The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover

by Bob Shacochis

  Hours later Eville was able to sit her up and she opened her eyes to a plague of screeching seagulls diving at the camp, one side of her face coated with sticky granules of sand, her body in a cold sweat and trembling. Why are they doing that? she asked with a weepy voice, as if the riotous birds were a new brand of tragedy. He told her he had thrown out bread from his lunch and for some reason this struck her as a heinous act and she looked at him severely and said, Don’t. You have a fever, said Eville. What do you think is going on? She told him everything aches, her teeth hurt, her hair even hurt, and she wanted to lie down again but he made her scooch onto the blanket he had spread under the shade of the tarp and drink a glass of water with two aspirin and told her to shout if she needed anything, he wouldn’t be far. Aren’t you glad, she said meekly but never finished what she meant to say and never said what she should have, revealing the very active remnants of her addiction, the cocaine, her pockets full of it in Tampa and Fayetteville, I’m in withdrawal and I want want want, tormented and ablaze with want, do anything, anything, just tell me what I can do, fucking hell.

  Then holy suffering, the sensation in her mouth of a communion wafer welded to her tongue, which she could neither expel nor swallow, her delirium bombarded with irrational thoughts and lucid dialogue and hyperreal episodes that felt like dreams but were more truly hybrids, like satyrs, of the darkest memories she possessed patched together Frankenstein-like to bizarre tableaus, convinced at first that if only she said her rosary, it—the plunge of this sickness within; the hopeless moments, these helpless hours—would go away, but then she was reciting her rosary and her father was in some dirty dark place under Turkish ruins speaking with an angel who looked like a clear plastic bag filled with glowworms and Eville came dressed in a black cassock and white collar to sit on a cushioned bench behind an ornate metal screen and she was mumbling gibberish. You are not worthy of my confession—did she actually say that to him, to the Eville in his bathing suit and ball cap, cross-legged in the sand, watching over her? He wasn’t the priest, but then someone else was, demanding to hear her confession, not a man after all but a woman and, of course, and fuck me, it was her mother. You don’t know? she shrieked at her mother who seemed to be dressing for an evening out in DC, pulling on panty hose, shimmying into a floral-print satin gown with a hedge of ruffles sprouting from her bosom. I don’t know what, sweetheart? she asked, apparently heartbroken by the look on her daughter’s face. If something terrible happened, I swear I did not—did not—know. But let’s face it, you were his girl, not me. From the day you were born. Do you want to hear about it? her mother said. He loved you more than anything, but Dottie knew that was as well not true. I put that man on a pedestal, said her mother. He could do no wrong.

  Then her thoughts curled around her father who was sitting on the edge of her hospital bed in Tampa, just in from a round of golf with his uniformed chamberlains, his hand atop the sheet, stroking her leg. Let it go, he told her, but she couldn’t possibly let it go. When she keyed Karim’s name and pseudonyms into the TS datascape, she was rerouted to another base and denied access. Daddy would know about this, she had thought, but when she asked he told her Sidiqui’s nom de guerre is Abu Masab. She persisted in believing that the man was Karim, she had spoken with him briefly in the Syrian’s back room, he had Karim’s malevolent dark green eucalyptus eyes. She had asked him disingenuously in Arabic, Is there a painting you would like to buy? and he had said to her, I knew a girl like you once, and she held her breath until he continued. Well, not like you, he explained. You are a woman. He questioned her about her fluency in Arabic, where had she learned to speak like this, and she repeated the cover story she almost believed herself, her father an oilman who had taken his family with him to Jedda when she was a girl in middle school. She had ended the conversation’s roulette with a rude dismissal, shuffling the documents on her desk, blatantly ignoring his lascivious assessment, not bothering with a response when he asked if he could buy her a drink, thinking, If you want to be a martyr, asshole, say Turkey, secretly thrilled by the antimony, the hermaphroditic nature of espionage, two natures inhabiting the same body, the one space. Yet how odd it was to have the years go by to reveal her most enduring love from that time, her love for the fatherly Maranian, abiding and real, more faithful than her love for Osman, which now seemed to have been not much greater than a powerful teenage crush. But she always remembered what it felt like to believe she loved him, the exquisite forever-after unachievable purity of her heart, their youth inexhaustible and dead-ended.

  Daddy, did you know what he would do to Osman? Why didn’t you save Osman? We can’t save everybody, her father said, but we can kill the Salafis. What’s for dinner, Kitten? He asked her three times and each time his eyes grew duller and his look further away. Pharaoh’s tribe, drowned in the tide, he said, sing-songy.

  And wasn’t it obvious to everybody in his alternate universe, not his desire for perpetual war but that a state of perpetual war was his congenital condition. His birthright, you could say. Don’t be history’s enemy, he would say. And if it came or not it would not matter, at least to him, because he had done everything possible, everything one man could possibly do, and that, finally, for him, was enough. And whatever happened, whatever might happen, did not require his presence, only the infusion of his spirit. You could step back, or be thrown back, and be gone, but what you had set in motion could not be rescinded.

  Yet what mattered to the dead, your dead, what did they care most about? Could there be an answer other than justice, whatever its name, whatever the price? She had met a man in Haiti who professed to share this same conviction but in a manner weakened and diluted by his submission to procedure and evidence—transitional justice, he called it, his duty performed for the glory of abstractions and not for the necessity of blood—and after Haiti she finally understood that men like this left the door unlocked for defeat, on earth, in heaven, and, as death had taught her, the hell that contained the eternal present of everything in between.

  Her dreaming self said, I want to see him dead, and she was startled awake by a real voice asking, Who? Something’s wrong with my father, she muttered without opening her eyes to change the scene, her father saying, Do they deserve democracy? They deserve a cage, a whip, a flaying, he said and his hand stroked higher over the sheet to the top of her thigh, pretending to smooth the cotton wrinkles. What shall we have for dinner, Kitten? his eyes beseeching. But you’ve already eaten, she reminded him.

  Did I? A blank stare before the inexhaustible charm of his smile resurfaced on his aging face and he clasped her hand and told her he wanted a kiss.

  Enough. She had sensed he wasn’t in his right mind but in many ways his right mind was not so radically different than the one he now inhabited. Enough, she said, unable to hold back her tears, but he wasn’t going to listen. Enough, Daddy. You can’t keep doing this forever.

  Then it was as though she’d been parachuted into some lunatic scene out of Paul Bowles, one of her father’s favorite writers, the blinding desert air resonating with a chant, Keyfaya! Keyfaya! A Muslim woman ululating. There, you see? said her father. You see how these sand apes treat their women.

  September second was maybe September third and the middle of the night and she was naked and doglike on hands and knees in the grass somewhere in Pera Park and the Muslim boy—Muhammed? Mustafa? Murat?—was giving her a violent fucking from behind and she didn’t care about that. The problem was Maranian’s gold cross, batting against the festering stigmata on her chest and distracting her and finally she balanced on one hand and snatched the cross and put it in her mouth to prevent it from swinging against her wound like a pendulum of nipping shame. But the boy rammed into her with such force and unexpectedly deep against her cervix and the pain was dagger sharp and so excruciating that she bit through the links of the chain. The boy thrust again, harder and so hateful he knocked her flat, splayed on her bel
ly, and the cross wasn’t pooled on her tongue anymore because it had flown down her throat and she stuck her finger in her mouth and tried to retch it back out but it wouldn’t come.

  Then she was being shaken and she opened her eyes to Eville crouched over her, his hands relaxing their steel grip on her shoulders, his body outlined in the golden-furred penumbra of a modest campfire, shy flames caressing a bowl of embers. You were shouting, he said, you were having a bad dream, and it alarmed her that it was night and that her head was raving with Arabic.

  He wanted her to sit up and drink something and she tried to clear her mind of its turmoil and confusion, telling herself what she told herself after Istanbul, and told herself again that night on the road in Haiti when she began to feel the turning-to-stone effect of St. Jean’s powder coursing through her metabolism, I will come back, I will come back, I have not gone native in this world’s darkness, and she did find the way back through the graveyard but along the journey something slowed and then impeded her progress, she found the gate of return and opened it but hesitated on its threshold, she came back halfway, where the shadows and light mingled in the beauty of impermanence, which seemed to be the right place, which proved to be far enough.

  She must have said sorry out loud because Eville lifted her like a spineless creature, slumped over into a sitting position, whispering, it’s okay, baby, everything’s okay, nothing to be sorry about.

  Sweetness, she mumbled. You’re sweet, and she remembered something that wasn’t in her memory, because she was outside the vision, located in a spaciousness not wholly contained by her body at the same time she was inside peering through a stationary lens at the starless firmament, her ti anj hovering above herself prostrate on the roadside in Haiti, her head seeping blood into the gravel, and she was cognizant of Eville kneeling over her, looking at her as if God were looking at her, she had never seen that look from a man but recognized it in an instant—the end of desire is named God—and behind him in the darkness was that dim-witted stealthy boy, did he even have a name, the bokor’s nephew, her erstwhile guinea pig, slipping Osman’s bracelet from her wrist, stealing from the dead.

  She had given the boy his own bull to be sacrificed, she had given him a red motorcycle, the only thing he ever dreamed about, to compensate and justify his own brief death the night of the ceremony, a rehearsal for the following night and her own submission to the sorcerer’s chemistry. What she had given for a few hours of the idiot’s life, it was enough, wasn’t it, but he had taken more, he would always take more. Every counting comes up short. There was no enough, was there?

  Eville tried to encourage her to eat, handing her a warm tin cup with broth and packaged noodles but the overriding strength of her craving allowed her no more of an appetite than a wish for cigarettes and beer and so, listless, she chain-smoked mechanically, lighting one butt off the other, and nursed a bottle of Rolling Rock, pressing the cold glass against her ruddy cheeks, slowly widening the circumference of her sensibility—the pitched tent, a cache of driftwood, the sand chairs set angled like a conversation in waiting, the tarp overhead, one end tied to the truck, extending out to two pieces of flotsam lumber erected in the sand.

  You were busy, she remarked, apologizing for being no help, and he sipped on his own beer and said, True, if she meant short intervals of jogging, fishing, and beachcombing, constantly circling back to check on his patient. Did you catch anything? Wasn’t trying, he said. He asked her if she was feeling any better and she said, This hole in my head is throbbing and maybe she had the flu. It’s not the season, he told her, let me have a look, coming at her with a flashlight, brushing aside a flattened patch of sweaty hair to inspect the triplet stitches closing the wound. It seems to be healing fine, he pronounced, but rubbed on a dab of antibacterial ointment as a precaution.

  The truck was parked parallel to the water and under the tarp they sat facing the dunes. She could hear now more clearly what had been there all along, the thumping crash and sizzle and shush of the waves, the ocean calling, and she began to crawl out from their tiny cave onto the open beach, her feet unsteady as she stood, her form instantly illuminated by the rising moon, erupting into the misty atmosphere like a single monstrous salmon’s egg, the bright droplets of haze a steamy crystal dust magically wisping along the shore, not exactly the globs of cocaine her flesh thundered for, but for the moment an alternative, the best the world dare provide. It’s full, she said, delighted, and Eville told her, Not yet but Monday night. Look, she said wryly, pointing at their elongated moon shadows in the pale blue nocturnal sand, there are our souls.

  In the lunar light she saw him actually blush when he asked if she wanted to go for a dip. It’s chilly, isn’t it, she said, and he responded by placing his open hand on her glistening forehead, his palm overlapping her brow, a comfort closing her eyes, the elixir of his touch sending such a powerful current of solace and quickening deliverance through her body that she almost began to sob. He diagnosed the persistence of her fever and she told him despite her rally she continued to feel wretched and tomorrow would be better but she needed to lie back down, can we roll back the tarp and sleep outside, it’s a beautiful night, and he brought out their sleeping bags and a quilt from the tent and arranged them on the blanket next to the dying campfire and in front of him she removed her garish muumuu, which was all there was to remove, and jammed herself into the bedding and fell asleep. Not very long afterward he woke her as he lay down himself and she said I’m cold, and he pulled her sleeping bag and their communal quilt higher up on her bare shoulders and she said to Eville, You can hold me, you know, and he said he knew but didn’t move and she said, Hold me, and after a moment felt his iron body spoon against hers and smelled the rum on his breath. His arm came tentatively across her side to hug her breasts and she sighed so long and deeply and with such intense relief that when the sigh in fact ended she was still tucked under the lovely arching bridge of his arm and it was morning.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  For a prep area he lowered the truck’s tailgate and cooked breakfast on his fold-out propane stove and she took a bite of egg and a bite of bacon and puffed on a cigarette while she drank her orange juice before telling him she was still sick and lay back down on her sleeping bag, vaguely aware that he had leaped into action, refitting the tarp on its posts, protecting her, his new mission and his old mission, obeying orders, tasked with the viceroy’s daughter, a mental case, the idea of his service affecting her like an unwanted infusion of melancholy. But she was eased away from her self-pity before the bitterness arrived, a tide of vertigo dragging her toward the mercy of unconsciousness.

  When she cracked her eyes again it was not quite the end of the day, whatever day this was, the sun backing brightly over the sound, leaking elevation, the air hot and motionless but not so oppressive anymore and the silence hidden within the lulling rhythm of the sea. She called out for Eville but got no reply and she stood up and walked around to the front of the truck to look down the beach just in time to expose herself to a cadre of fishermen driving by. They honked, saluting her nudity with cans of beer; she waved, a small promiscuity that made her realize she must be feeling better.

  She went behind the dunes, smiling in admiration at Eville’s methodical private stakeout supplied with trenching shovel and bagged toilet paper and an unused cat latrine, one more reason to cheer the troops, and then she went to the tent, an oven at this time of day, and grabbed her new bikini out of the duffel—an off-the-rack purchase at Walmart, solid shouting electric orange—my orange phase, okay?—and the bottom fit just fine but the cups would not agree with her breasts. She stared down at her nipples erect in the loose fabric and no amount of tugging would alter the equation. She half-apologized to Eville and then she grimaced and sighed, acquiescing to her self-deprecation—Eville the Decent in association with a woman he already judged long past her apprenticeship as a whore. When that was a man’s
opinion of you, what chance did you have to be something more complex than slut?

  She stepped over to the cab of the truck to rummage in her day pack for her toothbrush, thinking boy or girl, no one was walking away from their biology without considerable damage, but sometimes—many times—she found the best thing to do was to disappear during sex, some women do, perhaps every man does, to just let flesh fuck and forget you might be a person with any greater feelings than a baboon. Girl not there; girl too much there, possessed by an animal rage. A little humiliation, a bit of force—was that the answer to Freud’s question? Eville’d been married what—once? More? Trust-building exercises, right? And how was he going to react to her if they ever actually slept together and he experienced the binary nature of her sexuality? Anyway, she thought, thinking about Eville was making her feel oddly lovelorn and romantically deprived and she set off on a stroll down the beach to find him, reminding herself of the obvious: for either one of them too attached meant just about any attachment at all.

  She walked north along the tide line, her feet lapped by the last cool kiss of each wave, surprised by the temperature of the refrigerated water—swimming promised to be a bracing exercise—but the breakers looked ideal for body surfing and sooner or later, once she felt like herself again, rejuvenated, she knew she would have to do it, fling herself right in, to be reborn in the baptismal exuberance of the water. She walked at least a mile it seemed, passed by three trucks heading down to the ferry, the weekend over, honking, waving, hooting, the lustful faces of their occupants exaggerated in joy at the sight of her.

  She walked on under the brilliant saline sky, cloudless and cobalt, forgetting about Eville in exchange for the bliss of the primal shore, the edge species whispering to her own identity. She stooped to pick up shells—a scotch bonnet, a cowrie, a fluted angel wing—marveling at the ugly buglike herds of sand fleas unearthed by the expiring waves, likewise the vivid shoals of tiny coquina clams like a child’s glossy painted fingernails—yellow, pink, purple—each exposed community frantic to burrow back in before the shore birds snapped them up. Then just about the time she decided she had chosen the wrong direction, walking from him rather than toward, a man came into view headed her way and she knew it was him, Eville waddling through the sand in his heavy rubber waders, his fly rod in one hand, a string of fish in the other, a look on his face like he’d been blasted into the promised land.