The Soul Thief

36

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

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

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

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

“Couple hours from now.”

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

“They’re not FBI.”

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

“Bye,” I said.

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

“Day after tomorrow, probably.”

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

“No, I’m not.”

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

I was? That was news to me. I shut the door softly behind me. I walked past the hallway table just beyond the bathroom whose light I had carelessly left on, down the stairs on whose lower landing I inspected a framed picture of a high school girl whom Jeremy had sketched in art class, out onto the street where the morning papers were being delivered, thrown from the passenger-side window of a creeping car. I greeted the dawn before getting into my car and starting the engine to drive myself to the airport. I remembered a prayer I had said years ago on behalf of Jamie, before I had blacked out. These days, I had lost the ability to pray or to bless. That gift had abandoned me. It was like throwing words down into a ditch filled with corpses.

On the airplane, I was seated far back in steerage class, two rows up from a disabled lavatory smelling of caustic lye. Before boarding, I had eaten a hasty breakfast in the airport restaurant, ominously named the Afterburner Lounge. I was just now beginning to feel the consequences. The food I had ordered — scrambled eggs that looked concocted from powder out of a tin — had been served with ill-disguised jocular contempt. The eggs had disagreed with me, so that when I sat down in my assigned seat, I was almost immediately afflicted. My gut gushed and gubbled.

My seat was next to that of a young mother accompanied by her squalling son, who appeared to be about a year old. He clutched a teddy bear with a music box inside. The bear’s head rotated, demonlike, as the music played. Several nearby seatmates gazed steadily at the teddy bear as if they planned to dismember it. Meanwhile, the screaming child, in the full flower of his own hysteria, grew as red as a turnip and as loud as a megaphone.

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

“Noisy, isn’t he?” she laughed. She tried to plug her son’s mouth with a pacifier. He spat it out onto the floor as the plane banked to the left, and the pacifier tumbled out of reach.

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

“Do you have kids?”

“Two sons,” I said. “Mostly grown.”

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

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

“What’s that?”

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

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

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

37

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

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

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

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

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

And then there were the cars, alongside of which you could ignore the speed limits or sit waiting for the jams to clear. The captains of industry zoomed past in their pink Bentleys, blue Maseratis, and white Porsches, or in their smoked-glass limos with vanity plates (SILKY was one, DIRECTOR another), and the upper-level drones sported about in their ordinarily luxurious Audis and BMWs. Lower-level types, at the bottom of the food chain, drove the humiliated Fords and humble Chevys, mere shark bait. The street stylists had their lowriders and their bass-driven hubbub. But there was also this museum aspect to L.A. traffic: sitting in a seemingly full-stopped backup, I noticed in front of me a perfectly maintained candy-apple green AMC Gremlin, clown car par excellence, and behind me a blindingly white ’64 Ford Mustang. This city, after all, was the North American capital of whimsicality, and if Angelenos wanted campy remnants from the ridiculous past, they would find them. Here you could spot antique Peugeots and Citroëns and Fiats, Kaisers and Frasers and Morris Minors, Austins and Vauxhalls, rescued from junkyards and given a shine.

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

Eventually I found my way to Sunset Boulevard and proceeded toward the Fatal Hotel, where I had arranged to meet Coolberg later in the afternoon. I had always liked the twists and turns of Sunset, its deluxe corridors like roped-off walkways outside of which you might spy distant palazzos whose turrets peeked up above the tactically planted topiary that no drudge was permitted to approach. After living for so long in New Jersey, I simply stared at the palm trees, the bougainvillea, the nature-conservatory greenhouse luxuriance, as I motored past. I didn’t want any of it. I just wanted to look, from a safe distance.

When I reached the hotel, a bored valet removed my luggage, gave it to an equally bored bellman, and sped off somewhere in my contemptible rental car. I was ushered into the lobby. For such a famous place, known for its hospitality to louche celebrities of every stripe, the Fatal seemed rather drab, even seedy. It advertised its own cool indifference to everything by means of dim Art Deco lamps and shabby antique rugs. Indifference constituted its most prized form of discretion. To the left of the entryway sat an ice plant. A dusty standing pot with a sunlit cactus in it, close to the elevators, matched the ice plant for pure floral forlornness. They were emblems of four-star neglect. In front of me, and to the right of the front desk, was a brown Art Deco sofa that looked as if it could have used a thorough cleaning. Scandalized, I saw stains. In the sofa’s dead center, a model with a high, soft laugh sat talking to a deeply tanned predatory type in a safari outfit who perched on an arm-rest. His teeth gave off a glare of whiteness, and his huge panopticon eyeglasses — an hommage to Lew Wasserman — seemed to cover the upper half of his face. He had probably trapped the object of his attention out in the wilds of Malibu and would soon sell her to the slavers. Meanwhile, the half-lit lobby seemed to be recovering from a recent binge. The pale yellow stucco walls radiated the weltschmerz of hangover.

Perhaps, of course, all this feverish registry of impressions was just that — the fever I typically fell into when visiting L.A. I approached the front desk. The clerk sized me up instantly and smiled a shimmering, vacant smile full of patronizing friendliness. He would be polite, dealing with a nonentity such as myself, the smile proclaimed. My banal debaucheries (if I could rise to even that level) would be cosmically inane, however, and laughably conventional. The universe was running down because of people like me. He was already stupendously tired of my existence, and I hadn’t yet said a word. On his face was the blasé expression of a young professional who has exactly calibrated which drugs, and in what quantities, are required to get him through the day.

“Yes?” He gave me an affable thousand-mile stare.

“I’m checking in.”

The clerk impatiently examined his prizewinning watch. “I’m sorry, sir, but no rooms are ready yet. Check-in time here is three p.m.” Well, yes: major-league fun leaves a big mess behind, and didn’t I know that? Coolberg would not be meeting me until three.

“Well,” I said, “maybe I could check in and turn my luggage over to the bell captain, and take a walk?”

Take a walk! What an idea! Now the clerk actually grinned. An enthusiastic happy disdain flared out of him like the scent of a strong cologne. One did not walk away from this hotel. One was driven away, after being loaded into a limo or a hearse. Although he had the random good looks of a would-be actor, the clerk’s overbite now protruded slightly when he smiled. Handsomeness gave way to his latent provincialism and failed orthodontics. He would never get more than one line per movie, if that, but what fun I was turning out to be. “Yes,” he said. “You could take a stroll. Also,” he said, remembering his manners, “the hotel has a restaurant. We serve,” he said, then paused, unsure of how to finish the sentence, having lost the thread, before catching his thought again, “all day.” He licked his upper teeth with his tongue.

“No,” I said, “I’ll take a walk. By the way, my reservation here was called in, possibly under the name Coolberg. Jerome Coolberg.”

“Ah.” Sudden recognition; his face brightened slightly, as if a rheostat had been turned to about twenty-five watts. “American Evenings.”

“Yes,” I lied. “I’m one of them. I’m one of the evenings.”

His lips tightened patronizingly, as if at last he had to acknowledge my minuscule somebody-ness. “Congratulations,” he said.

Outside the hotel, I walked in what I thought was a westerly direction.

38

ACTUALLY, I KNEW perfectly well where I was going. I ignored the somnolent junkies on the sidewalk and got out of the way of the roller girls zipping past me in the opposite direction. I was intent on my destination. Tempted as I was by the neighborhood record store, still in business and, I could see, patronized by clueless middle-aged men who didn’t know how to steal music files from the Web, I nevertheless continued to stride at a soldierly pace, peering in quickly at the tattoo parlors and the magazine racks as I advanced toward the shrine. At last I found it.

Angelyne. There it was, the billboard, dedicated to totally meaningless celebrity. Just as historic literary Long Island had its eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg, so L.A. had Angelyne. She was completely admirable. She had her blowsy showgirl beauty and had peddled it for years in these primary-colored billboards mounted on the roofs of the neighborhood buildings: and in this particularly characteristic one — traditional, just her picture and her name, ANGELYNE — her hazardous giant breasts were on display, though miserably confined by a tight dress of plastic, or was it laminated vinyl? She sported black elbow-length evening gloves, a junk-jewelry bracelet, a cigarette holder, and her aging blond-bombshell hair tumbled on either side of the weather-beaten eyes. Supposedly, according to legend, she drove a chartreuse Corvette. She had once run for mayor.

No one I knew in L.A. had ever paid the slightest attention to these Angelyne billboards. But I loved them. I loved them more than the ocean, more than the Getty Museum, more than the canyons, more than Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall. They spoke to the moralist in me. They were like Protestant cautionary tales to the supplicants and votaries of the dreamworld: here, presiding over the beautiful narcotic substances of the city, was this shopworn royalty figure, this majestic ruin, this queen without identity, this ex-beauty, this tautology (her full name was Angeline Angelyne) as powerful in her prodigious way as Ozymandias. She looked out at you, and if you dared, you looked back. You could ignore her; you could pray to her; you could deconstruct her; you could even bother to think about her; but whatever you did, she would continue being as blank and as melancholy as fading beauty itself, brooding down at you from this height, but, like the rest of us commoners, powerless against time.

39

I RETURNED TO the hotel. On the way I bought some postcards and mailed off one to Laura (a picture of the Hollywood sign), another to Jeremy (Malibu volleyball-playing beach bunnies), and a third to Michael (smog). A toothless wizened African American guy approached me and asked me for bus fare. I walked right past him, afraid of a shakedown from a practiced con. Back in the hotel, behind the front desk, the clerk roused himself from his customary insolent ennui and smirked quickly at me before composing himself again. Finding the best seat in the lobby, out of the way of commerce, I sat down to wait until Coolberg arrived. Moths fluttered around inside my stomach. Models and DJs and B-list Eurotrash movie stars came and went.

I felt myself dozing off.

I hate dreams. I hate them when they appear in literature, and I hate them when I myself have them. I distrust the truth-value that Freud assigned to them. Dreams lie as often as they tell the truth. Their imaginary castles, kingdoms, and dungeons are a cast-off collection of broken and obvious metaphors. When you hold them in your hand, you do not hold the key to anything. No door will open. You can live an honorable life without them.

And yet in that lobby, I had a dream in which the two parts of my life were brought together at last. I walked down Sunset Boulevard and entered the People’s Kitchen. The place had been restored and spruced up. It was efficient and clean. The dispossessed and hungry who were fed there greeted me happily when I came in. Laura sat near the window and was conversing with Jamie, across from her. They gestured as they spoke. They were both beautiful. The two women leaned toward each other as women friends will, in the great intimacy of shared affections and interests. Jamie had been made whole again. The damage to her had been undone. Here, she was undestroyed. Theresa came by with a water pitcher and poured refills into their glasses. Nearby, my boys conversed with the street people, among whom I saw Ben the Burglar, smiling and laughing, and the old African American man on Sunset to whom I had just refused a handout. Once again I found myself caring for the victims of industrial decline, the poor and ill-fated. My history had been scrolled back and rewritten. I could love anyone and not be punished for it.

40

SOMEONE IN MY DREAM SAID, “Nathaniel, wake up.”

When I opened my eyes, I took him in. Standing before me in the hotel lobby was Coolberg, tapping my shoe to rouse me. On his face was the kindest expression I have ever seen on the face of a fellow human. It was angelic, if you could imagine a middle-aged man — balding, slightly overweight, dressed in baggy trousers, rumpled shirt, and unpressed tie stained with spilled food — as angelic. He had the undefended appearance of a middle-aged cherub with a five o’clock shadow and bad posture.

Time had humanized him. I could tell that nothing that he and I were about to do would develop as I had anticipated. The scenario I had foreseen — recriminations, blame, righteous anger — gave way to my sudden intense bewilderment.

“Jerome,” I said. I stood and shook his hand.

“Let’s get out of this place,” he said, glancing around the hotel’s lobby with disapproval. “This hotel terrifies me. I thought you might like it. I don’t know why I believed that. Out-of-towners are sometimes impressed by it. But of course you wouldn’t be.” He sighed. “You were never an out-of-towner anywhere,” he said cryptically. “I’ve got a car here and a few errands to run. I drive now. I finally learned how. I learned directions. Then maybe we could go out to Santa Monica for dinner. What do you think?”

I nodded halfheartedly. “Seems fine.”

His car, a nondescript Toyota, was cluttered with books, DVDs, and plastic pint bottles of chocolate milk, a remedy, he told me, for the chronic sour stomach from which he suffered. He cleared off the passenger-side bucket seat, and within a few minutes we were on Hollywood Boulevard, passing the Walk of Fame. I noticed that Snow White and Darth Vader were circulating there, handling out discount coupons for local businesses. The sunburnt tourists seemed happy to have been given something, anything, by these mythic creatures; they clutched the orange coupons to their hearts. Snow White had been located in that same spot when I had brought my family here on vacation a few years ago. She had had a dotty expression on her face then, and she still had it. The job had deranged her, or perhaps she had suffered from heatstroke and the loss of her worldwide renown.

“Snow White should be institutionalized,” I said.

“Oh, she has been,” Coolberg knowingly informed me. We drove for another few minutes, and he stopped in front of a supermarket. “I just have to get one thing here,” he said. “A seasoning. Want to come in?”

“Oh, I think I’ll stay here in the car.” I didn’t want to find myself following him around.

“Suit yourself,” he said.

At the corner, someone with an odd, doughy face was hawking maps to the stars’ houses. Coolberg and I — it was unnerving — hadn’t really spoken. He had bragged that the day seemed unusually clear for L.A. (true) and that you could see the hills (also true). Maybe, he said, we should drive up to see “the vista” for ourselves. I had nodded. Sure, whatever. But he hadn’t asked me about myself, or my flight, or my past or present life, and I hadn’t asked him about American Evenings, or his health, or his personal arrangements — whether he was married or partnered or single. We hadn’t said a word about the period of antiquity in Buffalo we had shared. Buffalo possessed a drab unsightliness, a thrift-shop cast-off industrialism, compared to L.A., the capital of Technicolor representations. People were leaving there to come here. They were giving up objects for images. Besides, it was as if neither of us had the nerve to start a real conversation.

I looked down at the books in the car. Luminaries: Paul Bowles, Goethe, André Gide, Kawabata, Bessie Head. Books from everywhere, it seemed, many of them old editions with yellowed pages. A notebook was also there on the floor. I picked it up.

The outside of the notebook displayed my name in my own handwriting, Nathaniel Mason, and the date, 1973. I dropped the thing back on the floor as if I’d been slugged. Of course I was meant to see it; I was meant to toss it back onto the floor; I was meant to stare off into the distance, toward the maps of the stars and the brilliantly shabby street, lit by the perky late-afternoon sun.

On our way up one of the canyons — I think it must have been Beachwood, snaking upward just under the Hollywood sign — he kept his silence, but it was one of those silences in which you imagine the conversation that is simultaneously not occurring.

Where are we?

Oh, what a question! We are where we are.

Whose houses are these? Whose castles? What are these hairpin turns?

Don’t you admire the camellias? They bloom about this time of year. Those bushes can be pruned into any shape. Note the rose-petal-like flowers, in cream, white, red, or striated colors. Note how they’re surrounded by waxy green leaves?

Yes, very nice. We don’t have those at home in New Jersey.

What happened to you, Nathaniel? Whatever became of you?

My life changed, that’s what. What is my notebook doing on the floor of your car?

Eventually we reached the end of Beachwood Drive, stopped, looked (yes yes, I agreed: an impressive view), turned around, and began to creep back down the canyon on the same hairpin turns. I noticed that he was a rather disordered driver, slow to react, a poor calculator of distance. He was also unobservant, and, I could tell, wearied by the sights. The truth is that L.A. is a company town, and there isn’t all that much to show to tourists. Its arid provincial beauty quickly stupefies the innocent and bores the initiate.

“Shall we go to Santa Monica?” he asked, evidently bereft of other ideas. “Should we head out there?”

“Yes,” I said. “Let’s do that.”

41

HE HAD MADE a reservation at a restaurant on Ocean Boulevard, where we had a relatively clear line of sight to the palisade and the Pacific beyond it. It was a coolly perfect late afternoon, with faint wisps of cirrus clouds drifting in from the west. Around us, the cheerful chirps of the local song-birds mixed with slow pensive jazz. A saxophone, played live, from somewhere nearby, curlicued its way through “Satin Doll.” From the restaurant’s terrace, we were presented with a bright parade of in-line skaters, lovers, and their audiences, and they, too, made me think of tropical birds in brilliant colors, not a crow among them. There was no better place to be. Seated close to us was the usual mix of tourists, domestic and foreign, and local swells, most of them dressed in the gaudy clothes of joy. If you strained to listen, you could hear French and German spoken here and there in the restaurant. No Spanish, though, except back in the serving area and in the kitchen. As a habitué of such scenes, Coolberg took all this prodigality for granted in a way I could not, but he smiled at my keen curiosity, my outsider’s hunger for sights and sounds.

“Would you like some wine?” he asked me. “White or red? Maybe a white to start? They have a wonderful Sancerre here, so they tell me.”

“So they tell you?”

“I don’t drink,” he said, flagging down a waiter and ordering a bottle for me. “I can’t drink. I go to pieces.” The Sancerre came, was poured, was delicious, and Coolberg beamed his kindly cherub smile in my direction as he sipped his mineral water.

“You go to pieces?”

“I lose track of myself.”

“Ah,” I said, thinking that he had always been guilty of that particular error. I gulped, a bit, at the wine, whose quality was above my station in life. Nevertheless, I was trying to mind my manners. But manners or not, I had business to attend to. “Jerome, how did you find me?”

“Oh, that’s easy, these days. You can use the Web to find anybody. There’s no place to hide anymore. And if you can’t do it yourself, you hire a teenager to do your snooping for you. They know how to find Social Security numbers, credit cards—”

“Yes,” I said. “Identity theft.”

The phrase hung in the air for a moment.

“But…well. Anyway, I had been keeping track of you,” he said, going on as if I hadn’t said anything. “I knew where you were. Even after I moved out here, to Los Angeles, I studied where you had gone to.” He leaned back and glanced out toward the ocean, as if he were contemplating a trip. “You know. What had become of you, things like that.

“It was a little hobby of mine,” he continued. “So. When you were engaged to Laura, I found out. That was easy. Really, ridiculously easy. You can’t imagine. When you were married, I saw the announcement. That was easy, too — finding out, I mean. You don’t even need a detective for such things. I followed you from job to job, just, you know, keeping tabs, the post office, the gas company, et cetera, all of it from a distance, of course from a distance, my distance, where I’d note things down in my record book, and when your son Jeremy was born, I marked the date on my calendar. August twenty-third, wasn’t it? Yes. August twenty-third. A good day. I almost sent you a card.” He laughed quietly. “And when your wife hit that pedestrian, that vindictive man, I saw the court records of the litigation. Then there was your second son, Michael. A July Fourth baby, born to fireworks, a little patriot, a…Yankee Doodle Dandy.” He smiled tenderly and tapped his index finger on the table. “I noticed all of the milestones, each and every one of them. My eye was on the sparrow.”

I must have stared at him. It was like being in the audience at a show given by a psychic who tells you details about your dead grandmother.

“But why?” I asked him. “Why did you do that? Why did you—”

“Keep track?” He leaned forward. “Please. If you have to ask me such a question, then you’re never going to know.” I could smell lemongrass on his breath. Probably he drank herbal tea all day. “Your son Jeremy is on the swim team, the breast-stroke and the medley, and your wife has a little business dealing in quilts.” He rubbed at his jaw. “Quite a diversified family. I almost bought one from her, and then I thought better of it.”

“You thought better of it? You do more than keep track,” I said.

“Oh, yes. Sure. I do. I do more. But I won’t bore you with additional details about your life. After all, it’s your life. You’re living it.”

It’s important to say here that I wasn’t angry, or shocked, or disbelieving, or amused by what he was telling me. I was simply and overwhelmingly neutral now, as if witnessing a unique force of nature manifesting itself in front of me. “So,” I said, “you became a student of my life.”

“Well, obsession stinks of eternity.” He reached out for a piece of bread, then spread butter all over it. He hadn’t lost his gift for plummy phrases.

“Why me?” I had never before seen so much butter applied to a slice of bread. Coolberg had the uncertain etiquette of a child born to poverty, and I remembered that he had always eaten like an orphan in a crowded noisy dining hall. “Why me?”

“Why you? You’re being obtuse. It doesn’t suit you.” He glanced to his right as a recently disgraced film actress sat down near us with a female friend. Other people in the restaurant were watching them.

“Well,” I said, “as long as we’re talking about this, do you know what happened to Theresa?”

“Theresa?” he laughed. “Her? Oh, she scuzzied herself back into the great membrane.”

“What does that mean?” Twilight was beginning to come on. The waiter lit the candle on our table. The ocean currents went their way. Planet Earth hurtled through space. The galaxy turned on its axis.

“She wasn’t much to begin with, was she? And she wasn’t much later either. So now, I imagine, she isn’t much at all. All that tiresome irony of hers, that sophomoric knowingness. I don’t think irony as a stance is very intelligent, do you? Well, I mean it has the appearance of intelligence, but that’s all it has. It goes down this far”—he held his hand at knee level—“but it doesn’t go any farther.”

“She was pretty,” I said, feeling the need to defend her.

“No,” Coolberg said. “I don’t agree. Theresa was attractive without being pretty. She had the banal sensibilities of a local librarian who’s moved to the big city and has started serious drinking and making semi-comical overstatements to disguise her obvious gaps. All those Soviet medals! Come on. And one memorized line of French poetry. What a doofus she was. Poor thing. There’s a difference between — well, attraction and prettiness, and she never got it. All of her books were borrowed, if you know what I mean. Anyway, she’s wherever she is.”

“But you were her lover.”

He blew air out of his mouth in response to this irrelevant observation.

“And Jamie?” I asked quickly. “Jamie Esterson? The sculptor? She worked at the People’s Kitchen, remember?” I felt a shadow fall over me, as if I were about to get sick very soon. Could you become mentally destabilized in an instant? People talk about panic attacks, the feeling of the sudden oncoming locomotive and you, caught on the tracks in a stalled automobile. Anyway, I saw the shadow there, and I fought it off by looking out at the sidewalk and quietly counting the cars on Ocean Boulevard. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen.

He flinched. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know what happened to her. No idea at all.”

Eighteen, nineteen, twenty.

He ordered the salmon, and I ordered the cassoulet. Night dropped its black lace around us. He began to tell me what had happened to him. After leaving the East and never quite collecting a college degree, he had turned up in Los Angeles, having written a screenplay, a musical, Fire Escape, whose odd locale had been a downtown apartment building with a cast of colorful urban characters (“If you could imagine Rear Window as a musical, which I could, in those days, then you could imagine the script”). Although the screenplay had been optioned, the project went nowhere, but its readers noticed a certain flare in it, a soigné knowingness about plot requirements and genre conventions. Slowly he built up a lattice-work of friends, among them a programming manager at a local public-radio affiliate. Oh, this was dull. He would not bore me any longer with the banal details of what he had accomplished and where he had been and whom he had known. He had a life. Everyone has a life. If I cared, I could check on it. I could hire my own gumshoe teenager to snoop. No one cares about the particulars, he said — an obvious lie and the first mis-statement to emerge from his cherubic face so far. He was, after all, the host of American Evenings. In a sense, he was hosting it now. This was one of those evenings he so prized.

“I’m interested in the particulars,” I said, tipping back my third glass of wine. The waiter came to pour the remainder of the bottle’s contents into my glass. “Such as: Are you married?” I thought of current conversational protocols. “Do you have a partner? Is there someone?”

“Oh, there’s always someone,” he said vaguely, dismissively. He watched an old man rumble by on the sidewalk stabilized by a walker. He was accompanied by his elderly wife, and both were wearing identical blue blazers. No: they were not married. They were twins.

“Who’s yours? You seem to know about mine,” I said.

“What does it matter? Are you trying to take a moral inventory? It wouldn’t be anyone you know. Love is generic. Besides, that’s not what you’re really interested in.”

“What am I really interested in? Since you seem to be the expert.”

“Well, okay, to start with, here’s a subject of interest: What am I doing with your notebook from years ago? Why was it reposing on the floor of my car? Which you surely took note of, that notebook, when I was in the supermarket buying garlic and arrowroot?”

“I did.”

“Isn’t it interesting?” he asked. “So far, we haven’t talked about those days. You never asked me back then, or ever, why I had your clothes stolen or why I was wearing them. You went around with that expression on your face as if you understood each and every one of my actions, as if you understood everything and accepted all of it. No one will ever tell you this except me, so I’ll say it: that expression appeared to comprehend everything that anybody could present to it. Your tolerance was positively grotesque in its limitlessness. What didn’t you accept? It was your greatest weapon. No: your second-greatest weapon.”

“What was the first?”

“Want another bottle of wine?”

“I’ve had enough.”

“So what? Who cares? You’re not driving anywhere.” He made a gesture at the waiter, and instead of wine ordered brandy. Then he began teasing his lower lip with his index finger. “Why do you care about that sculptor so much, that Jamie person? Why did you care?”

I reached for my wineglass. “Because I loved her. Because I never got over her.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Yes. About that I am very sure.” My syntax had acquired the stately formality of the truly inebriated. I was still wondering what he thought my greatest weapon was. “And by the way, who are you to be interrogating me about any of this?”

He smiled an impish smile. “The host of American Evenings, that’s who. And look. That’s exactly what we’ve been presented with.” He pointed in the general direction of the Pacific Ocean. “A pleasantly wonderful American evening for the consumers of twilight and our national metaphysical ruin, as played out here, in the best of all possible worlds, in SoCal.”

I wasn’t sure that I had heard him correctly. “‘SoCal’?” Had he really employed that usage? “So this is another one of your American Evenings? You don’t have your tape recorder on, do you?”

“Oh, no, Nathaniel, that would be illegal, immoral, and, what’s worse, impractical. You can’t pick up an adequate—”

“What did you do to her?” I interrupted him.

“To whom?”

“To Jamie.”

“To Jamie? I didn’t do anything to her.” He leaned back. “She was set upon. By dogs.”

“But you predicted it. You told me that day in the zoo. You said you were writing something called Shadow, whose story contained an Iago-like character named Trautwein, I remember that, who is tormenting another character, I think his name — and it was truly a ridiculous name, an affectedly literary name — was Ambrose, who loves this woman, an artist, and Ambrose…well, the person he loves is harmed, not directly, but by hired-out third parties. It’s not Othello, but it’s a third cousin once removed to that story. Trautwein sees to the harm.” I winced at my own alcoholic repetitions, but they were essential to the case I was making.

Somehow, coffee had appeared on the table. Coolberg picked up his cup. “It might have been a coincidence.”

“Okay,” I replied to him. “But what if it wasn’t? What if…let’s just say…hypothetically…what if you, or, um, someone like you, not you exactly, not you as you are now, what if this hypothetical past-tense person had hired…what if you had hired some young men, some thugs, for example, that you found hanging around the People’s Kitchen or some place like that, to beat her up, to do terrible violence to her? Well, no. Strike that. I take that back. Maybe all they were supposed to do was threaten her a little. A teeny-weeny act of intimidation, motivated by jealousy, let’s say. That’s all. They would walk up to her at the bus stop and slyly put the fear into her. And this…prank would scare her right out of town. Off she would go, to another…what? Venue. That was the goal. You know: give her a little 12-volt shock. Affright her with their boyish street-thug menace, which is, I might add, celebrated now on all the major screen media. We can’t get enough of that, can we? Sweet, sweet violence. So, anyway, with this plan, she’d leave town, pack up herself along with her few minor bruises, if she had any, and move, taking her little birds and blimps with her. But maybe the plan goes awry. Let’s suppose that the guys who are hired are not just sly. They’re criminal sociopaths instead. The 12-volt shock turns out to be 120 volts. And then it gets European and goes up to 240 volts. And what if…let’s just say…they got into it, these thugs that’d been hired, or were maybe just doing a favor — well, you’d only need a couple of them, and they couldn’t stop what they had started, their specialty not being staying within limits set for them by authority figures, after all, and they hate women anyway, and they sort of raped her, because it was possible, you know how one thing leads to another, don’t you, Jerome? I know I do. And she was raped. And after it happened, she couldn’t remember much of anything, so there were no arrests and no trials because she couldn’t identify anybody and the police were helpless, and she left town soon afterward, clearing the field, so to speak. What if that had happened?”

He looked directly at me. “Then I would have been a monster.” He glanced at the sky. “Then I would have been unable to live with myself.”

“But you had already hired a burglar. You had hired a burglar to steal clothes, my clothes, and then he got into his tasks, and he couldn’t stop, and he stole everything from my apartment, until nothing was left, only a book or two. And a mattress.” I leaned back. I felt like repeating myself. “You had already hired a burglar. It’s what you do. You’re still a burglar. You still steal clothes. I’ve listened to your show.”

“Is that what you think happened?” he asked me. “Is that really what you think?”

“Sometimes I think it,” I said. We were both speaking calmly, like gentlemen, over the coffee and the dessert.

“You think your apartment was being emptied by burglars?”

“Sure it was.”

“Oh, you poor guy,” he said. “It wasn’t being emptied by burglars. It was being emptied by you. You were moving out, or trying to. Don’t be such an innocent. You were trying to move in with her. With that Jamie person. This hopeless hopeless stupid idiotic romance you thought you had going on with her. It was making you crazy, you poor guy. We could all see it. Anybody who loved you could see it. And of course she wouldn’t let you take anything over there, into her place. Because there was no room, to start with. And because she didn’t love you the way you loved her and…she didn’t really want you over there. So you were storing your stuff somewhere else, in the meantime, until she would come around, as we used to say, come around to being the benign woman you believed she could be, the heterosexual wife or whatever she was that you had envisioned. You had assigned a certain set of emotions to her and were just waiting for her to have them, and meanwhile you were reading that soggy Romantic poetry and dragging the spectacle of your broken heart across the Niagara Frontier. Love? You were offering something you didn’t have to someone who didn’t want it.”

“I was storing my stuff somewhere else?”

“Of course you were.”

“If she was refusing me, why wasn’t I taking my stuff back to my own place?”

“Because that would have been an admission of defeat. You were always good at denial.”

“So where was I taking everything?”

He gave me that look again. “You poor guy,” he said again. “You persist in your habits, don’t you? Your ingrained habits of incomprehension. Willful incomprehension. And convenient amnesia. You’re just like this country. You’re a champion of strategic forgetting. You really can’t give up your innocence, can you? That sort of surprises me.” He glanced down at my glass of brandy as if it were responsible for my faults. “You can’t live without your disavowals. You told me that Jamie left you a letter behind in her apartment after she took off. It was addressed to you.”

“Yes.”

“What did it say?”

“I never opened it,” I admitted.

“I rest my case,” Coolberg said, signaling for the check. “Let’s go down to the pier.”

42

I SUPPOSE HE MUST HAVE loved me back then. He must have enjoyed being me for a while, wearing my clothes and my autobiography. And I suppose I must have noticed it, but I never thought of his emotions as particularly consequential to anyone, and certainly not to me — the feelings being unreciprocated — and in those days, brush fires of frustrated eros burned nearly everywhere. Everyone suffered, everyone. I myself burned from them, and when you are burning, you are blinded to the other fires.

Next I knew, we were out on the Santa Monica pier, making our way toward the Ferris wheel, as if we had a rendezvous with it. After the wine and the brandy, I thought the structure had a giant festive beauty, with exuberant red and blue spokes aimed in toward the white burning center. Ezekiel’s wheel, I thought, a space saucer of solar fires. Give me more wine. My emotions had no logic anymore, having been released from linearity, and certainly no relation to the conversation we had just had, Coolberg and I. Multicolored plastic seating devices that looked like toadstools affixed to the Ferris wheel lifted up the passengers until they were suspended above the dull sea-level crowd. Coolberg was speaking; I could register, distantly, as if from my own spaceship, that he was uttering sentences, though their meaning appeared to be comically insubstantial. Slowly the words came into focus. He noted that during the day, the wheel on which we were about to ride was solar-powered, could I imagine that? A solar-powered Ferris wheel! Just as I thought! Energy from the sun lifted this thing. Only in L.A. He bought two tickets. From somewhere he had obtained a bag of popcorn. All around us we now heard Spanish spoken by the eager celebrants, the Ferris wheel being a bit too unsophisticated for your typical pale-faced tourist out on the Santa Monica Pier. This ride was more suited to the illegal immigrant population that understood distance, death, and sweep.

“Mira. Hoy, los latinos,” Coolberg whispered to me. “Mañana, los blanquitos.”

We were ushered onto one of the blue toadstools with an umbrella canopy obligingly suspended over it, and before I could register my objections, Coolberg and I were locked in, a gesture was made, and the wheel scooped us up into the air.

We went up and down, he and I.

“It would be nice to say that I’m asking for your forgiveness,” he was saying, somewhere nearby me, as we swayed in the air, and swooped, “but I’ve tried to eradicate sentimentality from my daily routines, and besides, you’re too drunk. You’re not going to remember any of this, and forgiveness induced by alcohol, from you, is meaningless. What I really want to do is explain something to you.”

The wheel lifted us up again, and I saw Malibu ahead of us, and Venice Beach behind (the toadstools twisted on some sort of pivot), diminish into starfields, in the way that a city, seen at night from an airplane whose cabin has been dimmed, will look, with its spackled pinpoints, like the sky that mirrors it. Directly below us the carnival sounds of the Santa Monica Pier faded into an audible haze, and I could feel my stomach lurch.

“I have admitted nothing,” he said, “and I have confessed to nothing. I haven’t asked for your forgiveness, because forgiveness has a statute of limitations attached to it. If it comes too late, the emotion itself has expired. Pffffft. It only works if it’s fresh, forgiveness; and when it’s stale, it’s rotten and useless. Don’t you agree? But, you know, I was sorry — really I was, horribly sorry, disgusted, mortified, disfigured with regret, oh, just fill in all the adjectives you want to. I’m sure you can do that. What was I saying? I remember. I was sorry about what happened to that girl, that Jamie, your one true love, and if those days could have been taken back, if I could go back there, then I would certainly have taken that journey and taken them back. If I could have gathered all those people in my arms — you and Theresa and Jamie and your sister and your father and all those other people we knew and didn’t know and didn’t even care about — and carry them away to safety, I would have, believe me. And then I’d save the Armenians from the Turks, and the Jews from the Germans and the Poles, and the Tutsis from the Hutus and the Hutus from the Tutsis, and the Native Americans from us, as time is my witness, I’d do that, but, hey, come on, who are we kidding? That’s marauding sentimentality, there. There’s no protecting anyone once history starts digging in its claws, once real evil has a handhold, and besides, what I did…well, look down. Are you looking down? Nathaniel? Good. Do you suffer from vertigo? I do. But you see what’s down there? I don’t mean the ocean. I don’t mean the salt water. Nothing but idiotic marine life in there. Nothing but the whales and the Portuguese and the penguins. No, I mean the mainland. Everywhere down there, someone, believe me, is clothing himself in the robes of another. Someone is adopting someone else’s personality, to his own advantage. Right? Absolutely right. Of this one truth I am absolutely certain. Somebody’s working out a copycat strategy even now. Identity theft? Please. We’re all copycats. Aren’t we? Of course we are. How do you learn to do any little task? You copy. You model. So I didn’t do anything all that unusual, if I did it. But suppose I did, let’s suppose I managed a little con. So what? So I could be you for a while? And was that so bad? Aside from the collateral damage? Anyway, I may have bought something, but I never paid for a rape.”

He stared off toward the darkness, and the lights, of Malibu.

“Let the British be the British,” he said, out of nowhere. I was losing the thread. “We know what they’re like, the Brits: stiff upper lip, a nation of shopkeepers, sheepherders, whatever, all the same, the Brits. We know them. But no one knows who we are here, in this country, because we’re all actors, we’ve got the most fluid cards of identity in the world, we’ve got disguises on top of disguises, we’re the best on earth at what we do, which is illusion. We’re all pretenders. Even Tocqueville noticed that. And if I was acting, anyway and after all, so what? I was just being a good American.”

“Stop talking,” I said. “Shhhhh. Don’t say another word.”

“No?”

I held my finger to my lips. “Shhh.”

The wheel turned in a temporary silence.

“That was a very good speech,” I said. “You were always good at imitating eloquence.”

“Thank you.”

“But I know what this is,” I said. “This is an imitation, isn’t it? All planned out. This is an imitation of Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles in that movie, The Third Man. How clever you are, Jerome, how devious,” I slurred. “Italy, the Borgias and the Renaissance, Switzerland, a thousand years of peace, and cuckoo clocks, Harry Lime’s big speech justifying himself. Everything becomes a reference, to you, doesn’t it? You’re so knowing. What don’t you know? Everything evokes something else, with you. Just as you say.”

His eyes appeared to be wet, but he smiled proudly. I had found him out. He was still pleased to be my friend. He could cry and be pleased with himself at the same time.

“You said you had something to show me,” I told him. “Where is it?”

“I wasn’t sure you’d remember.”

“Oh, I remember,” I said. “You told me over the phone that you had something, and you were going to…give it to me. Where is it?” I waited. “It’s not that old notebook of mine, is it? Because if that’s what it is, I don’t want it back. Or anything else I gave to you, all those years ago, for storage.”

He leaned over. His popcorn spilled out onto the floor. I think he was about to kiss me on the forehead. I leaned back, and he made a gestural lunge. The Ferris wheel’s toad-stool swung back and forth.

“None of that,” I said. “Too late now.”

“Oh, okay,” he said.

“So where’s this thing you have for me?” I asked again.

43

THE WALK BACK to his car seemed to prolong itself almost into infinity, as some experiences do on the wrong side of marijuana or alcohol. Some distortion or injury had occurred to my sense of time, and I could not get back into the easy clocklike passing of one moment into another. All he had told me was that the gift he had for me, whatever it might be, was back in his apartment. I think I died on the way to that car.

Somehow — it seemed to be many years later — we arrived at his Toyota. He unlocked it. I sat down on the passenger side.

44

AFTER A DRIVE whose duration in time I could not have estimated in either minutes or days, we entered, he and I, the infested interior of his apartment. The curtains, thick with grease, had turned from white to gray. Just inside the door, a three-legged cat hobbled over toward him and propped itself against his leg while the two of us examined the newspapers, magazines, books, and framed pictures scattered on the floor, the bookshelves and kitchenette table, and the sofa cushions. Elsewhere, VHS tapes and DVDs had been piled up along the wall, arranged by genre and alphabetized. Outside the window, the lights from passing cars swerved dimly in and out of view, leaving shadows on the ceiling. A calendar near the doorway had been thumbtacked to the wall and showed the month of December from three years ago; the accompanying picture, in faded colors, was that of a sleigh followed distantly by wolves. Through the doorway facing me, a kitchen sink was visible, illuminated by a 1950s-style overhead fixture; the sink’s faucet dripped softly and steadily, leaving a slime trail of rust. Green wallpaper adorned the kitchen. A silenced German clock hung at eye level; the time, it claimed, was nine fifteen. In a corner a TV set had been left on, though the sound had been muted. On the screen, a gigantic blue monster — the TV’s picture tube needed to be replaced — with fish-like scales and a long ropy tongue ripped its claws silently into human flesh. Blood spurted terribly against a suburban home; children ran screaming away. No doubt people were shouting, and frightening music would have been blaring on the sound track if only the volume had been turned up. Over in another corner, a radio, tuned to an FM classical station, played one of the piano pieces Schumann had written late in his madness when he claimed the angels were singing to him.

The masses of accumulation were piled so thickly in the living room that paths had been made between them to allow passage toward the bedroom and bathroom.

As an apartment, this one was not so unusual, especially for a single man. Cluttered and disorderly, every item indisposable, the spaces filled with the wrack and ruin of a solitary life, this apartment served up an antidote to emptiness with a messy mind-stultifying profusion. The rooms looked like the temporary unsupervised housing of someone with a ravening spiritual hunger, a grandiloquent vacancy that would consume anything to fill up the interior space where a soul should be. Books were piled and stacked everywhere. Behind this craving resided an urge as strong as love. All the furniture was secondhand, scratched — emergency furniture to be used in case a catastrophe occurred, as indeed it had. The dreadful had already happened. The catastrophe had come to pass and would last for a lifetime.

The cat purred, and the monster on the TV set was now attacking a major U.S. metropolis. These rooms were filled up but still empty, as empty as the vacuum of outer space uninhabited by a living being, and yet the place had retained its ability to project a human solitude and loneliness, as did Coolberg, who gazed at his dominion with a resigned expression of deadened appetite.

The clotted and crowded emptiness was so thick that it was almost impossible for me to breathe. The clutter seemed to be using up all the oxygen, as if it were inhaling itself. Coolberg placed a small spice bottle of powdered garlic, and another of arrowroot, on the stained kitchen counter with a slightly theatricalized pathos. Then he looked at me. His expression seemed to be one of ecstatically sorrowful triumph. He reached for something on the counter, couldn’t grasp what he wanted — a box of some sort — so he took a step into the kitchen, scooped up what he had tried to pick up, and brought it back.

“Here,” he said shyly.

I lifted the lid. It was a typed book manuscript. It was entitled The Soul Thief.

“I wrote your story for you,” he said. It began, “He was insufferable, one of those boy geniuses, all nerve and brain.”

Reader, what you hold in your hands is the book he wrote.

45

YOU WILL SAY, this is a trick. You will say, “This is the last twist of the knife that eviscerates the patient.” But a disagreement is offered: this narrative turn contained no trick; it comprised the story itself. And didn’t the details leave you every possible clue? On every page the narrative intentions were plain, even obvious, starting with the reference to Psycho and going on from there. He played by the rules. He played fair.

But the point cannot be that one person can take on another’s life, and in identifying with the other, give life to himself. Such a modest observation! We all know that. The point must lie elsewhere.

The point is that although love may die, what is said on its behalf cannot be consumed by the passage of time, and forgiveness is everything.