Soul Loss

by Amber Foxx

  Gorman’s office was a refuge. Jamie didn’t talk about spirits here, only his earthly sufferings and joys, such as standing on the diving board for the plunge into love.

  Carl Gorman sat in a swivel chair facing his client, one ankle crossed on his skinny blue-jeaned thigh, his fingers intertwined so his silver rings tapped on each other. He wore his hair in a long double-folded bun, and by luck or intention, his office door faced east. Jamie liked to imagine his therapist blessing himself with corn pollen before a session, making his work sacred, but he had no idea if Dr. G did any such thing. His specialty was working with people who didn’t respond well to medication or who objected to drugs on principle, but that was practically all Jamie knew about him. Talk therapy, but the psychologist didn’t talk much. He had a repertory of effective silences. Sometimes he nudged with a questioning syllable and waited, his dark eyes in his long, thin face quietly expectant. When that didn’t work, he asked Jamie a question.

  “You told her you needed six months to get well enough to have a relationship. How well would you say you were when you did that?”

  “Dunno. Maybe about a two.”

  Gorman nodded, allowed a medium silence.

  Jamie added, “But it wasn’t a fucked-up decision.” His last shreds of dignity and sanity had made it.

  “All right. What’s a ten?”

  “Sex. I think. Been so long I can’t remember.” Stop joking. The bloke is serious. “Maybe the chanting in yoga. Yeah. That’s a ten. Zero is when I try to kill myself. Think I’ve been an eight a few times lately.”

  Gorman raised an eyebrow.

  Jamie took the cue. “Rehearsals. Recording. Performances.”

  “So you feel best when you’re making music.”

  “Yeah. Hard to write new stuff, though.”

  The psychologist twisted one of his rings and waited. Mega-silence.

  A spider swung a web from the window blinds to the lamp on the table beside Jamie. He almost bolted, but then remembered what he was supposed to do. He closed his eyes and felt his breath, hands resting on his belly. When he looked again, there was an upside-down coffee mug on the table. Gorman had captured and covered the spider. Reward for good cognitive behavior therapy.

  Jamie stood and walked to the window. His new improved mini-panic. Instead of succumbing to breathless terror he escaped to windows, turning his back on what bothered him. A lot more than the spider. He’d thought he was coming in to say how well he was doing, but writing music was like unpacking. Like remembering what happened in the lake. Something stopped him. Pain swimming under thin ice.

  Fuck. He’d handled the spider. Its silk dangled from the blinds and made his flesh creep. That was enough for today. Jamie folded his arms and massaged them, and looked back at the mug. There were legs under that.

  His rings clicking, Gorman regarded his client in contemplative silence until some inner process completed itself. “Let’s make a list.”

  Grateful, Jamie returned to his chair. Gorman reached around to his desk for a legal pad and a pen and asked, “If we listed, from easiest to hardest, the things you still need to process, where would this be on the list?”

  “New music?” Jamie’s last new song had been his death song at the lake. “Fuck. Top of the list. Hardest.”

  Gorman wrote something. “What’s a little easier?”

  “Dunno.” Jamie shifted in his seat. “Spiders?”

  Gorman waited. Jamie felt around in his soul’s back pockets. There were problems there after all, but he’d gotten so used to them they seemed normal. “Still eating kind of funny. Still sleep with the lights on.”

  The doctor nodded, made some notes. “What would you call this on your list?”

  “Call what? Like why do I sleep with the lights on? Dunno. Just sleep better. Makes it okay to be awake and then I get sleepy.”

  “So you need to give yourself permission to be awake and then you can sleep.”

  “Yeah.” Silence. Fuck. Some profound insight was probably supposed to come from this.

  “If I put insomnia on the less troubling end of the list, would that be correct?”

  “Yeah. Still happens, but it doesn’t upset me. It’s just awakeness, y’know?”

  Gorman nodded. “You say you still eat funny. Could you expand on that?”

  “Expand.” Snort-laugh. “Yeah. Actually, I stopped. Expanding. I think. Dunno. Took the scale to the thrift shop. But I dance, do yoga. Feel like swimming, I swim. Feel like biking, I ride. Don’t push myself. Feel like eating, I eat. Kind of a lot, but I don’t fight it.”

  “You used to be very worried about your weight. Where does it go on this list?”

  “Jesus. If it was just me, I’d cross it off. Wouldn’t care. I’m all right, y’know? Not fat enough to die of it. Sort of ... comfortable. Like my body wants to be here.”

  “If it was just you.”

  “Yeah. But there’s ...” He almost said other people, but most other people didn’t matter. His audiences still loved him. Reviewers had made comments and he’d managed to laugh, not collapse into self-loathing. Jangarrai, bigger and better than ever. His physique has caught up with the size of his voice and his personality. “Mae. She’s a personal trainer. Fitness instructor. Runner.”

  “And you think she will ...?”

  “Dunno. Not criticize me. But she’s sort of a fixer. Might try to help me lose weight. Means well, but she helps too much, like she’s my Mum or something.”

  “Do you think she’d try to fix anything besides your weight now?”

  How did Gorman think of this crap? Would she? Jamie hadn’t unpacked yet and still didn’t have furniture other than the bed, table, and chair. Mae would try to fix that if she saw it. There was more time to get around to it, though, since she wasn’t coming this weekend. Did procrastination need to go on this list? Probably, but he could put that off. As he laughed to himself at this thought, Jamie noticed Gorman watching him with the patience of a naturalist studying sloths. Oh. Yeah. That question.

  Would Mae run into anything besides his weight where she’d think he needed her loving little prods and pushes? She would probably turn the lights off at night, but he could tell her he needed them on and have his way. It wasn’t that neurotic. “Nah. Just little stuff”

  “Couples fight about little things, and the feelings can get big. How would you handle a fight with her?”

  “We’ve had fights as friends. Can’t be any worse as lovers.”

  Gorman lifted his chin a millimeter.

  “We get over it fast. Really. I fight with everyone I love. And hate. Fuck, I fight with everyone.” Jamie held his breath, then let it out loudly. He’d fought with Kandy about Jill. And then Kandy had died.

  Gorman made another note on the list, drew something, and set his pen down. “Ten weeks ago you were in Elephant Butte Lake with a backpack full of rocks. You’ve made a solid effort toward getting well, but that’s a short time. This is what I hear you tell me you would bring into this relationship.” He handed Jamie the list. “There are uneasy places inside you still. The biggest obstacle you face is that you can’t create new music. Music is healing for you. It’s who you are. I can’t tell you where it will lead you when you break through that obstacle, but this is how I see it.”

  Jamie squirmed. It wasn’t a nice linear list. It was a spiral. The spiral was a common image in New Mexico—it was in petroglyphs everywhere. It didn’t have to be the spirit door. It could be the universal symbol for seriously fucked up, based on water going down a toilet. Gorman wasn’t psychic. Still, the synchronicity was unnerving.

  On the outside curve were insomnia and sleeping with lights on. It wound deeper into anxiety. The question what’s inside the dark? worked its way further toward the center. The word music wound from the deep center back out, as if the spiral could be unspun from the dark hole where the music stopped.

  But how? Jamie stared at the list.

  It seemed to rotate on the page. Gaia�
��s wild shamanic songs poured into his head, driven by the steady thump of her buben. Gaia, invaded by a witch, Dahlia—who was connected to Jill. The last person to see Kandy alive.

  The singing and spinning ceased. The voice of the drum grew deeper and louder. Gorman’s blue ballpoint spiral on the yellow legal pad became a bright blue-and-yellow Cochiti drum, pounding like a heart. Jamie closed his eyes. The drum stayed.

  “I know I’m giving you big questions,” Gorman said. “I think it’s time.”

  The drum fell silent.

  Jamie opened his eyes and found himself drawn to the coffee mug covering the spider. Did it mind being trapped there? The sensation of its legs against the ceramic, as if he were the spider in the mug or the mug being touched by the spider, made his skin crawl. At the same time he felt the creature’s imprisonment and wanted to rescue it. “Gonna do something. Might break your mug if I panic, but ...”

  He slid the spiral list under the mug, making sure he didn’t snag any delicate legs. Those creepy, far too numerous legs. Breathing slowly and deeply, he carried the arachnid out the door, through the waiting room, and out to the front of the building. He shook the mug, shivered, and watched the spider scurry along the pink-brown dirt toward a yucca plant’s shade.

  A strange vividness struck all his senses. Light and shadow intensified. Thin white curls of fiber on the edges of long sharp yucca leaves flickered in the wind. The smell of the hot dirt baked itself into his mind, along with the feel of it under tiny hair-tipped legs.

  The moment of radiance faded. Jamie returned to Gorman’s office and sat back down, putting the mug on the table with a shaky hand. “Wash that out if I were you.”

  The psychologist almost smiled.

  Driving down St. Michael’s from Calle Medico, Jamie watched traffic across the six lanes with extra vigilance. The spiraled list, with spider cooties on it, lay on the seat beside him. He didn’t trust himself not to see something suddenly. Andrea had done something to him. His visions were leaking again.

  So far they weren’t as out of control as they’d been at first. He hadn’t seen Gorman’s soul—but he never had. Just as well. Seeing it would ruin the therapeutic relationship. More telling, Jamie hadn’t seen the spider’s soul, the life force animating its horrid little bulb of a body. Or had he? What if that flash of clarity was its many-eyed awareness? Jesus.

  At Calle Lorca he turned right, drawn to Yoga Space. He’d missed the beginner class, and he didn’t have his yoga shorts with him, but he could sit in the Zen garden outside. It would be quiet, a good place to concentrate and squeeze his gift down to size again.

  He lay back on a bench and listened to the trickle of water down a rough slab of stone. A butterfly passed close to his face, its frail soul glittering like fine dust after a wind storm. He closed his eyes and focused on his upper chakras. They wouldn’t adjust as much as he’d like, but they closed a little.

  When he sat up to sing to himself the sending-away song for spirits, his attention was drawn to the sign on the second story of the building. Richard Winger, Pilates. The day Lily’s soul had appalled him back in March, she’d been asking about Pilates classes. Jamie stood to leave in case he saw her.

  Too late. She came into sight, strolling from the parking lot on the other side of the building. Several women in exercise attire passed her in a chatty cluster. Lily trailed them and paused halfway up the outdoor stairway, arresting Jamie with her eyes. Expressionless, she waved one long white hand and then continued up. He sensed the cold coming off her, little spider threads emanating from her fingers, not quite reaching him but dangling in the wind, waiting to stick to something. At least he didn’t see her soul, and hoped he never would again. He finished the sending-away song and hurried inside.

  The cool slate floor of the lobby of Yoga Space soothed him through his bare feet. Healing my soles. Jamie paid for a new five-class pass and signed in for whatever class was next. Level two. He’d probably fall over, like Gasser trying to lick himself. It didn’t start for fifteen minutes. He could change his mind. Go home and do level one by himself. Not bloody likely. He was anxious and would eat cookies as soon as he set foot in the apartment.

  Browsing the clothes, organic cotton and expensive, he looked for less humiliating shorts than the ones he already owned, but the studio only carried the same style, small and snug, designed to keep men from flashing the family jewels.

  He asked the receptionist, “Girl with hair down to her bum doesn’t ever take classes here does she?”

  “No. She’s one of Richard’s students. Pretty, isn’t she? Are you trying to meet her?”

  “Fuck, no.” The receptionist gave a little start. He apologized for his language and brought a tank top and shorts to the counter. Can’t believe I'm buying more of these bloody things. “Wanted to make sure I don’t.”

  “Oh. Ex-girlfriend?”

  Ex-human. “Jeezus, no. Not a chance.”

  In the bathroom he changed into the new outfit. It was dark green. He reminded himself of an iridescent beetle, and held his hair up in two antennae in front of the mirror. Yeah. Bug. Definitely. His phone rang. He fished in the pocket of his jeans. Kate. Fuck. He had to tell her about Gaia.

  “Yeah.”

  “Jamie—we need to do something to stop this plague. I met someone else who has it.”

  “Gaia, too.”

  Kate gasped and muttered shit. He carried his street clothes to a cubby in the lobby. In the studio, people were warming up by hanging from their hips using the ropes on the wall or arranging their legs in uncomfortable positions. The receptionist said, “Gwen is subbing for Narayani today. Is that why you’re doing level two?”

  “Nah. Glad, though. She’ll forgive me.” A what through the phone brought him back to Kate. “Sorry. Talking with someone else. I’m at yoga.”

  Kate said, “Ask your father if he knows any shamans who can stop this thing.”

  “Mm. Doubt it. Seeing him tomorrow, though. He and Mum are coming to my show at Soul. Talk with us after? Maybe we can brainstorm something then.”

  “Jamie, this can’t wait—”

  “Relax.” Had he really just said that to Kate? It was like offering sugar to a rattlesnake. But he’d had all he could take of the plague for one day. He needed to relax. “We’ll sort it out.”

  Jamie put his phone in the cubby and brought his mat into the studio. He took the spot no one else ever wanted, in the glaring sun from the sliding glass doors to the garden, and wriggled in relief as he lay down in the heat. His warm-up. We’ll sort it out. Did he believe that? It wouldn’t be as easy as hiring Heather. The person with the skills to solve this problem wasn’t going to come out of the woodwork.

  Gwen, skinny, freckled, and radiant, closed the door. Jamie sat up for the familiar reminders on posture and breath. The chanting of lines from the yoga sutras brought his inner world to rare stillness. The Om faded, and the bliss with it. Gwen left them in the first pose so long it made his limbs shake. A simple plank. Pain shot from his right elbow to his little finger, the nerve injury that had never quite healed.

  He took a break and gazed in admiration and envy at the woman directly across from him who was still holding the pose. Long dark hair streaked with gray dropped to one side of her neck in a braid, and her copper-brown arms supported her delicate frame in a line of perfectly organized energy. The Apache woman stood out as much as Jamie did in the otherwise Anglo class, yet he’d been so distracted earlier he hadn’t seen her. Dr. Bernadette Pena, the alternative medicine expert. The universe was kind, delivering her when he’d kept forgetting to call her. The right person had come out of the woodwork.

  Jamie resumed the pose, most of his weight on his left arm. Gwen gave detailed instructions he couldn’t follow. For how to hold still, for fuck’s sake. His abdominal muscles screamed for mercy. Gwen said, “Lower your knees.”

  Thank you.

  “Move the heels to the wall, prepare for dog pose.”

  He m
oved from his sunny spot to get wall access and tucked his shirt in. Not polite to hang the gut out for all to see. Not that they would. Well-behaved yoga students didn’t look around like he did. Bernadette lengthened her shoulder joints flawlessly. Jamie struggled. Both shoulders had been injured, in two different accidents. Gwen came over and told him to use the ropes. He hung in blissful relief, painless. Could Bernadette figure something out about the plague? Curing it? Stopping it? Could he delegate this after all? Hang the whole fair from ropes—

  “You still have to work.” Gwen placed her fingertips on his sacrum. “Take this in. Separate the sitting bones.”

  He didn’t dare. What if he farted? His phone began playing its Mozart ring tone in the lobby. He’d rushed in after talking to Kate and forgotten to turn it off. What else could go wrong? Lily’s evil roots could come dripping through the floor like some demon lotus. No. Sacred space. She can’t. He had to believe that.

  Gwen strolled down the center of the room, observing her students. “Take child pose. Support your head with a blanket if it doesn’t reach the floor. Separate the knees if you need to.”

  Jamie extricated his legs from the ropes and made the suggested adjustments to the next pose, but it still hurt his hip and squashed his breath. He wished he could take his belly off and put it somewhere. He sat up. Fuck. Somebody shoot me. Why did he always feel so good after class when he spent half of it going through all this inner noise?

  Bernadette folded as if she had no bones. More than anything on earth, Jamie wanted to feel like she looked. Free of everything. No. That was why he’d tried to die, to be free of everything. What he wanted now wasn’t an end, but peace. Peace with all the inconveniences of occupying his damaged body with his equally damaged heart and mind. He had a long way to go.

  Before he’d asked Andrea to experiment on him, he’d thought nothing was wrong. He hadn’t been paying attention. Between the plague and the fair and the pressure from Kate, and Gorman drawing that bloody spiral, seeking peace was like asking his body to bend like Bernadette’s.

  Gwen walked past with an inquiring look and a gesture to hip and heart—which hurts? Was he going to cry, or was the flexion too much? He hadn’t cried in class for a month now. Maybe that was progress. Jamie drew a little circle on his belly. Gwen brought him a bolster. He relaxed into the pose and for no known reason shed a few tears.