Bob Shacochis - The Woman Who Lost Her Soul

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?