The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover

by Bob Shacochis

  She clung to the handrails of the open hatch and hollered until she broke the suicidal focus of her father’s charge into battle. Daddy, there’s water down here, she yelled and he shouted out instructions, his attention swinging between her and the onslaught of the storm, telling her to go back down, start the engine, turn on the bilge pump, put on a life jacket, strap into a safety harness, tie herself to a secure line, get back pronto, and help him drop the sail. She did these things in a seasick frenzy and as she began to climb out of the hold she felt the concussion of an ear-splitting crack of light, the hair on her skin standing, and received a vision—an incandescent matrix, at its intersection her crucified father surrounded by a pale nimbus—that burned on and then off in an instant.

  Then the Sea Nymph was absorbed into a whipping malevolence, her deck listing steeply to port, its gunnel submerged, the boom like a crusader’s broadsword hacking the waves, and she screamed into the din, believing the boat was about to roll over. The blinding rain came then like a firehose in her face and she heard her father’s unearthly grunting and his command, Hold on, Goddamn it, Dottie, hold on, and she felt herself in a void being spun and torn, her father bellowing inside a noise as loud as jet engines, and she shrank into herself and breathed a stinging spray into her lungs and after an eternity felt the boat right itself in obdurate, infinitesimal increments and there was the solace of her father’s voice again, reciting Hail Mary, full of grace with lunatic serenity. She opened her eyes and raised her head to a universe of wonders in their wake, the octopus transformed to a dark green toad, urinating a waterspout as it sat tucked beneath an archway of rainbows, the rain turned to transparent wet moths, soft lustrous kisses, and the sun dialing up and down like stage lights. She dared to step higher on the hatch ladder and looked forward across a deck littered with sparrows, dead or weather-beaten, and a shoreline to the west, jagged with majestic summits toward which the Sea Nymph rocked bravely ahead, sinking.

  Daddy, she said to her father, who was sagged into the wheel, clasping his rosary. Her voice was tremulous and rainwater ran down her cheeks with her tears. I saw you glowing blue.

  The Sea Nymph slogged toward the darkening coast, the land’s center receding as its sides tightened to expose the expansive horseshoe of a bay, a montage of shadows and sunlight. For too long now her father thrashed about belowdecks waist-deep in the rising water, failing repeatedly to plug the breach where the toilet’s outlet had been installed, the bilge pump malfunctioning as the batteries submerged although the engine puttered on, Dottie on deck trying her best to keep the boat steady, the Nymph wanting to wallow every time she nudged the wheel in the direction of the headlands. Deeper into the emptiness of the huge bay, she heard the engine gag and die and the dense, awful hush that replaced its reassurance.

  Her father pushed a red dry bag out through the hatch stuffed with what he could recover of their personal belongings and she heard him on the radio, calmly pronouncing Mayday, switching channels—no one’s there, she thought, or it’s broken, listening to her father’s steadfast repetitions of longitude and latitude. Afterward she heard him slip Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances into the cassette player and he came on deck, grease-streaked and smiling weakly, and said, It seems we’re missing cocktail hour.

  At least put on a life jacket, she said, and felt her faith refreshed when he muttered another joke—What, and stand accused of pessimism?—but made an effort to find a vest and strap into it.

  He scanned the water and studied the ring of coastline, nearby but still miles off, encouraged by their shoreward drift and the twinkling of lights to the southwest, which he guessed to be the town of Bandirma, near the base of the isthmus linking the ancient island of Arctoneus with the mainland. He thought they might just be lucky enough to bob along into an anchorage, and he sat on the edge of the cockpit’s well, then lay back, staring at the sky. What about firing a flare? she asked and he said impassively, almost in a whisper, Patience.

  By twilight, though, the waves lapped over the stern, bathing the underside of her father still sprawled on his back, his unnatural complacency almost like an abandonment to Dottie. The gunnels now sat perilously low in the water, and she strained her eyes searching the littoral where she predicted they would wash up, able to distinguish nothing useful in her survey, and when she asked for the binoculars he did not respond. In the dusk she observed something new, a bulbous fist of blackness, like a bull’s head rearing above the ridge of the peninsula off the starboard bow, thunderbolts spiked from its nostrils, and a moment later a lazy fat wave of colorless water swelled across the deck, pouring down through the hatchway and lifting her father awake from his open-eyed dream to prop on his elbows and declare resolutely, I’m sorry, Kitten, time to go.

  She watched, momentarily stupefied as he sat upright to fasten the dry bag to his ankle. The thought of crying seemed welcome and true and necessary, but it was only an idea, not a feeling. Trust was what she most felt, linking hands with her father as they stepped without fanfare into the sea, nothing dramatic about it, like exiting a bus when it had pulled up at your stop, and then, ascending back to the surface in a ticklish flue of bubbles, what she most felt, and felt deliriously, was an imperishable sense of the life within her. The game, their game, had been reissued, her father no longer its author, she imagined, but another player on the board.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Take your time, he told her. Pace yourself. This could take a while.

  She flipped on her back to gaze at the sad receding outline of the Sea Nymph still afloat, wanting to witness the exact moment she went down. Backstroking, she checked on her father breaststroking, his head up like a golden retriever, then rotated her own head to get a better sense of her bearings out in the bay, the current already tugging them past the solitary clump of lights on the southern shore, the storm paused atop the northern peninsula, its interior roiling with belches of sheet lightning. My God, she thought with callow reverence, swimming idly, We’re so alone. She rolled on her stomach and with a sudden burst of energy raced ahead for the pleasure of it, just to the addictive point where her body exerted predominance over her mind and then she stopped and treaded water, waiting for her father to catch up but he was not there. She called out to him in the darkness and swam back toward the beacon of his muffled voice.

  The length of his image was wrapped in a snowy shroud of phosphorescence, greenish flakes of swirling light, and she heard him speak—Let’s stay together—before she could read the strain of his face. Her father’s condition, as it had throughout the day, distressed her, and when he groaned she made him confess to leg cramps and relieved him of the duty of the dry bag and tied its cord around her own ankle. She tried to grab the collar of his life vest to tow him to shore, but he brushed her aside with the cavalier insistence that he had so far found their evening dunk in the sea to be rousing and rather enjoyable. After a few minutes swimming side by side she noticed the night growing more impenetrable, the seas higher, the bounce and slap of sounds more threatening. Surf, her father barked, and moments later her ears were assaulted by a booming cannonade as the storm advanced from its redoubt atop the peninsula. The first flash of lightning brought with it a scary glimpse of her father’s face painted in wide-eyed cold insanity, his jawline hidden underwater below an expression of homicidal determination.

  The second blaze of lightning revealed an image more viscerally horrifying: directly in her path spread a garden of small ghostly craniums planted in the water like translucent floating skulls of infants, and she gasped, reeling backward, feeling a slithery graze across her left forearm, suddenly afire with stinging, as the current swept them into the school of jellyfish. She swam frantically and then stopped abruptly, pulling in her legs and paddling back with her hands, realizing she was being sucked forward by the crest of a breaking wave. She pivoted to swim back toward her father, splashing and cursing somewhere in the darknes
s, and found him faltering.

  My lips tingle, he murmured as she grabbed his collar, dragging him southward parallel to the shoreline, determined to escape what would surely result in slamming mutilation among the rocks on shore and the next thing she knew they were being flushed out into deeper water by the riptide.

  The current seemed to bulge inward around a promontory she could sense but not see. Then they were captured back into the coast-bound swell and there was nothing she could do about it. Lifted and catapulted precipitously forward, she tumbled down the curling face of a wave, her hand torn from her father’s vest and her body yanked backward through the wave’s base by a deadweight suddenly attached to the dry bag, the following wave breaking on top of her before she could catch her breath, gyrating in a chaotic sliding vortex until she felt the toes of her free leg scrape the bottom—first crusty stone and then sand—and she popped back into the air, her father floating facedown behind her on a mattress of ebbing white water, his right hand snared in the dry-bag line. Trying to stand up she was knocked down by still another foamy surge, which she bellied into and rode to the beach, her father rolling behind her.

  In the next flash of lightning she saw her father expired, done in, immobile, his face nuzzled in sand, his limp and swollen hand leashed to her ankle, and in a final bolt before the downpour began she saw him return to life, his shoulder blades laboring to lift him.

  Her heart thumped wildly when she turned him over and heard his urgent but incomplete command—Pill—rattle behind his clenched teeth and the choking gurgle of what she feared might be his last breath. For a moment she was paralyzed by the riddle of what was required of her and then she pounced on the dry bag, freeing her father’s tangled hand, and began clawing furiously through its contents. Her blind fingers groped among a mash of clothes and toiletries for a flashlight or the first-aid kit, whichever came first, and then she had them both and stuck her head in the bag, snapping open the plastic kit to find her choices blessedly limited—aspirin, Benadryl, an empty vial of penicillin—and ripped an antihistamine out of its foil sheet. Lashed by wind-driven rain, she pried down her father’s clasped jaw and slipped the tablet onto his tongue but instantly determined he could not swallow and rammed the pill into the warm cavern of his throat with trembling fingers. In the rain-shredded cone of light framing his streaming face he looked at her with fluttering eyes and rasped, More, and she stopped when he shook his head after five doses, squatting over him, panic-stricken and helpless, observing his struggle to breathe, until finally he began to smack his sandy lips and snort water from his nose and she watched the slow and then greedy rise and fall of his lungs, only now aware that she herself had been hyperventilating.

  On his feet again in the pelting rain her father was unsteady and she insisted he lay an arm across her shoulders for support. Like a pair of drunks they careened ahead, the yellow beam of the flashlight hopping erratically through the liquid darkness. At the top of the beach they discovered a path leading into the rocks and scrub and followed it to a grove of gnarled and ancient olive trees where, unable to discern an exit, they found instead a low wall of quarried biscuit-colored blocks that disappeared ahead into the brambled undergrowth.

  Her father said, Up, and they picked their way over the uneven spine of stones, Dottie behind him, aiming the flashlight into the rain, the wall like the path leading them to a confusing end—not olive trees this time but rubble, which they descended haltingly back to the ground. He took the flashlight from her hand, swinging it in a half circle across a field of ruins, and seemed to give in to their predicament, his body stiff and surrendering, and he lowered onto the fluted marble drum of a collapsed column. Not good, she thought, get up. In desperation she took the light from him and left the bag at his feet, begging him not to stray, and began to probe deeper into the site, searching for anything that would serve as shelter. What she found instead, between a channel of half-fallen walls, was a narrow alley of overgrown flagstone and she retraced her steps back through the mounds to collect her ravaged father.

  He walked with a sightless man’s grip on her shoulder as she trudged a serpentine route back through the heaps sprouted with wind-whipped thistles and tufts of wiry grass, rediscovering the crumbled outer walls of what tomorrow he would tell her was Cyzicus, a city once heralded as a wonder of the ancient world, and followed the paving stones into its labyrinth of destruction, a phantom architecture of indiscernible fragments and toppled hulks, until their dogged meander brought them to a clearing and the raised platform of a former temple landscaped with scattered remnants, like abstract pieces on a gigantic chessboard. They arrived at the base of the temple, Dottie’s light sliding over the terraced layering of its enormous foundation, up to the shorn mesa of what had once held the grandness of its roofed structure, and down again along its length to a series of marble steps like subway entrances descending into black mouths, the closest of which she edged them toward with increasing caution. The beam of light from her hand crept toward the opening, her adrenaline stirred as she realized the steps went steeply down to vaults embedded beneath the temple’s floor, a honeycomb of underground space that beckoned and repelled.

  Inexplicably, her father dropped his hand from her shoulder and resisted this, their first and only chance to get out of the weather, until she said, Dad, I’m freezing, and he let himself be guided down the cracked steps until she stopped abruptly and pressed back against him, aiming the light beyond the vault’s threshold, the beam jittering across a lumpy array of shit, broken glass, ouzo bottles, animal bones, cigarette butts, a spew of bricks beneath a gouge in the back wall, and a dead cat decomposing in a puddle. She hurried him back up the steps in disgust and took his hand to lead him down to the adjacent vault, scouring its spooky interior with the flashlight but spying nothing more offensive than spilled scoops of round goat turds and the rubbish from a shepherd’s meal. When he balked again she said, Come on! forced to yank her father’s arm to make him budge and they stepped through a fluid curtain of crystal beads out of the rain, properly shipwrecked and stranded, their ordeal perhaps in recess for the remainder of the night.

  I remember this, said her father dully. By now she was shivering uncontrollably and had no idea what he was talking about and did not care.

  They had stripped out of their wet suits and dressed in the clothes her father had jammed into the bag and got down and tried to sleep. Sometime during the night the rain stopped and she awoke scrunched against the back wall, in the same position in which she had nodded off, knees drawn into her chest and arms clasped around her folded legs and head wilted forward. The pain was back where she had left it before accepting a calming double-pinch of naswar from her father—a cut on the bottom of her left foot, the bracelet of raw tissue from the burn of the dry-bag cord on her right ankle, the scoring of welts across her flesh, identical to but less numerous and inflamed than her father’s—and she did not open her eyes, letting her ears take responsibility for the state of her consciousness. The rain’s harsh monotone had splintered into a much less intense dripping, plinking, splatting, pattering like tiny feet. She strained to hear what should also be there—her father’s breathing, which she seemed to have misplaced. Wasn’t he next to her, within touching distance? When the batteries failed, she had leaned her head against his shoulder for warmth and comfort but found neither, his body prone to excruciating adjustments—reflexive kicks and twitches and endless unsatisfying shifts, as though insects had gotten trapped under his shorts and T-shirt—and she had little choice but to scoot away from him, just far enough to separate herself from his intolerable torment.

  Sometime later she felt a spreading caress soft as flannel along her skin as an exhalation of warm moist air pushed into the vault, its soothing breath laden with a potent myrrh-like fragrance that assaulted her nose with the strangeness of its arrival, and then her head snapped up alert, her eyes open but unseeing, and she heard her father’
s throaty croaks across the vault, a mad oracle mumbling nonsense, though his lilting inflections and pauses seemed credulously engaged and conversational, a man on the telephone.

  Daddy, she hissed, her hand instinctively searching for the flashlight. Who are you talking to?

  Can you see it? he said, the surprise of his lucidity making the hair stand up on the back of her neck.

  What? she said. I smell something.

  Yes, yes.

  Where are you?

  You can see him, then? her father said, the words stretched and clutched with emotion.

  Him what? she implored. You’re scaring me.

  The frantic sweep of her hand located the flashlight and she switched it on, casting a receding glow of pink light across the vault before returning them to darkness, but not before her eyes had composed an image of her father on his knees, his arms flung out to embrace or receive the emptiness at his fingertips, silver rivulets of tears etched down his cheeks and his face expressing a contorted pleasure so beyond happiness she shuddered.