The Soul Thief Read Online Free PDF Page A

show-biz way she touches me. He reaches over to lay a hand on her, but she has maneuvered out of reach.
    “Give me a call . . . or something.”
    She glances down as she shuts the car door, and Nathaniel can see her grinning to herself privately, as if she liked him once upon a time, hours ago; but for him to return that smile through the car window, the minimal effort invested in any facial expression, hardly seems worth the trouble. It would require optimism and a heroic spirit. He would have to hire a crane to lift his mouth into a grin. The entire evening has turned into a dead battery. It doesn’t matter what you hook it up to. Nothing will go anywhere because no motor will start.
    In the light of the car’s high beams, he watches Theresa, accessorized with her flak jacket and her shiny tin medals of Lenin, her homage to the material world, skip up the sidewalk to her building, enter the front door to the foyer, efficiently take out a key, and make her beauty-pageant progress inside. A horrible thought: She is not drunk or tired at all. She’s just had enough of him.

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    What would Gertrude Stein say about this evening?
    For a long time being one being living he had been trying to be certain that he had known what he was doing standing and sitting where it was raining, and when he had come to be certain that he did not know and could not know that he was doing what he was doing with another who was also magnificent and living, that was the time he was certain that he would be driving to where he was concluding this evening and other evenings, and he certainly was driving, and anyway everyone agreed that he was driving to where he alone was concluding and sleeping. Occasionally Gertrude Stein explains his life to him, for the relief. She has accompanied him at odd moments ever since he heard her recorded voice one afternoon on the car radio as he was driving around doing errands.
    When Nathaniel reaches his own apartment, half of a duplex on a seedy cul-de-sac near the campus, the front door has been jimmied open, and, for some reason, his mail-box has been unlocked to reveal its lack of contents. He steps inside and observes in the half-dark that the lamp near the entryway is now turned over and is lying sideways on the t h e s ou l t h i e f
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    floor, a burglary prop. Somebody with a flashlight is fossick-ing in Nathaniel’s bedroom, pulling the drawers open, emptying them, checking the closets.
    “Hey, you,” Nathaniel calls out. “What’re you doing?
    What in the fucking hell is this?”
    The flashlight shines in his direction. “Me?” The voice is slurred. “Who’re you, man?” Nathaniel, who has been around the druggy block a few times, recognizes it as junkie speech.
    The tone carries with it an aura of super-sedated vagueness, along with a fuzzy pointless aggression, and the voice res-onates with that sleepy absentminded hipster attitude.
    “Who am I? I live here,” Nathaniel says to the burglar.
    “Fuck you. This is my place.”
    “Well, this place is pathetic,” the burglar mutters. “You got nothin’ to steal. Less than nothing. This stuff is all complete shit. This is what you return to the store the day after Christmas. It’s like a church basement in here. I’m wasting my valuable time.”
    “I know,” Nathaniel says, sitting down. He leans his head back against the wall, feeling a kind of Buddhist indifference to everything.
    “All you got is these fucking paperbacks. Books every damn where. A lamp that doesn’t work. This junk clock radio. And a fuckin’ coffeepot,” the flashlight says directly into his face. “Which is rusting. A rusting coffeepot! How come you live this way? I got it better than you. And your clothes are all wet. What’s that?”
    “I’m just a graduate student.”
    “You don’t even have a bike. Or a stereo.”
    “So?” Nathaniel says, feeling too tired to challenge him. “I walk everywhere or take the bus,” he lies. The VW, after all, had been