The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover

by Bob Shacochis

  Dad, she said. I’m totally freaked. Was somebody here?

  He chuckled knowingly and said, If I said an angel, you’d be worried about me, wouldn’t you? and she heard herself asking more with reluctance than disbelief, What did the angel say?

  Nothing I don’t already know, he said.

  It was weird and exhausting talking this way, like two glaze-eyed converts exchanging heavenly revelations in a Roman catacomb, yet she forgave him with a gush of sympathy when without a sound he transported himself across the room with dreamlike ease and she felt the tentative touch of his hand exploring her arm, her heart absorbing his great weary sigh as he sat down next to her and bent her head to his chest, whispering with the pure sweetness of paternal love into her damp hair, Go back to sleep now, baby.

  Okay, she mumbled, half-asleep and falling away, wondering was she entering a dream herself or leaving it when she heard him say, thought he said, imagined him saying, they had been summoned by God to Ephesus.

  You were dreaming, right? she mumbled again, drifting down into his warmth.

  Get some rest now, her father said. We’ve been called.

  What awaited her in the morning was not what she anticipated—his supernatural recovery, her father restored to an even more vibrant and contagious version of his former self, outside in the ruins singing like Caruso, his gusto a questionable tonic for her own low mood, its thirst and famished appetite, its itch and ache. Grotty hair and exasperation. She complained to herself, wanting her hairbrush, carelessly emptying the dry bag onto the floor and repacking everything in a fit of sullenness. He had at least bothered to rescue her drawstring pouch of jewelry, from which she removed Osman’s evil-eye bracelet to slip over her wrist, feeling no better for its belated protection.

  She watched him with waning impudence from the top of the vault’s steps, analyzing the transformation that had occurred, his nose in the ruins like an archaeologist at his first dig. When he turned and saw her, she was hailed with a barrage of manic exclamations. Fantastic! Tremendous! Look at this place! He laid his hands reverently on an intact slab of cornice to examine its pattern of ovoid carvings. What about that fucking storm! Never seen anything like it! He stooped to pick up a pottery shard, rubbing off the grime with his thumb. Hercules! Hadrian! Marcus Aurelius! They were here! He spun around, marveling at the surpassing novelty of their good fortune. How’s this for an adventure!

  Daddy, she said. What about my poor Sea Nymph?

  The boat was fun, wasn’t it? he said. Done, finished—every epitaph a non sequitur.

  But I’ll miss her, Dottie whimpered, a mawkish invitation to be consoled, an abject useless desire immediately discarded when he began to clap his hands provocatively, like her swim coach, challenging her to fly into high gear.

  All right! Big day! Let’s go!

  Without any affectation of modesty, she unbuttoned and dropped her blue jeans to her ankles and peed. As she pulled up her pants she chided him for forgetting to pack toilet tissue and then voiced her most serious grievance—her purse and camera were missing. He lavished her not with apology but offhanded rationale; he had grabbed whatever he could find to stuff into the bag and here they were, two very lucky castaways, alive and well and in God’s care. Nothing had been lost, Kitten, that could not be easily replaced. My address book, she whined, my passport. We’ll replace them, he repeated cheerfully. Don’t worry.

  She was, after all, a teenager and willing, when properly seduced or inspired, to exchange one attitude for another, without a mature dislike of contradiction or the need for introspection. What a perfect little bitch, she reproached herself, shamefully aware that she had awakened prepared to hold her father accountable for all things beyond his control—the squall, the badly installed toilet and its catastrophic leak, his diseased intestines, his untimely slump into grief, the poisonous jellies, his almost dying, and the unsettling hallucinatory cameo of his resurrection. On the verge of genuine tears, she ran to hug him, clinging to his waist with gratitude, and when they separated she asked what was the plan and he looked at her with tender-eyed derangement, his neck a rashy swelter of stings, and answered, Ephesus.

  Oh, she said uncertainly, I thought that was something I dreamed, and his right eye twitched—or was that a wink?—adding ambiguity to his constricted smile.

  A muddy goat trail flanked by nodding sunflowers led them away from the ruins into a ravine where they wandered into the ancient city’s amphitheater, scaling its broken rows of seats to the top of a windswept hill from which they could see the arched remnants of an aqueduct leading past a nearby village ringed with poplars, its dirt track connecting to a narrow road winding back toward the mainland. The lonely, primitive cluster of whitewashed cottages seemed abandoned until a large mastiff sent out an alarm of rabid barking at their approach and a gaunt churlish man with pants held up by suspenders opened his door to stare at them. She asked if they could stop for water but her father said I don’t like the looks of that dog and they went on. Following the path to the track, and the track to the scabrous paved road, they found an elderly peasant woman sitting with her linen-covered market baskets on a simple wooden bench, who pointed to where the next bus to Edincik would arrive. She wore a faded blue dress cut like a grocer’s smock, her white hair frizzing out from beneath a yellowed head scarf, and seemed to accept their company as an unremarkable event.

  The bus was unexpectedly sleek and modern, an air-conditioned first-class coach with high windows and tall reclining seats that allowed for privacy among its unlikely manifest of shabby peasants. She and her father passed down the aisle to the empty seats at the back of the bus and slid into a row, Dottie taking the window.

  Tourists? someone asked, but when she started to answer her father jumped in, telling unctuous little lies, alternate but plausible identities and circumstance fabricated out of habit, she supposed, and she began to feel cheated, realizing his intent to leave their incredible adventure a private affair, a decision she did not understand even as she remembered her father saying more than once that fame was a curse he could ill afford. That’s you, she argued silently.

  She was relieved to be off her injured foot but immediately vulnerable to more mundane discomforts—she craved water, her toothbrush, a shower; she wanted a tomato and onion omelet and a telephone, aching to spellbind Osman and her girlfriends with tales of personal disaster and, increasingly, with each passing minute stuck next to him in their upholstered booth, she wanted to retch from the suffocating vileness of her father’s breath. The next thing she knew he was shaking her bad foot and she woke up ugly and snarling, saying, You’re hurting me.

  They had backtracked to Bandirma, Dottie asleep during the brief stop at the Edincik market. Their bus had been chartered by a travel agency for an excursion to a nearby national park, her father said, they had to get off with everybody else and find another bus going south. He paid the driver with lira from the dry bag and they stood in the sunlight of the insipid provincial depot, looking for a kiosk or vendor, anyone selling anything she could drink or eat, even a pack of mints would be heavenly, until she spotted a police station across the car park and said, pointing, Shouldn’t we go there and report? and her father gave her a look that made her feel dense. Report what? he said. I think by now you would have learned your lesson about Turkish gendarmes. He was right, of course, but she felt disappointed again, her role in their survival negated, the act of telling someone, anyone, essential to her need to be rewarded somehow for her mettle, for not being a helpless baby, a reward not forthcoming from her father, who ambled off to make inquiries about schedules and destinations.

  She sighed heavily and wandered around dragging the dry bag until she saw a kid lugging a jerrican sloshing water from its uncapped spout and he directed her to a public standpipe. Grateful at least for this, she removed her sunglasses, washed her hands clean and tossed wate
r in her face, ignoring the vulgar catcalls of several pimply adolescent boys lounging against a nearby wall. Bent over the spigot to rinse her mouth, she listened to the taunts rise in volume and specificity—Stick it in! She’s waiting, she wants it!—and sensing someone behind her she wheeled around to confront a handsome boy holding at his groin a priapic loaf of bread, previously aimed at her ass. They seemed for a moment disarmed by one another, her contemptuous smirk softening with sly and interrogating curiosity, sweet chagrin replacing the loutish arrogance in his sea-green eyes, before her gaze shifted over his shoulder and her expression became deadly serious and she said with fair warning, Get out of here, my father is coming.

  Throughout her life, her father’s outbursts had been rare but devastating, meant to destroy, his victims never his own family, thank God, but house servants who had stolen, cabdrivers who had cheated, rude strangers who pushed things too far. Never pardon or forget an insult, he once told her on a street corner in Rome, standing over a man he had just knocked down for groping her mother’s breast on the crowded sidewalk. The boy turned, the self-deprecating grin that a moment before she had thought cute erased by her father’s right hand with the speed of a guillotine, his fingers clawed into the throat of the boy, the boy gurgling for air. She stepped back, petrified, then lunged after them, her father strong-arming the boy across the oil-stained macadam to slam him against the side of a bus, Dottie crying for him to stop, inhaling her father’s shit-breath seeping from the ice-cold hiss of his English: I saw you, mujo. I saw you.

  But it went no further than that. He raised and cocked his left hand as if he meant to strike the boy yet his murderous focus turned sensible, businesslike, he was only checking the time on his wristwatch and the almost comic reversal of his personality left her giddy and dumbfounded, the boy released and forgotten, her father grabbing her hand, her other hand snatching the bag. Wait! The bread! she blurted, her emotions thrown aside by her unfailing instinct for self-preservation. Her father snatched up the baguette from where the boy had dropped it and the two of them were off and running like muggers to a bus beginning to roll, its doors closing behind them as they clambered aboard, breathless and, in Dottie’s case, silly with laughter.

  They sat near the back, her father at the window because she didn’t want to be barricaded in by him again. She knew it was out of the question to object to his behavior. The boys in Istanbul are a lot worse, she could tell him, but he would find the comparison meaningless.

  Where are we going? she asked and he told her Izmir and she said she wanted the bread, which she ate, relaxing into a lazy acquiescence, well-suited for daylong bus rides, toward everything strange and extraordinary that had happened, or might yet happen, on their journey. Her father, for the most part, occupied himself with his mother’s ivory rosary, interrupting his prayers frequently to scratch, abstracted, at his welts.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  They arrived in Izmir at dusk and she was thrilled to smell the sea again after a day spent motoring through the interior, fertile countryside rising steadily into a range of savage mountains that formed the backdrop to the city and its steep hills and the terminus of the Aegean waterfront where they now walked along the Kordon among a stream of pedestrians and cyclists, the cafés alive with noise and gaiety. The first two pensions they scouted were grungy and inhospitable, but the third, above a fish restaurant, seemed good enough, its rooms plain but comfortable. She went directly to the shower while her father registered and paid, leaving it to him to bullshit the proprietor, if the man cared at all, about her lack of identification.

  Because she had not heard him return to the room, she shrieked when the bathroom door swung open, his intrusion a predictable surprise, saying, Don’t use up all the hot water, kiddo, but he withdrew before she had to tell him to get out. She wrapped herself in scratchy towels and attached her narcissistic scrutiny to the mirror above the sink, admiring the sun-cooked tone of her complexion until he glided behind her into the stall, and she slipped away to the temporary privacy of the room.

  Bracketed to the wall was an old television and she turned it on while she dried her hair, plopping down on the edge of the twin bed she had claimed as hers, her attention divided between the toweling and inspecting the wounds of her journey, hoping for at least one scar to brandish as a badge of honor, half-listening to both her father’s bubbly croon of pleasure and the transmission from an Istanbul station, a snowy static-smeared installment of a game show.

  When she heard the shower stop, she jumped away from her towels and dressed hurriedly in her only clothes, worn throughout the night and now all day and sat back down, her fingers combing out her tangles, waiting for her father, wishing he would hurry. The show ended and the evening news began in garbled, urgent Turkish and the bathroom door slammed open and there was her father, nude and frowning and riveted on the broadcast.

  Fuck, he said, who gave them that picture?

  She turned in time to see a cutaway from her father’s face to a Turkish coast guard helicopter lifting off from its base and then a map of the Dardanelles, an X north of the entrance to the straits, the commentator describing the unsuccessful search for the American diplomat and his daughter, lost at sea.

  Oh, my God, that’s us!

  Son of a bitch, said her father.

  They think we drowned. But they’re looking in the wrong place, aren’t they? said Dottie, bewildered but no less fascinated to be the subject of the news. She looked at her father for confirmation, startled with pity to see his flagellated body up close and in its entirety, the scarlet crisscross of whiplike markings on his shoulders, stomach, and thighs, but all she got from him was a guileless smile.

  Let’s get something to eat, he said, blithely lighting a cigarette before tugging his pants on over wet legs. It looks like we have a lot to talk about.

  She wanted to sit outside at a sidewalk table but he chose a less crowded area in the rear of the restaurant. He sat not opposite but next to her and they ordered a bottle of red wine, her father leaning on his forearms, speaking in an earnest but confidential voice, falling silent each time the waiter arrived with a new round of meze.

  It seemed reasonable and likely, he speculated, taking occasional small bites while she ripped through everything on the table, that whoever had answered their Mayday call had copied down the wrong coordinates. She swallowed what was in her mouth to say, But now they think we’re dead.

  Ah, he said, exactly, and there’s the opportunity.

  She did not understand his thinking and it seemed wrong and hurtful to everyone who cared about them, to pretend they had drowned when they had not. Not clever and romantic—irresponsible. It was, she realized, taking the game too far, and he said, First thing, you have to imagine that everyone’s pretending everything except us. We’re the ones only pretending to pretend.

  Why would we pretend we’re dead?

  To be just you and me, he said, completely and absolutely free, the last two unencumbered people on earth. You see what I’m saying, don’t you? No obligations, no responsibilities, no concerns. To be anybody you like, to be anybody you desire. It’s a wonderful opportunity, don’t you think? We answer to nobody and nothing except ourselves, like it was on the boat. Just until we return to Istanbul in ten days, where everything will be the same, except we’ll be resurrected, won’t we, returned from the sea. It’s an experiment I’ve always wanted to try, and now, as I said, here’s the opportunity, heaven-sent.

  She remained unconvinced, unable to perceive how their freedom was enhanced or their liberties multiplied by playing dead. Tell you what, he said with the aplomb that always tempted her with provisional assurance. He raised his wine to toast, pausing until she did the same, and clinked her glass as if she had already consented to his plan. We’ll try it for a day or two and if you feel it’s not working out I’ll call the authorities and
say, Hey, you dopes, here we are, quite thoroughly alive. What do you say, Kitten? The possibilities are damn intriguing.

  She felt the impulse to maneuver around her allegiance to their solidarity, careful not to fracture it with an excess of doubt or haggling but trading what she could afford to lose. Okay, she said, but on one condition, she wanted to make a phone call first. He wanted to know to whom, she told him Osman and Elena, it was only fair to let them know, she could make them swear to keep their mouths shut, and he said, Let’s compromise. I’ll call Mary Beth to let her in on the scheme and I’ll have her call your mother and Christopher and your two friends and let them know what we’re up to and that, I think, he said, standing up with his palms flat on the table to whisper in her ear, solves our problem, sweetheart. And then he was off to requisition a telephone.

  She poured herself another glass of wine, emptying the bottle, and drank half before stopping to consider what her father was proposing and why, another game but this one improvised toward a purpose that seemed superfluous and a bit zany. Together they had never been anything but free—perhaps too free, she thought, trying not to dwell on what she meant, the implication of her submissiveness. And yet the thing about playing with Daddy was she always felt more herself, unshackled and granted immunity from the deepest part of her interior. All the blind alleys of self-discovery were, or had been so far, most securely investigated in the company of her father. Was that normal? she wondered, knowing she did not care to answer her own question, and then he was back at the table, making no effort to mask his consternation, and she said, What’s wrong? Something’s wrong, right?

  He said, Should we order another bottle of wine? and when she said if you want he summoned the waiter and they chose identical entrées—grilled sea bass—for their dinner, Dottie abandoning her craving for a hamburger. When he lit a cigarette she asked for one too, waiting impatiently for the wine to be opened and poured, glancing at his new and unshaped beard, which had begun to look wolfish, she thought, a definite change from his physical trademark, the well-groomed presentation of reliability, and then free of the waiter she said, Okay, I know that look—are you going to tell me?