The Soul Thief_ A Novel - Charles Baxter [36]
Such occasions are so rare that when they occur, we often think I don’t belong here, something is wrong or Why didn’t they inform me? or Let there be someone, anyone, else. But for the duration, when the law of averages no longer applies, we are the sole survivors, the only audience for what reality wishes to show us. This may be what the prophets once felt, this ultimate final aloneness.
So it was for Nathaniel and Theresa entering the Buffalo Zoo. “It looks like the maintenance hour,” she says, briefly jogging in place. “Nobody’s here.”
“Nobody’s here,” Nathaniel says, repeating her phrase, stating the obvious out of sheer surprise.
“And the cages are empty,” she says, pointing. Before them is a large zoological space defined by bars in front and walls on the side, and a small landscape near the back with a water trough, on which float a few haystraws. Where is the rightful inhabitant, the animal?
“Isn’t there a sign for what’s supposed to be in there?” he asks.
She looks up. “No.” She turns and with a thin smile seems about to say something. Then she touches her finger to her mouth and shakes her head twice. How complicated, and yet how simple, her inner dialogues must be.
Nathaniel pivots away from her and walks in a northward direction. Here are other cages, a few with identifying labels, and although some animals are on display, they are, one and all, sleeping. Here is Mika the Tiger, stretched out, eyes closed, possibly tranquilized. Over there is Gottfried the Panther—the name is affixed to the bars—also slumbering. Have all the animals here been given narcotics? He remembers a story about the Cumaen Sybil, who was granted a wish for eternal life but forgot to ask for eternal youth to accompany it, and who was immured in some sort of pen, where she grew older and older and smaller and smaller, until she was no larger than a spot of dust, crying out for death to deliver her.
Perhaps they have brought her here.
“I’m not a devil,” Nathaniel says to Theresa.
“Well, it’s his story,” Theresa informs him, rubbing down her calves, “and he’ll decide what you are. You present various temptations, don’t you? In the meantime he’s wearing your shirts and your shoes.” She takes his hand. “I don’t see why you have a problem with that.”
“Ever heard of private property? Ever heard of theft? Besides, where has he been? I haven’t seen him lately. It’s as if he’s been hiding,” Nathaniel says, releasing her hand but keeping his eye on her legs, which are ostentatiously long and smooth-muscled. “He doesn’t answer the phone and he doesn’t seem to live in the building where I thought he lived.”
“Nothing dates like the past,” Theresa says with a slow drag on the word “past,” as if this exposition were all old, tedious information with which she couldn’t be bothered.
“Well, where is he, then?”
Theresa points. “Coolberg? He’s right over there.”
In the distance, through the pedestrian avenue between cages and the shuttered popcorn stand, is a bench on which Coolberg sits, facing them, one arm flung back. Theresa has conjured him out of nothing. When Nathaniel sees him, Coolberg raises his eyes from the book he’s reading and meets Nathaniel’s gaze, quizzically. The gaze turns into another stare. Some sort of telepathy has informed him that now is the moment for the exchange of glances. Under his unzippered jacket, the Brooks Brothers