The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover

by Bob Shacochis

  Yeah, Dottie said drily, of the underworld. So, she said, and changed the subject. What was going on with the two of you after mass?

  Nothing, said Ev. He made an inappropriate remark.

  You must have noticed, she said. His behavior, it’s been strange. Lately. A bit mental.

  Yeah, I don’t know. I haven’t seen him that much.

  I can see it in his eyes sometimes, she said. Slippage. Something, anyway. Ev, give me some advice.

  The wig is too much.

  People up here know me as a blonde. That’s not what I meant.

  Okay. The eggs Benedict.

  She swatted toward him with her menu.

  Advice about what?

  She explained to him that despite appearances to the contrary her professional relationship with her father was casual, advisory, and that her actual handlers, her case officer and the little group of people in the Ops Directorate who had been running her quite unnoticed from their closets had now flashed onto the radar of the potentates and suddenly people on the fifth floor were talking about, and I quote, she said, the death-wish flamboyance of what they call my stunt. They wanted her in from the field—not so cold anymore, is it?—secured behind a desk, exploiting her language skills, analyzing documents, fetching coffee.

  Yeah? he said. And? What does your father say?

  This is internecine. He’s against it, but I don’t think he has the clout. It’s all too straightforward and petty. Inside the building, no one knows he’s actually theirs, one of their own. More than one of their own, actually. Not just clan. More like a chieftan, you know, with his own faction. The guys on the summit with their oxygen bottles, two or three people—they know. Everybody else knows him as an ideological cheerleader from Foggy Bottom with impeccable connections.

  Well, Burnette said with a tight grin. I’d advise you to go rogue.

  They seem to think I already have.

  Flow with the go.

  I love that. Rock on. Everything is happening out there. I’m prepared to take the risks.

  Copy that, he said, pausing for the waitress to set down their plates and leave. Didn’t I hear you mention you wanted to go back east and study classical Arabic? He told her to request an assignment that fit the profile. Let them put you in an embassy somewhere in Indian country as an analyst and then enroll in a class in a local school or find a tutor or something along those lines. Have it both ways, you know. Let the bureaucracy reform you on your own terms.

  Hey, she said, suddenly effervescent, will you go to Africa with me? For the wedding?

  Go as what? he said. Your bodyguard?

  Wouldn’t that be great.

  I was there. Last year. Short mission.

  Where? You never told me.

  Kenya, he said. Two or three days. Jihadi pest control.

  Kenya? she said. I haven’t been paying attention.

  Chambers returned to the table and they ate their breakfasts garnished with Beltway small talk and the latest gossip about the president, specifically his famously careless propensity to knuckle-walk his way into scandals with women who proved to be stupendously insipid. With perverse optimism, Steven wagered that the commander in chief would one day soon discover a higher purpose for his testicles, their existence to date limited to slinging jism into the dentally challenged mouths of trollops.

  God! Daddy! That’s disgusting.

  Eville’s face reddened and he said, Sir, come on now, stopping himself from voicing any further admonishment. Chambers clipped him with an indulgent smile and continued on, mindless of his offense.

  The undersecretary predicted the president would shoot his way out of this farce, his latest and most dire sexual folly. Watch, said Chambers. And that would be a blessing, don’t you think, but God save us, consider the man’s target list. Haitians? Timorese? Serbs? I’d suck him off myself in the Rose Garden if I thought it would wake him up. He’s a weak sister, a little momma’s boy from Arkansas.

  That’s really enough, said his daughter. Stop.

  Rome’s burning, Kitten. Christ almighty, what do we have to do?

  Eville folded his napkin over his unfinished breakfast and said he intended to drive over to Arlington to visit his father’s grave. Dottie said she wanted to go along, which she did, after her father declined the invitation and they dropped him back at the town house, exchanging the Mercedes for the pickup truck, and turned around, taking Dolly Madison Boulevard to the George Washington Parkway, exiting at Memorial Bridge and through the arch to sacred ground.

  Like all family members of the interred, Eville had been issued a VIP pass to the national cemetery but it sat in his odds-and-ends box in Fayetteville and so they parked among the tourists for the long walk in. I’ve never been here before, she confessed, her voice wavering as they hiked from one acre of hallowed ground to the next, the nation’s sorrow a city unto itself, its resources inexhaustible. It goes on forever, doesn’t it, she said. Eville consulted the map he had grabbed at the entrance to the visitor’s center and guided them forward. We go left here. Then, a few minutes later, Okay, right again and up a ways. Then he said with a catch in his voice, Two more blocks is Vietnam, and they counted the headstones down a middle row until they were standing above his father’s grave, perfectly surrounded by the fallen, and Dottie took his left hand in hers, Eville kissing the fingertips of his right hand to touch the rounded white stone of the marble marker and pass the kiss to the dead—Dad. Hey.

  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. S
ometimes 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?