The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (78 page)

They spent the night together again at the hotel, forgoing the talk they might have
had about important things, what was around the corner, down the road, over the horizon—
fuck the horizon—
opting out for a last night of mutually assured dissipation, room service and pills
and vodka, a long encore of slothful rutting, a surfeit of sloppy tenderness, these
hours dumb and beautiful, themselves sustaining, falling asleep in a knot like tranquilized
wrestlers, waking at sunrise to a
chirr,
slow to realize the source of the intrusion into their peace—Burnette’s pager. Burnette
was being buzzed, summoned to report for duty.

She phoned the receptionist, reserving the room for the next two weeks, and then drove
with Eville to Andrews Air Force Base, Dottie clearly determined to have at least
the front of the conversation they had sidelined the night before. What happened on
that island, she confessed, admitted, declared, insisted.

Yeah?

It made me happy, she said. You’ve steadied me.

That’s good, he said. I’m glad.

Then what do we need to say to each other, now? What’s next, Burnette?

We should keep in touch, don’t you think? he said, and she let the silence ferment
and enlarge between them before she answered.

I’ve never been to Montana.

Let’s do it then. Let’s go.

He presented her with the keys to the truck before he walked out onto the tarmac for
a flight to Kyrgyzstan, and they would keep in touch, more frequently than he could
have reasonably hoped, exchanging encrypted updates of their whereabouts and doings
and planning a rendezvous in Africa for the wedding. She would write to tell him that
things continued to happen in the world that affected her deeply, personally, that
she had enrolled in the Agency’s clandestine service course but changed her mind about
volunteering for a slot in the paramilitary special activities division. I’m putting
on a dress and heels, she said, and heading for the desert, there’s something in me
that needs to go to the end of the world, and by midsummer she was in Yemen, working
for the ambassador. A woman! she wrote. At first glance, she’s not so much different
than Daddy—
We’re coming in and hell’s coming with us—
you know the type, all faith, no fear, but I have a suspicion underneath the Amazonian
veneer she is a Chamberlin. They don’t bother with shitty little hatreds here, they
want the West vaporized, every man, woman, and child. Sometimes I feel like I’m crawling
on my knees, looking for a place where I once lived, trying to return to the place
where I lost myself, or rather found myself, alone in the sea, so deep and so empty.
She wrote that she was up to her neck in intrigue, donning a burqa to take a night
class at the university in Sana’a, making enemies as fast as friends, both categories
sharing an odd politeness. She wrote that a prince who owned Arabian horses was teaching
her how to ride. At the end of July, she dropped him a postcard of a mud-walled fortress,
saying, Love may be the only thing we are right about. They arranged to meet in Johannesburg
in early August, rent a Land Rover, camp their way up through Kruger National Park
and into Zimbabwe for the wedding. She never mentioned she would be flying into South
Africa after a stopover in Nairobi. Burnette tried phoning her once from Fayetteville
but couldn’t get through.

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

He would not see Dottie again until August, not in Africa but in Germany, in the intensive
care unit at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, the largest American hospital outside
the United States. This time with her surely the last time in his life, although he
could not even say with absolute certainty that it was her and not somebody else swaddled
mummylike in bandages from head to waist, her face hidden and misshapen, a breathing
tube snaking into a mouth hole, but when he took her one unbandaged hand, its skin
a raku of superficial lacerations rising up her forearm to a band of gauze and tape,
he knew well enough, and when he squeezed her hand and said I’m here and felt a bird’s
wing beat of his own desperate affirming pressure reciprocated, he knew. I’m here,
he told her and he held her hand then long after the machines sounded their alarms,
an urgency that seemed to have no corresponding effect on the IC nurse in the room.
A harried-looking doctor stuck his head in the door—Do we resuscitate?—and the nurse
said, No, her father had signed the order this morning, and the doctor nodded grimly,
no saving this one, and left to continue his rounds.

The nurse said, I see this happen all the time. People wait for their loved ones.
She waited for you.

What’s happening? he said. What happened?

It should have happened this morning, the nurse explained gently. It should have happened
on the medevac. It should have happened in Nairobi at the embassy. She should have
died in the bombing, like the woman she was with, the woman standing next to her.
But she was waiting for you, wasn’t she?

She squeezed my hand, said Eville. She squeezed my hand. I felt it.

The nurse was behind him, patting his back, and he could hear her whimper as she struggled
to control her own emotions. Her brain was dead, said the nurse. She suffered massive
trauma to her skull and upper body. She was in a coma. She wasn’t going to pull through.
Her father brought a priest this morning to administer last rites. It was only a matter
of hours. But she waited for you, didn’t she.

I felt her, said Ev.

Yes, said the nurse, her tenderness stabbing into Burnette’s disorientation, her kindness
destroying him. Okay.

All right, said Eville, still holding Dottie’s hand, cold to begin with, cold now.
His lips pursed torturously, jaw clenched, eyes beginning to glaze with devastation.
All right, he said, aware just barely that he was repeating himself. All right, all
right, all right. Nodding, just nodding like a reprimanded simpleton.

I’ll leave you alone, the nurse said. Eville bent and kissed the palm of the woman
whose name was printed at the top of the IC unit’s chart, and on her baby-blue admissions
wristband, Dorothy Kovacevic, and dropped her hand, beckoning in its curl of death,
and said to the nurse, No, do what you have to do here, ma’am, thank you, I’m finished.
Thank you, thanks. God. Shit. I’m sorry. Shit.

The sight of a chair in the hallway seemed to whisk away his physical composure and
his knees twisted, sinking him onto the seat, and there he sat staring into space
as two attendants entered the room and exited uncountable minutes later, wheeling
out the gurney, the sheeted body sailing past him on its journey to the morgue. He
was aware of the nurse, her angelic kindness enveloping her like an aura, and he had
some sense that she had walked past him several times before she clicked into focus
and he stopped her, wondering if she knew what had happened to Ms. Kovacevic’s father,
who had earlier escorted him to Dottie’s bedside, wondering if he had been informed
of his daughter’s death, and the nurse told him, Yes, your father-in-law knows, he’s
down in the chapel. Take the elevator to the ground floor, said the nurse, and take
a right and it’s on the right.

Eville found his feet, confused, thinking, Father-in-law?

In the chapel there was Steven Chambers on a bench in front of an ecumenical altar,
a man at peace with nothing and nobody, yelling into a mobile phone—
You hit first and let others complain!—
and Eville sat down nearby, paralyzed. Then the call was finished and minutes passed
in silence, broken finally by the undersecretary.

Do you expect me to commiserate with you? he said, turning in cold appraisement of
Eville’s pain. Shall we commiserate with one another then?

Sir, said Eville.

Do you know what I want right now, Sergeant Burnette? said the undersecretary.

No, sir, whispered Eville.

I want you to remember who we are. I think it’s worth a fucking try, don’t you.

Okay.

Now it begins, said the undersecretary.

Yes.

This war will be a blessing.

Okay.

So keep your mind on that, said Chambers, his uncanny calm betrayed only by the tremble
in his hands, the phone replaced by a rosary, and he asked the sergeant when was the
last time he had checked his pager and Burnette said he didn’t know. Turn it back
on, man, said the undersecretary. I believe you have a plane to catch.

He missed her, but more truly he missed the person he was during those days with her,
out there on the island in a life they could imagine as theirs alone, knowing that
person might never appear again. Her absence became her daily presence, with a greater
persistence than it ever might have been otherwise in his life, her most potent form
of reality, and reality itself for Eville Burnette became more violent, the violence
an altogether different order of magnitude, and thus more self-negating and life more
tolerable, this hatred and this love dragging him deeper into the world and its madness,
where he imposed his country’s will but not its dream, for it had no dream to impose.
He stood in the shadowed entrance of a mountainside cave in Afghanistan and watched
cruise missiles rain into the valley below, the dust blooming like a garden of ochre
chrysanthemums. He met up with his D-boy squad in southeastern Turkey and they crossed
the border on a hunter-killer mission into northern Iraq to clean out a training camp
of Arab extremists near a remote Kurdish village. Then he was in Tajikistan with Scarecrow
and a pair of Agency outliers where they boarded a rattletrap MI-18 helicopter left
behind by the Soviets and flew with an Afghan crew to the Panjshir Valley, looking
out a cracked porthole at snowy summits that said,
Nothing here is worth dying for,
the spooks with a sack of cash to buy up Charlie Wilson’s leftover Stingers while
Burnette and Scarecrow acquainted themselves with the warlords of the Northern Alliance.
Then Spain, where they pulled a trio of jihadi scorpions out of a hole in Madrid and
delivered them to the secret police in Morocco. For the first three weeks of December,
he trained at a clandestine site in the Negev desert with an international assortment
of special forces operatives and Israeli commandos.

A week’s leave during the holidays allowed him to slip away from the Delta cycle to
the ranch in Montana, the family gathered again for dinner on Christmas Day, his mother
a silvery rose, not yet acquiescent to her failing muscles, still breaking horses
that might at any moment turn the tables and break her into irreparable old age, his
younger brother much subdued after his autumn’s residence in the Whitefish lockup
on assault and battery charges, a barroom fight that accelerated into some stuporous
zone of honor that brought out whatever lay murderous and ready in the kid’s psyche.
His mother came to him in the den on Christmas Eve where Eville sat on the crummy
old threadbare couch, lost in the annual ritual of cleaning his father’s guns, sitting
next to him, close, legs touching, his arm bumping hers as he worked, quiet for a
while before she asked, Why so sad, Ev? Aw, Mom, he said, quiet himself for a stretch
before he could speak. A friend of mine was killed, in that bombing in Africa.

I heard about that, she said. She took his closest hand away from the rifle across
his lap and held it in her own lap and he sat there with nothing more to say, wondering
why he didn’t tell her the friend was a woman. He could have said girlfriend, couldn’t
he? Maybe he could have said fiancée, as he had at the hospital in Germany, when they
were reluctant to let him onto the floor at the IC unit, visitation rights restricted
to family only. What if he said she was the daughter of Dawson’s old Vietnam buddy,
Steve Chambers? And what he really couldn’t tell her was what he had been increasingly
wondering about himself, like a miner toiling in an inhospitable desertscape, after
years of coming up dry and empty, who had just discovered gold in the hills only to
be ejected from the claim, forced by a grand robbery to flee for his life. He wondered
about this sense inside him, not helplessness so much as resignation, that he might
lose the world and it would not matter, a vision of perishability that seemed to inform
him about a condition that was not war and life and death but just him, losing control
of his feelings because his feelings—it was a slow, not sudden, process but each increment
seemed irreversible—had been canceled, threatening him with a bankruptcy of spirit
and conscience. He thought he could be better than that but now he wasn’t so sure.
Despite the loss he felt, which was intractable, he would not think about Dottie now,
he wanted no memories, she was never his, and in all likelihood never could have been,
their relationship fetal and miscarried, their weightless footprints vanishing as
the world disintegrated. It was a mistake to believe otherwise. Did they ever exist?
Was their time together worth anything? Prove it. Can you prove it?

Flicker, flare, gone.

Love, understanding, happiness.

He thinks, as he will always think, I can bring you close: an image, our time—but
he will not and cannot do it, because it is too much to bear, her closeness, now that
she is gone. I can remember, he tells himself, but he won’t.

Why would he want to keep telling himself their story when it felt better, saner,
to have no story at all?

Mom, it’s late, he said that quiet unholy night, go to bed. And he kissed her cheek
and she went to her room and he kissed her again on Christmas Day under the mistletoe
and he kissed her after they finished dancing at the American Legion on New Year’s
Eve and then once more the following day when she dropped him at the airport in Missoula,
a free and independent woman, his mother, her beloved eldest son like his own beloved
father, off somewhere in the hinterlands of the world when in her loneliness she most
desired their company and they most desired a higher cause, which she both acknowledged
and despised with a buried impotent fury.

Back inside the Wall at Fayetteville he reported for duty and was told that the lieutenant
colonel wanted a word with him and there in his office was McCall, half-hidden at
his desk, the poor bastard barricaded behind dung heaps of paperwork. The lieutenant
colonel scratched his brush cut and selected a folder from one of the mounds, using
it to fan the air. Top, he said, a salutation Burnette hadn’t heard in ages. With
apologies for a nonsensical policy now defunct, the colonel informed him that his
original pre-Delta selection rank had been restored. That ain’t the end of it, said
Lieutenant Colonel McCall. Burn, you still want to go mustang?

Yes, sir.

The major shuffled the dung heap and extracted another document that had him shaking
his head. Man, Burnette, your file is one fucked-up bitch, I have to say. This piece
of paper here tells me your direct commission as a captain has continued to mature.
Your entire career path has been highly unorthodox, wouldn’t you say?

I’d say so, sir.

Want to try to explain it?

I can’t, sir.

I have the orders right here to put you in school—the Command and General Staff College
out at Fort Leavenworth. Yes or no, partner. Choose your poison. You’re eligible for
a bump up the ranks.

School sounds pretty good, sir, said Burnette.

And so that winter of ’99 he found himself in Kansas, sitting in Bell Hall, the schoolhouse
at Leavenworth, scheduled for promotion to major off a special, never published list
of candidates, a zebra dropped into the horse show, learning how to write operations
orders to scale for a battalion or brigade, his classmates and especially his instructors
mostly people who look down and see the top of their stomachs, guys with more degrees
than a thermometer. For a while Leavenworth seemed like the right choice to Burnette,
an idyllic respite from the regimens of killing (practice, practice, practice) and
the adrenaline stream of the field, the blood drama, the screech of chaos and precision,
the eerie calm, the hideous thrill. The classroom was a powerful antidote to his season
on the warpath, a dismount into a restorative interlude, breaking the bad habit of
not thinking beyond the absoluteness of the moment, not thinking deeper, deep enough
to separate his life from its lethal existence before it became impossible to have
a life beyond war that amounted to much. But after a few months, alone at night in
his rented room, the episodes of doubt began—he was being shown an army he had never
truly seen, the one worried about PowerPoint presentations, fonts on slides, men who
can’t climb the stairs without being out of breath. His workouts became fiendish as
the classes struck him as increasingly worthless.

And it was there at the college that spring, after a heated morning’s seminar in international
humanitarian policy (topic: war as philanthropy), that he was pulled aside by an adjutant
as he left the classroom and told that the head of the department wished to see him.
In line with his scholastic immunity, he hadn’t been paged or summoned to action in
months, nor had he had any contact with Steven Chambers since the undersecretary’s
heartless dismissal in the Landstuhl chapel. When everything’s that fucked up you
don’t ask questions, you walk away, you don’t look back, you move on, you forget because
forgetting is the only positive thing you can do. He took the stairs to the third
floor, his footsteps echoing on the tiles past the long line of doors on both sides
of the hallway, the length of a football field. He reported to the secretary in the
front room of the administrative section, who gestured toward an inner door. He knocked
and walked in; the colonel, bland as any civilian dean, stood away from his desk,
forgoing a salute, waiting to greet him with a handshake. Burnette, he said, do you
own a suit and tie? I mean a black suit, wool, formal? And a tie? Not any old hippie
tie with flowers and polka dots.