Free The Soul Thief by Charles Baxter

chalk this trip up to the adventurousness of youth and high spirits. But for now . . . what? Gradually his eyes adjust to the darkness. A small crowd of Japanese tourists passes behind them, snapping flash photos in the dark.
    Something terrible is about to happen. The thought drifts downward over him like a veil over a face. And at that moment, he reflects that some people, like Coolberg, simply have a talent that he himself lacks—a talent for creating hypothetical narratives out of the air, out of nothing. Gods. If you play a tune, a few suckers will always dance to it. But first you have to play the tune and, even before that, advertise the concert.
    No tune, no dancing. What an innocent I am, he thinks.
    The fact of water rushing past in the river; the fact of the rich fetid darkness in this park, at night; the fact of a few storm clouds and a bit of lightning; the fact of beautiful, anxiously intelligent Theresa sitting next to him, who may or may not now be his adoring lover—all these facts make him uneasy. Ease? Ease is elsewhere. Ease is for others.
    When, Nathaniel wonders, will I ever get free of these narratives in which the gods are promised? When will anybody?

    t h e s ou l t h i e f
    65
    “Nothing is going to happen,” he says glumly. “Nothing is ever going to happen.”
    “Oh, yes,” Coolberg says, his voice coming out of the dark. “Something will. Something will always happen. You just have to wait patiently until it does.”
    “And how long is that?” asks Theresa.
    “ We can make it happen,” Coolberg says, chuckling. “History is ours. For example.” He rises from the bench and shambles in his raincoat over to where the water laps against Goat Island. Theresa and Nathaniel follow him. Down below, the Niagara River seems to be calm, but, under the surface, probably isn’t. If you fell in that water, there would be no resisting it. All your earthly choices would be over.
    “The gods are in the water,” Coolberg says. “That’s why they have the dynamo over there, down below, to capture them.” He waits for a minute. “People think that the gods are in the air, but they aren’t. They’re pulsating down below.
    They’re waterborne. Then they’re pushed by the generators into high power lines. Okay. I have an idea.”
    “What’s your idea?” Nathaniel asks.
    “I’ll stand here,” Coolberg says. “With my back to you, with me facing the river. And what you do is, you push me, and I’ll start to fall into the river, and then, after I’ve lost my balance but just before I fall, you reach out and you grab me.
    You pull me back.”
    “I don’t like your idea,” Theresa says.
    “Well, it’s a serious idea, and here I am,” Coolberg tells her, walking forward a few steps toward the embankment, where the park service has cleared away the scrub brush for the sake of the view. The distance to the water seems negligible, but it’s impossible to tell how deep the river might be here. He holds his arms out in a gesture of resignation, a shrug, or an imitation of a crucifixion, an homage to the gods 66
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    he has claimed are located in this spot. In front of them, the river flows past, dividing. “Grab on to my coat,” he shouts.
    Nathaniel takes a handful of cloth at midlevel in his right fist and another handful, lower, in his left. Then he unclutches his hands, letting Coolberg go.
    “Okay,” Coolberg says. “Theresa,” he says, “push me into the river.”
    Theresa looks down at her shoes. “Aren’t we too old for this?” she asks. “Aren’t we adults by now?”
    “Give me a push.”
    There is a moment when everything stops. Nathaniel glances up to see the masses of land in the distance—Grand Island and Navy Island. A late-autumn thunderstorm has opened the heavens with cumulonimbus clouds and lightning. As if in slow motion, Theresa gives Coolberg a tentative push, and Coolberg loses his balance. He appears to tilt forward yearningly