Bob Shacochis - The Woman Who Lost Her Soul

Are you enjoying this? he finally asked, and again it was as if she would not hear him but seemed to grow more unrelaxed and tense in her seat, fidgeting her body but staring straight out the windshield at the miles flying before them. They were hurtling through an arid, corroded landscape, the foothills brambled with cactus and thorny scrub and above them a tremendous wall of emaciated mountainsides and bone-white peaks once crowned by forests, mountains like a queue of cancer patients. He thought in her agitation she might be carsick but she flatly dismissed Tom’s suggestion that they stop for a moment and stretch their legs.

A few minutes later Tom sensed her attention on him and glanced over to see her studying his face, her lips pursed but her expression otherwise blank. He looked back at the road and then back at her and she was still intent on trying to see him, the unflinching scrutiny of a woman who wants to know if she can trust a man, but if that was the case he wasn’t pleased she was taking so long to make up her mind.

What is it with you? he said.

I have to ask you something, she said, but as soon as the words left her mouth she averted her eyes and shook her head, regretting her decision, or perhaps not, perhaps she intended to be cajoled.

He knew not to say anything and waited but then he gave in and said, Go ahead. Ask.

She was looking at her knees, her head bowed, her hair streaming back from the breeze of their open windows, her pained face in exquisite profile and just then he slammed into a pothole that made her grab the dashboard and jerk herself upright, wearing a new look of determination.

You can’t think I’m silly, Jackie said, not a plea but a cool demand. I don’t want you to laugh. If you laugh I’m getting out of the car.

What was she going to do — hail a cab? Tom glanced over his shoulder at Gerard to check his reaction to such a threat coming from such a person in such a place, which was itself reason to laugh, and they lifted their eyebrows at one another in stone-faced amusement.

I won’t laugh, Tom promised and instantly her words rushed out into a question that was a type of falling or jumping, although he did not immediately recognize its nature because he had never met a woman anywhere in the world who was so defiantly literal and without irony. Tom wanted her to be cute, a ditz, a sexy ideologue, a glib bitch, a camera junkie, a news hound, a crusader, anything but this — literal and seemingly unschooled and tormented and wrapped as tight as you get before you explode.

Do you think it’s possible, she began, and with the drop in her voice Tom leaned over to hear her better, for someone to lose their soul?

He made a token effort to ponder the question. Sure. What do you think, Gerard?

I don’t know, said Gerard. It’s possible, maybe.

You’re lying. What kind of a Haitian are you? Tom said, grinning into the rearview mirror and then looking over at Jackie. If there’s anybody in this car who believes you can lose your soul, it’s the Haitian, not the Americans.

You’re not taking this seriously, she said.

He thought it would only make things infinitely worse between them if he explained that right now everybody in Haiti was taking this outlandish question quite seriously indeed — the Green Berets, the houngans, the Baptist missionaries, the Catholic priests. Any villager in the hinterlands would eventually tell you the village’s number-one problem was loup-garous — werewolves — coming to their huts at night and stealing their babies’ souls, gobbling them up like werewolf vitamins, and then in the morning of course the baby would be dead and cemented into the statistical afterlife of Haiti’s horrific infant mortality rate.

Just forget it, said Jackie.

Too late, said Tom. He had suspected she was being frivolous and theatrical about matters that did not fare well in casual conversation. He thought she was asking about vodou again, teasing herself with the undercurrent of its diabolique, but again he had misunderstood her. Let’s start over, he said, if you actually want to have a real conversation. Do I believe in God? I could believe in God in Latin, or in any other language incomprehensible to me, but I cannot believe in God in English. English exposed everything wrong about our approach toward a supreme being, the core platitudes of the institutions behind the ritual, and I’m not even going to tell you what I think about the politics of religion. So I suppose you might say I believe in the mystery of God and I don’t appreciate anybody fucking with that mystery or trying to grease it for me if I’m having trouble swallowing. Do you want me to go on?

He missed her nod and finally she said quietly, Okay.

Do I believe in the soul? Yes. What is it? I don’t know and neither do you. An eternal essence within us? Sure, why not? The life force that appears from darkness and reenters darkness or, here’s the happier scenario, appears from light and reenters light, and is not flesh and is our single connection to what some of us call the divine or the infinite or the force behind it all. Do I believe that something like that is in me? Yes, I choose to believe that. Do I believe I can lose it? I don’t know. If I lose my shoes at the beach I can go back the next day and find them or just go buy another pair, but if I’m at the beach and lose my arm to a shark, that arm’s not coming back, is it? When we say someone has lost his soul, what are we saying? That somehow that person has been emptied, that a light has been extinguished at the center of his being. He sold his soul to the devil, we say. What happens to people who lose their souls? They seem to die and be reborn in order to breed horror and misery in the world. Whether they are full of hatred or not, they seem to be without love, loveless, emptied of all love, the enemies of love. Where do those souls go, and are they coming back? Maybe you can buy a new one, but where, and with what currency? Penance? A life dedicated to good acts? Am I being serious enough for you, Jackie? And then he sighed loudly with his own frustration, unhappy with his release of words, unhappy that he had even bothered to say them, shadows cast by shadows.

She did not shrink from his unfriendly monologue but instead seemed emboldened. It’s me, she declared. I’ve lost my soul.

Now how in the fuck did you lose your soul? Tom said. This confession was absurd and bewildering and he did not want to hear it and he did not know what she expected of him and as far as he was concerned she was in every sense too young and too affluent to be having a genuine spiritual crisis, something that would pass out of her system like a kidney stone, naturally although not painlessly, in another year or two, and even then she would not be thirty.

I don’t want to talk about it.

How could you have possibly lost your soul?

I am not going to talk about it.

Look, metaphorically, everybody experiences—

Fuck. Metaphors. Fuck. Metaphors. Her words brittle and sharp and clipped. I’m not talking about my imagination. This is not about the imagination.

What she said he didn’t understand, yet when he tried again — We all have our demons — he sounded fatuous even to himself.

That’s not what I’m talking about, she insisted.

What in the hell are you talking about then? What is this all about?

Believe what you want.

All right, Tom said. Look, I believe you.

I don’t care, she blurted childishly, her hands fluttering upward, and Tom thought, Oh, brother, ain’t this entertaining! and concentrated on the unimpeachable reality of the road.

There were trees now shading the highway, generous and lovely, and two-room clapboard houses side by side by side in the coolness beneath their canopy. The dusty shoulders thronged with pedestrians, bicyclists, children in school uniforms, wandering goats. Occasionally a boy would lean out toward the car, dangling a line strung colorful with reef fish or gripping a brace of spiny lobster by their antennae. Jackie did not remark upon this sudden oasis of life surrounding them and they rode through the village in the new silence of the contorted intimacy of her secret. They now knew each other less by knowing each other more — at least Tom felt so. The allure had drained from the tantalizing shell of her perfection, the robust clichés of her youth and unblemished femaleness, and he felt pointlessly manipulated. Their conversation had not been engaging, it had only been weird and dumb, and Jackie’s alleged loss of soul and the evasiveness that followed, her refusal to yield as much as a particle of explanation to appease Tom’s incredulity, seemed a variation on cock teasing, and he thought again, cruelly, glibly, How many years are required of us on this earth before you can plunge yourself into serious moral complications and actually have a soul worth losing, or do we arrive afflicted by the original sin of our births? His brain idled on such thoughts, the abandoned catechism of a Roman Catholic upbringing, as they accelerated away from the village and Jackie, to his astonishment, continued her inquiry.