The Soul Thief_ A Novel - Charles Baxter [0]
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
PART TWO
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
PART THREE
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
PART FOUR
CHAPTER 46
NOTES
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY CHARLES BAXTER
COPYRIGHT
For Michael Scrivener and Mary Ann Simmons
and for Ross Pudaloff
I dreamed I had my wish:
—I seemed to see
the conditions of my life, upon
a luminous stage: how I could change,
how I could not: the root of necessity,
and choice.
—FRANK BIDART, “GOLDEN STATE”
PART ONE
1
HE WAS INSUFFERABLE, one of those boy geniuses, all nerve and brain.
Before I encountered him in person, I heard the stories. They told me he was aberrant (“abnormal” is too plain an adjective to apply to him), a whiz-kid sage with a wide range of affectations. He was given to public performative thinking. When his college friends lounged in the rathskeller, drinking coffee and debating Nietzsche, he sipped tea through a sugar cube and undermined their arguments with quotations from Fichte. The quotations were not to be found, however, in the volumes where he said they were. They were not anywhere.
He performed intellectual surgery using hairsplitting distinctions. At the age of nineteen, during spring break, he took up strolling through Prospect Park with a walking stick and a fedora. Even the pigeons stared at him. Not for him the beaches in Florida, or nudity in its physical form, or the vulgarity of joy. He did not often change clothes, preferring to wear the same shirt until it had become ostentatiously threadbare. He carried around the old-fashioned odor of bohemia. He was homely. His teachers feared him. Sometimes, while thinking, he appeared to daven like an Orthodox Jew.
He was an adept in both classical and popular cultures. For example, he had argued that after the shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho, Marion Crane isn’t dead, but she isn’t not-dead either, because the iris in her eyeball is constricted in that gigantic close-up matching the close-up of the shower drain. The irises of the dead are dilated. Hers are not. So, in some sense, she’s still alive, though the blood is pouring out of her wounds.
When Norman Bates carries Marion Crane’s body, wrapped in a shower curtain, to deposit in the trunk of her car for disposal, they cross the threshold together like a newly married couple, but in a backwards form, in reverse, a psychotic transvestite (as cross-dressers were then called) and a murdered woman leaving the room, having consummated something. The boy genius wouldn’t stop to explain what a backwards-form marriage might consist of with such a couple, what its shared mortal occasion might have been. With him, you had to consider such categories carefully and conjure them up for yourself, alone, later, lying in bed, sleepless.
Here I have to perform a tricky maneuver, because I am implicated in everything that happened. The maneuver’s logic may become clear before my story is over. I must turn myself into a “he” and give myself a bland Anglo-Saxon Protestant name. Any one of them will do as long as the name recedes into a kind of anonymity. The surname that I will therefore give myself is “Mason.” An equally inconspicuous given name is also required. Here it is: “Nathaniel.” So that is who I am: Nathaniel Mason. He once said that the name “Nathaniel” was cursed, as “Ahab” and “Judas” and “Lee Harvey” were cursed, and that my imagination had been poisoned at its source by what people called me. “Or else it could be, you know, that your imagination heaves about like a broken algorithm,” he said, “and that