The Soul Thief_ A Novel - Charles Baxter [52]
“Coolberg,” she said. “You know, I think I’ve heard of him. I just can’t think of where.”
My wife hadn’t quite put two and two together. If she had, she would have recognized his name as the host of a program on public radio, American Evenings. Although the program’s format resembled, in some small respects, other personal-testimony-and-narrative programs on NPR, it had a unique verbal texture and a distinctive angle: Coolberg would begin the program by introducing his guest for that week, a man or a woman with a story to tell—a woman who worked as a writer of inspirational church pamphlets, for example, or perhaps a single father with two children, a man who fixed computers and drove a snowplow in Fair-banks—and although the program would start as an interview, gradually the guest’s story would take off, would soar, and at last would reach a moment of disillusion or epiphany that constituted one of those rare moments of clarity, a life-changing instance at first aided by the host’s ravening promptings, which gradually diminished and finally disappeared as the show reached its conclusion and the guest found his or her own voice, which was simultaneously the discovery of the story’s secret heart. But the show always began as a duet between the interviewer and the guest; the guest could not ascend, it seemed, without Coolberg’s help in running ahead and lifting the kite of the narrative. Sometimes American Evenings sounded like therapy or a church confessional and sometimes like a radio drama in which the tension arose both from the story’s conflicts and from the interaction between interviewer and guest. I always found the program funny and enlightening and even moving whenever I could bear to listen to it. My trouble was that I also found the initial parts of the interview peculiar, as if Coolberg sought to make himself invisible week after week by enabling someone else’s narrative into existence. He had a hunger, a neediness, to lift someone else up and thus to perform an audio vanishing act for himself, by himself. The story allowed him to make a life into art, and then disappear before taking a bow.
One other subtext in the show became apparent every week: as the title, American Evenings, intimated, all the stories, all the narrators, somehow pointed toward the phenomenon of disappearances, things and emotions and rituals and forms that had once existed and no longer did, or soon would not. They constituted tales of a twilight as experienced by this culture’s citizens. As a result, the show gave off an air of hip nostalgia. People listened to it and wiped away tears while they sipped their martinis or got high.
The format could not have existed without Coolberg, who had an uncanny ability to get under his guests’ skins, as if he knew what it was like to be them better than they themselves did. He gave their narratives a structure, understood their gains and losses, and sometimes offered them the key to what they were struggling to say, so that they blossomed into suddenly articulate observers of their own lives, they who had been wordless shadows and subalterns before. He nourished them into a form of knowing. He inhabited them by parsing their tales. He squirmed inside their stories and their anonymous selves. Meanwhile, he himself, the unmoved mover, on each of these American Evenings, faded, until his voice returned at the very end of the show when he listed the credits for the show’s producers, technicians, and corporate sponsors. Underneath his soothing closing words rested a layer of astonishing becalmed rage. You always felt a slight static shock when you heard his voice come on again. You didn’t think he could still exist. Where had he gone to? Was his doom always to live inside the stories of others?
“He was a guy I knew,” I told Laura. “Back in Buffalo. I’ve told you about him. He’s got that radio show now.” I reminded her of it.
After my prompting, she did indeed remember it. He