parties like this. Look at us. We’re all pretending to be smart, as if intelligence were the cure for our anguish. We’re all making this verbal clatter. We cluck our thick tongues…and speak oh so very politely. Aren’t you cold? Your clothes are soaked. Theresa’s, too. Did you take a shower together? Fully clothed? Why would anyone do that?”

“Oh, I’ll survive.”

“That wasn’t my question.”

What was his question? Nathaniel can’t remember it. He sits down again and leans his damp self against Theresa. She is as warm as a radiator filling with steam.

3

TWO OR MORE hours later (Nathaniel does not wear a watch on principle — he refuses to be a slave to any clock), still damp, and now thoroughly bleary with alcohol, behind the wheel of his rusting dark-butterscotch-colored VW Beetle, Nathaniel maneuvers around the streets of Buffalo in an effort to take Coolberg back to his apartment and Theresa back to hers. When Theresa asks him whether he’s drunk and thus unfit to drive, Nathaniel shouts proudly, “I’ve been driving drunk since the age of sixteen.” He must shout. No intimate conversation has ever been carried on in a VW Beetle; the motor’s chain drive creates too much commotion for reflective conversation. Talking in such a car is like orating into the surf.

At a street corner, as they stop at a red light, Nathaniel sees a woman standing and staring at him mutely. No doubt the look she is giving him has nothing behind it, no intention beyond curiosity. And yet he feels accused. These people follow him around.

The implementation of the favor that he is performing has grown complicated: Coolberg lives farther away from Nathaniel’s apartment than Theresa does, but it is essential that the boy genius be disposed of quickly in case Theresa wants to prolong the evening. Meanwhile, Coolberg has taken up the subject of solitude again, quite loudly. “You know what I think? I think we’re all in our private traps, clamped in them. We scratch and claw, but only at the air, only at each other, and for all of it, we never budge an inch.”

Theresa suddenly barks a command from the tiny backseat. “Stop making speeches,” she shouts over the noise of the engine. “Stop quoting. You don’t believe that! That’s not you.”

Coolberg laughs. “Nothing is me.” He looks over at Nathaniel with a boyish expectancy. “Nathaniel, I liked what you said about polio and iron lungs.” Nathaniel tries to remember what he has said about that subject. He doesn’t recall having any opinions about polio. “Let’s talk again. Let’s go to Niagara Falls or something. Have you ever been to the falls at night? The gods come out there in the dark. Really, they do. Or we could go to the Mirrored Room.” The Mirrored Room, by Lucas Samaras, is a well-known fixture of the local art museum. In this room, the floor, ceiling, and walls are made of mirrors; the body dissolves there. “You can let me out right now,” he says unexpectedly. “This is my place. I’ll call you.”

The building outside of which they have stopped is yet another Buffalo structure, a large upstate New York house on a tiny lot, the front lawn so small that it could be mowed in two minutes. Nothing separates this house from the one next to it except a driveway. The neighborhood is cluttered and congested with houses; in this jungle of domiciles, trees have been forced out, to live elsewhere. Coolberg scrambles out of the car and walks in a slouching ramble toward the front door. Nathaniel would like to see him enter the house — he is not completely sure that Coolberg actually resides here — but in the meantime, Theresa has clambered into the front seat and has closed the door.

“Onward and upward,” she says, smiling briskly, as she loosens the rubber band from her ponytail so that her hair drops onto her shoulders. She puts the rubber band in her mouth and chews it as she fluffs out her hair. Suddenly she looks very naked.

Nathaniel drives to the end of the block. “Where to?” he asks. “Want to come back to my place?” With some effort, he creates a likely scenario. “We could talk. I could make scrambled eggs and coffee, and we could watch the sun come up.”

Theresa smiles, amused by him. “No, not tonight.” She touches the back of his neck in a seemingly tender gesture, though it feels more like a tease than affection. “I’m too gone. I’m much too gone to have breakfast with you.”

“We don’t have to do anything,” he says, not wanting to sound desperate. “We don’t have to have a meal together.”

“Take a right here,” she tells him, pointing at a streetlight up ahead. He signals a turn and follows her next instructions for another minute or so. Someone half a block away shouts or screams. City sounds.

“I want to call you. I want to see you again. Is that okay?”

“I guess so.” She sighs. “Just not tonight. We should be…I don’t know, alert. If I ever sleep with you, I want to be stone-cold sober. Besides, I already have somebody.” She takes out a slip of paper from her damp flak jacket and writes down her phone number. “Even though he’s not important and can be disposed of, I’ve got him. He’s not here, but he is somewhere. He exists, I mean. He has a residence. Anyway, I haven’t thought through the whole monogamy thing”—she shouts over the noise of the motor—“so I don’t have a position on sleeping with you. Yet.” She puts the slip of paper into his shirt’s front pocket. “Do you have somebody? You’re so cute you should never be alone.” In the noise created by the VW’s acceleration, the question seems loud and rhetorical, unanswerable, and a bit mean-spirited, coming from this beautiful woman who twice (or was it three times?) placed her hand on Nathaniel’s thigh. Does Theresa enjoy creating desire in him just to see herself doing it? To establish that she herself is unmoved? Like a laboratory scientist? Or a sleepy cat with its prey? That she can cast spells, that she is powerful? A rash of questions.

He therefore does not answer her inquiry about whether he has someone because the answer is “No, not now,” and those words are not the ones he wishes to utter as he shifts into second gear, sober from the intensity of loneliness and arousal and late-night animal longing. His hands are sweaty and he can’t think straight, and he feels sick with alcoholic lust, damp clothes, desolation, and maybe even neon-lighted love. Right now he would sleep with anything beautiful, if only beauty would sleep with him, this beauty or any other.

“Up there,” she says. “I’m up there.” They have found themselves on Hertel, and she points to an ice-cream shop, Lickety Split. Her apartment, she claims, is located upstairs from the ice cream and the service people who scoop it and the customers who eat it. All day, Nathaniel imagines, she inhales the smell of waffle cones. That’s what he smelled on her earlier: confectionary scents, cream and sugar spackled all over this girl.

“Good night,” whispers Theresa, giving him a peck on the cheek. Then she touches his face under the cheekbone with her finger, a kind of mini-caress. It feels like a depth charge, coming from her. “I’ve wanted to touch you in that spot all night,” she confesses. This is unlawful, Nathaniel thinks, the carnival style, the show-biz way she touches me. He reaches over to lay a hand on her, but she has maneuvered out of reach. “Give me a call…or something.”

She glances down as she shuts the car door, and Nathaniel can see her grinning to herself privately, as if she liked him once upon a time, hours ago; but for him to return that smile through the car window, the minimal effort invested in any facial expression, hardly seems worth the trouble. It would require optimism and a heroic spirit. He would have to hire a crane to lift his mouth into a grin. The entire evening has turned into a dead battery. It doesn’t matter what you hook it up to. Nothing will go anywhere because no motor will start.

In the light of the car’s high beams, he watches Theresa, accessorized with her flak jacket and her shiny tin medals of Lenin, her homage to the material world, skip up the sidewalk to her building, enter the front door to the foyer, efficiently take out a key, and make her beauty-pageant progress inside. A horrible thought: She is not drunk or tired at all. She’s just had enough of him.

4

WHAT WOULD GERTRUDE STEIN say about this evening?

For a long time being one being living he had been trying to be certain that he had known what he was doing standing and sitting where it was raining, and when he had come to be certain that he did not know and could not know that he was doing what he was doing with another who was also magnificent and living, that was the time he was certain that he would be driving to where he was concluding this evening and other evenings, and he certainly was driving, and anyway everyone agreed that he was driving to where he alone was concluding and sleeping. Occasionally Gertrude Stein explains his life to him, for the relief. She has accompanied him at odd moments ever since he heard her recorded voice one afternoon on the car radio as he was driving around doing errands.

When Nathaniel reaches his own apartment, half of a duplex on a seedy cul-de-sac near the campus, the front door has been jimmied open, and, for some reason, his mailbox has been unlocked to reveal its lack of contents. He steps inside and observes in the half-dark that the lamp near the entryway is now turned over and is lying sideways on the floor, a burglary prop. Somebody with a flashlight is fossicking in Nathaniel’s bedroom, pulling the drawers open, emptying them, checking the closets.

“Hey, you,” Nathaniel calls out. “What’re you doing? What in the fucking hell is this?”

The flashlight shines in his direction. “Me?” The voice is slurred. “Who’re you, man?” Nathaniel, who has been around the druggy block a few times, recognizes it as junkie speech. The tone carries with it an aura of super-sedated vagueness, along with a fuzzy pointless aggression, and the voice resonates with that sleepy absentminded hipster attitude.

“Who am I? I live here,” Nathaniel says to the burglar. “Fuck you. This is my place.”

“Well, this place is pathetic,” the burglar mutters. “You got nothin’ to steal. Less than nothing. This stuff is all complete shit. This is what you return to the store the day after Christmas. It’s like a church basement in here. I’m wasting my valuable time.”

“I know,” Nathaniel says, sitting down. He leans his head back against the wall, feeling a kind of Buddhist indifference to everything.

“All you got is these fucking paperbacks. Books every damn where. A lamp that doesn’t work. This junk clock radio. And a fuckin’ coffeepot,” the flashlight says directly into his face. “Which is rusting. A rusting coffeepot! How come you live this way? I got it better than you. And your clothes are all wet. What’s that?”

“I’m just a graduate student.”

“You don’t even have a bike. Or a stereo.”

“So?” Nathaniel says, feeling too tired to challenge him. “I walk everywhere or take the bus,” he lies. The VW, after all, had been a grudging gift from his stepfather, and the burglar might want to steal it. But, no; once having seen its butterscotch-colored paint job, no thief would want it. Nathaniel waits. “You going to leave now? There’s nothing here for you.”

The burglar sighs. “Don’t I know it. You’re not going to attack me or nothin’?” he asks. He is young also, probably Nathaniel’s age, stoned, but — Nathaniel can see this in the semi-dark — wearing a wedding ring.

“No,” Nathaniel says. “Why would I do that?”

“Well,” the voice asks, coming out of the flashlight, “would you make me a cup of coffee, then? I don’t care if it tastes of rust. This has been an awful night.” Nathaniel reaches for the light switch, and the burglar says, “No, don’ do that. I can’t have you seein’ me.”

“Oh, okay,” Nathaniel says. So all right. So why not make a cup of coffee for a burglar? It is a revolutionary act. After going into the kitchen, he fills his coffeepot, the Mighty Midget, with Breakfast Blend and water, lets the brew percolate, and pours a cup. “Cream or sugar?” he calls out.

The burglar has nodded off on the sofa. “Cream or sugar?” Nathaniel repeats more loudly, approaching the guy, who smells of anise. Nathaniel shakes the burglar’s shoulder. The intruder still has a flashlight in one hand, a toy gun in the other, and a grocery bag at his feet.

“Aaargh,” the guy says. “No. I hate sugar. Sugar is a disguise. It’s bad for you. Gives me headaches. Black, just black, okay?”

“Okay, sure,” Nathaniel says. After returning to the kitchen, he pours the intruder and himself each a cup of coffee, goes back to the sofa, hands one of them to the guy, and sits down on the other side of the room from him.

“So,” Nathaniel says to the young man, in the near-dark, “you’re married?”

“Yuh,” the man says. “And my old lady got a baby on the way.” He sips the coffee. “Soon, too. See, I lost my job months ago. I was a janitor. Welfare’s run out and shit. She can’t work, my wife. She broke her leg in a fall she took downtown. Marble stairs, slippery, you know? Maybe we could sue. She just gimps around. Like a bug. What it is, we don’t have no parents, the two of us, like most people do.”

“Too bad.” Nathaniel waits. “Of course it doesn’t help things that you’ve got a habit. You must be a crummy thief if you shoot up before you go out to steal things.”

The man doesn’t respond to the critique of his lifestyle. “How come you live like this, man?” the burglar asks, sipping at his hot coffee, his voice calm. “This is one motherfuckin’ friendless apartment.” He pauses, contemplating it. “Are you a Spartan or something? ’Cause a lonesome soul lives here, I’ll tell you that. I wouldn’t be able to stand it. Shit. I’d get me a comfortable chair, at least. And a TV set. Don’t you watch TV? Football? Johnny Carson?”

Nathaniel shakes his head. And, before dawn breaks, he tells the burglar about the entire night, about himself, his studies, his former home in Milwaukee, and how Theresa would not come home with him, which, considering the burglar’s presence, was probably a happy accident.

“You’re okay, man,” the burglar says a few minutes later, before he shakes Nathaniel’s hand to leave. “But, you know, you should get better locks on your door. You know, the dead-bolt kind? The kind you got here, they won’t stop a flea from coming in and sitting down on you.”

“Talk to my landlord,” Nathaniel instructs him, as he closes his eyes. It has been a long night. “But I don’t think he’ll listen to you, either.”

“See you around,” the burglar says, stepping quietly out. As he goes, Nathaniel has, at last, a quick look at him, and he wills himself to remember the face in case he should ever see it again.

“See you around,” Nathaniel replies as the burglar closes the door behind him. “Drop by again. Just knock next time.” He could always use another acquaintance, even one who steals. Still, he latches the door.

5

THE NEXT MORNING Nathaniel calls Theresa. The phone rings and rings and rings. Perhaps she is resting up after her social exertions. Or is out in the library, foraging in the stacks. Or is still actively caressing someone, somewhere — the two of them guttering and moaning into the sheets followed by sweaty laughter, the sun rising over her arched back, her fingers in someone’s mouth, her breasts damp from kisses, her thighs from semen. Ah, Nathaniel notes, yes, here it is, the poison of jealous erotic imagery, the first sign, the barbed hook in the heart. Theresa Theresa Theresa.

He drives down to the Broadway farmers’ market, buys two large bags’ worth of assorted vegetables, then takes them back to the People’s Kitchen, a little storefront co-op hunger-relief project on Allen Street. The butterscotch VW Beetle wheezes and squeaks and groans as he parks out in front, where a hapless bush occupying a small square of embattled dirt strokes the passenger-side door when he squeezes into the space. The People’s Kitchen stands next to an artist’s studio and is a block down from Mulligan’s Brick Bar. The neighborhood — Allentown — has a pleasantly lazy urban squalor. Nathaniel carries the vegetables inside, turns up the heat, causing the radiators to clank, raises the shades in the front and back, and, with the radio on, starts chopping carrots and boiling water. The poor and hungry and various assorted street people usually drop in starting around three in the afternoon for a meal. Sometimes Nathaniel serves, but today he is assigned to chop and boil and stir and clean.

In Buffalo, real estate is so cheap that almost any collective can buy or lease property, and Nathaniel has joined this one, the Allentown Artists’ & Culinary Alliance, not out of vague progressive ideals, but because he likes cooking and cleaning and serving, and because his soul has always thrived being around cast-off people — greaseballs and windbag artistes, hippies, losers, the poor and unwashed, and those with sociopolitical ambitions, the ones who forget to wear socks and who blow their noses on their shirtsleeves while making speeches. Besides, once when he was meditating over the direction of his life, the message came to him that he should do this work.

He knows about himself that all his charitable deeds are, at base, selfish. Such drudgery makes him feel better, lifting a dead weight off his soul and putting a lighter-than-air spiritual substance in its place.

Through the south-facing back kitchen window the sun shines cheerfully, an all-American sun, optimistic about everything. In Buffalo, the sun is a member in good standing of the Rotary Club. Things, the sun sings merrily, will get better better better better better better better better better. Nathaniel turns up the volume on the radio, tuned to the Buffalo NPR affiliate, in an effort to drown out the sun. They’re playing Vaughan Williams’s Fifth Symphony, the second movement, a demented scherzo of sea shanties interrupted by a sudden eerie calm evoking the approach of nothingness. Nathaniel knows his classical music: before she married Nathaniel’s stepfather, his mother played it day and night at home and in the car. Now he can recognize anything in the standard classical repertoire, and this knowledge burdens him. The sun shuts up.

When Nathaniel’s mother and stepfather were living in New York City, and he would return home from college during spring break and, later, during the summers, the sunlight had a curiously hard metallic sheen. On good spring days the light defined trees, buildings, and people alike with brilliant tactile clarity. Then, in late summer, like the old-time God of the ancients, enraged, the sun would melt down whatever it saw and start over again. In August, Nathaniel thought, the sopping gruesome heat in Manhattan liquefied the city. Someday the entire urban landscape would ooze into the Hudson. In New York, summer would be the season of doom.

By contrast, his childhood sun over Milwaukee tended to be Midwestern and diffident, hidden by clouds tossed up by moisture from the Great Lakes. For most of his youth, he had lived under vague, noncommittal skies, broken occasionally by raging storms. Then the clouds would part to reveal the banal blue immensity.

His parents had resided in a three-bedroom suburban house with a white picket fence and a large grassy backyard with a rose garden, an arbor, and a reflecting ball, and to this day Nathaniel believes that if his father hadn’t died of a sudden stroke in his forties, and if his sister hadn’t been in the automobile accident that took her speech away, he would still be living out there in the suburbs, selling insurance or working as an accountant, starting a family and following some harmless occupation under those noncommittal Mid-western skies. He’d have a white picket fence and a rose garden of his own and a very white wife; he’d have an indistinct human outline and would genially fade into his home and family and belongings.

He cleans and cuts up the carrots and sets to work on the potatoes. The beef and celery can wait. The Vaughan Williams symphony progresses into its third movement, a meditative adagio.

During his lifetime, Nathaniel’s father had run an elaborate charade: he gave the appearance of being just a standard-issue dad — a person you didn’t have to pay much attention to. An astoundingly unremarkable man, display-case ordinary, an estate-planning attorney who worked at a law firm in downtown Milwaukee, he played catch with his son on weekends or did household repairs while he hummed the same tunes over and over again, “Blue Moon” or “Where or When.” Clumsy and not a true handyman, he was nevertheless willing to repair anything if asked, carrying up his toolbox from the basement and laughing, “Look out, house! I’m coming!” He told jokes around the dinner table. In the morning he would playfully bonk his sleepy son on the head with the rolled-up newspaper to wake him. He would go fishing with his friends on Lake Winnitonka. As an alumnus of the University of Michigan, he watched Wolverine football on Saturdays if he had the time. He made of himself a generic parent, sweet and well-meaning and doubtlessly in a consensual relationship with routine. If he harbored quiet desperation, he kept it to himself.

After his death, he acquired perfection. Perfection dropped like an alarming protective covering over his memory, as Nathaniel and Catherine, his son and daughter, helplessly recognized — they saw it happen. No one could remember their father’s flaws. Once he was gone, his benign imperturbable self became painfully lovable and thus toxic. His monkey way of scratching his back, his unpleasant habit of picking his teeth after dinner, his insistence on pouring too much garlic salt over the steaks before he grilled them, that strange equanimity of his — he never seemed to get angry, irritability being all he could manage — all of it coalesced into the composite of an affable man who, in everyone’s collective memory, gave nobody the advantage of having a case against him. He had been sweet and generous. Who had noticed? Nobody. His virtues came back, as virtues will, to haunt the living.

He had taken his children for walks on trails through the city parks and into the playgrounds, where he had pushed them on the swings. He had carried first Catherine and then Nathaniel, as kids, on his shoulders; they had grabbed on to his hair to stabilize themselves and to steer him. He remembered birthdays, took the family on excursions to movies, and always showed up for school functions. He was a patiently good man who seemed to relish his nonentity status, his lack of individuality. Nathaniel on the basketball team, Catherine in gymnastics: he was there to witness them both. His habit of saying, “You’ve enlightened me.” The beer after dinner, the affectionate kisses on the top of the head, his patience in teaching his kids how to swim or to ride a bicycle or to approach the net, his interest in history and Russian nineteenth-century fiction, his demand on New Year’s Eve that his wife sit in his lap — oh, it was unforgivable, all of it, the entire inventory, it was a fortress that could never be breached once he was gone.

After her father’s death, Catherine, silent and spectral, would sleepwalk into Nathaniel’s bedroom. She would clear away his discarded clothes on the floor. Then she would descend, convulsed with sobs, and curl up like a dog. Already half a ghost herself, she brought herself to her brother’s room so that he might witness her grief. If there had been consolation to be offered, Nathaniel had no idea where to find it. Their father, a genial guy they had taken for granted, was now fully absent and had taken all comfort with him. What was there to say? Nothing much. Nathaniel resorted to patting his sister on the back as she lay there on the floor beside his bed.

She had been a strong solid smart girl, with brilliant blue eyes that had ice traces in them. As a field hockey player and a rock singer fronting a high school band called Strep Throat, she had been good at raising her voice. With her particular appetites and raucousness, she would have been loved early on in the ordinary course of things by some brave boy who might have noticed and admired her. She was an inventory-taker, a psychic accountant, habitually noting quantities and qualities in rooms and in people. But after her father’s death, a single inventory took over the others. “There was only one of him,” she would sigh, over and over again.

She formed a new appetite for oblivion.

Nathaniel had not guessed that his sister could be furtive, brazenness having been her usual tactic, but, freed from stability, she developed a gift for secrecy. She joyfully took up drinking, a habit for which she had a calling. Alcoholism brought out her stealthy side, the midnight joy of beer from the refrigerator and whiskey from the cupboard. Nothingness called to her and she answered. At first she drank alone or with strangers. Her mother concealed all the liquor bottles — a guileless woman, she first tried hiding them behind the detergent boxes in the laundry room, where they were as obvious as Easter eggs — before throwing all of them out.

Catherine quickly found a community of like-minded high school classmates who drank, a whole crowd of fellow students who loved getting wasted as much as she herself did. They drank and drove and staggered around the woodsy Wisconsin off-road locales they found, cursing the sky, vomiting, laughing, falling down, passing out, waking up, and crawling behind the wheel before starting up the collaborating cars and weaving their way back.

On a Friday night in early November in Catherine’s senior year, one of these boys, on a mission to take Catherine home, drove off the road into a patiently waiting tree. The impact threw her forward into the dashboard. When she came to, wrapped in swaddling clothes after several days of unconsciousness, all her words had been wiped clean from her brain’s left hemisphere. She had sustained a skull fracture, a broken arm, and her body seemed to be one large bruise. The driver, a boy contemptuous of the future, had successfully canceled his own, but she had been saved — that is, her physical life had been saved — and before very long she was up and about, seemingly as beautiful as ever, except for her eyes, which had gone blank. The neurologists claimed that something had happened in her posterior temporal lobe, and they engaged in professional mumbling about the prognosis, saying that there would certainly be more tests until that stage when they could discover the source of her asymptomatic verbal aphasia. The tests, they said to Nathaniel and his mother, were very good these days. We have excellent tests, they said proudly, brain injury is no longer the grave mystery it once was, we will figure it out. And we have therapies, many of which have been proven to work. We are scientists; this is a science.

With her light dimmed, Catherine came home. She took up her life, almost, where it had been left off.

Around that time, Nathaniel began to notice ghost-women watching him from street corners, alleyways, from behind jewelry displays, ash-women, silent, mute, and unmoving, women trying on hats, women before mirrors, women deep in shadows, called forth in some manner by his sister’s silence, called forth by the song of her injury to surround him and stare at him and accompany him everywhere. What did they want of him? They seemed ready to ask him a crucial question, these familiars, but they never got around to it. All through his college years, they kept up their surveillance. They stayed on their street corners with their hooded beautiful eyes, women-beggars made of mist and fog. They had moved into his world for good, it seemed, but they could not be spoken to — they always disappeared when he approached them. Often they opened their mouths to sing to him, though nothing audible ever came out. They were frequently bent over, human question marks, first in Milwaukee and then in New York, after his mother remarried.

6

NATHANIEL LOOKS UP. There’s one of them, right out in front, in broad sunlight. A woman wearing a blue denim cap, and a hideous pink cardigan sweater over a blouse with a printed pattern of marsh grass and bamboo, and purple slacks with threads of string for a belt — this apparition is staring in through the front window at him, her accusing eyes crazily fixed. She reaches up and takes out her teeth. She waves the dental plate at him. Hi! Hi hi hi hi hi. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. She flashes a startling bedlamite grin through the glass. She screams a fun-house laugh. Sometimes they do these stunts just to scare him, to watch the hair on the back of his neck stand up, to give him goose bumps. They like that. But they also have some other, undiscovered, agenda. He looks down at the table, where he has been chopping onions. Another pair of hands has joined his, another member of the Allentown Artists’ & Culinary Alliance here in the People’s Kitchen, one of his favorites, Jamie the Catholic — apparently she snuck in while he was hypnotized by that ghoul out there on the sidewalk. Having tied her apron on over a t-shirt and jeans, Jamie has set to work on shelling peas. Gold dangles from her earlobes. She is a lesbian and a sculptor and a dancer who lives in the neighborhood, and she drives a taxi for Queen City Cab at night to pay the bills, and Nathaniel loves her strong tanned forearms and blond flyaway frizzy hair poking out from under the contrivance of her head scarf (he also loves her soul), and he says in a formally affectionate tone, “Sweet Jamie. Good morning. How you doing?”

“How I doing? I doing all right. It’s almost afternoon, dummy,” she tells him, knocking her hip gently against Nathaniel’s. “You should buy a watch. I slept late. I’m so bad. I’m a bad bad girl. Where’s the rosemary?”

“Up on the shelf.” He nods. “Close to the garlic. You know where it is.” She reaches up to a shelf underneath a sign that says ANARCHISTS, PLEASE WASH YOUR HANDS! Tears squeeze out of his eyes. “Fucking onions. Always do this to me.”

“Fucking onions,” she agrees, shaking her head so that her earrings glitter. “You know what causes all that crying, don’t you? Sulfur. Sulfur in the onion’s oil. The devil’s molecule. Aren’t you going to ask me why I slept late?”

“Okay. Jamie, why’d you sleep late?”

“None of your damn business, Nathaniel.” She grins. “I got lucky. So how come you didn’t sleep late?”

“I didn’t get lucky.” He’s about to tell her about the burglar but decides not to; she’d be alarmed on his behalf.

“You poor child. Why didn’t you get lucky?”

He stops slicing for a moment. “Is there accounting for luck? Anyway, this girl said that if she was ever going to go to bed with me, she wanted to be sober.”

“Sober! To sleep with a man, you’d have to be drunk. What a crock. Sober! Don’t believe her. Girls are such liars. Well, maybe she wants to know you better. Maybe she wants to know your sign. Your horoscope. If you love cats. If you can commit. Hey, aren’t you going to ask me,” she asks, “about who made me late?”

“So, Jamie,” he says, “who made you late?”

“None of your business.” She laughs loudly. “Check the society pages. Jesus, I wonder if we have mice in here. I saw rodent leavings when I came in. Back there near the door, while you were staring at the front window? Somebody should clean up the rear entryway. You, probably. It’s your assignment today, isn’t it? Man, I think this is serious, the mice problem, I mean.”

“Of course we have mice.” He glances at the front window, where the toothless woman has dissolved into the noontime air of Buffalo. “And, yeah, I ought to put out some traps before the city shuts us down.”

“They’ll shut us down anyway. Any day now. Pronto. They hate us. Free food is a thumb in the eye of free enterprise, is what they think. People hate charity; they really do. It insults the worker. The city will come in with inspectors and cops and tear gas, and it’ll be curtains for us.” Jamie looks down at his crotch, hidden by his own apron. “You know, babycakes, you’re kinda cute, for a guy,” she says. “Listen. Don’t take this wrong. I’m serious. If you’re lonely and need a sleepmate,” she says quietly, almost in a whisper, “give me a call. I’m not kidding. I wouldn’t mind holding you all night. You have virtues, and virtues,” she says, slicing into another carrot, “should be rewarded, occasionally, with kindness.”

“You’re so romantic,” Nathaniel says.

“Romance is in my nature.” After a pause of chopping and seasoning, Jamie asks, “What was her name? Is her name?”

“Theresa. We were at a party.”

Jamie nods twice, frowning, and seems ready to speak up when the phone rings. Nathaniel wipes his hands before answering it. “Thank you,” the voice says without benefit of a greeting, “for taking me home.” For a moment, Nathaniel can’t place the voice as young or old, male or female, or even human, can’t place it at all until he realizes that it belongs, if that’s the word, to Coolberg.

“Ah. Jerome,” Nathaniel says, as the Vaughan Williams on the radio behind him embarks on its finale, a very British passacaglia with brave launching-into-the-void sentiments. “How’d you know I was here?”

“Don’t you remember last night?” Coolberg asks. “I told you: I know everything about you. You were a little drunk and got…I don’t know, confessional. You said you worked at the People’s Kitchen on Saturday mornings, preparing meals for the poor. Very admirable. That’s what you said. So I called. Don’t you remember? That was right after you told me about your sister and your father…”

“I did? I talked about them? I don’t think I said anything about them.”

“Well, I certainly thought you did.” A pause. “Your father’s death? From a stroke? Your sister’s muteness? How she slept on the floor beside your bed after your dad died? Your mother’s brief spell of unreason?”

Nathaniel waits. Someone in the world claims, on very little evidence, to know everything about him. Despite his doubts, he feels flattered. He notices that Jamie has turned around and is watching him, studying him as if he needs protection from something scratching through the wall.

“It’s just that I was thinking,” says Coolberg, “that we should do something together. I mentioned this to you. Possibly you forgot. We should go see the gods come out. At night. At Niagara Falls. Have you ever done that? Ever seen the gods come out? You should. They’re quite a sight, the gods.”

“No, I haven’t.” He waits. “What’s this about the gods? I never heard of any. Besides God, I mean.”

“Oh, skepticism is so easy, Nathaniel. And lazy. Lazily uninteresting. This excursion — we should do it. The pagan gods have a new boldness. They desire to be seen. The name of God is changing in our time. Really. Don’t you agree? Besides, you have a car. I don’t drive. I have never driven. With me, practice doesn’t make perfect. I have no sense of direction.”

“Okay. But we should bring Theresa along, you know? If I’m going to take an excursion, it should be the three of us.”

In the long silence that follows, Jamie has shrugged and returned to washing and chopping and tossing vegetables into the stewpot. “Yes,” Coolberg says at last. “What a good idea. You call her. When do you want to go?”

“How about tomorrow night? It’s Sunday. The gods come out on Sunday, don’t they? It’s their day, Sunday. Right?”

“Fine,” Coolberg says angrily. Nathaniel hears the telltale click of the disconnection. Apparently Coolberg never says hello or good-bye.

When he returns to Jamie’s side, she asks him who it was, and when he tells her, she puts down her knife, drops her hands to her sides, and slowly leans sideways into him, a gesture of affection and, it seems — Nathaniel can’t be sure — protection. “I should be your guardian angel,” she says. “I think you need one.” She drops her head on his shoulder for a split second. Under the protective chef’s head scarf, her blond hair brushes against his neck. It feels blond.

“Do you know that guy who called me? Coolberg?”

“No,” she tells him. “It was the look on your face I recognized.”

“What look?”

“Like you were being pickpocketed. Or, I dunno, taken. You make me nervous,” Jamie tells him. “You’re too available. You need to be more vigilant. Close yourself down a little. Men shouldn’t be like you. Give me a call, if you ever think of it.”

7

JUST BEFORE HE LEAVES in the early afternoon, Nathaniel, who has finished mopping and disinfecting the floor near the kitchen drain, sees a guy escorting a pregnant woman, evidently his wife, through the front door and then to one of the long community tables. She walks past the entryway in deliberate stages, first limping from a bad left knee, then waving brokenly with her right arm for balance, as if she were directing traffic. Her progress comes in physical-therapy steps. Apparently she doubts that she will stay upright. Regaining her dignity, she sits down slowly before gazing at the dining area with the abstracted air of a queen about to announce a decree. Her husband — they are both wearing wedding rings — is white, and she is black, though their facial features are rather similar, with dark widely spaced eyes, Italian, as if they had both descended from the Medicis, one side in Italy, the other in Africa. It is the burglar and his wife, and when the burglar sees Nathaniel he nods, very quickly, a hi-but-don’t-come-over-here look.

When Nathaniel approaches them, the burglar glares at him, resisting. Nathaniel walks through his resistance. He says, “Hi. I’m Nathaniel.” He holds out his hand.

“Um, it’s Ben,” the burglar says, referring to himself. He gestures in his wife’s direction. “This here’s Luceel.”

“Hi, Luceel,” Nathaniel says. Luceel gazes at him before studying her hands in her lap. She has great physical beauty and will not exchange more than a quick once-over with just anybody. She is one of those women who rations out her glances. Maybe she is just shy.

“Um, hi. You two know each other?” she asks, looking at her fingers.

“We’ve met,” Ben says. “That’s all it is. We met someplace. He remembers me from a thing we did.” He sighs loudly, examining the traffic passing outside and shaking his head, as if the mere fact of the cars oppresses him, all those Buicks, Chevrolets, and Fords, with their purposeful owners.

“Right,” Nathaniel says. “Well. See you later. Nice to meet you, Luceel. Have a good afternoon, you guys.”

As he walks out the front door, he notices that they are conferring together, heads lowered, this topic having momentarily taken precedence over food and hunger.

In the afternoon he plays basketball in a city park with a group of guys he’s seen here before, most of them about his size, their elbows as aggressive as his own, their collective breath visibly rising above them in the cold autumn air, their sweat soaking through their shirts. One basket has a chain net hanging from the hoop; the other hoop, on the opposite court, is naked, with an unpadded support pole holding up the backboard — a funky urban playground for adults, inmates of the city. Nathaniel plays slowly and distractedly, but the other players, too, have strangely mournful expressions on their weekend faces, like the little men bowling in “Rip Van Winkle” who were unable to smile. Despite their gloom they all make self-encouraging male noises, and the noises free them. Doing a lay-up, Nathaniel allows himself a loud triumphant outcry.

The ball falls neatly through the hoop.

Back in his apartment after his shower, he gets Theresa on the line, and her apologies begin, one by one. Apologies? For what? She launches in with her mistakes in tone, advances to mistakes in behavior, and ends with the full self-indictment. “I’m a total fraud. Somebody should arrest me,” she says calmly. “Last night? That wasn’t me.” The confession of fraudulence sounds fraudulent, though it has charm. Nathaniel notices that she speaks quietly, intimately. Listening to her is like being in a sensual confessional booth across the hall from a hot steamy bedroom. Her statements emerge from her full of self-doubt, the sweetly narcissistic self-censorious note struck again and again, as if she is surprised to find that she actually likes him a bit more than she likes herself and is evoking her own dubious flaws so that he can refute her, thus showering her with praise and returning the conversation to the subject of her wonderful, winning self.

“See, the thing is,” she tells him, and then trails off into strategic mumbling. She admits her yearning to inhabit an intellectual realm that she has not by rights acquired citizenship to. “Oh, everyone else around here is so smart,” she confesses, “and all I can do is to put on an act.” Really, she says, she is just a simple girl brought up in buttfuck Iowa, the daughter of a manufacturer’s rep who sold prefabricated silos. She’s afraid of being dumb, a silo salesman’s daughter — that’s her breathy assertion.

She has mastered somehow a tonal mixture of the bogus and the seductive, so Nathaniel interrupts. “But you were quoting Valéry last night!” he says. “Who else does that?”

“That line, that’s the one line I know,” she says. “That one. I always quote it. ‘Beau ciel, vrai ciel, regard-moi qui change!’ That gets me in the door, that line, it’s the key to the city.”

“Okay. Enough. You know something? When we came in last night,” Nathaniel says, before a coughing fit takes him over, “everyone thought we were a couple.”

“Yeah? You think so? Why?”

“Because they said so. Because we were both soaked. Because we looked it. There was a perception there. Of, what’s that word? Togetherness. That we were mated.”

“Yeah?” She waits. “Well, who knows? It could happen. You and me, I mean. I’d just have to dump my boyfriend. I’d have to cheat on him. Of course, that’s always a possibility. Sometimes I do despise him. He lives in Berkeley, half a million miles away. And, after all, he’s an out-and-out android, this guy. Robby. Robby the Robot.”

“So let me ask you a question,” Nathaniel says, improvising. “There’s something I can’t remember about what happened when I drove you home. Did I talk about my father and my sister last night? Coolberg said I did.”

“Oh, him. Hell, I don’t know. I didn’t hear you saying anything like that. Forget him, all right?”

“All right. Sure. But I can’t forget him — he just called. Listen: he wants to go to Niagara Falls tomorrow evening. To see the gods come out, is what he says. I told him I wouldn’t go unless I brought you along. Can you come?” To break the pause that follows, he asks, “Will you come? You’ve got to.”

“All right,” she says. “Yes. But what’s all this about the gods? What gods?”

“How should I know? I’m not acquainted with them. You should ask him.”

“Nathaniel,” she says.

“What?”

“Take me somewhere. Right now. Okay? Come get me and take me somewhere. I’m alone here and I can’t stand it and I need to be delivered. I’ve been drinking stale burned coffee and having a breakdown. The kind where you tear paper into little strips and then stare at the phone? And you watch the sun crossing the sky? A day with no future? That kind.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“No, no, don’t ask me. I don’t care. Uh, wait: I do care. Last night, you said something about the Mirrored Room. The one in the Albright-Knox? Floors, ceilings, walls — all mirrors? That Lucas Samaras piece. We could do a trip over there. We need a break. We could be trapped in infinity. That’d be cool. Come get me in that strange little car of yours and take me to the Mirrored Room, all right? You remember where I live?”

“Yeah,” he says, hanging up in so much of a rush that he forgets to say good-bye to her, which is just what Coolberg does.

8

INSIDE LUCAS SAMARAS’S Mirrored Room, in his socks — once again, shoes must be left outside, and only two people can inhabit the room at one time — Nathaniel takes Theresa’s hand. He is making an effort to think, but this site itself disposes of ideas quickly, leaving the visitor empty and somehow impaired. The question of whether this assembly is “art” seems somehow beside the point, though what that point may actually be recedes and dissolves like all other points, into the mirrors. The air in the Mirrored Room smells rank, a soiled and not-at-all-friendly unventilated stenchy atmosphere in three cavernous dimensions. This eight-foot cube has a table and chair inside, placed against the opposing wall, both objects with mirrored surfaces, opposite which the only available light trickles in from the doorway, and either the glass has been tinted, or infinity itself, as revealed by the mirrors, is green, a color that in this particular case has been emptied of all hope. The mirrored chair appears to be a joke and affords no rest to the visitor. Light inside the room, dog-tired, bounces off the surfaces until it drops.

Nathaniel has been warned by a friend: the visitor to this room returns to the rest of the museum uncertain whether he has had an interesting experience or a dull one or any experience at all. Nothing attaches to the room, and visitors are usually eager to escape its confines.

Looking down, Nathaniel sees himself and Theresa, holding hands, reflected so that they stand underneath the floor, balanced upside down on the images of themselves, as if under a layering of lake ice, the two of them submerged, immersed in glass, duplicating themselves in an arc traveling farther downward toward the lake’s bottom, and, past that, into the earth’s core. Above them and to the sides, their images pile up on top of each other, daisy-chained into a green velvety vertical sky-darkness. Everywhere he looks, Nathaniel sees himself — t-shirt, jeans, jacket, socks — attached by hand and thus umbilicaled to Theresa, similarly t-shirted, jeaned, jacketed, socked, their eyes perfectly aligned. He is looking at the mirrors, and Theresa trades that look with hers, and he looks at her looking at him looking at the mirrors.

But if mirrors multiply space, they must also multiply time. Nathaniel peers into the visual soup created by the green mirrorglass. There he is. He sees himself, having aged, eighteen reflections down, eighteen/twenty/thirty years from now, holding Theresa’s hand. There he is, with her, in the disenchanted darkness, smaller, faded, old, a tiny bent nonagenarian. There he is, there they are, a particled assemblage of atoms and molecules; there they will be, aged, aging, in the mirrors, growing dark and gray and small, and, somewhere off in the temporal distance, pinpointed, exquisite human nebulae, dying and dead and then gone. He approaches the mirror to see what the expression on that person’s face is years from now, that person being him-self, though he can’t see it — him — because the closer he approaches the mirror, the more the distant images recede into nothingness, blanked out by himself. He can see these echoing images only if he stands away from them. From there, they are like almost invisible light from distant stars fueled by stone, flickering out.

“Nathaniel?” Theresa asks, grinning. The mirrors please her. She makes a sudden little guttural noise.

He can’t stand being in here; he can’t breathe. This room-sized speculum involves the domestication of the infinite. And that’s the least of it — the room feels disagreeable and really quite monstrous, meant to undermine the soul by wrapping it in reflections. And yet he smiles at her and picks her up as if they had consummated a joyous occasion in this room, and he carries her out, back into the adjoining day, a gray gallery of paintings safely held in their two dimensions. He lowers her, and she touches him quickly on the earlobe.

“That place made me wet. I started to come in there,” she says quietly, and it takes Nathaniel a moment before he understands what she means and then another moment before he can believe it, but when she offers him her tremulous hand, the skin gives him a faint but distinct erotic shock.

Unable to speak, he accompanies her to the car, takes her home, walks her to her apartment above the ice-cream shop, staying behind her as she seemingly floats up the stairs, his hand snuggled in the back pocket of her jeans while she unlocks the door and makes her way past the old vinyl-covered chair near the phone, where he kisses her.

When he breaks the kiss, he says, “A burglar was in my apartment last night.”

She seems unmoved. “Did he take anything?”

“No,” Nathaniel tells her. “I made him a cup of coffee. Anyway, he was only a burglar.” Strips of paper have indeed been scattered everywhere in her despair, and beyond the window, the afternoon sun is sputtering out. The room has caught the odors of the waffle cones on the first floor, and the vanilla-candy confectionery smell is on Theresa’s breath. Her cat, lying on top of a book of crossword puzzles, eyes Nathaniel with autistic worry and suspicion. Theresa leads him into the bedroom, where they spend the rest of the day and the evening. They forget to eat until long after dark.

“Don’t get any ideas,” she says, drowsy, her voice a flat-line, just before midnight, a few minutes after her last orgasm, when she has called out to Jesus again. “This doesn’t mean that I like you. Let’s not be sentimental.” She smiles and pats him on the cheek. “But I sure did like our field trip. Time for you to go home, honey.”

9

THE NEXT MORNING while he is making poached eggs for himself, his sister calls, as she always does on Sunday morning around ten o’clock. He knows Catherine’s calls from everyone else’s because she never speaks. She just listens while he talks. He does his best to fill his sister in on his life. The phone rings; he answers it. Silence from her. That’s their tradition.

“Hi, Catherine,” he says into the dead roar of long distance. He never asks her anything because there’s no point in asking; she can’t speak. How she can comprehend human speech but not be able to speak herself? A neurological mystery. In any case, every Sunday he has to concoct a newsy monologue for her. “So. I had a pretty good week. The classes are going well. Nothing to complain about there, really. It’s been raining. Friday night I went to a party and met this girl. Actually I’d met her before but we bumped into each other again outside the party, and we went in together. I took her home. And there was somebody else there, at this party, this guy named Coolberg…I don’t really know who he is, but he claims to know all about me. I don’t know how he knows. Yesterday afternoon I played basketball with these guys who are usually at this park, and in the morning I worked in the People’s Kitchen and…oh, I almost forgot to tell you. On Friday night I came home and there was a burglar in my apartment, but he was an okay guy and was stoned out of his mind and so I made coffee for him, and believe it or not, we almost became friends, maybe. So, anyway, yesterday I was working at the People’s Kitchen, the one I’ve told you about, and the burglar and his wife came in, Ben and Luceel — that’s their names. They introduced themselves. Funny coincidence. I don’t know, Sis, sometimes I think my life is full of these strange…happenings, these weird events that just drop on me. They remind me of what Jung wrote about concerning coincidences. Carl Jung, the psychologist? He talked about how there are no real accidents. He could be right. And so anyway yesterday afternoon this girl I met on Friday — I called her, her name’s Theresa, and we went over to the art museum here in town and went into a room that was made of mirrors, floor to ceiling. It made me feel, I don’t know, sort of woozy, like I would pass out, like I’d disappear somehow. Then I took her back to her place. I have to study this afternoon, but tonight this girl, Theresa, and I are going out to Niagara Falls, with Coolberg, the one who says he knows me, to see the gods come out. Well, I mean, that’s what he calls it. I don’t really know what he means by that, but I guess I’ll find out…”

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? 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 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 miniature, 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 travelogue 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 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.”

“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 machinery, 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 complex 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 automatized. 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.”

“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 pressure, 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 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?

“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.”

“And how long is that?” asks Theresa.

“We can make it happen,” Coolberg says, chuckling. “History is ours. For example.” He rises from the bench and shambles in his raincoat over to where the water laps against Goat Island. Theresa and Nathaniel follow him. Down below, the Niagara River seems to be calm, but, under the surface, probably isn’t. If you fell in that water, there would be no resisting it. All your earthly choices would be over.

“The gods are in the water,” Coolberg says. “That’s why they have the dynamo over there, down below, to capture them.” He waits for a minute. “People think that the gods are in the air, but they aren’t. They’re pulsating down below. They’re waterborne. Then they’re pushed by the generators into high power lines. Okay. I have an idea.”

“What’s your idea?” Nathaniel asks.

“I’ll stand here,” Coolberg says. “With my back to you, with me facing the river. And what you do is, you push me, and I’ll start to fall into the river, and then, after I’ve lost my balance but just before I fall, you reach out and you grab me. You pull me back.”

“I don’t like your idea,” Theresa says.

“Well, it’s a serious idea, and here I am,” Coolberg tells her, walking forward a few steps toward the embankment, where the park service has cleared away the scrub brush for the sake of the view. The distance to the water seems negligible, but it’s impossible to tell how deep the river might be here. He holds his arms out in a gesture of resignation, a shrug, or an imitation of a crucifixion, an homage to the gods he has claimed are located in this spot. In front of them, the river flows past, dividing. “Grab on to my coat,” he shouts.

Nathaniel takes a handful of cloth at midlevel in his right fist and another handful, lower, in his left. Then he unclutches his hands, letting Coolberg go.

“Okay,” Coolberg says. “Theresa,” he says, “push me into the river.”

Theresa looks down at her shoes. “Aren’t we too old for this?” she asks. “Aren’t we adults by now?”

“Give me a push.”

There is a moment when everything stops. Nathaniel glances up to see the masses of land in the distance — Grand Island and Navy Island. A late-autumn thunderstorm has opened the heavens with cumulonimbus clouds and lightning. As if in slow motion, Theresa gives Coolberg a tentative push, and Coolberg loses his balance. He appears to tilt forward yearningly toward the water and his own death, and at that point, Nathaniel, almost without thinking, lunges toward him. With one hand he grabs the back of his coat and with his left arm encircles Coolberg’s waist, pulling him back onto safe ground, while in the distance cloud lightning briefly illuminates the scene.

“Thank you. I’ve been saved. Your turn,” Coolberg says to Theresa. He turns to Nathaniel. “See? Something happened. It’s like a drug that wakes you up.”

Nathaniel expects Theresa to balk, but she doesn’t. She stands exactly where Coolberg stood, though she does not hold her arms out as he did, in the crucifixion shrug. Nathaniel cannot see her face clearly, but he can tell that her eyes are closed.

“Okay, I’m ready,” she says.

“I’ll do this,” Nathaniel announces, slipping in behind her. With his right arm, he gives her a slight push but with insufficient force to cause her to lose her balance or to fall forward. She does lean over, pantomiming a fall, as his arm clutches her just above the hip as a lover would, whereupon she falls backward into him, as if she knew all along that this stunt was a pretext for some good-natured fun. Somehow both his arms surround her now as if he were embracing her — no, not “as if,” because that’s actually what he’s doing, he realizes, as she squirms. She turns around and lifts her face to kiss him, standing on tiptoes, a quick kiss that he returns. Coolberg is of course watching this.

“Would you kiss her again?” he asks. “I’d like to see that.”

“No,” Nathaniel whispers angrily. “For Christ’s sake.”

“In that case, it’s your turn.”

Reluctantly, in a kind of dream state, Nathaniel releases Theresa to take his place in front of the embankment. Someone has always saved me, he thinks as he closes his eyes. When his father died and his sister lost her words, and his beautiful mother seemed about to be as unstable as a canoe in white water, his stepfather took over their care and removed the family to New York, to the sunny apartment on West End Avenue, walking distance to the overpraised Zabar’s. Life settled down long enough for him to grow to be a man and for his mother to regain her steady calm heart. For an instant, he remembers the rug in the doorway of his stepfather’s apartment on the eleventh floor of the building, its deep red weave.

Through his closed eyelids, he stares at the darkness before him. He listens to the water for a five-second eternity. Then two hands push at him, he begins to fall forward, and nothing reaches out at his sweater to pull him back. Nothing saves him.

12

LIFE IS A SERIES of anticlimaxes until the last one. Standing in the Niagara River with the water up to his waist, Nathaniel turns to see his friends. They are standing on the bank watching him, and Theresa may be screaming in laughter, but in the onrushing river noise, he can’t hear her; Coolberg continues to stare at him, or so it appears when the lightning illuminates the scene. If he loses his balance now, he’ll be gone forever, of course; he’ll be swept away. Why did they think that the river just off Goat Island would be over their heads? It’s nighttime and the water is dirty — they couldn’t see.

Nevertheless, he can’t move.

13

IN THE CAR heading back to Buffalo, Nathaniel says nothing. He has no observations to make about how he stepped gingerly back to the island, nothing to comment upon to either Coolberg or Theresa about their inability to reach out for him, no sly remarks about their collective intentions.

“Okay,” Coolberg says. “If you’re not going to say anything to us, do you mind if we turn on the radio?”

Theresa twists the knob, and a Buffalo station floats up into the car’s noisy silence. They’re playing the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows.”

The unearthly beauty of the music fills the car. Nathaniel listens: muted horns, strings, tapped blocks, sleigh bells, a linear vocal line lightly harmonized in thirds until, three-quarters of the way through, the music becomes vertical rather than horizontal, as the voices pile up in a series of increasingly complicated harmonies in a refrain—God only knows what I’d be without you—repeated and repeated and repeated, with a frightening emphasis on the word “what,” until the voices fade out, having absolutely nowhere to go. This is the song, Nathaniel knows, in which Brian Wilson handed over his heart to God and simultaneously lost his mind. The song is Brian Wilson’s favorite, the one he sold his soul for. After “God Only Knows” there were other songs, certainly, “Good Vibrations” and the rest of them, but the spirit had abandoned him: addressed not to a California girl, a sun-bleached surfer-chick, the refrain had been spoken to his own spirit, his genius, which, in one of those ironies of which life is so fond, left him there and then.

“Okay, I’ll talk to you,” Nathaniel says, turning the volume down, and both Coolberg and Theresa sigh with relief.

“So. How did you like the gods?” Coolberg asks.

“Would you stop with this talk about the gods, please? They were roaring,” he replies. “Anyway, what difference does it make?”

“Oh, hypothetically, it doesn’t make—”

“‘Hypothetically.’ That’s an interesting word, considering what we just did. Hypothetically, I could have just died. Hypothetically, you could have just witnessed my drowning. Both of you. You’re really hypothetical, Coolberg. I’ve noticed that.”

“But we’re students. With students, everything is hypothetical. Besides, we didn’t witness your drowning. We tried to—” Theresa begins.

“And if you had seen me go,” Nathaniel continues, “if I had disappeared, what then?”

“Oh, that’s easy,” Coolberg says from the backseat. “If we had seen you go, we would have been very sad. We would have presented the world with the grim face of tragedy.” His elegiac tone of voice seems distant, avuncular, ironic.

“Sad? Jesus. That’s not much,” Nathaniel says. They drive for another ten minutes until they enter the outskirts of Buffalo. As if he had been thinking about word choices all that time, Nathaniel says, finally, “‘Sad’ isn’t much of anything. I hate that word.”

“But there’s more,” Coolberg continues. “I wasn’t finished. You should let me finish. If you had disappeared, if you had died, we would have…we would have become you. We would have taken you on. We would have turned into you.” He waits. “You would have lived in us.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Nathaniel says. “Theresa, do you know what he’s talking about?” Theresa shakes her head. “See? Theresa doesn’t know either.”

“When a person dies,” Coolberg says, “the survivors take on the features of the deceased. The most eccentric traits are acquired first — tics, stuttering, shakes of the head. That’s how grieving works. The living reimagine themselves as the one who has gone missing. I would have taken you over. That’s what we would have done. I guarantee it.”

“Speak for yourself,” Theresa says.

“Oh, I never do that.” Coolberg laughs.

14

FOR THE NEXT TWO MONTHS, as Buffalo descends into winter, Nathaniel often finds himself in one of two sets of arms: Theresa’s or Jamie’s. He does not, for now, think of himself as a hypocrite or a two-timer.

His love for Theresa happens to be contaminated by his doubts about her vaguely empty character. Still, he can’t resist her nervous wit, or her catlike purring when they make love, or the sheer force of her physical attractions — her narrow waist, her perfect breasts, the knowing smile. As for Jamie, he has never been involved with a lesbian cabdriver before. Who has? The relationship, such as it is, follows no logic. The outcome is predictable. The situation bubbles on its surface with a comic pathos they both recognize: Please kiss me typically followed by Do I have to? Well, all women feign indifference, he believes. That’s their scene. Courtly love requires that men must be educated through rejection, patience, and gift-giving.

Jamie’s physical apathy toward Nathaniel gives her a certain distance about his needs, all needs, the human comedy of neediness, including her own. Indifference to him makes her into a wise guy. She is unsullied by any desire for him, and yet…With her, there are always those ellipses.

Standing on a kitchen stool near her refrigerator, replacing a bulb in the overhead fixture, he tells her, “Uh, you know, Jamie, I’m kind of falling in love with you. I’ve been dreaming about you lately.”

“Oh,” she says, “you are? You have been? And…where did that come from? That’s an odd…” She tilts her head at him in silent inquiry.

“Yeah, I know,” he tells her, screwing in the bulb and flinching when it suddenly goes on.

“Because…well…this is awkward,” she says, “and…um, impossible, though not…heartrending yet…but…yes, certainly impossible…”

All the ellipses, the negative space around her responses to him — how could he not notice them? He lowers himself to where she has placed herself, near him. She touches him tenderly on the shoulder in thanks.

“I thought I would break my neck,” he tells her. “If I fell off that stool, I mean.”

Because what else is happening is that on certain other evenings when he lies on the floor of her little studio, surrounded by molded geometrical objects she has fished out of junkyards and altered and made beautiful with her blow-torch, he gazes up at the quasi cylinders, metal Möbius strips, and Styrofoam tetrahedrons hanging by wires and string from the ceiling, and he finds himself aroused and shaken by her talent, her vision of airworthy topological surfaces. Surely, somewhere in the United States another cabdriver is making skeletal flying machines out of Styrofoam and discarded plastic and junked metal, but he doesn’t know where. Only here, on the Niagara Frontier, is such a gifted woman perfecting her art.

So out of masculine dutifulness and the tribute that love pays to accomplishment, he cooks dinner for her, elaborate three-course concoctions. He prepares the meals like a servant, a slave to love; he does not eat much himself, being enamored. A man in love cannot eat, keyed up as he is for a long journey. He listens to her disquisitions about the soul of materials, the mysteries of negative space, the genius of Giacometti and of David Smith, and the plotlessness of her interestingly fucked-up life, a life she claims she would not trade for anyone else’s. In return, she lets him hold her in preprogrammed ways on certain predetermined nights, and on occasion she takes pity on his luckless erections. Is she beautiful? He hasn’t always paid attention to that; her physical appearance seems irrelevant to his infatuation.

If she loved him the way a woman loves a man, she’d be jealous of Theresa. Or so Nathaniel likes to think. What interests her more (she claims) is Nathaniel’s futile love for a lesbian sculptor, herself, and his nonsensical love for a blandly intelligent Marxist would-be academic and ironist. These are bad options. She remains intrigued by his waffling, his male duplicity. He is a case study in the problem of the masculine. For the time being, she has suspended her interest in other women, so that she can observe him unimpeded. She asks to hear what Theresa is like in bed, and when he starts to inform her, she abruptly refuses to hear the details. Sex between him and Theresa empties their souls of content, so she claims. Surely he can’t be considering a vanilla life with such a trifling female, this…cipher.

Nathaniel lies on Jamie’s mattress on the floor, watching her as she works. Clad in overalls, she taps and hammers away at the head of a small metallic bird. She applies percussive techniques at the workbench and then seems ready to use her fiery equipment to weld another wing onto the bird’s torso until she decides that two wings are probably enough. On other evenings she assembles and disassembles rhombic dodecahedrons, meditating aloud on their shape, humming along to the radio or keeping up a monologue on arcane geometrical matters. Did Nathaniel know that Alexander Graham Bell, of telephone fame, once designed an elaborate flying contraption built out of small tetrahedron cells? No, he didn’t. Or that Bell invented a man-lifting kite, the ancestor of parasailing devices? No.

She keeps up three or four projects at once. Dinners prepared by Nathaniel bake in the oven as she turns her brooding attention to a football-shaped piece of metal, perhaps a blimp or dirigible of some kind, meant to hang somehow in the air. Music from the radio: Bartók’s second string quartet — clangorous Magyar scraping and sawing, sul ponticello wiry screeching, a Mitteleuropean racket perfect for a sculptor’s studio — snarls its way out of the speakers into the air, keeping the blimp suspended. Around seven on the nights he is permitted to stay, they eat dinner, and one particular evening over lamb chops he asks her why she’s a Roman Catholic.

“Oh, that? I’m sick in love with the Virgin Mary,” she says unsmilingly. “She’s my girl. I’ve been in love with her since I was ten years old. She came to me in a dream and said my name out loud. She’s not an idea. She’s real. I saw her face on the wall inside a movie theater, just before the lights went down. She exists. I’ve danced for her. She’s a fact in my life.”

“A movie theater. Like Max Jacob.”

“Who?”

“Max Jacob. He was a French poet, pre — World War II. Jewish. He saw the face of Jesus on the wall of a movie theater, and when it happened a second time, he went to the Fathers of Zion, an order dedicated to converting the Jews. At his baptism, Picasso served as his godfather.”

After dinner, he washes up, reads, and she takes a long bath in the claw-footed bathtub before she goes out to drive for Queen City Cab. On those nights when she isn’t working, she emerges from the bathroom wrapped in a towel, and she lies down with him on the mattress where he has been reading Norman O. Brown’s Love’s Body, a book whose ecstasies already seem dated and stale. Tonight, he puts the book aside. Together, naked under a comforter, they gaze up at the ceiling from which are suspended Jamie’s birds and blimps. Above the art and to the side, a ceiling fan rotates languidly.

“You know,” she says, “you’re kind of sweet, but I’ll never know why I got involved with you.”

“Because you thought I deserved it. You said so. You initiated this. Anyway, it’s not really involvement.”

“Oh, really? I have sucked your dick. That’s intimacy, isn’t it? Still, I guess you’re right. And I suppose I did start this, didn’t I? That’ll teach me. Why did I do that?” She drapes her left leg over him. Her thigh has a dancer’s taut muscular symmetry. “But you’re a delay. You’re just a man. You’re temporary.” She smiles at the ceiling. “You understand me. That’s the danger part. It’s like I’m Nixon, and you’re my Haldeman.”

“Don’t think so. You’re not Nixon. No woman can be Nixon. Not possible. He’s one of us.”

“Okay okay. But you know me and the sum of me and you seem to know what I want,” she says in a friendly growl. “You’re the first guy I’ve ever known who did. It’s unfair.”

“That’s right. I do know. You want to fly away.”

“Right. And I want another girl,” she says, “to fly away with me. Not you. I can’t fly away anywhere with you. With you, I’m grounded. Men are beasts of the ground.”

“Uh…you sure about that?”

“Absolutely. You’re all creatures of the mud. You can’t help it. I know this feels weird. That desire I’m supposed to have for you? I don’t have it. I sometimes wish it were there, but it isn’t.” She waits. “I sort of love you anyway, but a girl can’t go on doing charity work for a mud-beast forever.”

“See, the thing is,” he says, “you can treat me as hypothetical. That’s an adjective that guy Coolberg uses with me. Hypothetical this and hypothetical that. You haven’t met him, but—”

“Oh, yes, I have,” Jamie announces, her hand drifting down his chest. “He came a few days ago to the People’s Kitchen and struck up a conversation with me.”

“This was when?” Nathaniel has a sudden flushed sensation.

“Last week, I think. He asked me about working there, like he was planning on joining the collective. I couldn’t remember seeing him before. He’s friends with your other girlfriend, right? The real one? The one you’re cheating on, with me? Theresa? The straight girl with the great tits, the high IQ, and the ironic knowing smile?” There’s an accusatory pause. “Anyway, he asked me all sorts of questions about me. And you. Funny that I forgot to mention that I saw him. He seemed to know that you and I had this…well, I don’t know, okay, this hypothetical thing going. He was curious about everything. He’s a collector of facts, I guess. And so he told me a little bit about himself.”

“What did he say?”

“Oh, you know.”

“Actually, no, I don’t.”

“Well, he said he grew up in Milwaukee, until his family moved to New York, an apartment on West End Avenue. Didn’t you live in Milwaukee, too? And New York? That’s quite a coincidence. Anyway, he said he has a sister who was in a car accident and is mute. That’s a shame — I felt bad for him. He said his father died when he was quite young, of a stroke—”

Nathaniel sits up quickly. He feels cold sweat breaking out on his forehead, and his chest heats up. “Wait! What? He said what?”

“You heard me.” She looks over at him. “What’s the matter?”

For a brief moment, Nathaniel looks down at his shape under the comforter, as if some part of him is no longer there. Where his right foot should be, nothing. Quickly he scrambles out of bed and rushes into Jamie’s bathroom. His stomach has been seized with a sudden twist of electric current. He is afraid that he may be having a heart attack. A metaphysical nausea instantly converts itself into physical nausea, and he leans over the toilet bowl, staring downward. The seizure feels like a heart attack located in his gut. Maybe, he thinks, a heart attack can strike anywhere in the body. You could have a heart attack in your brain.

Jamie appears in the bathroom doorway, as naked as he is. In the midst of his nausea, he admires her legs. They are solid; they will not disappear on her. They will continue to hold her up, and maybe she will hold him up. “Nathaniel,” she says, “what’s going on?” She approaches him and puts her arm around him as if to support him, to keep him from falling.

He glances down to see if his right foot still exists. It does. It has returned. This is crazy, he thinks.

“That’s not his life,” Nathaniel says. Anger arrives belatedly. “The stroke, the mute sister, Milwaukee, New York — that’s all mine. That’s not his. It’s my life.”

“He’s claiming your life?” Jamie asks. “That’s preposterous.”

“Okay, yeah, I know. But that’s what he’s doing.”

“Are you feeling sick? Are you okay?” In the mirror’s reflection, Jamie’s face shows high-level concern, her dazzling eyes signaling that she’s at home and the lights burn brightly. At this moment, when Nathaniel sees her face reversed in the mirror, he thinks that Jamie is the most beautiful woman he has ever looked upon, even though she is not beautiful. He is having another Gertrude Stein moment. She is beautiful although she is not beautiful.

“I have to go,” Nathaniel tells her. On her bathroom mirror she has stuck a little decal that says WATERFOUL OBSERVATION SITE. In the bathtub is her collection of yellow rubber ducks and ducklings and orange shampoo bottles. The bathroom smells of primal girl. One of her metal dirigibles hangs from the bathroom ceiling. Jamie’s little tchotchkes constitute a conspiracy of the hapless and lovable and airborne.

“Can’t this wait?”

“I mean, it won’t. No, it can’t wait,” he says, his verbal confusion adding to his rage. Something must be done. He feels like pulling down a few window shades and tearing them into small bitter pieces.

“Why did he do all that? Why does he want your life? Is he in love with you?”

Nathaniel says nothing.

“I bet he’s in love with you.” She stands behind him and reaches around him to lean her head against his shoulders. “I’m sort of worried about you.” She waits while Nathaniel notices that “sort of”—must everything she does be qualified? — and she touches him on the chest. “You’re not going to hurt him, are you?” Little whiffs of physical desire are making their way from her toward him, little fugitive hetero longings. In the mirror, her eyes bore into him and her brow is furrowed. Maybe his current psychic crisis energizes her. His sudden suffering makes her want to bed him down. But it’s his suffering she wants to have, to lay her hands on, not him.

“Oh, Jamie, not now,” he says. He turns around and kisses her, then breaks the embrace to put his clothes on.

The metallic bird hanging to the side of the door sways back and forth, given life by his rushed departure.

15

NO ONE ANSWERS at the Coolberg residence. Nor does he respond to pressed call buttons in the apartment building where, numerous times, Nathaniel has dropped him off. On the callboard are six names:

Wendego

Highsmith

Augenblick

H. Jones

Bürger-Wilson

Golyadkin

In Nathaniel’s current state, they all feel like bogus names invented by a mad postmaster. No Coolberg here. Is there a Coolberg anywhere? The name itself sounds fictional and implausible, a poor effort at whimsy.

He calls Coolberg’s number all night. No one answers.

At home the next morning, he stares at the telephone before calling his stepfather at his New York office on Water Street, near the East River with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge. On warm days when the wind is right, his stepfather claims, he can get a whiff of the Fulton Fish Market. Nathaniel hates to disturb him, but he needs some advice from a fully qualified adult. His stepfather is a “semi-pro capitalist,” as he calls himself. An investor in start-up companies, he’s an easygoing, charming moneymaker unafflicted by true greed. He doesn’t mind being disturbed at work. He’s placid and detached, observing with disinterested attention the tidal flow of capital. All he wants is to get his hands in that water from time to time and scoop out a few cupfuls of cash. The system continues to function thanks to coolheaded minor players like him. The raptors come and go on huge reptilian wings. Nothing surprises this man; nothing shocks him. His worldliness is a perpetual relief from everyone else’s naïveté.

After chatting for a minute or so, his stepfather says, “So. Buddy boy. Something on your mind?” Nathaniel tells him that he has a problem. “Tell me,” his stepfather says quietly, and Nathaniel hears an audible creak as his stepfather leans back in his leather chair. All successful middle-aged males love to listen to stories and to give advice, Nathaniel has noticed. They feel that mere survival has given them the right to pontificate. It’s the Polonius syndrome; they all have it. But this one, this man, adores narratives; he is, by nature, an anecdotalist.

Nathaniel explains the intricacies concerning Coolberg to his stepfather, presenting the story as straightforwardly as possible. When he is finished, his stepfather clears his throat. He is going to respond to Nathaniel’s story with another story. It is his way.

During his junior year in college in Maine, his stepfather says, a particularly bad winter dropped itself down over the community: colossal snows, day after day of subzero temperatures, radiators clanking all day, students coughing and getting frostbite and pneumonia. “Imagine the silences. Everything muffled. You couldn’t even see outside,” he says. “The frost and snow blocked the windows.” No one could go anywhere. No one wanted to risk driving off the roads into a slow demise from disorientation and hypothermia. The roads were more or less impassable, but because most of the college faculty lived nearby, classes went on as scheduled. The sidewalks had snow piled on either side as high as your head — it was like walking through a tunnel just to get to calculus class. Old men died shoveling out their driveways. Their wives began talking to their cats on a daily, hourly basis. People had the feeling that the snows would never stop, that the flakes would continue to drift downward forever, lazily and implacably covering everything in a terrible white stupor.

“An old-fashioned winter. So we all burrowed in and found various occupations.” The college bookworms curled up with their books; the basketball players played endless rounds in the gym; the lovers stayed in their beds, making love nonstop in the hope of reviving spring. Some slept together naked with their doors open, on display — modesty, for some reason, having abandoned them, the terrible privacy of a perpetual snowstorm calling forth its opposite, prideful noisy exhibitionism and shamelessness more often associated with the exposed skin of the tropics than with New England. Such cohabitation wasn’t allowed in those days, but all the rules were being ignored. But for everyone else, those not completely erased by studiousness or by the fortunes visited by love, the snows became a spiritual and psychological problem — how to be distracted from the maddening iron chill, the accumulating white silences falling out of the sky?

Somehow, an idea was born, no one knew from where, one of those ideas that arises like bacteria spreading overnight in spoiled food. A bunch of guys formed a social club, the Merry Andrews. Six of them at first, then a dozen, then more, including a few women. They met surreptitiously. They called each other “Andrew” everybody was an Andrew. Everybody dressed in identical clothing as the snows fell hour by hour outside. Women became Andrews and were invited into the drunken meetings filled with absurdist bureaucratic business about whom to admit and what protocols to follow. “Hello, Andrew,” they said to each other. They affected the same speech patterns, they acquired identical tics during their encounters — the parties began in the afternoons and went through the nights into the following days until the beer and cigarettes inevitably ran out, when they would discuss the future: the future generally, and the future of the Andrews, and where to obtain more beer, more Scotch, more cigarettes, more drugs. All the Andrews seemed to get drunk at about the same time, and they all seemed to share the same tastes in the same songs, which they sang or played repetitively on their phonographs. They disappeared into each other; they vanished into a collectivity. Then the phenomenon spread to the college at large, at a slightly higher voltage. For two weeks, all the undergraduates called themselves “Andrew” in this epidemic folly, and a general breakdown in morals followed, as Andrews mated with other Andrews. The snow had induced this. The Southerners lost their drawls, the Midwesterners their flat vowels — everyone began to speak alike, except for the athletes, and the lovers, and the bookworms, who paid no attention.

“Then what happened?” Nathaniel asks.

“Then the sun came out,” his stepfather says, “and everything returned to normal. Individuals became themselves again.”

Nathaniel does not believe this story, but he appreciates his stepfather having taken the trouble to think it up and to tell it. The narrative seems like a mask covering over another actual story that his stepfather will never tell, so Nathaniel asks, “Did anyone kill anybody else?”

His stepfather, puzzled, says that of course no one killed anyone else. Why would he ask such a question? “Why do you ask? People like us don’t kill each other,” he says. “We don’t do that. But, now that I think about it,” he adds, as an afterthought, “two people, two of these Andrews, did try to kill themselves.”

“Each other?”

“No, themselves,” his stepfather insists. “You know, suicide.” He waits. “But they didn’t succeed.” Then he says something that sounds like his verdict on this particular history. “You know, few people really want to become individuals,” he says. “People claim that they do, but they don’t. They want to retain the invisibility of childhood anonymity forever. But that’s not possible except in a police state. In an ordinary life, you have to become yourself.” He takes a deep breath. “So. Classes going well?”

“Oh, yeah, the classes are fine.”

“Good. Your mother’s good. She misses you. Your sister’s all right, too.”

That “all right” also has a touch of the disingenuous itself, Catherine’s condition being timeless and unreconciled to reality. Having refused to give up her lifelong mourning, she lives outside of Milwaukee in a small group home with a view of Lake Michigan. There, minded by salaried employees, she passes a contemplative life colored by the narrow spectrum of apathy, except for episodes at the piano. She has been given antidepressants, sedatives, and stimulants, but still she does not speak. She reads, or seems to: she glares at the words and turns the pages with impatient finger flicks. Occasionally she peeps and squeaks. But when she sits down at the keyboard, she plays with a rather frightening virtuosity, though without any recognizable human feeling — the music emerges from the instrument with the dead expressionism of a player piano switched on in an empty room. Catherine’s face remains vacant no matter what musical notation passes in front of her or what her fingers find to do to occupy the time.

The subject of the job market removes Catherine from the conversation, and soon his stepfather tells Nathaniel that he has to go back to work. If this were a real crisis, the old man would stay on the line, but for him identity has nothing to do with money or with how the world actually works, and that is that.

“Thanks, Pop,” Nathaniel says. He puts down the phone and looks around at the comfortable dinginess of his apartment, now, thanks to the absence of valuables, unburglarizable. Outside the window, a cardinal chirps frantically as if affrighted. Nathaniel would like to snap off his imagination and its multiple narratives, but it’s stuck in the ON position, and if he didn’t live in his imagination half the time, he wouldn’t be himself, and he wouldn’t be bothered by Coolberg. Maybe he wouldn’t be bothered by anything, period. He would live on the Blessed Isles.

He leans forward to gaze out the window. He sees his own reflection in the glass. What good is an identity, anyway? his reflection asks him. For that matter, what good is a reflection? I lived in Wisconsin before I lived in New York, he tells the reflection, these were my parents, I broke my arm when I was twelve and Brian Hennerley tackled me when we were playing touch football, I first kissed a girl when I was fourteen, I remember she was ticklish…the rubble of the personal, the dust motes of the specific. Who cares who you are? the reflection asks, pointing at him. Every identity consists of a pile of moldering personal clichés given sentimental value by the fact that someone owns them. The fallacy of the unique! A rubbish heap of personal data, anybody’s autobiography. You can’t sell it or trade it. Besides, everyone has an autobiography, the principle of inflation thereby causing each one to be worthless.

Well, okay, the reflection admits, maybe some identities do shape up better than others thanks to the clothing of grace and good fortune. Of course, of course, of course, of course. Some identities are significantly richer than others, you’d have to be a fool to deny it. Better, more magnificent sins enacted on satin sheets in the penthouse, with music piped in through the floor grates along with the perfume, lend a certain robust glory to a man’s memory trove. Whereas some existences are empty dry sockets giving off the radiation of pain, victimization, mere shadows on the wall, dim bulbs, lethal vicissitudes, black holes in space, gigantic gravitational vacuums piloted by hungry ghosts…

Nathaniel finds that he is sweating again as these gigantic formless concepts tumble out of the window glass’s reflection into him, taking up mental occupancy. The unpleasantness of these ideas causes him to radiate a nervous malodorous sweat that he himself can smell and be offended by, and to remedy the smell of himself, he rushes to his closet to put on a clean shirt. He searches among the hangers and in the dresser drawers for the blue Brooks Brothers that his sister gave him, once upon a time, the one with thin rust-colored vertical stripes and a button-down collar, the shirt that always cheers him up, the wonder-working shirt. Wearing it makes him into a serious man, what they used to call a man of parts. Outside, snow has started to fall and is tapping against his bedroom’s window glass. The cardinal is no longer chirping, his reflection has disappeared, and the shirt’s not here — it has gone conspicuously missing. The dresser drawer advertises its own emptiness. And what about the white shirt his stepfather gave him, the one tailored in Italy, the elegant Fratelli Moda? What about that one? That one isn’t here either.

Where did they go? Who would burglarize two shirts?

Where are my shirts?

16

AT ONE OF THE TABLES in the dining area of the People’s Kitchen sits Ben the Burglar, alone, slurping his soup. He wears a red cap. He eats with his gloves on, spoon in his right hand, lit cigarette in his left. Today he sports a pair of old tortoiseshell glasses, a 1940s look, that of a chump in a downtown diner wearing a cheap disguise, behind which his junkie eyes peer at his fellow citizens. A bruise shines from the left side of his jaw. Deep film-noir shadows fall on him; blue smoke rises from his head. It is four o’clock in the afternoon, and Nathaniel sits down next to him uninvited.

“Whad I do this time?” Ben asks without looking up. He swallows, then takes a puff from the cigarette.

“I’m missing two shirts,” Nathaniel says. “I think you know where they are.”

“Would you let me finish?” Ben slows down the eating process, savoring each bite of potato, carrot, and stew meat. Why hasn’t he taken off his gloves? He needs a gangster affectation.

“You broke into my place again. That was unfair.”

“So?” Ben smiles. “You didn’t mind when I did it before.” Confessions of misdeeds apparently emerge easily from this hard-boiled guy. Like any tradesman, he takes pride in his work and in a job successfully accomplished. He smiles coldly, blowing smoke upward toward the ceiling. It is an era when people still know how to smoke and eat at the same time.

“So why did you take those shirts?”

“You forgot to lock the door again, for starters. I took a pair of pants, too,” Ben says thoughtfully. “And a pair of shoes.”

He’s now madly grinning with self-love. Also, his speech has slowed down, an effect caused by the good life of cigarettes, food, and opiates. For him, heroin is to experience what salt is to rice. It makes it palatable.

“How come you took them?”

“How come? I was on commission.”

“You were what?”

“You’re funny when you pretend to be deaf.” Ben gazes up at the ceiling with merriment. His eyes mist over. Life is one long spree. He taps out ash on the coffee cup’s saucer, then rotates the cigarette’s tip on the china, a delicate gesture suitable for a dollhouse.

“On commission from whom?”

“‘Whom.’ I like that.” He shakes his head in admiration. “You sure got yourself a good education somewhere.”

“Oh, fuck you, Ben.”

“Okay, there you go, fuck me,” Ben replies, rubbing his chin violently before lifting his eyebrows to express radical innocence in the line of questioning from this overeducated spoilsport. After taking one last long drag from his cigarette, he stubs it out on the saucer and exhales smoke through his teeth. He resumes foraging in the bottomless bowl of soup, prolonging the moment to excruciation, a delay that evidently delights him, because he smirks. Now, with his left gloved hand, free of the cigarette, he lifts a piece of bread, taking a delicate bite. The bread has been slathered with butter, and butter affixes itself to his chin, giving him the look of a polished wooden marionette.

“Coolberg. It was Coolberg, right? He found you.”

The burglar shrugs. “A man’s gotta eat.”

“Which you’re doing. For free. It’s not as if you’re dining off your ill-gotten gains.”

“That’s right. I gave the ill-gotten gains to Luceel. My wife. You remember her. You let yourself meet her, which she didn’t want to do, with you. She didn’t like your looks. She didn’t want to make your acquaintance. Listen, I tell you what.” Ben straightens up. His comic momentum appears to have diminished. “So here I am, okay, right? Eating?” He talks and chews with his mouth open, exposing his nutrition. “So. Okay. So look around at my kingdom.”

Nathaniel involuntarily takes in the People’s Kitchen. Its sights and smells — the graying dust on the front windows, the vinegary odor of cooked food and gamy dirty clothing, the collection of cast-off benches and chairs on which the four other shabby diners sit, absorbing what nourishment they can, the cars on Allen Street rumbling by in a gray audible haze — the entire scene, he knows, should depress him with its overtones of despondency, what his stepfather used to refer to, smilingly, as miserabilium. Gray day, grayer mood. But no: he feels comforted and slightly elated to be here among scruffy outcasts. These are his people.

“So what’s your point?” Nathaniel asks.

“My point? My point? Listen, there’s gotta be a word for people like you, people who get off being around people like me. I’m just trying not to go down the drain here, man. Maybe you haven’t noticed: my future ain’t what it used to be.”

He rubs at his chin. He is working himself up and shivers with agitation.

“You look at me. Okay, I got a habit. Also I got a pregnant wife, but we love each other, me and Luceel, and you come in here, asking me questions like I’m some award you got in the Good Deed Department. You sit there, college boy, pretending like I got a whole bunch of choices in life, a cookie jar full of cookies. You got a word for yourself, for what you are, you little shit, you slimeball educated fuck?” He says this quietly, with scary neutrality.

“A sentimentalist,” Nathaniel says. “But I thought we were talking about my stolen shirts.”

“Whatever.” Ben takes another bite of bread. Outside a siren passes. “So, on account of you once made me a cup of coffee, I’ll say this to you, at least: No, it wasn’t whoever you said it was, Iceberg or Coolberg or Kustard or whatever the fuck his name is or was, who asked me for a couple of your shirts and the other stuff. Hey, someone comes up to me, askin’ for help on a job, offering money, I don’t ask this jerkoff who they are and what they want this shit for. I just do it.”

“So who was it? Who was he?”

“Not a ‘he.’ It was a her. Your girlfriend.”

“Jamie? What would Jamie want with my clothes?”

“That’s funny. You’re funny. Jamie. I like that. Me, I do my women one at a time. Sorry to disappoint you. I never heard of this Jamie. Wasn’t her.”

“Theresa?”

“That’s the one.”

“How’d she find you?”

“Guess you must’ve told her about me.”

“Did she talk to you here?”

Ben shakes his head emphatically. “We’re finished, you and me. No more questions, and no more answers neither.” Ben takes his spoon and taps it twice on the soup bowl. “No, wait a minute, I just thought of something.” He turns to gaze through his film-noir eyeglasses at Nathaniel for a long moment, during which the sounding clatter of dishware comes out of the kitchen, and Ben takes a stagy cigarette from his shirt pocket, sticks it into his mouth, and lights it with a safety match. Outside on the street, a car hoots. “You know what? I’m better than you.” He inhales and nods, agreeing with himself. “Much better. I love my wife, is the thing. I don’t have to apologize about that to no one. Okay, I’m a big screw-up. I’m a flop as a moneymaker. Mistakes were made. But I’m okay with that. You could even say I was happy, once I was dead.” He points the cigarette at Nathaniel, and Nathaniel flinches. “And you are whatever you are.”

17

HIDEOUSLY PERKY and upbeat, Theresa on the phone informs Nathaniel that, yes, indeed, she will certainly discuss the theft of his clothing (a joke! for heaven’s sake! a joke!), but, no, she will not do so at his apartment or at hers, which she refers to as “ma maison,” the sexy irony in her voice side by side with comic pretentiousness. Then she coughs and says, “We’re certainly not going to have a ‘long serious talk,’ as you call it, while we’re sitting around somewhere. I don’t like sedentary quarrels.” Instead, they will meet at Delaware Park at the west end of the pond, and together they will jog until they reach the zoo, whereupon they will greet the lions and tigers and bears in the name of humanity before turning around and jogging back. Recriminations, she says with her customary cheerful detachment, are staged more effectively while doing something else, such as exercising or monitoring wild animals. He offers to pick her up, but she says that she will walk over to the park from Hertel Avenue by herself, as a warm-up.

Halfway there, adjusting the volume control on the VW’s staticky inadequate radio while gazing out at the block south of the Central Park Grill, Nathaniel notices a man walking his dog, a huge mottled mongrel probably acquired at the pound. The dog pulls the man forward at the end of his — the dog’s — leash, the man himself in the forward-tipping posture of a pre-topple, and just when the man does in fact lose his balance and Nathaniel simultaneously finds a good strong radio signal, he has one of those crippling thoughts that occasionally come into the mind unimpeded: Theresa is of course Coolberg’s lover. She plays the chords of betrayal every day as a lark, monogamy being a hilariously bourgeois bad habit, as is, or was, the story of her ex, Robby the Robot who resides in Berkeley, and furthermore, if he — Nathaniel — actually loved her instead of just thinking that he did, he would have already called her by now. He would have called her immediately. He would have confided in her, man to woman, lover to lover, as soon as he had found out from Jamie, who (the epiphanies will not stop) is the woman he actually loves, that Coolberg was clothed in his — Nathaniel’s — autobiography. And now his actual clothes.

The pronouns are getting horribly mixed up. His, hers.

I am sometimes oblivious but seldom obtuse. Now I am both.

Maybe I am not actually here anymore.

18

IN THE PRECISE SPOT where she had said she would be, Theresa, wearing warm-up garb, stands stretching and flexing, and when she catches sight of Nathaniel, she smiles. It’s tough to carry through on a grudge against an attractive insincere woman when she smiles at you that way. The smile is like an irresistible cheap song. Nathaniel smiles back. He can’t help himself. No wonder they call what she has a winning smile. She wins. She always wins. Her hair’s held back in that same ponytail she had displayed when he first met her, and now she leans over to limber up, placing her hands almost flat on the ground, and when she straightens, she takes him in her arms quickly and kisses him in a perfunctory good-morning way.

“April fool,” she says.

“It’s still November.”

“You’re so serious,” she announces, tapping his chest. “And literal. You’re earnest. I don’t like that part of you. Well, are you ready to run?”

He nods. She takes off her sweatpants and trots over to Nathaniel’s car, which she evidently knows is always unlocked on principle (another one of Nathaniel’s principles, like the nonexistence of a watch on his wrist), and drops them in.

Before he has been able to stretch or loosen up, she takes off. Theresa has gained the distance of a city block when he finally catches her. He’s reasonably fit and manages to overtake her without too much trouble, but when they reach a jogging path, she sprints ahead of him.

“So what’s your question?” she asks him, throwing the words to him, backwards, behind her.

“Those shirts?” he asks. “That burglar?”

“Him? Ben? You introduced us, remember?” Nathaniel remembers no such thing. “Anyway, I wanted to wear one of your shirts, to have you close to me. Really, Nathaniel, I do have moments like that.”

Nathaniel jogs around a hissing overfed goose, which lunges at him, and he tries to coordinate his pace with Theresa’s. But she has a habit of changing her speed whenever he’s next to her. A bird seems to be flying alongside him, and one of his familiars, a bag lady with a Band-Aid on her forehead caked with dried blood, stares at him fixedly from a bench. He runs off to the side to make way for another jogger, and when he does, Theresa slows down.

“I don’t think I believe you. I think you gave my clothes to Coolberg.”

“Why would I do that?” She falls in behind him. “Well, maybe I did do that.”

“Are you seeing him?” he asks, throwing off the words to the wind.

She says something that sounds like “Seeing him? Of course I’m seeing him,” and Nathaniel would feign surprise and stop dead in his tracks, but he can’t pretend to be shocked — it would be insincere shock — and besides, he’s in no position to complain to her about anyone’s sexual duplicity. He’s not angry because he’s not jealous because he doesn’t love her. Also, she can’t see the expression on his face, so why bother? “And you,” she seems to say, from behind him. “You’re balling that dancer, that cabdriver.”

“How do you know?” he asks the wind.

“I followed you once,” the wind says to him, without inflection. “I looked in through the window at you two. She was performing for you. Scarves and shit. Very Isadora Duncan.”

This seems possible, so he drops the subject. Why isn’t she angry, if she took the trouble to be a voyeur? Maybe she just has a little curiosity about him, a shallow blank desire that lighted on him before it found its way into another corner, to another object, a suitable target for her brand of erotic whimsy. She is a kind of avant-garde lover, the type who will try anything without being truly invested in it. Voyeurism suits her perfectly; from where she watches, she occupies a zone of safety.

“Is Coolberg wearing my clothes right now?”

“Could be. He’s writing a story. He needs to be you for a while.”

“Oh, no.” He feels as if he’s been kicked in the stomach. He struggles for breath as he runs. At last he manages a question. “What’s the story about?”

Theresa catches up to him, jogs alongside him for a minute, then accelerates. Ahead of him, tossing up mud and dirt from her running shoes, she says, “He’s writing a book called Shadow.” She’s panting slightly now from her exertions. “The first part is about a solar eclipse. The second section is set around the time of World War I and is about someone named Pierre Chadeau who’s followed around by his cousin, Henri l’Ombre, a ghost, who died on the front in Belgium. The third part takes place entirely at night. That’s the one with you in it.”

“What role do I play? What do I do?”

She slows down again, turning around, jogging backwards, facing him. She seems to have no fear of stumbling or running blindly, backwards, into anything. She raises her hands to her forehead and sticks her index fingers out toward him, as horns. “You’re the devil,” she says, grinning.

19

THE ZOO SHOULD HAVE BEEN loud and smelly, with children milling around taunting the big cats for having been caught and caged, their kiddie-mockery accompanied by peanut shells launched toward the bars, and contemptuous laughter hurled at the now harmless teeth, the useless claws. There should have been trumpeting by unhappy elephants, desperate despairing silent roars sent up into the air by the voiceless imprisoned zebras, and there should have been peacock-shrieking.

But sometimes it happens that we enter a public place and find that, for once, the law of averages has broken down. We step gingerly into the darkened movie theater; the film starts, and we are the only ones in attendance, the only spectators to laugh or scream or yawn in the otherwise empty and silent rows of seats. We drive for miles and see no one coming in the other direction, the road for once being ours alone. Our high beams stay on. Where is everybody? The earth has been emptied except for us as we make our stuttering progress through the dark. We take each turn expecting that someone will appear out of nowhere to keep us company for a moment. In the doctor’s anteroom, no one else is waiting and fidgeting with nerves, and the receptionist has vanished; or we find ourselves alone in the fun-house at the seedy carnival, where, because of our solitude, there will be no fun no matter what we do; or we enter the restaurant where no one else is dining, though the candles have all been lit and the place settings have been nicely arranged. The waitstaff has collectively decamped to some other bistro even though they have left the lights on in this one. The water boiling in the kitchen sends up a cloud of steam. The maître d’ has abandoned his station; we can sit anywhere we please. The outward-bound commuter train starts, but no one else sits in the car, and no conductor ambles down the aisle to punch a hole in our ticket. In the drugstore no one is behind the cash register, and the druggist has left the prescription medications unmonitored on their assorted shelves. We enter the church for the funeral, and we are the first to arrive, and we must sit without the help of the ushers. Where are they? No sound, not a single note or a chord or a melody line from the organ loft, consoles and sustains us.

Such occasions are so rare that when they occur, we often think I don’t belong here, something is wrong or Why didn’t they inform me? or Let there be someone, anyone, else. But for the duration, when the law of averages no longer applies, we are the sole survivors, the only audience for what reality wishes to show us. This may be what the prophets once felt, this ultimate final aloneness.

So it was for Nathaniel and Theresa entering the Buffalo Zoo. “It looks like the maintenance hour,” she says, briefly jogging in place. “Nobody’s here.”

“Nobody’s here,” Nathaniel says, repeating her phrase, stating the obvious out of sheer surprise.

“And the cages are empty,” she says, pointing. Before them is a large zoological space defined by bars in front and walls on the side, and a small landscape near the back with a water trough, on which float a few haystraws. Where is the rightful inhabitant, the animal?

“Isn’t there a sign for what’s supposed to be in there?” he asks.

She looks up. “No.” She turns and with a thin smile seems about to say something. Then she touches her finger to her mouth and shakes her head twice. How complicated, and yet how simple, her inner dialogues must be.

Nathaniel pivots away from her and walks in a northward direction. Here are other cages, a few with identifying labels, and although some animals are on display, they are, one and all, sleeping. Here is Mika the Tiger, stretched out, eyes closed, possibly tranquilized. Over there is Gottfried the Panther — the name is affixed to the bars — also slumbering. Have all the animals here been given narcotics? He remembers a story about the Cumaen Sybil, who was granted a wish for eternal life but forgot to ask for eternal youth to accompany it, and who was immured in some sort of pen, where she grew older and older and smaller and smaller, until she was no larger than a spot of dust, crying out for death to deliver her.

Perhaps they have brought her here.

“I’m not a devil,” Nathaniel says to Theresa.

“Well, it’s his story,” Theresa informs him, rubbing down her calves, “and he’ll decide what you are. You present various temptations, don’t you? In the meantime he’s wearing your shirts and your shoes.” She takes his hand. “I don’t see why you have a problem with that.”

“Ever heard of private property? Ever heard of theft? Besides, where has he been? I haven’t seen him lately. It’s as if he’s been hiding,” Nathaniel says, releasing her hand but keeping his eye on her legs, which are ostentatiously long and smooth-muscled. “He doesn’t answer the phone and he doesn’t seem to live in the building where I thought he lived.”

“Nothing dates like the past,” Theresa says with a slow drag on the word “past,” as if this exposition were all old, tedious information with which she couldn’t be bothered.

“Well, where is he, then?”

Theresa points. “Coolberg? He’s right over there.”

In the distance, through the pedestrian avenue between cages and the shuttered popcorn stand, is a bench on which Coolberg sits, facing them, one arm flung back. Theresa has conjured him out of nothing. When Nathaniel sees him, Coolberg raises his eyes from the book he’s reading and meets Nathaniel’s gaze, quizzically. The gaze turns into another stare. Some sort of telepathy has informed him that now is the moment for the exchange of glances. Under his unzippered jacket, the Brooks Brothers shirt he wears does not quite fit him, and the trousers need alteration, downward, about a half inch. The shoes appear to fit perfectly.

“You arranged this,” Nathaniel says. “You planned this out and arranged this.”

“Oh, no,” she replies. “The totally empty zoo? An accident. The bored sleeping animals? A mere coincidence. Don’t call me a bitch before you’re ready to back it up.”

“I never called you a bitch. I never did that.” The outside air has the enclosed noncirculatory staleness of a cedar closet, and Nathaniel feels his hands closing up into clenched fists. As he runs toward Coolberg, he hears Theresa say something whose exact words he can’t make out. But the sentence sounds like “Don’t hit him.”

When he arrives in front of Coolberg, Nathaniel says, “Stand up.”

“Hi, Nathaniel. Ever read this?” He holds up a book entitled The Wandering Beggar.

“No. Stand up.”

“Why?” He seems puzzled. “I’m glad to see you.”

“Stand up so I can slug you.”

“What good would that do? If you hit me, nothing would really happen.”

“Something would happen. I’d feel good.”

“Oh, but you’re not like a character in a movie. Why act like one? That’s a movie line. You keep underestimating yourself. You make yourself into less than you are. Well, you can hit me if you really want to, I suppose. I suppose you have the moxie for it. And by the way, I’m going to return your clothes and this pair of shoes in a few days, you know. I was always going to return them. I just needed them for a while.”

“Stand up.”

“Don’t be that way. Ah, here’s Theresa.” Coolberg does indeed stand up as Theresa joins them. She’s humming “Here Comes the Sun” in a high cheerful soprano. For some reason, her hands are crossed over her breasts. Ignoring her, Nathaniel hauls back and swings his fist into Coolberg’s stomach. But Coolberg is an unsatisfactory victim, and the sensation is oddly like punching a Bozo the Clown doll. Nathaniel’s fist meets little or no resistance, as if the fogged-in body it struck had anticipated and already made a place for the fist, accommodating this and every other occasion of physically intrusive violence, with fog. Nevertheless, Coolberg gasps and falls back onto the bench. The strangest part of it is that Theresa does not stop humming the Beatles tune as she reaches around Nathaniel to keep him from swinging his fist again. But how would he hit a man sitting on a park bench anyway? One blow must suffice.

“Okay…now you’ve done that…sit down.” Coolberg gasps.

After what seems to be a blank, a blackboard of empty space and time suddenly inscribed with a few chalky words of instruction that vanish as soon as they have appeared, Nathaniel finds himself sitting on the bench next to Coolberg. Despite his intention to leave these confounding people at the zoo and to drive home, here he is nevertheless, their straight man. Around Coolberg, good intentions have a negligible effect. Coolberg, the recipient of Nathaniel’s sudden attack, appears to have resumed reading The Wandering Beggar and now obligingly begins a plot summary. In the meantime Theresa has maneuvered her body, and herself, behind the two men and has one hand on Coolberg’s shoulder and another hand on Nathaniel’s. Her puppeteer fingers — she wears bright maroon nail polish — have him in a controlling grip. They rise and begin to caress his neck.

I love these stories, Coolberg says. They’re about the adventures of Simple Shmerel, who travels from village to village. It’s almost like The Arabian Nights.

Theresa kneads Nathaniel’s shoulder. Then her finger-tips move up to his earlobes.

This story, the one I’m reading now, is about Calman, the rich merchant, and Zalman, his coachman.

“I’m leaving,” Nathaniel says.

Zalman is a good coachman, honest and sober. He even goes to bed early. But he has a vice: he imitates his master. For instance, he walks with his hands clasped behind his back in a thoughtful posture, like Calman’s own attitude and bearing when walking, and he imitates his master’s tone of voice and uses many of the same words and expressions.

“Let go of me,” Nathaniel says.

One day Zalman steals Calman’s clothes and begins to wear them. Now no one can tell Zalman and Calman apart, so alike do they appear. The two of them, master and man, are indistinguishable even to those who know them. Both have glossy black beards and brown eyes. Zalman begins to give orders to Calman, and Calman protests. He does not take orders! He himself is the merchant, Zalman the mere coachman! To no avail. Everything is upside down.

“I’m going,” says Nathaniel.

At last Simple Shmerel is summoned by the befuddled villagers, who want everything to return to normal. Simple Shmerel considers the puzzling situation, then orders the two men into an adjacent room. After a moment, Simple Shmerel speaks up. “Servant, come here!” he says. Almost instantly, Zalman opens the door and pokes his head in.

“Yes, sir?” he asks.

“There’s your Zalman,” points out Simple Shmerel. Apparently the habits of servitude cannot be broken.

Coolberg closes his book.

“Fuck you,” Nathaniel says.

“Obscenities again. So tiresome. Well, maybe,” Coolberg mutters, in an apparent non sequitur. The two men rise from the bench simultaneously as if under orders. Nathaniel feels light-headed, as if he is going under: he is gradually succumbing to some general anesthesia set loose at the zoo, or perhaps a hypnotic spell has been cast upon him. He needs a good night’s sleep. He hasn’t rested well lately. As he and Coolberg walk across the park, Theresa following them, Coolberg begins to narrate another plot summary, this time of the book he is writing, the one that takes place entirely at night, the one with Nathaniel in it, called Shadow.

In the story a young man, a student, a somewhat fever-brained type, loves two women at the same time. One of these women is a brilliant student, a polyglot, and a reader of Sumerian sacred texts; the other is a painter. Women have always loved this young man; he is gracious to them, considerate and thoughtful, and besides, he is disconcertingly beautiful, athletic, with long blond hair that the women imagine being trailed languorously over their bare skin under the covers as he kisses them, over their breasts and thighs, that is, until the force of Eros flings the covers back. But the strain of loving two women is one that few men can withstand. Even Ezra Pound lost his mind by loving two women. This young man, this character named Ambrose, develops an antipathy to daylight because in his doubleness, his double-heartedness, he fears that he will meet himself on the sidewalk coming toward himself from the opposite direction. At the same time that he is developing a phobia to daylight and the solidity of actual things, he is also receiving phone calls from an ambiguous Iago-like character named Trautwein, who, through brilliance and charm, gradually convinces him that the second woman, the painter he loves, who suffers for her art in poverty, has been cheating on him. There will be an unspecified fire. A violent death is indicated. However, certain parts of the story have only been sketched out; possibilities have presented themselves but have not turned into probabilities, much less inevitabilities.

“That’s crap,” Nathaniel says. “Sumerian texts? Please.” An implausible detail: it takes decades to learn how to read those texts. Nathaniel’s knees are shaky. Drops of perspiration appear as if by magic on his forehead, and unbidden tears spurt into his eyes. What if something were to happen to Jamie? What if these two sociopaths enacted…one of their fictions on her?

“I’ve got to go,” he says, taking off toward his car.

Behind him he hears Theresa shout, “My sweatpants. They’re in your car!”

What is the expression? Clothes make the man.

“I made you so beautiful,” the wind says. “And you didn’t thank me.”

20

JAMIE IS SLEEPING. She may even be sleeping with another woman. Anyway, she is not answering the phone.

Nathaniel waits for a day and then shows up on her doorstep, ringing ringing ringing the doorbell until she opens the door and says to him, “What happened to you? You’ve got bags under your eyes. Were you up all night? Well, come in.”

She shepherds him into the tiny kitchen, takes off his jacket, which she hangs on a wall hook, and sits him down close to a little metallic duck standing guard on the counter. He tells her that he hasn’t eaten today, he hasn’t been able to eat at all, much less sleep, so she pours him a glass of milk and in silence makes him a quick cheese omelet, which he picks at.

“Your teeth are chattering, and you’re not chewing,” she says. “You’re trembling the food up.”

“Right. I know.” His fork rattles against the dinnerware.

“What’s going on? It’s getting late. I have to go to work.”

“It’s never been later than it is now,” he tells her. He reaches across the kitchenette table and takes her hand. Jamie has a strong woman’s hand, and he touches her fingers one by one, precious humanity, beloved warmth. “There’s something I have to tell you,” he says.

“What’s that?”

“I love you.” He squeezes her fingers. “I’ve been in a fever. I love you with all my heart. I know it’s hopeless and crazy, but, uh, I have to say this right now, this minute, this second. I love you, and I’ve just realized it these last days, and everything else is irrelevant, and now I have to tell you. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I can’t think.”

“You do? You did?” There’s no mistaking her surprise, but at least she doesn’t indicate amusement at statements of helpless emotion. A practical woman, she takes his plate and begins to rinse it in the sink. “What do you mean, ‘last days’?”

“What? Oh, Jamie.” He likes saying her name, so he says it again. “Jamie. Sit down. Please. Forget about the dishes. Sit down.”

“Okay.”

“Dear,” he says. “Darling.” He’s not used to talking like this. The language of love and endearment seems hopelessly outmoded to him. Using such idioms is like walking into a dusty Victorian bedroom where cheap chromos of nymphs and cupids hang on the wall. The side tables and overstuffed armchairs have been degraded from years of abuse. Still, it’s all he has. If he doesn’t say what’s in his heart, he’ll die.

“What’s come over you?” she asks. She’s wearing her usual work-at-home outfit: t-shirt, bib overalls, tennis shoes, and now a red flannel shirt on top of everything, for warmth in the underheated apartment. She has a few flecks of metal in her hair.

“I was up all night last night. I couldn’t sleep. I can’t stop thinking about you. This is really love. I’m sure of it now. I’ve been doing inventories of you. I’ve done a checklist. I think about your sculpture, your dancing, your good heart. Your hands. Your eyes. Your hair. I think about you over at the People’s Kitchen. I think about your soul. Your soul! Listen to me. But I can’t help it. The more I think about you, the more…the more I hunger for you. I even love it that you’re a lesbian.”

“Jesus, Nathaniel.”

“I know. I know. This is really uncool. But I want someone who’s messed up the way you are, and your eyes, and your everything, I want it all. I know you don’t think you’re beautiful and maybe you’re not, but I think you are. It’s the way you talk when you’re talking, and it’s the little sculptures on your windowsills, and the fact that the world is okay because you’re in it. It’s everything about you. It’s the way you smell. It’s the odor of your soul.”

“How’s that?”

“You smell clean,” he tells her. “Like the soap of heaven.” He waits. Her hand in his hand has relaxed a bit, and he holds her palm over his so that he can caress her fingers. Even at this moment, making a complete fool of himself, he recognizes that this is really love, because he could caress her fingers forever. Time would cease. Nothing now, or ever, would present itself as what he would rather do than this.

“I don’t know what to say,” she tells him.

“I know that.”

“I’m not pretty.”

“I don’t care,” he announces proudly.

“I’m attracted to other girls,” she insists. “Your father would spin in his grave if he saw me coming home with you.”

“Oh, let him rotate,” Nathaniel says, in a freeing rush. “Please, honey,” he says, “don’t ever let anything happen to you.”

“I’m not planning on it,” she laughs, pulling her hand away. He takes it again.

“This is desperation you’re witnessing,” he says, gripping her. All at once, the thought occurs to him that what he’s expressing is not love but hysteria, rising out of his own emptiness. He is in the grip of inflated speech, exaggeration, all the insincere locutions of opacity and self-deception. He is becoming, he feels with sudden queasy recognition, like a character in a plot dreamed up by someone like Coolberg. Nevertheless, he goes on, believing that he can explain himself, as his language veers further out of his control, as if he were behind the wheel and the steering had failed in the car — a dirt road, a tree straight ahead of him, an accident resulting in the loss of speech. “I’m a desperate man,” he says, the words coming out of his mouth unaccompanied by inflections. “Oh, I love you. I can’t say it enough. My dear, you’re the one.” Appalled by himself, and triumphant, he waits for her response.

This time she does pull her hand away firmly. “No, Nathaniel,” she says quietly. “Nathaniel, I am not the one. Listen to yourself.”

“You are. You are, you are, you are.”

Sometimes he was insisting what he was sure about and when he was sure about it, he could not stop himself from insisting because it was the thing that he was knowing and by knowing this thing he could be correctly insisting and not stopping what he was telling and saying and telling again and again and again by really knowing. Why did Gertrude Stein continue speaking to him? Why would she not leave him alone? She loved women, too; that was why. She understood.

“I’m not. Really I’m not, I’m not, I’m not. You’re deluded. Listen: I can’t love you the way you love me. A woman has to love a man all the way down to the root. Otherwise, it’s the usual disaster. A true marriage exists between bodies and souls. And I can’t — I can’t love you that way. I like you. I even love you sometimes, for a man, for what you are. I gave you my bed to lie in and my body, too, because you deserved it. You needed a buddy in bed, and that was me. You’re a good man, maybe the best I’ve known. But we just slept with each other and liked each other a lot, and that’s not love. That’s an arrangement.” She waits. “Did that other girl give you an ultimatum?”

“People are after you,” Nathaniel says to her.

“What?”

“People are after you. Those two, Coolberg and Theresa.”

“They are not after me. She may be jealous, but that’s her problem, not mine.”

“No, I think they’re really after you.”

“Honey. Nathaniel. You are really messed up. You should get help.”

“There’s something I have to do,” Nathaniel tells her. “I love you, Jamie, please, and I have to do this right now.” More foolishness, maybe, but none of his actions are under his control. He stands up and takes her hand — she does not resist this time, as he thought she might — and he guides her into the bathroom. He sits her on the bathtub’s edge, and he squats down to unlace her shoes, first the left, then the right. Kneeling before her, he takes her sneakers off. Jamie watches him quietly, unprotesting. He peels off her white socks, then grabs a washcloth.

“Oh, no,” she says.

Quickly he dips the washcloth into a stream of warm water and begins to wash her feet. He can feel her resistance, as she tenses her muscles and tendons, before that tension gives way to the sheer force of her astonishment.

“What are you doing?”

He does not look up. “I love you,” he says, keeping his eyes down. Tears are rolling off his cheeks. He does not wipe them away. When his task is completed, he tosses the washcloth on the floor, like any ordinary man. Out of abjection and pure longing, he bows his head before her. He waits.

Jamie takes Nathaniel’s face in her hands and lifts it so that she can look at him. “All right,” she says, the tears coming into her own eyes, laughing, shaking her head. “All right,” she tells him, “take me to bed. Make me late to work.”

“That’s not what I’m telling you. That’s absolutely not what I’m asking for here.”

“I know what you’re asking for,” Jamie says equitably. “But this is all you’ll get.”

Half an hour later, his eyes closed, then suddenly opened, tears and sweat dripping down onto her, he calls out her name, and in response Jamie comes at the same time that he does. Her facial expression is one of pleasure mixed with horrified surprise. After a moment — she has broken out into quick shocked laughter — he looks into her eyes and imagines that her spirit, without knowing how or why, has suddenly disobeyed the force of gravity that has governed it. Her soul, no longer a myth but now a fact, ascends above her body. Like a little metallic bird unused to flight, unsteady in its progress, her soul rises and falls, frightened by the heights and by what it sees, but excited, too, by being married to him for a few seconds, just before it plummets back to earth.

21

BACK IN HIS APARTMENT, more clothes seem to be missing, more objects burglarized. The Escher print has disappeared from the wall; the phone is gone. The notebook on the desk appears also to have been filched. You’d think someone would at least leave a thank-you note. Outside the window, down the block, an old woman wearing a grotesquely jaunty Easter bonnet keeps him under surveillance from behind her loaded-down grocery cart.

Nathaniel goes into his bedroom. It is dinnertime. The apartment is feasting on subtractions. In a few days they may take his name away along with his address. Who or what could possibly stop them? Still, he will fight them. A few objects still remain here, unstolen. A book on the bedspread, the Brownstone Eclogues of America’s forgotten great poet, Conrad Aiken, whom even burglars don’t want to read, remains open to the stanzas he had been studying the day before. The poems consist of complicated farewell gestures to vanishing elements of American life — including the ordinary virtues. These poems, the intruders haven’t taken. Perhaps they don’t care for the art of verse. He gazes down at the closing lines from “The Census-Takers.”

And we are the census-takers; the questions that ask

from corner and street, from lamp-post and sign and face;

The questions that later tonight will take you to task,

When you sit down alone, to think, in a lonely place.

Did you ever play blind-man’s buff in the bat-flit light?

Stranger, whose heart did you break? and what else did you do? —

The census-takers are coming to ask you tonight;

The truth will be hurrying home, and it’s time you knew.

Absolutely right. It’s time you knew. The lines have the quick comic jokiness, the perky melodramatic intelligence, of everyday despair. Meanwhile, Nathaniel stands up, sits down, kneels. He reads while fidgeting. He can no longer sit still. A prayer is coming upon him. When the spirit of prayer arrives in the bat-flit light, he must give way to it.

There is no organized religion whose articles of faith Nathaniel believes in. So when he prays, he has nothing to go on. He lacks authority figures and trustworthy spiritual guides. He prays sitting down or standing up or lying flat on the floor with his face bordered by his outstretched arms like a penitent. In his private faith are several articles: Life is a gift and is holy. Love is sacred. Existence is simple in its demands: We must serve others with loving-kindness. Some entity beyond our knowing is out there. Nathaniel believes that this unknowable force is paying attention to him. He has no idea why. The God that watches and loves him cannot be a personal God. Also: Is God, as the theologians insist, perfect? Somehow he doubts it. But he feels as if he knows as much about God as an ant knows about the room into which it creeps and crawls. Which is to say that he acknowledges that he knows nothing about God.

So today, now, this evening, he puts down the book and lies on the floor, placing his forehead on the linoleum tile. His penis is still thick from his lovemaking with Jamie. His body, wracked with discomfort, spreads itself out flat. That is how it should be. The words travel up out of his mind into the great nothingness.

Thank you for my life, he thinks, thank you forever and always. Thank you for the gift of this woman who is also holy and sacred to me. Thank you for the sight of her and for my joy in her company and for her moment of joy also with me. Thank you for my guardian, Gertrude Stein. Blessings upon all the poor and unfortunate. May they be given food and love as I have been given these gifts. Suffering is necessary, I know. I do not know why it is necessary but I know that it is. Blessings upon all children and all innocent creatures such as animals at the zoo. Blessings upon those who suffer. May their sufferings be relieved. Blessings upon my dear mother and my kindly stepfather and my poor sister. Why have I been called a devil? For myself I ask for very little. But I ask for your care for this woman I love, for Jamie Esterson, who has danced for you, and I ask that no harm come to her. May nothing harm her now, I beg of you.

Then everything goes dark.