The Soul Thief_ A Novel - Charles Baxter [5]
“You’re wet,” he observes in a scholarly manner. “Is that deliberate?”
Nathaniel nods before looking down the hallway.
“Don’t go in there, Mason.” Rimjsky nods toward another room, a bedroom. “I wouldn’t go in there if I were you.”
“Why?” Nathaniel asks. The door to the bedroom stands half open.
“Coolberg’s in there. He’s talking about his dreams. Stay away from that.”
“So what’s the matter with dreams?”
“Everything. Don’t you know Coolberg?” The noise of the party seems to reach a crescendo before dying away. Nathaniel feels a fingernail on his back. Theresa has passed by and has touched him. “I thought everyone knew him.”
“No. I’ve just heard of him. You’re the second person tonight who’s mentioned the guy.” Nathaniel is about to excuse himself to pursue Theresa when Rimjsky grabs his arm in a laconic gesture.
“Coolberg’s always striking one pose or another. But listen, Mason, he’s dangerous. And that’s an adjective I have never in my life used until now. You’ll think at first that he has no known location, but he’s as real as we are,” Rimjsky drones, conversation-as-hypnosis, a monotonality that makes Nathaniel sleepy. “He’s the first person I’ve known who can be in two places at once. He’s dislocated. Not a joint or a knee—the whole person.”
Rimjsky scratches his beard to prevent interruption or response.
“Of course he’s brilliant. He’s a virtuoso of cast-off ideas,” he continues. “And he may be a genius. I don’t care. Genius doesn’t impress me. You’ll notice that he doesn’t assert ownership over his ideas. He’s in some kind of Artaudian condition where all the ideas are unoriginated and unsourced; that’s how he can claim anybody else’s ideas as his own. Really all he wants to do is acquire everyone’s inner life. I’d use the word ‘soul,’ but I don’t believe in souls. Still, it’s like a Russian novel, what he does. He inhabits a dense spiritual vacuum. I apologize for the phrase, but that’s what it is. Don’t go in there.”
When Nathaniel glances again inside the room, he sees, through the crack of the door opening, Theresa sitting on the floor. She’s attentively watching someone out of Nathaniel’s view. “Aw, come on. Don’t be melodramatic,” Nathaniel says to Rimjsky, whose eyes, he now notices, do not ever blink, although they are wide and predatory. Glancing down at the floor, he urges the door to the left with his knee, but before entering the room, he pauses to listen to the voice emanating from it.
The tone of the voice he hears is calmly agitated, as if it had lived with its own agitation for so long that it had grown slightly bored with the ongoing crisis of its condition, a crisis so complex and multilayered that no effort could possibly repair it or even define the nature of its own apparent suffering. The voice has a pleading note, halfway between seduction and distress, and an intelligent gentleness that is all the more alarming for its measured calm, its burnt-over benumbed despair. It sounds, Nathaniel realizes, like a therapist’s voice, thick with overeager compassion, but it also seems at almost any moment about to modulate into mad spattering giggles. The voice performs code-switching out of apparent sincerity into malevolent amusement and then into excited despair.
The voice, it seems, is reporting a recent dream.
“I was in a gigantic white lavish hotel that was on fire, done for,” the voice behind the door claims with comic mournfulness, “but the fire was consuming the hotel so gradually and deliberately that people were still permitted to arrive and depart freely. The fire wasn’t visible, but I knew the hotel was burning because smoke was hanging thinly everywhere, especially around the lights. Very beautiful, that smoke. I returned to my room to save my valuables, and I couldn’t find them, whatever they were. I didn’t know what to search for, what I had to save, how soon the building would collapse, what I had to do. Everyone was busy and wandering around but it was quiet and a little slowed.