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it. They didn’t ban poetry—they still encourage it, officially—but they did get rid of the insides of things, the interiors that poetry once, in another era, before the fall, referred to. In that sense, they are like us.” He says the last sentence almost in a whisper, a loud whisper over the engine noise, as if confiding his single precious insight.
    “Would you please shut the fuck up?” Nathaniel shouts.
    “Oh, okay,” Coolberg says, smilingly exhausted after his riff. “I just wanted to tell you about the Quolbernyans.” He waits for a moment before saying, “And about those lilacs?
    The ones that never die.”
    “Jeez,” Theresa says. “Where did you get that routine? I thought I knew them all.”
    “I was reciting a poem,” Coolberg says modestly. “Almost.”

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    c h a r l e s b a x t e r
    “Well, don’t ever do it again,” warns Nathaniel, gripping the steering wheel. “It’s like vomiting in front of people.”
    They pass over the second bridge from Grand Island and turn onto Buffalo Avenue, running parallel to the Robert Moses Parkway, which leads to Niagara Falls on the American side.
    “Who’s been out here?” Nathaniel asks. “To the falls?”
    “Well, I never have,” Theresa informs him.
    “Me neither,” Coolberg tells them quietly, seemingly miffed.
    “How’d you know about the gods, then? That was the whole point of this expedition. ‘Gods’ are what you promised,” Theresa says.
    “I had heard about them,” Coolberg explains. “From someone. Someone who had seen them. Besides, look.” He points ahead. A smell from the atmosphere invades the car’s interior, filling the little Volkswagen with the odor of petro-chemical solvents. On the left-hand side along Buffalo Avenue is an array of chemical plants, visible ahead along the river for miles: DuPont, Carborundum, Olin, Dow, Occidental Chemical, others, all brightly lit in gold by sodium-vapor lamps. The plants’ complicated tubular pipes look like giant industrial webbing connected to enormous black-and-gray fortress-refineries and processing machin-ery, their smokestacks decorated with evenly spaced vertical lights and red blinking stars at the top—lighthouses that beckon the chemical storm and resist it. Close to them are gas flares. This display is the triumph of something that does not want to be named. No humans are visible, no cars are parked. Nothing appears to be moving except for the smoke that wafts like a little industrial storm cloud toward the parkway, the Niagara River, and the car in which they are traveling. A background hum is audible. This entire com-t h e s ou l t h i e f
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    plex operates without any human intervention and could continue forever without anyone turning a dial or throwing a switch. Nevertheless, Coolberg is correct: some presence is here. You can hear it.
    “Valhalla,” Coolberg says, from the backseat.
    “Should we stop?” Theresa asks.
    “Stop? Stop where?”
    “Well, anywhere.” She shakes her head. “To go in. Nobody works here, that’s obvious. These factories are all automa-tized. Is that the word? Automated. That’s the word. They run themselves. No one’s been here in years.” She puts her hands under her armpits for warmth. She shivers and grins.
    She is so beautiful when she shivers; she shivers and trembles when she comes.
    “There are fences and barriers and guard shacks. The lights have to be replaced. See those keep out signs?”
    Nathaniel asks, ever the practical soul.
    “Xanadu,” Coolberg says from the backseat. “Stately pleasure domes.”
    Nathaniel takes an angry left turn onto a service drive, downshifts into second, then takes another turn into a mostly vacant parking lot bordering a squat brick building over whose doorway are the words the carborvndvm company. Behind them, and at a distance, a ghostly train consisting of chemical tankers chugs forward into the darkness. In the lot where they have parked, tanker trucks rumble, their engines