Bob Shacochis - The Woman Who Lost Her Soul

I have to go to the airport with them.

I know, said Eville.

I’ve been horrible, haven’t I? she said, searching his face for consensus.

It’s family, he said. It’s important.

And then she was back-stepping away, her hand raised to the side of her head, fingers pantomiming a telephone, saying she would call him, and he started the engine and drove off, convinced he had just been inducted into the Suckers Hall of Fame, certain his episodic misadventures with the undersecretary’s daughter had been permanently discontinued, his service ending in the customary manner, a sudden forfeiture of meaning and utility, the voiding return to irrelevance and banality, the personnel who previously found you necessary and vital staring at their feet at the mention of your name. He would never see her again, he told himself, hauling his cargo out of the bed of the truck to the elevator and up to his room, a severance that would have been almost all right with him were he able to forget or even dismiss their days out on the island, their night in the motel.

At midnight, though, she was knocking on his door at the Hilton, passionate with apology and outbursts of gratitude, rattling with fucked-up rationales and nevertheless a presence he welcomed as he never thought he might or could, his good sense unmoored by this alchemic mess of a woman and her countervailing force — you always know better until suddenly you don’t seem to know anything at all.

Seeing my brother Christopher was odd, she said.

You seemed glad to see him.

We were really close as kids and then one day we just weren’t.

What happened?

I don’t know. Daddy. I guess that’s what happened.

How’s that? he asked, but she was thinking in another direction.

I always thought my brother was queer. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Do you have brothers and sisters?

Two brothers.

Are you close to them?

Like you, he said. I was and then I wasn’t. I’m close to my mother.

So, can I stay? she asked, less manic, glancing around at the gear cluttered around the room. Is that a problem?

Am I aiding and abetting an act of home-front insubordination? he said, attempting lightness.

I told you, she said. I wasn’t spending the night there.

Explain the rules. Dead? Not dead?

Explain an act of grace. I want my life returned to me. It’s mine. I’m taking it back.

And Parmentier? What about him?

He’s gone. We won’t be hearing from Jack again.

You and your father—

We’re not talking about it.

Minutes before she appeared he had taken an Oxcycontin for the recurrent pain low in his back; now, after such a day of aggravation unscrolled from the ease of their splendid morning, he felt incongruently mellow, sloppy with tenderness, pleased that she came to him regardless of what she ran from. Hey. Honey, he said. Look. Shh. Sitting down on the edge of the bed. It’s okay, I don’t care, none of that matters, and, suddenly queasy but painless, he floated back flat and loose and she responded as he might have hoped but for the bad timing of the opiate’s arrival in his bloodstream, leveling him out, deboned, Dottie occupying another spectrum of energy, recharged and moving forward, his jeans unbuckled and tugged from his legs. He fell asleep caressing her silky head, her mouth warm and wet around his grateful penis, startled upright in the morning by the room phone ringing, the operator announcing his wake-up call, Dottie undressed and clinging to his bare self from behind, mumbling, We have to get up, we have to get Daddy and take him to mass at St. Luke’s, and all Burnette could think to say was, Fuck all that tradecraft stuff, huh.

Dottie keyed open the door to the town house to a sonic blastwave of Rigoletto playing top volume on the stereo from one of the upper floors, her father’s unfaltering tenor joined in a duet with the soloist, Dottie ascending the stairs and descending ten minutes later on her father’s arm, dressed for Sunday services but wearing a blonde shoulder-length wig and designer sunglasses, everyone behaving with the utmost circumspection, like coddled, overprotected amnesiacs, imminently vulnerable to the wrong word or careless action that might trigger the memory of old grievances, and so they drove to church like any other family carved away by time, incomplete in number and destined for further shrinkage, filing together reverently into their pew on Sunday morning.

Ev, Chambers stage-whispered, offhanded, wickedly, into Burnette’s ear, stepping close with jaunty arrogance as they walked back out into the sunshine an hour later. You fucking my daughter? He chuckled, one cocksman to another, and clapped Eville on the back and said, You lucky dog, and Eville gritted his teeth and impulsively placed his open hand on Chambers’s chest, over his gold necktie, his hand there and gone in an instant but the line irrevocably crossed, the slightest push of insolence, warning the undersecretary to never speak to him this way again.

Or you will strike me down, Ev? asked Chambers, his head tilted with a taunt of gleaming interest, and Burnette said, Yes, sir.

Dottie, ahead of them, turned around gaily and asked, What are you guys laughing about? and Eville, his face blanched and rigid, said, I’m not laughing, am I? But she laughed herself, scanning their confrontational expressions, ignoring them with a smirk, continuing to the car, not about to step between them.

They went to the Joshua Tree for brunch, an Agency hangout in McLean, where the undersecretary spent much of his time table-hopping among his fellow suits and their fleshy accessories, the painted wives sipping mimosas, big-haired ladies smelling of Paris, his clubhouse laugh of affability bubbling through the atmospheric clatter.

He’s like the fucking mayor, isn’t he, said Eville.

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.