The Soul Thief_ A Novel - Charles Baxter [67]
He leaned over. His popcorn spilled out onto the floor. I think he was about to kiss me on the forehead. I leaned back, and he made a gestural lunge. The Ferris wheel’s toad-stool swung back and forth.
“None of that,” I said. “Too late now.”
“Oh, okay,” he said.
“So where’s this thing you have for me?” I asked again.
43
THE WALK BACK to his car seemed to prolong itself almost into infinity, as some experiences do on the wrong side of marijuana or alcohol. Some distortion or injury had occurred to my sense of time, and I could not get back into the easy clocklike passing of one moment into another. All he had told me was that the gift he had for me, whatever it might be, was back in his apartment. I think I died on the way to that car.
Somehow—it seemed to be many years later—we arrived at his Toyota. He unlocked it. I sat down on the passenger side.
44
AFTER A DRIVE whose duration in time I could not have estimated in either minutes or days, we entered, he and I, the infested interior of his apartment. The curtains, thick with grease, had turned from white to gray. Just inside the door, a three-legged cat hobbled over toward him and propped itself against his leg while the two of us examined the newspapers, magazines, books, and framed pictures scattered on the floor, the bookshelves and kitchenette table, and the sofa cushions. Elsewhere, VHS tapes and DVDs had been piled up along the wall, arranged by genre and alphabetized. Outside the window, the lights from passing cars swerved dimly in and out of view, leaving shadows on the ceiling. A calendar near the doorway had been thumbtacked to the wall and showed the month of December from three years ago; the accompanying picture, in faded colors, was that of a sleigh followed distantly by wolves. Through the doorway facing me, a kitchen sink was visible, illuminated by a 1950s-style overhead fixture; the sink’s faucet dripped softly and steadily, leaving a slime trail of rust. Green wallpaper adorned the kitchen. A silenced German clock hung at eye level; the time, it claimed, was nine fifteen. In a corner a TV set had been left on, though the sound had been muted. On the screen, a gigantic blue monster—the TV’s picture tube needed to be replaced—with fish-like scales and a long ropy tongue ripped its claws silently into human flesh. Blood spurted terribly against a suburban home; children ran screaming away. No doubt people were shouting, and frightening music would have been blaring on the sound track if only the volume had been turned up. Over in another corner, a radio, tuned to an FM classical station, played one of the piano pieces Schumann had written late in his madness when he claimed the angels were singing to him.
The masses of accumulation were piled so thickly in the living room that paths had been made between them to allow passage toward the bedroom and bathroom.
As an apartment, this one was not so unusual, especially for a single man. Cluttered and disorderly, every item indisposable, the spaces filled with the wrack and ruin of a solitary life, this apartment served up an antidote to emptiness with a messy mind-stultifying profusion. The rooms looked like the temporary unsupervised housing of someone with a ravening spiritual hunger, a grandiloquent vacancy that would consume anything to fill up the interior space where a soul should be. Books were piled and stacked everywhere. Behind this craving resided an urge as strong as love. All the furniture was secondhand, scratched—emergency furniture to be used in case a catastrophe occurred, as indeed it had. The dreadful had already happened. The catastrophe had come to pass and would last for a lifetime.
The cat purred, and the monster on the TV set was now attacking a major U.S. metropolis. These rooms were filled up but still empty, as empty as the vacuum of outer space uninhabited by a living being, and yet the place had retained its ability to project a human solitude and loneliness, as did Coolberg, who gazed at his dominion with a resigned