The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (73 page)

Then they were the last vehicle poised to be loaded onto the little four-car ferry,
the
Green Grass.
Her heart was unprepared for this sight and, missing a breath, she said to herself
in a breathless burst of despair,
Burnette, what have you done, where have you brought me?
because there was the water and the other side of the water and the ferry that would
take them there, its sturdy classic lines identical to the upswept design of a Turkish
tirandhil.
Against her will, her memory had begun its bittersweet alterations, removed the ferry’s
cuddy cabin and replaced it with a mast, it had stripped the deck of the boat’s white
paint to reveal an expanse of varnished teak, and there lashed to the dock was her
long lost
Sea Nymph,
the impossible cruelty of the happiness given and taken away, and here she was being
a baby, a weakling, crying to herself,
Go away.

Burnette, his smile collapsed, was looking over at her now, at the same time trying
to obey the attendant’s directions into the confines of the remaining space on board,
asking her,
Shit, what’s wrong?
And how could she ever open her mouth to tell him, in the guise of reminiscing,
I haven’t been on a ferry in twelve years. Once upon a time I was a girl and my name
was Dottie and I was seventeen and in love and I was real. I had a life that I loved
and it was beautiful and the boy was beautiful and here I am again but once was enough,
once is all you get to ask for, once is about all I can survive.

They were securely on board and each sensation made her ache with sadness, the sense
of imminent departure once so precious, the shimmy of the ferry’s diesel engine, thrumming
into her flesh. The attendant chocked their wheels to keep the truck from rolling
and she said without looking at him or anywhere, Ev, do you mind? I need a few minutes.
Alone, she said coldly, feeling hateful, and she waited for him to get out of the
truck. It was a moment, a straw, that you would never get past unless you love someone.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

The sun rose red through a purpled cavalry of clouds marshaled along the horizon and
after a while it spiked straight into her eyes and she could not look at it and looked
away under the shield of her hand east along the ribbon of the island, thinking, It
doesn’t look like a safe place, which she understood for some would be the island’s
virtue. It could have been the Bosphorus, eons ago, before a cow jumped into the straits
to break the diluvian spell separating east from west. The distance was approximate
shore to shore, and the outer banks were in the purest sense borderlands, where you
occupied the last footstep of a boundary and looked out beyond, facing the naked immensity
of the unknown, impossible to see where it might end, plucking and shedding dreams
until you arrive at the last dream and find that it is enough or it is not.

Dottie dropped her hand from her brow, looking out the windshield at Eville, his feet
planted directly behind the low gunnel on the starboard side, no rail to prevent him
from pitching overboard but the water was a slick calm and no traitors around to undercut
him with a shove more consequential than the one he had just absorbed from her. Oh,
Christ, she lamented, understanding the need to get out of the cab and speak to him.

This interests me,
she had said to Eville during the night, her laconic catechist’s response to the
overwrought, slightly flaky topic of soulcraft, yet by her own accounting she had
lost her soul and had given up the search as besides the point and probably chimeric,
her soul elsewhere in another unnameable realm, neither America nor heaven, not to
be readmitted, believing that the loss was irretrievable but believing also that the
loss was not insurmountable but a circumstance to which life required adaptation,
a loss you ceased struggling with and learned—and it got easier, didn’t it—to live
with as you learned to live without. Because in the end you can’t fight everything,
she told herself. But how ironic, Eville finding his soul in Sarajevo, as if that
would ever do him any good, bring him any peace of mind, secure his wholeness when
he felt so condemned by the blemish of an anomalous part. Because, because. Someone
would have to tell him—when you cannot be saved by love you must be saved by hate.
Drop the knife and turn the other bloody torn cheek? Follow Christ to the cross?
Why?
Must we all be crucified?
Why?

She opened the door and went to stand next to him, his face fallen with a lack of
sleep but also with misgiving, and stared down as he was doing at the water, the reflections
shifting over the shallows, the flicker of small fish and scuttle of crabs, the swaying
meadows of turtle grass and the solitary whelks. After the silence became too much
she said, It’s not you, I’m having these bad memories, I don’t always know how to
be myself, you can throw me over if you want, a terrible joke she couldn’t believe
hearing from her own mouth, unsparing, disloyal, but it seemed she had rendered him
mute and she had to apologize.

Her penance was to suffer his polite aloofness, cool and matter-of-fact, his mouth
opening and closing like a wind-up toy. He told her what he had heard from the other
fishermen and the people in the marina. The red drum were running, the crowd would
be down for the weekend and then the island would clear out, there was a chance for
bad weather Tuesday or Wednesday. I got you five pounds of frozen mullet for bait,
he told her, still reserved, his eyes in the shade of his ball cap and his vision
still fixed over the side.

I’m sorry, Burnette. I really am.

I don’t get you.

How many times have you told me that? Why bother?

You gonna be okay?

I’ll live, she said, relieved that he had met her eyes without rebuke or animosity
but open concern, trying to read her face and what it might tell him about his fortune.
I was having some weird past-life flashback, she told him, I was Julia or somebody,
the daughter of the Emperor Augustus, being banished to an island. It doesn’t make
any sense, I know.

Eville said, Banished? Why?

I don’t remember. Either for being a whore or for plotting against her father. Probably
both.

She grabbed a beer from the cooler and sat back down in the cab, satisfied for the
remainder of the voyage to watch Eville in his element, striking up conversations
with the guys in the other trucks, grand sportsmen all, a native among his people,
gathering intel for the vagaries of Operation Dottie. One of the older fellows strolled
over to examine Eville’s tires and she heard them talking, the man handing Ev an air
gauge and advising him to deflate the pressure to fifteen pounds to avoid getting
the truck bogged down wherever the sand was soft—the sort of practical butt-saving
information Eville loved, and he spent the last five minutes of the trip in a squat,
the tires hissing like reptiles. Then the
Green Grass
idled down into the channel of an austere cove staked with fish traps and they began
to dock in what looked like the middle of nowhere, an osprey’s insouciant nest of
sticks right there atop one of the pilings, and Eville was back behind the wheel and
despite her general feeling of shittyness, she gave him what she suspected was a daffy
look, thanks to her breakfast beer and sleep deprivation, wanting to reignite his
optimism and diminish his anxiety for the gamble he felt he was taking simply by being
with her.

They followed the other trucks off the ferry and down a sand track through flats of
yaupon and sea oats into a small hamlet of rental cabins on stilts, where the truck
in front of them pulled off but the lead trucks kept on and so did Eville until he
was called upon to downshift into first gear to navigate the looser sand on the rising
barrier of dunes. The trucks ahead mounted the incline easily and disappeared down
but Eville had to back up and gain more speed to power up to the top of the crossing,
where he stopped to appreciate the sudden stark magnificence of the view, disciplined
squadrons of brown pelicans on patrol, an offshore breeze throwing back the manes
of frisky little pony waves trotting to the beach, the beach itself an unstained purity
as far as the eye could see, out into the emptiness that was the fullness of the natural
world.

Dottie looked at the ocean and exclaimed, It’s blue! before she hung her head out
the passenger window and quietly threw up.

The two other trucks on the ferry had turned south down the beach, heading, he supposed,
to New Drum Inlet. Eville turned in the opposite direction and they motored along
the tide line when they could, bouncing through the gullies higher up when they had
no other choice. She began to feel like liquid, the sensation of her insides sluicing
from head to gut with each gravitational dip and anti-dip. After several miles they
had spotted only two other vehicles and their campsites and she asked where they were
going and how much farther and Eville said he was just scouting around for a good
place. It all looks the same, she said, her hands clamped to the dashboard, and he
looked over at her, registering her distress and began angling up toward the dune
line, slowing down at a hard-packed wash that formed a level cut between the hillocks
back into the flats stretching beyond to the sound. He stopped and said, How’s this
look? but she was already out of the truck with the dry heaves, telling him between
gasps, perfect, great, she loved it, and then she felt as is she were spiraling and
falling, and she fell.

There was an unremitting harsh light suddenly obstructed by a low ceiling or shelf
of darkness, a claustrophobic change until she realized this was Eville’s doing, his
work, taking care of her, blocking the sun. Later she felt her damp head lifted out
of the sand and resettled on the comfort of a pillow and thought, self-satisfied,
he was the one who didn’t want to bring pillows to camp.

Somewhere further along in the jagged sequence of her awareness there was the unimaginable
luxury of lotion-spreading hands gliding along the inflamed contours of her face,
the hands moving on to her arms, then alighting erotically on her feet, the exposed
skin of her shins and calves, stopping prematurely, stopping before she was ready
for this useful pleasure to end, her flesh engulfed in wretched heat, everything burns,
she said or thought she said, keep going, do everywhere, and she slipped away again
toward some center of longing that seemed always to be receding from her thirsty approach.
Then there were fingers at her swollen lips, trying to put something into her mouth
and she heard Eville, exasperated, say, Goddamn it, stop fucking hitting me and swallow,
and she heard herself making an awful noise and Eville saying, What! his voice latent
with repugnance, and she passed out in the middle of her incoherent objection, asking
herself, What did I say? Telling herself she had lost them all, her lovers, all being
no greater than one.

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.