The Soul Thief

22

ALL THIS HAPPENED a long time ago.

These days I work in a local arts agency writing up grant proposals. Our office puts poets (and sometimes out-of-work actors and musicians and dancers) into the schools. I am rather good at the work I do and take some pride in it. I’m able to give a sense of urgency to the project descriptions. A certain studied eloquence is not beyond my reach. I have a good track record for landing foundation money. I can point to successes. People believe me.

For a brief period a few years ago I worked as an insurance adjuster but found the job distasteful — I had to go around discounting distress. My task was to soft-pedal the damages. After flooding, after windstorms, after fire, I showed up to say, “Well, that’s not so bad.” You can’t do such work for very long without suffering the consequences. The victims of calamity end up despising you. Years before my days as an adjuster, I served as an assistant editor for a small-town newspaper — I did some copyediting and reporting and sold advertising space. Before that, I was assigned to the role of the seemingly amiable person at the other end of the line to whom you talk when you call to ask about your utility bill. Prior to my time at Amalgamated Gas and Electric, I made phone calls — very briefly — at a collection agency. Early in my life as a working man, I delivered the mail.

My jobs have not defined me. With a minimum of training, almost anyone could have had my employment record without leaving a trace.

I have become an altogether different person from the man I once was. Now I’m something, someone, else. You might not notice me. I am in disguise. Mine is an old story.

Keats describes his “knight-at-arms” who fell in love with a beautiful maid, la belle dame sans merci, as having awakened “on the cold hill’s side.” I woke up there, too, alone. Like Keats’s knight, I was found “palely loitering”—beautiful phrase. Cold hill’s side. Palely loitering.

23

BEING A PARENT to two sons involves complicated logistics. This is one of those clichés that happens to be true. You have to plan ahead to make sure the car has arrived in the correct place at the correct time. The scheduling of such matters may seem trivial, but family life cannot be managed otherwise. The weekly roster attached to the refrigerator dictates who should be where, and when. Without it, chaos would descend on all of us. Jeremy, our older boy, has to be picked up after swim practice at exactly six thirty p.m. most days. If I were to forget or slip up, he would feel demeaned and ignored. But I have never forgotten.

When I’m scheduled to get him, and my wife, Laura, stays at home to make dinner, I sit there waiting in the car facing the exit doors of the locker rooms. Outside, evening has come on, and darkness has descended, except for those scattered pools of illumination under the parking lot’s flood-lights. In cars near my own, other adults await their children, all of us clustered together in a parental flock. Some keep their motors running so that the warm interiors will seem comforting when their kids open the door. Certain parents — I am one of them — think that this practice wastes gasoline and is ecologically unsound. My car will warm up fast enough once I have started the engine.

It is peaceful here. I keep the radio going, usually tuned to the public radio classical music station, sometimes to a local jazz station that is struggling to stay afloat. The afternoon programming director at the classical station likes the music of Hector Berlioz and often puts that composer’s shorter pieces into the rotation. A few weeks ago, they were playing Harold in Italy while I watched the kids straggle out.

What’s odd is that the girls always show up first. You’d think the boys would appear before the girls do, but, no, it’s the girls who emerge initially, with their hair pulled back or scrunched up. They often stand there while their eyes get used to the semi-dark. They look exhausted. They scan the parking lot for their parents. (The rich kids scurry to their own vehicles and drive off, but ours is a public school in the suburbs, and there isn’t that much flaunting of wealth.) The girls find where their moms or dads have parked, and they clamber in. The cars start up and drive away.

Then the boys wander out, many of them wearing earbuds connected to their iPods. Boys, I have noticed, listen to music much more often than girls do. Although they take longer to shower and dress (why? it is a great mystery), they have invariably failed to comb their hair. Their hair goes up and out every whichway. The boys’ faces have that circle-around-the-eyes raccoon look from the swimming goggles they wear, and, also like the girls, they have the appearance of complete exhaustion.

If I am part of a car pool, Jeremy and one or two of his teammates will throw their backpacks in the trunk and drop themselves wordlessly onto the front or back seat. Instantly the car smells of chlorine. If Jeremy is alone, he tosses his gear on the floor and sits down next to me. I ask him how his day went, and he usually shrugs and says, “Okay.” I have learned not to push a conversation on him. He’s usually too tired to make a social effort anyway.

All he wants, most nights, is to get home so that he can eat dinner. His appetite seems to know no bounds; he’s always famished.

You would think that in a car pool the boys would start talking to each other, but they don’t. They just sit there, mute, waiting to be delivered. Sometimes a few syllables are muttered, a sentence fragment here or there: that’s all. Tiny shards of music — death metal, hip-hop, rap, folk rock, whatever — fly around the car’s interior from their earbuds.

On the night the radio station was playing Harold in Italy, I accidentally kept it on. Typically I turn the car’s radio off when Jeremy gets in. I had forgotten I was listening to it. Halfway home, Jeremy pulled his earbuds out and pointed at the radio.

“What’s that?” he asked. “What are you listening to?”

“Haven’t any idea,” I said, hitting the OFF/ON button, to bring forth silence.

24

WE ENTER THE BRIGHT HEAT of the kitchen. Jeremy’s younger brother, Michael, is usually there, setting the table. (At one time, Laura thought it would be funny if we called Michael “Chad,” so that we would have two boys, Chad and Jeremy, in the house, but the joke proved to be too arcane and quickly died.) Our son Michael is a character. He has the intelligent eager expression of a little wolf. Unlike his older brother, who seems straightforward and strong and indulgent, already dad material, Michael is a trickster, a wily pipsqueak shape-shifter. He has a highly developed, but occasionally comic, compassion for the downtrodden.

For this reason he goes through phases. At nine, he threw his lot in with African Americans and claimed himself as one of them. He was enraged when I told him that he couldn’t be black, ever, because he himself was white. In his most recent phase, he decided that he was gay (he is now almost twelve) and that we were all to call him “McQueer,” which, he said, would be his trademark. At the dinner table his older brother told him wearily that if he went to school demanding that he be called McQueer, he’d get himself beaten up. Michael replied that such a result would be fine. “I can take it,” he said, reaching for the serving dish containing mashed potatoes. “Faggots like me have to take it.”

“Don’t be retarded. And don’t call yourself that,” Jeremy said.

“What?”

“That word.”

“What word?”

“The one you used. Anyway, dummy, you’re not gay.” Jeremy said this through a mouthful of food. “Not this week.”

“How do you know?”

“I’m not discussing this. This is ridiculous. Please pass the meatloaf.”

“I’m as queer as a three-dollar bill.”

“You can’t decide things like that. Come back when you start dating guys, and we’ll talk.” Great quantities of meatloaf were shoveled onto Jeremy’s plate and quickly disappeared into his mouth. I reminded myself that I should issue instructions to him now and then to chew. But he’s getting too old for that. Next year he’ll be out of the house. You can’t order a seventeen-year-old boy to chew his food.

“Me and my queer friends are gonna do something big,” Michael announced. Then he lifted his boyish fist. “Power to the queer nation.”

“‘My queer friends and I,’” Laura corrected him, with a weariness close to Jeremy’s.

“Hey, you’re queer, too, Mom?” Michael asked, seeing his advantage. “I never knew that.”

Changing the subject, my wife inquired, “How was school today?”

“It was a scene of unparalleled horror,” Michael told her. “This kid threw up in class.”

So much for that. Usually Laura and I let Jeremy be the spokesperson for worldliness when confronted with Michael’s latest idea and his latest expression, such as “a scene of unparalleled horror,” which, these last few days, he has employed every ten minutes.

“How’s German class?”

Michael pointed at the nearly empty serving tray. “Ich muß meine meatloaf haben, bitte.”

After going through a phase when he claimed that he would “convert” to African-Americanism, Michael tried to pass himself off as a Communist. “Property is theft,” he informed us one night over the tuna-noodle casserole. He was then just barely ten years old. His brother sighed his practiced sigh and asked him if he planned to start a career in shoplifting. Six months later Michael announced that he would grow up to be a Mormon missionary. Mormonism! Where had that come from? Had we heard, he asked us one afternoon, that he would soon leave for Mozambique on a mission? He would have to learn Swahili, or whatever they spoke in that faraway nation, and he would have to do it right away. Jeremy asked him his opinions about Joseph Smith, and Michael said, “Who?” I used to catch Michael reading the encyclopedia — a dangerous hobby with a kid like that. So is surfing the Web. Weird ideas are out there for the picking: he is convinced, for example, that if you turn your TV set to a blank static channel, the dead will find a way to send you a message through the ambient snow on the screen, or through the white noise on the speakers. I have seen him sitting patiently next to the TV set, tuned, he claimed, to the Dead Channel.

Some of his interests, his habits of mind, can probably be credited to me. When he was about six years old, I was delegated — Laura ordered me — to go up to his bedroom and tell him a bedtime story. I climbed the stairs and in the dim light began a tale of Heroic Henry. This fellow had been born an orphan in a cabbage field but had been trained by a wizard in bravery, guile, and fighting skills. In the first story, Heroic Henry fights back an army of killer gnomes threatening the village. The villagers reward him with a beautiful house and bride. Then, somewhat abruptly, because I had grown a bit sleepy myself, Heroic Henry dies.

“He dies?” Michael asked, disbelieving, sitting up in bed.

I nodded. Tears threatened to appear on my son’s face.

“He can’t die!” Michael told me.

“Well,” I said, “he does. I’m sorry, but that’s what happened.” I kissed him good night and, after waiting for him to calm down a bit, went back downstairs.

The next night I told another story about Heroic Henry. In this story, he persuades a dragon to eat the lava that is dribbling down from the volcano and threatening the village with incendiary ruin. Then, together, he and the dragon conquer an army of zombie puppets coming in from the West Country. Overcome with thankfulness, the village rewards both the dragon and Heroic Henry with a salary and comfortable shoes. The dragon is put on a retainer. At the end of the story, Heroic Henry dies again.

“This is like last night,” Michael told me.

“Sorry. Can’t help it. That’s how the story ends.”

On subsequent nights, Heroic Henry fought off the vollzards — lizard-like vultures — and then he organized picnics and freed various slaves and went to King Alarcord’s Mine to retrieve the Biggest Diamond in the World, and he wrote operas and he invented the water-powered automobile engine, and somehow found himself as a relief pitcher in the seventh game of the World Series (he saved the game, of course, for the Toonerville Titans, who had at last made it, after much struggle, into the major leagues), and he rescued the elephants from the evil capitalist poachers who had flown in from Frankfurt, Germany — he is, indeed, a super-hero, but he must meet up with Death at the end. Death, impeccably groomed, is usually wearing a business suit and takes him through the nearest doorway.

After about two months of this, on those nights when Michael was half asleep, he would sometimes tell me to shorten the story. “Make him die,” he would mutter.

In January, Michael invited a friend to stay for a sleep-over, and when the boys were ready for bed, he asked me to tell both of them a Heroic Henry story. The friend had a sweet bewildered look underneath a mop of tangled blond hair; his name was Abraham (we were getting into the era of Old Testament names). I didn’t think Michael’s friend could handle the usual narrative conventions. So I went up there to Michael’s bedroom and had Heroic Henry cure King Scotty of the wound in his side, and then Heroic Henry fought off the Yankees, a flock of vampire birds wearing baseball caps, and finally the rains came and saved the village from starvation, and the wheat was harvested, and everyone lived happily ever after.

From his sleeping bag on the floor, little Abraham seemed quite contented. He appeared to be drifting off to sleep.

But Michael was outraged. “He has to die!” he said. “He always dies! He’s not Heroic Henry if he doesn’t die!” I shook my head and turned out the light. Behind me, I heard Michael protesting, “That’s not a real Heroic Henry story. That’s a fraud!”

“Sorry,” I said, behind the closed door. “Tonight he lives.”

“No, he doesn’t,” Michael replied.

He once told me that he knew he had been conceived on the Moon by Moon People, transported as a Moon Baby on a rocket ship back to Earth, and we, his parents, were trying to foist him off as a normal American boy, whereas in fact he was totally interplanetary.

I agreed with him. Yes, that was exactly what had happened. He expressed dismay with my agreement — he shuffled away angrily. But he’s a sweet little lunatic who actually has pretty good sense, and anyway, the sight of him always lifts my heart.

25

AFTER DINNER, the boys disappeared — Jeremy into his room to do his homework, write out his college applications, and call his current girlfriend, Celeste (pronounced “Sellest”). Like other American teenagers, Jeremy has his own cell phone, and sometimes the two of them simply stay on the phone all evening as they do their homework. I don’t see how this is physically possible, but I know that it happens. Jeremy’s ear has reddened from having a phone always pressed up against it. He has had one girlfriend or another for as long as I can remember. They adore him — his kindness, his good looks, his gentlemanly manners, and his attentiveness. Even when he breaks up with one of them, he manages to be so gracious that they stick around. It will not be like that once Michael’s romantic feelings are stirred up. There will be an air of sickness and apocalypse. Michael will make them crazy.

After Jeremy excused himself from the table, Michael, lacking his best audience, also excused himself — for a wolf cub, he is polite — and, after waving and saying “Tschüss,” made a beeline into his own room, the better to read up on his latest enthusiasm, Gay Pride. After half an hour, he would probably get bored with that. A page would turn. Coca-Cola syrup concentrate is often available behind the counter at drug-stores, for certain gastrointestinal ailments—and few people would know this sly little fact. Michael would be suddenly interested. Coca-Cola syrup! What uses…might it be put to?

My wife stood, swept a strand of hair aside from her forehead, and with a laugh said, “Well, it seems we have a gay son.” With the back of her hand, she wiped her cheek, a gesture I have always found endearing.

“Could be. But I doubt it.”

“Me, too. Well, we’re completely unsatisfactory parents for him anyway. In this household, if you came out of the closet to your parents, all you’d get is a bored yawn.”

I nodded. “That’s it. No closets here. With us, everybody says everything.” As she cleared the table, I settled in to add up some receipts, part of our months-long preparations for our income taxes.

Once, about a year ago, in the car as we drove along the back roads to one of Jeremy’s swim meets in the next town over, I said to Laura that she and I were like a couple of oxen hitched together, yoked, and that when we had first come out of the stable, no one had known how much work we were good for. As it had turned out, we had accomplished plenty; we were a good team. (We had met when I was still working for Amalgamated Gas and Electric, and she and I had endured periods of tight budgets and some of the terrible economies that can break a marriage.) She was of course offended by my remarks. Oxen? Yoked together? Not a kind analogy. Not very romantic. Her womanly honor was offended.

I’m not stupid. I know that no wife wants to be compared to an ox.

Laura, by the way, is now a collector and dealer in contemporary and classic quilts. I hadn’t known about quilting and the system of sales and trading in women’s quilts until I met her, but she knows all the networks, African American and white, and she knows all the collectors and the great artists of quilting. She has spent a lifetime learning this trade and learning this art. She loves the work and as an agent takes very little for herself.

In any case, I don’t see what is particularly romantic about a married couple raising their children and getting from day to day, and I said so in the car that afternoon. I made my case. The ordinary business of diapers and fevers and broken bones and drafty rooms and lost socks and schedules on the refrigerator door takes the shine off everything for a while. Women understand this better than men do. Why should any marriage with kids be starry-eyed? Romantic heat may start the process off, but dutifulness and pure stubbornness keep it going. Romance — this is my personal view — is a destructive myth after the age of nineteen. Most people give it up, and they should. Percy Bysshe Shelley may have been a great poet, but he had an aversion to raising the children he sired, and he avoided them, and they suffered; you can look it up.

Girls swoon over Jeremy. They can see that he’s a practical boy and will be a pragmatic man. Once he’s married, he’ll be steady. He’s a great prospect. Reliability is sexy. Of course, having good looks like his sweetens the whole deal. They attend the swim meets to see him in his Speedo, these girls, avid. They smile to themselves. Their eyes are wide and glistening.

But on that day, Laura was angered by what I had said. She went into a sulk, and even though Jeremy won his event with a personal-best time, she wouldn’t speak to me on the trip back home. It was the ox simile, I’m sure.

On the particular evening when Michael had enrolled himself into the Queer Nation, and my wife and I were having one of our ordinary after-dinner clean-ups — me doing the taxes, and Laura, my wife of almost two decades, rinsing the dishes in our suburban home in New Jersey — Laura jerked her head up with a sudden recollection and said, “Oh, by the way. Someone called.”

“Who?”

“Someone I never heard of. Said his name was Jerome Coolberg. Who’s that, Natie?”

Someone should have complimented me. Only five seconds passed before I said, “Nobody. Well, somebody, from…grad school days. Did he leave a number?”

Yes, he did.

26

LAURA AND I have had our own share of shadows. We’ve been lucky but not that lucky. For years we were poor. I’ve already mentioned this. When the quilting business was flat, Laura worked as an administrative assistant. I took a second job teaching a night class for immigrants, English as a Second Language. Then there was the accident.

When Jeremy was six years old and Laura was driving him home from day care, she hit a pedestrian who was crossing a street downtown. She had been adjusting the radio to get a better station, and Jeremy had been yelling, and she was distracted. Baby Michael was home with me. This guy was where he shouldn’t have been (no intersection and no crosswalk), but Laura didn’t see him, and the impact of the car threw him several feet into the air. He went unconscious for an hour or two, had a concussion and multiple fractures, and was in the hospital for over a month. He turned out to be one of those litigious Americans, a real bastard, a pain profiteer. Also an electrician and a drunk, but his alcoholism didn’t get into the trial. He sued, of course. It’s true that Laura hadn’t had her eyes on the road, and it’s also true that our Chevy needed brake work. Our insurance was paid up, thank God, but the whole process went on for a couple of years. We were destroyed in some of the ordinary ways, and when it was over, you couldn’t find either of us for a while; we had become vague and insulated. I could feel internally the parts of myself that had dried up and withered. Laura said I looked like a tree hit by lightning. I never said to her what she looked like. When lawyers stay calm but keep on talking to you and won’t stop, it’s as if they’re screaming and screaming.

But we’re lucky. We got over it. Our next-door neighbors have had the whole menu. Their daughter ran away a couple of times, mismanaged a major cocaine addiction, and was turning tricks in Atlantic City by the age of sixteen. She even had her own pimp. The parents were nice middle-class Americans, churchgoers. They didn’t know what was happening to them, or how it had started. Poor American parents: so easily confused. This same daughter got herself enrolled in a recovery program, emerged from it, began cutting herself for fun, then ran away again, this time to San Francisco, where she resumed her career in prostitution. This time she refused help. She accompanied her pimp/ boyfriend on a drugstore holdup, was caught and jailed. Her brother, inspired by her behavior, developed a liking for Vicodin. He started stealing prescription pads. He earned his own jail time. Etc. Two kids in the slammer. The father commenced drinking, and why wouldn’t he? Catastrophe is contagious. Everyone knows stories like this.

My point is that middle-class life in this country seems to be operating on a contingency basis. It can change on you at any moment. They can pull the rug out from under you. You can be thrown into the street without appeal. Your furniture is carted away; your clothes are tossed on the front lawn; your children are ground up by a crazy commercial culture. Catastrophe lurks; ruination prospers. As the guy in that movie said, Ask people for help, watch them fly.

I went into the den and gazed down at Coolberg’s phone number. The numbers in that particular combination had a terrible frightening appearance to me. My hands were shaking, and of course I didn’t want to go back there, into that world.

27

ULTIMATELY I WAS REMOVED from Buffalo, but the stages of my breakdown have a montage-like quality to them, and by now they’re mixed up with what I have dreamed. My memories of those events were adulterated by the nightly visitations from those people and occasions after the major scenes were over. A sorcerer ruled my imaginings. The music of Mahler served as the background audio sound track. My visitors walked through walls toward me the way Marley’s Ghost seeped past the door on his errand to Ebenezer Scrooge. My dreamcallers carried their deadness around with them. Chains clanked. I can’t sort out what actually happened from what didn’t, and I can’t get the dreamstuff out of the narrative. Even though I don’t think about that time period often anymore, it accompanies me. My soul was mortgaged. I paid it off through regularity, routine, and hard work, until it was mine again. My history is what it is. Anyway, my crisis occurred decades ago, and I have a life to get on with. So I apologize now for this reconstruction, which is only an outline, a foggy sketchy thing, and for its necessary unreality. Also for its fragmentation. I don’t perceive the beauty in brokenness these days, though I once did. But I can acknowledge its truth.

28

I WAS LYING on the floor of my bedroom, praying to God to save Jamie, whom I adored, from all harm. When I came to, someone seemed to have taken away most of my furniture. I was in a blank space unbounded by dimension or time. The apartment had been almost entirely emptied. A mattress remained on the floor, and one book remained, the Brownstone Eclogues. No: over there, a book of translations of a German poet, whose name disappears on me every time I read it, sits on the windowsill. The rest of my books had performed a vanishing act. I went to the mirror. Coolberg’s face looked back at me. As in a Cocteau film, I fell into the mirror and swam in the glass.

29

SOMEONE IN THE CULINARY ALLIANCE called me, and I drove my VW down to Allentown where the People’s Kitchen was burning to the ground. I was surrounded by my friends from the Allentown Artists’ & Culinary Alliance. The firemen went about their work with deliberation. Joyous flames shot out from the windows the way they do whenever a particularly effective job of arson has been ordered and set into motion. I was weeping, first, and then violent sobs overtook me. This fire signaled the end of collective generosity in this our country, America. Bent over with sorrow, I was grieving for all our broken promises, for the loss of charity and loving-kindness. Someone reached down for me and ordered me to stand up, someone who looked like Jesus. In the early 1970s, many men in their twenties looked like that. Jesus had broken out on their faces. There was an epidemic of Jesus. What was Jesus doing here? I despised him; I had said so. He spoke to me. To this day, I remember that among other instructions, he told me to be a man. Then he vanished into the crowd. Most of his words disappeared from my head almost as soon as he uttered them because Jesus lives solely in the world of dreams. But not the part about being a man. Why did he care about that?

30

THERESA HAS CALLED ME a devil again and apparently I have hit her. Or tried to. She blocked my fist. I might have hurt her. Probably not: she seems pleased by my gestural violence. How is this possible? It cannot be possible. She’s a feminist. She has been giving me more of her typical knowing smiles. She recognizes that I have been two-timing her and that I do not love her or her irony or her great body. Nevertheless, she continues to ask me for sex, to demand that I fuck her. When I am tender with her, she becomes impatient and angry — that’s pretend-love, she says, and from you, it’s sickening. We start to get rough with each other in bed. We begin to cross the borders that you shouldn’t cross. With her, love is complicated by its opposite, contempt. On the other side of the border is pain and the promise of clarity, but in our case there is no clarity, just more pain.

31

THIS PASSAGE IS a palindrome.

My adored, my beloved. My life. Why did I love her? No explanation is ever satisfactory. How could it be? Jamie had finished her night’s rounds, had returned the cab to the central dispatcher, clocked out, and was waiting for the bus in a shelter downtown when she was set upon by a gang. What were they doing out on the streets at that time, five thirty a.m., before dawn? Were they under orders? Why had Coolberg predicted something like this, in Shadow? A coincidence, of course, that was all it was, a mere coincidence, a narrative necessity, a required episode of violence against a woman to keep readers awake and alert.

I sat beside her bed in Buffalo General day and night. She would live, they said. A kind nurse named Mary kept us company for several hours, I remember that. Sometimes Jamie would come back to consciousness and look over at me. She whispered from underneath her bandages. Where was her family? Where were her girlfriends? Wherever they were, they didn’t visit us, though a few of them called, and when I answered the hospital phone, they asked questions, their voices full of concern. But people don’t like to visit hospitals, I know, and even an assault can be regarded as infectious. The police questioned her, of course, but her assailants, by striking her, had blurred themselves into nothingness, and she could not detail them. What I finally said was that I was her family, and when I did, Jamie whispered to me to take any of the pieces that I wanted, the birds and the dirigibles, from her apartment; she had never made out a will, she confessed. Am I still alive? she kept demanding of me, in whispers, as if both the question and the answer were secrets. It feels like I’m dying. And I told her she wasn’t, and she couldn’t; I wouldn’t permit it. I saw her pursing her lips, so I kissed her, and she winced.

In the rape, she’d been hollowed out and emptied and smashed up, her broken pieces carelessly glued together in the aftermath, and when she was released, she couldn’t bear to be touched or even looked at. She would scream upon being observed. She came to regard her little metallic birds and blimps and tetrahedrons with utter contempt. Junk, trash, leavings, waste. If I wanted them, I could have them all. She hated herself, she hated her work, she especially hated art: sentimental frivolities, all of them, part of a gone world. Life was not like that anymore. Her hatred poured out in a flood, and of course her hatred included me. Because she could not identify her assailants, who had been wearing ski masks, the case remained unsolved, and no suspects were ever arraigned. It took on the phantom existence of something so terrible as to be almost imaginary.

Old women approached me in the street to offer their advice. They flapped their lips silently.

One night Jamie packed up and left her apartment. In a cloud of unknowing, I let myself in the next morning and discovered that she had moved out. On the table just inside the door she had placed an envelope with a note enclosed addressed to me. I could not open it. I still have it.

My life. My adored. My beloved.

32

“MR. MASON, do you have a view concerning this particular image in the last stanza?”

Yes, I do, yes, actually. Indeed yes. The cold hill’s side is a place of spiritual hangover is a place of the pale burning loitering soul is the place of rubble and ash following the fire, the fire that leaves I mean evokes the sweet moan referred to in the hemistich of the concluding line of the stanza, causing the reader to bang his head against the wall, and this is where the knight awakens only to find that he has awakened into yet another dream from which he cannot awaken this time, in a garden of blackened flowers. There has been a rape and an assault, and they have shut her wild wild eyes with kisses four and those dilated eyes have stayed closed.

Everything went dark again, and when I opened my own eyes, from my sprawled position there on the floor of the English department seminar room in Annex B, I saw my fellow students gazing down at me, some with concern, others with curiosity, and I heard a woman saying, “Get help.”

33

I WENT INTO that timeless and spaceless realm. Voices circled around me in rooms that were infinitely wide and unfathomably deep. I lived inside the moaning green infinity of my own mirrored existence, where geometrical atrocity reigned, spaces and rooms with boundaries carved out of the air by a diabolical architect. Certain horrors have a strict, dreadful geometry, and I came to know their angles and cosines and tangents. Day and night exchanged their features. Demons favored me. I felt myself sobbing. I lost all desire for the things of this world.

At last, from the chair I sat in, I saw the Hudson River in the distance, and, out of the air of the alcove where I sat, a voice spoke. The voice reverberated from my childhood. I could hardly recognize it. On my windowsill stood a small metallic duck, and from the ceiling hung a little blimp. I found myself in my own bedroom in my parents’ apartment on West End Avenue, and when I turned my head, I saw my sister, Catherine, sitting close to me and yet far away. She was dressed in a black turtleneck sweater and a black skirt. The expression on her face was solidly prim, though fierce-ness lay in it somewhere, and, also, beauty, at a distance. She wore a pair of running shoes.

Her voice emerged from her throat and mouth with a rusty sound like cold water rising up in an antiquated pump. In her hands she held a paperback book. Her general appearance was that of a rather sleek funeral director, but in fact she had clawed her way back to life, and she was dragging me back with her. She had become a force, my sister, on a mission.

Is there anything more restorative than the act of one person reading a beloved book to another person, also beloved? Slowly I returned to my senses.

The rusty unused voice began another narrative. “‘About thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward, of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet’s lady, with all the comforts and consequences of an handsome house and large income.’” She took me all the way through Mansfield Park, and as she did, the Hudson River acquired a particular color (blue, in sunlight), as did the buildings on this side of it, in Manhattan, and on that side, in Jersey. I noticed people coming and going in my room, and I observed citizens walking to and fro down at ground level, rushing about their business. On stormy days I heard the wind panting against the window glass. In that room, voices became identifiable instead of hallucinatory and generic. Miss Fanny Price eventually disposed of handsome and shallow Henry Crawford and found her match in Edmund. The book ended; my sister started another.

“‘In M—,’” my sister intoned, “‘an important town in northern Italy, the widowed Marquise of O—, a lady of unblemished reputation and the mother of several well-brought-up children, inserted the following announcement in the newspapers: that she had, without knowledge of the cause, come to find herself in a certain situation; that she would like the father of the child she was expecting to disclose his identity to her; and that she was resolved, out of consideration for her family, to marry him.’” This was “The Marquise of O—,” which I’d never read. How had my sister discovered this genius, Heinrich von Kleist? I would have to ask her.

Her readings restored me to life. Gradually I shed the residual toxins of where I had been and what I had done. I moved about in the apartment and prepared my own meals. I toasted bread and put jam on it. I took showers, washed myself, shaved: the little miracles of everyday existence. I tidied up. I avoided reading poetry, and when music came on the radio, I shut it off. Music and poetry both felt disabling to me, part of a world closed and shuttered. Besides, I couldn’t bear the stuff in any form. My mother took me down to the shops on Amsterdam Avenue, where I bought new clothes. She left me at the various doors, knowing better than to accompany her adult son into a haberdashery.

From his calm altitudes, my stepfather gazed down at me with mild benevolent confusion. He had adult children of his own from his first marriage. He was under no requirement to love me, his strange irresolute stepchild. So why did he?

34

BUT IT WAS MY SISTER who had become a wonder and a marvel. When the reports of what had happened to me in Buffalo made their way to the Milwaukee halfway house where she lived, she spoke up. Words came from her mouth. She issued a demand: “Take me there.” Meaning: to him. To me. My mother flew out on the next nonstop to get her and brought her back to West End Avenue. Catherine — this was reported to me later — saw me sitting in my room, my personhood having been drained out, leaving behind this smeary blotch of nothingness, and, with a cure in mind, she marched over to the bookshelf in the living room. She chose a novel. (I learned later that she happened upon Flaubert’s Sentimental Education—not where I would have started.) I don’t remember the thread of the story, though I do remember hearing her voice; for me, the journey was like coming out of an ether dream, accompanied by a woman telling a coming-of-age tale of someone named Frédéric. And somewhere, toward the end of that book, the ether dispersed, or, to use another metaphor, the muddlement in my head began, ever so slightly, to lift, and I saw people and things in the room where I sat, and I heard a story being told to me, and I could tell the difference between the actual things and the imaginary ones.

Later, much later, she told me, “I just wasn’t going to let both of us go down the drain.”

Her recovery was sometimes referred to as “a miracle,” more miraculous than mine, but I don’t believe in miracles, just the force of compassion, which under certain circumstances can bring the dead to life. Nor do I believe that to say so is to be a sentimentalist. Though a prejudice exists in our culture against compassion, there being little profit in it, the emotion itself is ineradicable.

After I had come to, I made an effort to talk to Catherine, but she didn’t enjoy conversations as much as reading aloud. In fact, she didn’t care for conversations at all. Small talk irked her and touched her in the site of her wound. She read to me for another few months, until I was on my feet, whereupon she returned to Milwaukee, eventually found a job, and got herself an apartment. By saving me she saved herself. My stepfather landed me a temp position as a clerk downtown in an East Village sundry shop, where I shelved and restocked shampoos and soaps and condoms. Then I applied for a job at a post office over on Staten Island. I got it. My adult life began. My parents let me go. They released me to the perils and rewards of the world. I moved to another city. I went to work for Amalgamated Gas and Electric, where I met Laura. She had an innocence that moved me. After she gave me a quilt as a token of her love, I married her.

Meanwhile, Catherine thrived, if you can call it that, in Milwaukee, where she resides now. She currently works in a hospice. She plumps pillows and talks softly and reads and actively cares for people she hardly knows. She has never married.

I call her sometimes. I have unanswered questions.

“Why didn’t you speak after the accident?”

“I couldn’t.”

“But when you came home, and you started reading to me, you could.”

“That was different.”

“How?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It just was.”

“Because I was in such bad shape?”

“Maybe. I wasn’t going to let you go.” There was a pause. “Also.”

“Also what?”

“You used to call me. Remember? You used to tell me about your life. Stories. Serials.” Another pause. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

“Okay.” I had one more question that I had to ask her. “How does the world look to you now?”

“It looks all right.”

“You don’t think about Dad ever anymore?”

“Sometimes. But, you know, I did all that.”

“What was it like, when you weren’t speaking?”

“Nate, I have to go.”

“All right,” I say. “Talk to you next week.”

“Right.” And then she always says, “Love from here.”

And I answer, “Love to you, from us.”

35

LAURA SLIPPED INTO the den, where I had retreated clutching the slip of paper with Coolberg’s phone number on it. My hand continued to shake. Sometimes the telephone can look like an instrument of studied malevolence.

“Coolberg,” she said. “You know, I think I’ve heard of him. I just can’t think of where.”

My wife hadn’t quite put two and two together. If she had, she would have recognized his name as the host of a program on public radio, American Evenings. Although the program’s format resembled, in some small respects, other personal-testimony-and-narrative programs on NPR, it had a unique verbal texture and a distinctive angle: Coolberg would begin the program by introducing his guest for that week, a man or a woman with a story to tell — a woman who worked as a writer of inspirational church pamphlets, for example, or perhaps a single father with two children, a man who fixed computers and drove a snowplow in Fair-banks — and although the program would start as an interview, gradually the guest’s story would take off, would soar, and at last would reach a moment of disillusion or epiphany that constituted one of those rare moments of clarity, a life-changing instance at first aided by the host’s ravening promptings, which gradually diminished and finally disappeared as the show reached its conclusion and the guest found his or her own voice, which was simultaneously the discovery of the story’s secret heart. But the show always began as a duet between the interviewer and the guest; the guest could not ascend, it seemed, without Coolberg’s help in running ahead and lifting the kite of the narrative. Sometimes American Evenings sounded like therapy or a church confessional and sometimes like a radio drama in which the tension arose both from the story’s conflicts and from the interaction between interviewer and guest. I always found the program funny and enlightening and even moving whenever I could bear to listen to it. My trouble was that I also found the initial parts of the interview peculiar, as if Coolberg sought to make himself invisible week after week by enabling someone else’s narrative into existence. He had a hunger, a neediness, to lift someone else up and thus to perform an audio vanishing act for himself, by himself. The story allowed him to make a life into art, and then disappear before taking a bow.

One other subtext in the show became apparent every week: as the title, American Evenings, intimated, all the stories, all the narrators, somehow pointed toward the phenomenon of disappearances, things and emotions and rituals and forms that had once existed and no longer did, or soon would not. They constituted tales of a twilight as experienced by this culture’s citizens. As a result, the show gave off an air of hip nostalgia. People listened to it and wiped away tears while they sipped their martinis or got high.

The format could not have existed without Coolberg, who had an uncanny ability to get under his guests’ skins, as if he knew what it was like to be them better than they themselves did. He gave their narratives a structure, understood their gains and losses, and sometimes offered them the key to what they were struggling to say, so that they blossomed into suddenly articulate observers of their own lives, they who had been wordless shadows and subalterns before. He nourished them into a form of knowing. He inhabited them by parsing their tales. He squirmed inside their stories and their anonymous selves. Meanwhile, he himself, the unmoved mover, on each of these American Evenings, faded, until his voice returned at the very end of the show when he listed the credits for the show’s producers, technicians, and corporate sponsors. Underneath his soothing closing words rested a layer of astonishing becalmed rage. You always felt a slight static shock when you heard his voice come on again. You didn’t think he could still exist. Where had he gone to? Was his doom always to live inside the stories of others?

“He was a guy I knew,” I told Laura. “Back in Buffalo. I’ve told you about him. He’s got that radio show now.” I reminded her of it.

After my prompting, she did indeed remember it. He had become quite a personage out there in Los Angeles, by putting his disappearing acts front and center. He had become famously insubstantial.

“Are you going to call him?” she asked me.

“I guess so.” I nodded, so that I could agree with myself.

“Your hand is shaking.” She reached out and gripped me.

“I’m all right.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Well.” I tried to find the right words. “You know: it’s hard to find the right words when you’re about to talk to someone you once knew when you were someone else, someone you no longer are.”

She nodded. The quilt she had given me a few months after we had met each other, her love’s token, was up on the wall close to the phone. It had been stitched together, as some quilts are, from rags and cast-off clothes and found fabrics, and the pattern had been set in a series of tiny squares that evoked a child’s world of curlicues and stars and snowflakes. What I had always loved about Laura had been her kindness and innocence in the face of the world’s sophisticated cruelty. She was almost frighteningly guileless. This meant that about sixty percent of human behavior was simply beyond her comprehension. She had never wised up, and she never would. And yet — I insist on this, too — she was not a child. She just had a permanent immunity to evil. It baffled her.

“All right, I have to call him,” I said. “I have to do this myself now. I guess I need to be alone with this.”

She nodded and left the room as I dialed the number. “Dialed”! There are no dials on telephones anymore. Nevertheless, the verb lives on in its ghostly phantom way.

A briny-sounding woman answered after two rings, as if from an underwater world. “Mr. Coolberg’s office,” she gurgled. Background music at her end of the connection could be construed: Bill Evans, one of the solo keyboard albums, where he sounds like a jazz Debussy contemplating which form of addiction he’ll try next.

A pause, as I collected myself. “May I speak to…” I couldn’t say “Jerome,” and I couldn’t say “Mr. Coolberg,” and I couldn’t say “Jerome Coolberg,” and deciding that I couldn’t use any of these terms required an unhealthy and embarrassing amount of time; I was stymied. Finally I said, “Couldn’t I speak to him?”

She laughed at the grotesque phrase. “Whom shall I say is calling?”

I gave her my name.

She put me on hold, and a recorded voice came on urging me to contribute to my local NPR affiliate. This was followed by a blip on the wire and the sound of something breathing asthmatically into the mouthpiece one full continent away.

“Nathaniel,” he said at last.

“Jerome.”

“Thank you for calling back.”

“You’re welcome.”

“How are you?”

“Oh, I’m fine, I guess. You?”

He continued to take short stabbing breaths. It was him, all right. “I’m frightened,” he said.

“Of what?”

“Of talking to you. This is like swimming across a lake in the middle of the forest and trying to see someone who has been reported as missing, and who may well have drowned. You keep swimming and searching, but you don’t want to see what you’re supposed to be looking for.” Coolberg hadn’t lost his taste for epic similes. I had no idea what he was talking about. Sometimes his brilliance just sounded like garble, a form of pre-cognition.

“Uh, right,” I said agreeably. It wasn’t as if I could answer such a statement. “Is that why you called?”

“No.”

“Did you want to talk? About—”

“No. Well, yes and no. I’ve done something. And I need to…well, I’m sorry to be so unclear, so vague. I can’t really talk about it over the phone. But I need to tell you about it by showing it to you. It’s important.” Indefinite reference always had a way of proliferating with him, as it did in the fiction of Henry James. After a while, you just lost the thread. Everything turned into “it.” At least on the page you could search through the previous paragraphs for what was being alluded to.

“Yes? How? What’s this ‘something’?”

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

“Yes? What?”

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

“For what? I don’t get it.”

“Would you agree to be on American Evenings?”

“No.”

“That’s what I thought you’d say. Yes, that’s right. You don’t have to agree to it now. I wouldn’t expect you to. Think it over. The show can send you tickets anyway, whether you’re on the program or not. I could say that I brought you out as a consultant. We have enough in the budget for that. We could put you up in a hotel. You could stay on Sunset Boulevard. It’s a well-known hotel we could put you in. Celebrities have died there,” he said with a tone of morbid cheer. “The famous Fatal Hotel! Could you come out? Or is the timing inopportune?”

Such talk, thick with unreality, had gone out of my life. I could hear Jeremy upstairs murmuring on his cell phone. No, I couldn’t hear him murmuring, not actually, but I could imagine him crooning his love and longings to a girl who would be crooning them back to him. I could see Michael trying to rig up some new use for Coca-Cola concentrated syrup, sold behind the drugstore pharmaceutical counter but not yet properly exploited by the adventuresome early-adolescent set. I could hear my wife talking to a quilter about a purchase on her own cell. “Cell”! That’s the word, all right. Everyone else was deeply engaged in his own variety of life. Everyone else inhabited a world. What was I going to do? Spend the rest of my days as a time-server in suburban New Jersey? And never revisit this particular corner of my past, now, in the present, out there in the Golden State?

“No, it isn’t,” I said. “Okay.”

“Okay, you’ll come?”

“Okay, Jerome, I’ll come.”

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