The Soul Thief Read Online Free PDF Page B

around,” Nathaniel replies as the burglar closes the door behind him. “Drop by again. Just knock next time.”
    He could always use another acquaintance, even one who steals. Still, he latches the door.

    5
    The next morning Nathaniel calls Theresa. The phone rings and rings and rings. Perhaps she is resting up after her social exertions. Or is out in the library, foraging in the stacks. Or is still actively caressing someone, somewhere—the two of them guttering and moaning into the sheets followed by sweaty laughter, the sun rising over her arched back, her fingers in someone’s mouth, her breasts damp from kisses, her thighs from semen. Ah, Nathaniel notes, yes, here it is, the poison of jealous erotic imagery, the first sign, the barbed hook in the heart. Theresa Theresa Theresa.
    He drives down to the Broadway farmers’ market, buys two large bags’ worth of assorted vegetables, then takes them back to the People’s Kitchen, a little storefront co-op hunger-relief project on Allen Street. The butterscotch VW
    Beetle wheezes and squeaks and groans as he parks out in front, where a hapless bush occupying a small square of embattled dirt strokes the passenger-side door when he squeezes into the space. The People’s Kitchen stands next to an artist’s studio and is a block down from Mulligan’s Brick 32
    c h a r l e s b a x t e r
    Bar. The neighborhood—Allentown—has a pleasantly lazy urban squalor. Nathaniel carries the vegetables inside, turns up the heat, causing the radiators to clank, raises the shades in the front and back, and, with the radio on, starts chopping carrots and boiling water. The poor and hungry and various assorted street people usually drop in starting around three in the afternoon for a meal. Sometimes Nathaniel serves, but today he is assigned to chop and boil and stir and clean.
    In Buffalo, real estate is so cheap that almost any collective can buy or lease property, and Nathaniel has joined this one, the Allentown Artists’ & Culinary Alliance, not out of vague progressive ideals, but because he likes cooking and cleaning and serving, and because his soul has always thrived being around cast-off people—greaseballs and windbag artistes, hippies, losers, the poor and unwashed, and those with sociopolitical ambitions, the ones who forget to wear socks and who blow their noses on their shirtsleeves while making speeches. Besides, once when he was meditating over the direction of his life, the message came to him that he should do this work.
    He knows about himself that all his charitable deeds are, at base, selfish. Such drudgery makes him feel better, lifting a dead weight off his soul and putting a lighter-than-air spiritual substance in its place.
    Through the south-facing back kitchen window the sun shines cheerfully, an all-American sun, optimistic about everything. In Buffalo, the sun is a member in good standing of the Rotary Club. Things, the sun sings merrily, will get better better better better better better better better better. Nathaniel turns up the volume on the radio, tuned to the Buffalo NPR
    affiliate, in an effort to drown out the sun. They’re playing Vaughan Williams’s Fifth Symphony, the second movement, a demented scherzo of sea shanties interrupted by a sudden t h e s ou l t h i e f
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    eerie calm evoking the approach of nothingness. Nathaniel knows his classical music: before she married Nathaniel’s stepfather, his mother played it day and night at home and in the car. Now he can recognize anything in the standard classical repertoire, and this knowledge burdens him. The sun shuts up.
    When Nathaniel’s mother and stepfather were living in New York City, and he would return home from college during spring break and, later, during the summers, the sunlight had a curiously hard metallic sheen. On good spring days the light defined trees, buildings, and people alike with brilliant tactile clarity. Then, in late summer, like the old-time God of the