The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (74 page)

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thrown back, and be gone, but what you had set in motion could not be rescinded.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 belly, 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.

The fish too were a conspiracy, more evocations of Istanbul—a pair of Taylor blues
and a pair of mackerel but Spanish, a more flamboyant looking species than their Asian
cousins, their sleek undersides lit up with a fluorescence of blue dappled with yellow
spots. Oh my God, she blurted like her seventeen-year-old self as she and Eville came
together. Your fish are beautiful.

They were running, he said, his eyes replaying the excitement.

You’re happy, she said as they turned back toward the camp.

I’m topped out, he said. But hey, come on, how are you?

She said better but what she meant to say was, Yes, I’m happy too.

At sunset thunderheads gathered over the mainland, the gloaming exploded with columns
of a whiteness more alive and grand than any primary color she had ever seen, and
she crossed the beach from the water to camp carrying a filet knife and the scaled
and gutted fish, Eville looking up appreciatively from his crouch, kindling his cook
fire, saying, Where’d you learn to do that? and she arched her eyebrows and said,
Seriously, Burnette? Clean a mackerel? She laid the fish out on a plank of scavenged
driftwood and butterflied them along the spine and went to the dry box in the back
of the truck for olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper, and a lemon. Cook two for dinner
and save two for breakfast, Eville suggested, and when she glanced back across the
fire at him, his eyes gleamed, his vision a hostage of her levitated breasts, escaped
from their cups. She said she would put on a T-shirt. If you want, he told her, but
he said he’d rather just enjoy the unobstructed view, and she reached behind her to
unclasp the strap and said,
Well then, there,
letting him look as he wished, a symbiotic liberty, his look itself calmly arousing,
until she slapped at a horsefly on her ankle and said the bugs were beginning to drive
her crazy and she needed to put on that shirt.

Yep, he said, saying the wind had shifted, blowing in mosquitoes from the salt marshes.

I’m taking care of you tonight, she said, returning from the tent, her legs and arms
shiny with repellent, and he helped her position the grilling rack over the coals
where she set two unhusked ears of white corn to roast and then went to work at the
lowered tailgate, slicing cucumbers, onions, and tomatoes for a simple vinaigrette
salad. Want a beer? he asked, going to the cooler. She said, How about a rum and Coke,
and he made them both Cuba Libres and they shared a cigarette while she finished with
the prep. Burnette, she said, I should tell you why I’ve been sick, and he preempted
her confession, he supposed it was the cocaine, hard to throw that monkey, and she
told him it was nothing to be proud of, she had run through her stash, voraciously,
deliberately, okay, but still, and if he set out a line right now—

Stop, he said. It’s over.

But you should know.

You loved the dope.

Yeah, there’s that. The Agency doesn’t select homemakers to send out into Indian country.

Right. What were the other chicks like, in your training group?

Don’t ask. You don’t want to know. In a hand-to-hand exercise—actually, it was the
final exam—one of them used her menstrual blood as a weapon. She wiped it on the instructor’s
face. Honest to God. We all stood there speechless. You have to admit, as a tactical
countermove it was inspired. She was being dominated but she worked an arm free, stuck
her hand down the front of her sweatpants, pulled out her tampon and swabbed the poor
guy. He freaked out, like
gack!
, broke contact, and she beat the tar out of him.

Oh, man, said Eville, laughing uncomfortably. That’s vile.

She didn’t want to lose.

They sat side by side at the fire and she rolled the corn until the husks were uniformly
blackened and then grilled the fish and fixed their plates, Ev given the Taylor blue,
taking the mackerel for herself, each feeding bites to the other to savor the difference
in taste. Burnette, finishing with a satiated groan, lay back in the sand to proclaim,
That fucking meal—now that’s America,
as though this moment somehow represented everything he ever wanted in his life,
and he propped himself on his elbows so that she could see the fullness of his face,
the wordless addition to his thanks for the food,
To have a day and a meal like this,
to have these days with her, saying, trying to say,
this
is the land that I
love.
Were there ever better days?

Of course that’s what he had meant, not quite what he had articulated, and she stared
out at the darkness to the east as they waited for the moon to rise and said, I still
don’t feel at home here.

But it’s your home, he said. It’s who you are.

Is it? she said. I haven’t lived in the States long enough to be sentimental about
this. Out there—she gestured toward the ocean, across the ocean—it’s like my drug
of choice. It makes me high in a way that makes me real. You must have felt it, being
deployed.

But you have to come back.

Why?

To take the cure. For being too real.

Yeah? Is that like a white people disease?

Montana’s a good place for that. So’s here. Let your life mean something else for
a while.

Something less. Do you want to go for a swim?

He said excellent and when she returned from the tent with towels he was standing
over the fire, his nakedness sculpted by the flickering light. She stripped too, quickly,
with an unfamiliar self-consciousness for her body, shrunken and gaunt from abuse,
not looking at him watching, her sense of humility appealing in a way she understood
to be perverse. They pretended to race to the water and she dropped the towels above
the tide line and grabbed his hand as they splashed into the shallows high-stepping
toward the waves, unjoined by the first one that knocked them off their feet, the
second one sending them under, but she knew how to resign herself to an undertow until
just the right moment to scissor free. She swam ahead submerged in black and when
she surfaced outside of the break she could hear Ev somewhere behind her in the fizzle
of the last wave, calling her name.

I’m here, she said, treading in the frigid water, I’m here, she said, but not loud
enough to be found.

In the morning she woke to the sound of a horn, a staccato double-bleat, and poked
her bleary-eyed head through the door of the tent to observe Eville bent at the driver’s
window of an avocado-colored SUV, in conversation with a uniformed park ranger wearing
sunglasses and a wide-brimmed hat, and she watched until the vehicle drove off and
then scurried behind the dunes to relieve herself. When she came back Eville was pouring
hot coffee into two mugs and she took hers with contrite gratitude and said, What
was that about?

Guess there’s a storm coming, he said, blowing steam off his cup, slurping, his eyes
inquisitive as he tested her equilibrium with a smile. The ranger had advised him
that the last ferry was leaving at four and then there wouldn’t be another for a day
or maybe two.

She asked if they had to evacuate and he told her it was up to them. There was no
official order but they were going to get slapped by the tail end of a late-season
northeaster, there would be wind and some overwash, they’d be wise to move their camp
up a few feet to higher ground, but if they were prepared to be isolated without hitting
the panic button, they shouldn’t have a problem beyond a good soaking. It’s your call,
he said. You’ve had a rough couple of days. Maybe you want to get out of here. Maybe
we should go, she said. You have to be pretty well fed up with me by now.

Nope.

I’m such a fucking wreck. I don’t want you to hate me.

We checked off that option, he said. If you weren’t here, doing what you’re doing,
what would you be doing?

Trying to score. Scoring.

What you’re going through, he said. You need me.

No. Maybe. Is that okay?

Stranded with a needy woman? he grinned. Every guy’s dream.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It was a gorgeous balmy morning, lethargic brush-stroked clouds above the ocean, and
she looked around, sipping her coffee, refreshed, feeling at the end of something
bad. Is this the calm before the storm? she asked.

Looks like it, he said, and she said then let’s stay and he smiled and said, Yes,
ma’am.

She withdrew to the privacy of the tent to attend to her neglected self, changing
into her bathing suit and tugging a comb through her scary clown hair, opening her
compact case to stare briefly into its mirror before she snapped it shut, a dismissal
of Renee, who would have shrieked at her haggard unmade face and devoted the next
inviolable thirty minutes to cosmetic repair. Renee, Renee and Jack—
God!
she said out loud, shuddering. Jack was sitting right this moment behind bars in
the federal building in Miami and she thought, money laundering, drug running, extortion,
world class venality, material assistance to the nation’s enemies, murder, for Christ’s
sake, what more do you need?
Keep him there,
but she knew a half-dozen agencies in the government needed him out and gone before
he opened his mouth
.
By the time she crawled back into the sunshine Eville had fixed a breakfast of delicious
sandwiches, fried fish and egg and tomato, and they decided to spend the rest of the
morning clamming in the sound, driving back down to the mouth of the cove behind the
ferry landing, Burnette raking and Dottie meandering through the warm flats just using
her toes, carrying her haul in the front of her bikini bottom until she had stuffed
it so full of cherrystones her pants were falling down, Ev bent with laughter at the
sight of her. When she hooked her thumbs into her waistband and lowered the front
panel to let the clams plunk out into his bucket, he smiled, devilish, Cheshire rat,
saying, Is there one more? and she looked at him sideways, sultry, and said, That
one stays.