Soul Loss Read online

  “Nothing’s wrong. We’ll do our date Sunday like we planned. Just at your place instead of mine. And we can get together Saturday afternoon—”

  “Please, love.” His voice grew soft. “Just—see me. Will you?”

  “It’s a long drive from Bernadette’s place in Pojoaque. Won’t it be like eleven at night or something?”

  “Get a key from my landlady next door. Make yourself at home. I’ll tell her you’re coming. No—fuck—the boxes. Bloody hell. I’m such a bludger. Thought I’d get to that. I didn’t.”

  “I can help you unpack.”

  “Nah. There’s too much. Jeezus. Some of that crap’s been packed since Lisa and I split.” He’d lived with his fiancée for several years, and they’d broken up eighteen months ago. “Dunno what’s the matter with me. Putting it all off. Feel like I’ll dig up a body or something.”

  “What do you mean, a body?”

  “Dunno.” He slurped. Coffee must be ready. “Corpse of my past, I guess. My own body at a hundred pounds of different sizes. All of that.” Another slurp. “Agh—I want to come home and find you there.” His speech began to accelerate. “But I don’t have any furniture and I don’t have time to get the place ready. I fucked up, I left everything, it’s so fucking embarrassing—”

  “Shh. Slow down, sugar.” She wanted to hold him and calm him down. “I’ll be there.”

  “You will?”

  “Yeah.” She’d have to pack some pretty lingerie. Her pulse sped up a little. Had she really thought that? Were they ready? Crossing over into that kind of intimacy with Jamie was no small deal. “I don’t know how late I’ll stay, but I’ll be there.”

  Mae signed up for a library computer and was assigned one next to a scrawny middle-aged woman in a paisley dress. In typical T or C style, the woman greeted Mae like a friend though they weren’t acquainted. Mae answered in kind and started her search with Jill Betts. The title of the first book that came up was Maiden, Mother, Crone: a Woman’s Sacred Cycles. Wasn’t a crone an old ugly woman, like a cartoon witch with a wart on her nose?

  “That one’s my favorite,” the paisley woman said, peering over at Mae’s screen. “It’s her newest.”

  Mae doubted she’d have time to read more than a chapter or two before she made her first contact with Jill, and she had to pass for knowledgeable. “What’d you like about it?”

  The woman smiled, revealing stained teeth, a few missing. “I’m going through the change, and it makes it mean something. Becoming a crone.”

  The librarian signaled for quiet. The self-proclaimed crone scooted her chair over and lowered her voice. “I’m in a women’s spiritual growth book club. We did a Jill Betts cycle. We started a drum group when we read The Urban Shaman.” Mae looked at the screen. The full title, The Urban Shaman: Walking the Spirit Path on Pavement, sounded like a satire, though it had to be serious. Her companion continued, “We play in Ralph Edwards Park on Thursday nights. You should come.”

  Mae couldn’t imagine being comfortable in what was almost a Jill Betts fan club. Kate had sent an e-mail explaining the plague in more detail than Jamie had provided. She’d expressed a strong suspicion that Jill Betts was behind it, acting through her protégées. Jill’s late student Kandyce Rainbow Kahee might have been the earlier prototype for Jill’s current project, Dahlia. I don’t like Dahlia, Kate had written, but I don’t want her to die. Her reading made me think that she might, and that Jill would have something to do with it.

  “Thanks for asking me,” Mae said, “but I won’t be in town this Thursday. What did you think of The Woman in the Light?” It was subtitled A Shaman’s Path to Healing. That might be the one Kenny had said wasn’t very enlightened, about Jill becoming a shaman.

  “Very exciting reading, but I liked the others better. It doesn’t tell me things I can do to heal myself like those do. I can’t exactly go to the Amazon and take ayahuasca like she did.”

  “No, I reckon most people couldn’t.”

  Mae went back to her search. Seeing the Illness in the Aura and The Origins of Disease in in the Spirit by Mary Kay Dieffenbacher intrigued her. There was so little time to read them she was glad she’d already checked out Fiona McCloud’s Integrated Energy Healing, seen Azure on TV, and watched Gaia’s movie.

  The remaining person on her list of healers to interview and try to heal was Ximena Castillo. Kate’s description of Ximena’s fame was that her healing practice had been the subject of Jamie’s father’s work. Mae found none of his books listed in the holdings of her small town’s library.

  She logged into the College of Rio Grande library online. The long list of Dr. Ellerbee’s publications impressed her, but they were all about indigenous religions and healing in Asia and Australia, except for one about the Mescalero Apaches. Nothing about curanderismo. It must not have gotten into a book. Searching the library databases for academic journals in anthropology, she found two relevant articles by Stanley Ellerbee: “The Role of an Urban Curandera” and “Healing Perceptions of a Curandera and her Clients in an Urban New Mexico Community.”

  This was the only fame Ximena Castillo had other than her local clients and the fair? Even if other academics had worked with her, she was hardly a celebrity. Did the source of the plague read scholarly journals? That would be more like Jill than Dahlia.

  Mae printed the articles, got the books from the stacks, and carried her load to the checkout.

  “Oh, I loved these.” The woman at the front desk lit up as she scanned the Jill Betts books. A square-built woman with fading red-blond hair and a lined face, she wore feather earrings and a scarf with beaded fringe. “Especially the Sacred Cycles. It will really speak to you as a woman.”

  “What did you think of the crone part?”

  “Reading it changed my life. I’ve celebrated with my crone circle ever since.”

  “So...” Mae took a guess. “A crone is like a wise woman? A grandmother?”

  “Yes. It’s a beautiful stage of life. Like the book says, it’s a sacred cycle.”

  Silver-haired Jill in her skinny jeans, dancing seductively with Lily, hadn’t looked like she thought of herself as a crone. She’d looked like she was chasing a nineteen-year-old in a bar.

  From the opinions of the two women and Kenny’s comments, Mae had a sense of what Jill’s first and last books were about. The subject matter of the middle one, The Urban Shaman, wasn’t clear to her, though it apparently had something to do with drumming. If she got in touch with Jill in the next day or so she’d have to pass for someone who’d read all three, at least in part. Mae slid her stack of books to the end of the library counter and flipped to the introduction to The Urban Shaman.

  The Case against Culture

  As a lifelong student of indigenous spirituality, I have nothing against culture. However, most of us have no pure culture, only the shabby remnants of our ancestral garb clashing with a mass media mélange that we call modern culture. The struggle to maintain culturally pure shamanic traditions in such a world leads to snobbery, confusion, and spiritual disaster, as seen in—please pardon my use of these terms; their negative impact is intentional—the tragedy of the “half-caste” or “half-breed,” manifested through suicide, substance abuse, or both.

  There are two paths to shamanic access to the Spirit World. One is through our creative imagination, and this is the safest and most natural path for most modern people. In some indigenous cultures, there is the crisis of emergence. For the profoundly gifted individual, the one with the capacity to become a true spirit-possessed shaman, this crisis opens the soul to the Spirit World through a struggle, a surgery on the soul, which only the chosen can endure.

  Because our modern “culture” only looks for this in a “pure” culture, we have no place for the shamanic emergence crisis, and instead of nurturing it we suppress it with so-called therapies. For the average unhappy person, such treatments may be wise, but for the truly called, it is tragic.

  The son of a promin
ent American anthropologist is my case in point, the archetypal tragedy of the half-caste. Uprooted from one of the oldest and most spiritual cultures left on the planet, deprived of his mother’s people’s teachings, this young man instead spent his formative years exposed to other cultures and immersed in urban life. He was taught the ideal of a pure culture while being raised with none. When his shamanic emergence crisis appeared, it was not recognized and was treated instead as a mental health problem. I believe that such suppression was the cause of his repeated self-destructiveness, when in fact he was called. Medicating and hospitalizing the struggle of the Spirit World to come through is one of the crimes of the modern world, well-meaning though it may be, whether committed by family or by medicine.

  The goal of this book is to introduce the reader to culture-free shamanism, pure shamanism rather than pure culture, a method that needs no special language or costumes, and that will create a community in which access to the Spirit World is nurtured, supported, and encouraged as in the wise ways of traditional cultures, without need for blood ties to privilege access.

  Welcome to the Spirit World. It welcomes you.

  Jill Betts

  No wonder Jamie hated Jill. Mae slapped the book shut, gathered her things, and started home at a furious pace.

  These women who thought Jill was so wonderful probably had read this and believed it. They must have thought that some anthropologist they’d never heard of was a terrible parent for trying to help his depressed kid survive. People who idolized Jill wouldn’t notice that their favorite crone didn’t make any sense, criticizing the ideal of a pure culture and then blaming Jamie’s father for taking him away from one.

  There was a fine line between what Gaia said about the untapped power overwhelming her body, and Jill’s suggestion that spiritually gifted people couldn’t have real mental illness. What if her followers read this and quit therapy? Went off their meds? Even if they really were called as shamans, that could hurt them. The last time Jamie’s gift had emerged, it had made him more unstable. It was only because he was getting well now that he finally had a little room for it, though shrunken down to cat size.

  How did Jill know Jamie’s story to twist it this way? What had he or his father ever done to her that she would do this to them? In her angry rush, Mae almost stepped on the big black ants. She slowed down, careful to avoid them as they scurried in service of their queen. An image popped into her mind, of Jill Betts deep in the ground in a special chamber, while women like Naomi and the ladies in the library fed her, and girls like Lily and Kandyce Kahee ran out on the sidewalk to get crushed.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Mae stood in Jamie’s living room, staring, then finally remembered to push the door shut behind her. She’d expected newly painted walls, scant furnishings in each room, and some boxes in the closets. What she found was both better and worse.

  He’d painted each wall a different color and the trim yet another color in various rock-red-orange hues. A cloudy spiral like a petroglyph floated in an upper corner of one wall, and the ceiling was sky blue. The effect was like walking into an O’Keefe landscape. The hours of work he must have put into it showed determination and creative energy, but he couldn’t have given any thought to how such colors might integrate with furniture—and he didn’t have any. Not a stick. The room was empty except for the boxes.

  Gasser woke from a nap on a stair-stepped pile of them and uttered a low, one-syllable mer. He stretched, spreading his toes apart, and rolled onto his side. Mae stroked his back. His fur had a freshly brushed fluffiness and smelled like herbal shampoo. Gasser ignored her touch, stretching again and farting.

  She moved to the kitchen. It had the same color scheme and a spiral. At least this room had two pieces of furniture, a table and one chair. One chair? Three dishes and two cookie sheets sat in the bamboo drainer on the counter. Boxes blocked the bottom cabinets.

  The counter was cluttered with bags of snacks and plastic tubs of whole-grain, home-made cookies. Bananas shared a bowl with multicolored cherry tomatoes. Shriveled tomato stems lay in a neat little heap nearby, as if Jamie had stood there eating tomatoes and collecting the stems and forgotten to throw them away.

  Hoping to see that he’d really unpacked more than it seemed, she opened cabinets above the counter. The first held food and spices. The next, a coffee grinder, a single cookbook, one lidded pot, one frying pan, and one mixing bowl. Why just one? He must have burrowed into the boxes for these things and then closed them back up. That was even crazier than not unpacking at all. Why not finish the job once he’d dug in? She had an image of a depressed mid-winter Jamie carefully taking out the fewest possible items and then resealing the boxes, making it easier for his survivors to clear out when he died. Sad, but she wouldn’t put it past him to think of that.

  On the table lay a sheet of paper that had been torn from the unused January section of a planner. A cartoon heart with arms and legs and a chef’s hat spoke in a word balloon. Jamie’s sprawling handwriting spilled over the balloon’s borders. He’d worked hard at it. All the letters were in the right order. Dinner in the fridge. Love ya. JEJE.

  She checked the refrigerator. Finally something looked normal. It was stocked full with healthy foods and local brews. She recognized her meal, a tomato-garnished plate of three big burritos, and another plate filled with a huge salad under clear plastic wrap. It was too early for dinner, and there was more food than she could finish, but she knew it would be good. Prepared with love.

  She closed the door and headed upstairs. Maybe he had unpacked up there.

  He hadn’t. He’d painted in softer tones of the same general theme. The spirals almost merged with the wall color, and there was one in every room, even in the bathroom at the head of the stairs. What were these? Did he like the pattern or did it mean something? She remembered he’d seen a spiral when he started hearing those buzzing spirits.

  One room was empty except for boxes, the cat’s litter box and toys, and a hairy towel and cat brush on the floor. The bedroom had boxes, too, and no furniture except the bed. Freshly made, with crisp satin-edged sheets, it was strewn with roses of all colors: red, coral, yellow, even lavender. Oh, Jamie. She pictured him cooking, garnishing the plates just so, buying the flowers and spreading them, anxiously double-checking again and again that they looked just right, hopeful despite the boxes blighting his romantic efforts. Mae took a deep breath of the roses. She’d need to unpack a vase for them or they’d die.

  There was probably one in the kitchen boxes. Were they labeled by contents? She looked in the open closet. The boxes in it had something scribbled on them. Bedroom. Not much help. The ones in the kitchen probably said kitchen.

  At least he’d unpacked some clothes. On the shelf sat his mouse-brown winter fedora, his white cowboy hat, folded jeans, underwear, and funny little knit shorts and tank tops. Loud cotton shirts in various ethnic prints hung on the near-empty rod. All were the same style—the kind that was meant to be worn untucked and loose. Similar clothes lay in a basketless heap of laundry on the floor. The pants and shirts looked new. He hadn’t unpacked much after all—he’d shopped. Maybe he liked to shop, but from the look of the place she didn’t think so.

  Jamie had told her that Wendy had ordered him to get clothes that fit. He could have unpacked some, but he hadn’t. When he’d said he felt like he would dig up a body—my own body at a hundred pounds of different sizes—that meant he had clothes in these boxes that would fit him at his present weight. It also implied he didn’t want to see the ones that had fit him when he was a lot bigger or a lot smaller. That couldn’t be the whole explanation, though. Mae’s suspicion that he’d been making re-packing easier on his survivors came back.

  It was time to unpack. He’d made progress on his body image, and his remarkable survival in the lake seemed to have put an end to his death wish. Living with the boxes had to be making him feel more stuck than he really was. Was he afraid they had spiders in them?

&n
bsp; The vase for the roses should come first, and then she would unpack everything. Jamie would be so surprised—and relieved.

  As she started for the stairs, a glimpse of something lived-in and personal caught her eye, another hint of normalcy. On a box across the room from the bed was the usual little pile of things men pulled from their pockets at the end of a day. Coins. Crumpled notes and lists. A wrinkled pink business card with one word on it and a phone number. Dahlia.

  Mae put the roses in water in the sink. Already tired, they left petals on the bed.

  Dahlia’s reception was cool. “Jamie Ellerbee gave you my number? He hasn’t even called me himself.”

  Mae doubted he ever would. “His father is one of my advisors on an independent study I’m doing over the summer. I’m researching modern shamanism and healing. Jamie said he’s seen you with Jill Betts. I’ve got interviews scheduled with some other prominent people, but I haven’t been able to arrange to meet her.”

  “Jill doesn’t just meet people.”

  “I can understand that. But I’m not some groupie, I’m a college student. Jamie said you were with Fiona McCloud, too. It’d be great if I could talk to her.”

  “Oh. Fiona.” Dahlia’s voice dropped, dismissing Fiona like an unfashionable idea. “I can steer you better than that. Don’t waste your time.”

  Did she want to hide Fiona’s condition? “Wow. I’m glad I talked to you. Her book made me think she’d be one of the best. Do you know other healers, then?”

  “Of course I do. If you want to talk with me, I’m at De Vargas Mall. Meet me at the Starbucks there in about half an hour.”

  Not a question, a command. Mae gave a description by which she could be recognized. Dahlia didn’t reciprocate. She said, “I’ll look for you.”

  And then decide if you’re willing to talk with me?

  Seated at a table in the center of the coffee shop, surrounded by small shopping bags, Lily—Mae had to make herself think of her as Dahlia—waved a few fingers and hinted at a possible smile. Mae crossed the room and introduced herself. As soon as she spoke, she wondered if her accent would make Harold’s daughter think about him. Dahlia was so limited in her expression, it was hard to tell if she noticed.