The Soul Thief_ A Novel - Charles Baxter [20]
Just beyond his apartment window an old woman who is pushing a grocery cart stops and stands on the sidewalk, staring in toward him.
“What the gods are, I mean. I thought they were all gone. Aren’t they?”
A thought: What if this is not his sister on the phone? What if he’s talking and telling all this to someone else, not his sister at all, a terribly wrong number, someone who has happened to call him deliberately or by mistake, someone who doesn’t say “Hello” or identify himself when you answer?
But Nathaniel continues to narrate the story of his recent life, into what he thinks is his sister’s silence. After all, she needs his stories. She needs him to talk. The stories keep her alive, or so he believes.
10
ON THE WAY to Niagara Falls, at dusk, to see the gods come out, they cross Grand Island. Coolberg sits in the backseat, Theresa reclines on the passenger side, Nathaniel is hunched behind the wheel. They pass a little abandoned amusement park. The humble roller coaster is oxidizing gradually into scrap metal, and one loop-de-loop lies dead on the ground. Nathaniel imagines the joyful screams of yesteryear. Above the roar of the VW’s engine, and to pass the time, Coolberg begins to describe a trip he apparently made last summer to a country whose name, when he says it, sounds like “Quolbernya,” one of those rarely visited Eastern European locales at the edge of, or just off, the map.
“In that country,” Coolberg says, in a voice that gradually gains momentum, “the houses are all built of white stone. They’re sepulchral, these houses, like those in a Bergman movie, and although they have huge drooping gutters and oversized windows, nothing about them seems particularly knowable. The people there don’t believe in directional signs, to begin with. They think you should know how to get where you’re going, and you should always know where you already are. But by law, they require homeowners to plant decorative purple lilacs in their backyards, which will bloom throughout the seasons, lilacs engineered in the local laboratories so that not even snow will kill them. Another thing I noticed was that families no longer go down to the docks to welcome the passengers, because people have become, without anyone knowing why, too much trouble. The waves flatten out oddly in the central harbor, which is obscurely brokenhearted, like Lisbon. It’s one of those places that history currently ignores. The sights extrude a kind of nineteenth-century pain. There is nevertheless much actuality. The state planning makes everyone feel like a miniature, and though I found a few maps printed on high-quality paper, the maps themselves were fictional, and comically inaccurate. And, after all, people were indifferent to exact location—or they didn’t ‘care,’ if that’s the word—and I noticed that at dinnertime they bent down to their plates, where invariably food was located, and most of them ate and didn’t remark upon where they were.”
He takes a breath and makes a sound like a giggle. Nathaniel feels rage, a rare emotion for him, rising up at this mockery of eloquence and distinction-making, this travelogue through a massive cognitive disorder, this manic word-spinning, but before he can interrupt, Coolberg starts in again.
“Everyone’s very loyal to the directives, for example, about eating the food. It’s one of those countries where people are particularly loyal to loyalty. Also, there’s the business of sleeping, how much dreaming has to be done, who has to love whom, that sort of thing. Their murders are elaborately planned and executed. Nothing is left to chance. As they like to say there, ‘You certainly have to dream a lot of dreams to get through