Lost Soul

By Paul Moore Chaves

In this hauntingly stark and spiritually apocalyptic novel, Paul Moore Chaves has created a character of such depth that we have no choice but to confront ourselves in renowned psychotherapist Nicholas Moss. After allegations of sexual misconduct ruin his personal and professional life, Nick is detained and forced to labor inside Boyle Armory, a weapons manufacturing facility contracted by the Grand National Armed Coalition, where he is to arm opposing sides of a brewing Civil War between the People's Liberation Army and the established U.S. government. In this dark and deplorable space, Moss must find the spiritual strength to free himself—not only from his own darkness but from the oppressive military machine that holds him captive.

 

From the Illinois farm of Nick's childhood to his rise to fame navigating high-society circles in the city of YorkTown emerges the story of a man desperately piecing together the memories of his broken past while confronting the brutal, terrifying, and unyielding setting he must now ultimately conquer. Transformative and overpowering in its intensity of emotion, Lost Soul speaks to finding hope for a modern American culture in decay.

• Language: English
• Publisher: OHM Enterprises LLC
• Release date: Nov 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9798986777818

Book preview

Author’s Note, 2022

We are living through uncertain and challenging times, in which the men and women who control all human systems have sold their souls for profit and fame. Lies, greed, ego, and hatred are obscurations to the divine Source that informs the wisdom of the soul. Do you believe you have a soul? Does it speak in a language of its own? Is that language an inner knowing? Can we achieve a direct experience of soul? Can we train our minds to be its silent witness? I submit to you that we can.

Darkness is easier to see than the Light. It is denser and consumptive; it pulls on our most primal human aspects. But the technology of the Light is here. The technology of healing, self-realization, wisdom, love, and the Divine are extant for us to experience and to use. This tale that unfolds within these pages is meant to awaken in you the portal to directly experiencing your soul. Nicholas Moss’ journey—though full of turmoil, pain, and suffering—will bring you closer to the Source of Power within you. Your soul knows. Contact with your soul will empower you to lovingly and forgivingly overcome the obscurations of current world leaders with Truth. This Truth will expose these rich, narcissistic people who’ve appropriated the world to feed the void inside them where their souls once were. Good luck! I’ll be there with you.

- Paul Moore Chaves

A man with inner courage dares to live.

- Lao Tzu

PART ONE

I was a man who had everything but deserved nothing. I wasted all I’d achieved. Resented those who loved me. Felt unsatisfied despite my privilege.

I left my family long before I walked out the door, and I haven’t seen them in what feels like years. But it has only been a few months since the night I was detained. I want to return to them but must first return to myself. Meanwhile, what they sound and look like has blended and faded with time, as people do when shouldering the weight of becoming a distant memory. Isabelle, my wife, and Sebastian, my only son, at best are muddied blotches on an amateur’s canvas and at worst, no longer vivid ingredients to their own original masterpiece.

I looked up from the dusty clay ground. I heard Sebastian laughing, first softly and then slowly rising, dominating all sound, deafening the patter of my feet on the ground in front of me. This desolate land, home to nothing but the sound of wind through the brush, lizards scuttling up rocks, and the occasional distant thunder, repelled laughter. So much so that I doubted what I’d heard. I wondered if my comrades, this convoy of men traveling with me, trudging through the desert wasteland could hear it too.

Sebastian’s laughter ricocheted past the graves behind us, the piles of stones commemorating my comrades who’d died along the way. The sounds, as quickly as they’d arrived, disappeared behind me. Carried by the hot wind and finally reaching the river we’d crossed a week ago until along its granular banks my son’s laughter settled, then fell and mixed into the current, rendering it indistinguishable from the water itself. Sebastian’s no longer a baby. Yet now, through the fumes of my exhaustion and delirium, the curdled giggles from his infancy are what I hear or perhaps are at least comforting for me to imagine.

My soothing fantasy was interrupted by a voice from behind me. I lifted my arm only to recoil from the searing pain in my shoulder. I’d injured it on the day of my arrest. I’d been pinned to the floor of my room at Hotel Luxxe, where a PeaceKeeper had took me by my wrist and twisted my arm into a knot, the way that a baker manipulates dough into a pretzel, before securing it against my back.

I resisted, leaving the officer no choice but to leverage his hips and knock me off balance. It came as no surprise, by my surly bearing, that our confrontation nearly came to blows. With or without my resistance, he was chomping at the bit, carrying weapons to neutralize any threat that I might pose as I’d been on their radar for weeks, isolated in my room, drinking to forget where I was or how I got there.

The voice from behind me wielded enough influence to awaken me from my regret. My comrade, the man who’d spoken behind me, knew I’d heard him. I couldn’t discern a single word out of the mouth of that Neanderthal though. Starting with my ears, like a wolf sensing a threat, my whole body froze. The pain in my shoulder practically immobilized me. Pain can certainly have free reign if it’s allowed to.

I was terrified that I was permanently damaged from the struggle of having journeyed here. Yet I’m still standing, carrying my wounded and bloody body, the only constant link to all I’ve left behind. All things are eventually left behind. My challenge has been finding the courage to let them go.

My feet, and the earth under them, contrasted in color below me. The translucent white clay surface of the ground offset my olive complexion. Small spots of my Mediterranean skin tone were visible between patches of dried blood, blood that burned from red to black along my insteps and across my toes, charred by the harsh sun.

After the garbled memory of my son’s laughter flitted past me, Isabelle’s face appeared on the ground between my feet. Her face was blurred by the fading sun’s rays. A combination of pain, thirst, hunger, and shame follows me. Conditions enhanced by hallucinating her into form.

I’m trapped into a confrontation with her astral projection where she’s enraged by circumstances of my doing. Those that were the cause of my arrest. After falling to the floor, I was cuffed and escorted by a small group of uniformed PeaceKeepers. They’ve brought me here to the middle of nowhere. Yet this place has no middle, nor any boundaries to speak of.

I left without the chance to say goodbye. If I’d had the opportunity to say goodbye, I may not have left. Isabelle may have been persuasive enough for me to make an attempt to save our marriage or to salvage even a little hope to keep our family together.

‘For the kid’, we’d say.

Both of us knew, despite our wishes to overcome the odds, that we’d eventually separate. The safety she needed was something I couldn’t provide. It stressed our marriage and after we had Sebastian finally broke it. We lost our curiosity with one another, and were no longer content to carry on the facade, nor to parade around the city attending events, hosting god awful parties, and engaging in empty social routines.

She lived to flippantly explain to her invited guests, to the women in her circle, the reasons for our lack of affection. Fallout from heated exchanges we’d had and excuses we’d made about our troubled child. I lived for the bottle: at home, in the office, at the bar, and anywhere my appetites led me. I numbed myself beyond the reach of recompense or regret. I was astonished she ever fell in love with me.

Through the rays of the sun, and on the white clay surface of the earth, I saw her hypnotic eyes coalesce below me. Her eyebrows tilted towards the bridge of her nose. They were manicured, pointed and black, completing the expression of a woman deceived. Her stoicism had cemented over time, and remained unchanged by the emotional breakdown and dissolution I couldn’t manage. Her dark hair looks tightly matted against her scalp, matronly complimenting her resentment, severely conveying how she must feel regarding the distance that now separates us, compounded by the miles of barren land that now divided the vast territory of our broken marriage.

Isabelle was a woman who valued the taste of impermanence, and was never filled by its consumption. Oils, perfumes, bags, jewelry, clothes, and shoes, were among the endless objects to meet her dissatisfaction. I gave her everything; my industry, my seed, my heart, my money, my life. They were empty symbols that failed to meet unreasonable expectations.

The Neanderthal who stood behind me impatiently trumpeted a question that echoed and bounced off the canyon walls that surrounded us. I had enough clarity to barely decipher the question that escaped his overgrown jowls.

He’s not the one who ordered my capture though, nor inured me to travel thousands of miles away from any life I had. That man was up ahead, Captain Pritchard, mounted on top of his horse nearly fifty meters from where I stood. He’s the interim director and I’m the actor who waits in the wings, listening for cues to enter the story of my past existence. I’m desperate and afraid of seeing the truth. Unable to undergo the unilateral search for who I am or who I was before the end of my life as a father, husband, psychologist, and citizen of YorkTown.

My crude comrade’s voice was brash enough to send shock waves into the air that quickly hit my back.

‘Not so loud,’ I said, wincing and grabbing my shoulder to indicate to him the cause of my distress.

My words were gnarled and bound to the pain I felt, and mutated into a response that was hardly discernible. My anger unfurled in waves, like sonic pulses, emanating from deep inside my gut, rising up my chest, through my throat and out my mouth.

‘It’s bad for the joints,’ I said defensively, softening my tone. I was, after all, speaking to a man one and a half times my size. I knew how to handle myself but was asking for trouble, compromised as I was, bloodied and bruised, deluded by thinking I could challenge this devolved brute.

‘What? Didn’t know you could still talk,’ said Slade. There was an edgy surprise to his voice, poised as he was to egg me on even further.

‘Nothing,’ I said.

‘Poor bastard. What good does this do the rest of us? It’s almost dinner time. Now we’ll have to wait. When the sun goes down. Then Slade stops. But now. Because of this…,’ he said, lazily waving his arm towards the scene in front of us, dismissing the ceremony. ‘…Now we’ll have to march in darkness,’ he paused before finishing, ‘Slade’s afraid of the dark.’

I continued to lose and find my balance, slightly shifting my weight from left to right, from right to left, then forward and back. Repelled from being centered. It must be the heat or the pressure in the air, likely a combination of the two. I was disoriented by all the intangibles that took me off balance. Especially my memories, my visions, or the quixotic decision to seek elixirs for all that has ailed me. For I do ail. That much is known. That much has always been known. Least of all to me.

My son mirrored me more than I knew, or cared to know, until his maturation revealed parts I didn’t want to see. I made ill-timed and ill-advised decisions to mismanage who I was. The consequences were inescapable. I slowly began to realize, over the course of months and years, how insoluble my relationship to him became. A wedge was driven between us from the fear of what I saw. Insights that were unmanageable given my stress at the time.

Burdens I thought I could compartmentalize or file safely away in my office with all my other vanities. Inside the folders that lay in my desk were neatly stacked rejected articles and essays on top of my collection of erotic paraphernalia locked in the bottom drawer. Secrets kept not only from my colleagues, patients, and family, but also from the healthy and normal parts of myself.

As far as the eroticism goes, I forbade myself to reveal the depth of my wantonness. Inside that drawer were records of all the money I owed from gambling and alcohol, my impending lawsuit, my recent review from the Board of Directors, and dozens of articles and essays I’d penned in recent months. Insights once prized by my editor and publisher now dismissed for lack of coherence. I kept them alongside my important documents: my life insurance policy, my will, my birth certificate, and my deed of trust. Thin sheets of paper that proved I lived with signatures to ensure that my death will leave pieces of me behind.

In that drawer, underneath an album of family photographs and an unopened carton of cigarettes, was my life in black ink. Then there was Yvette, and my desire for her which consumed me, and was intensified every time my long-legged, busty, French-Canadian secretary entered my office. My colleagues called her a healthy distraction.

‘C’mon, Nick. Every married man deserves one. I have a rotation,’ Dr. Pine would proudly say, casually tossing out his confessions between bites of a sandwich or drying his hands in the men’s room.

I never laid a hand on her. I didn’t know how. Despite my countless swellings, I was faithful to my wife. So at least I did something right but not enough to erase a life filled with discrepancies.

‘You there,’ said Pritchard, who sat astride his horse along the canyon’s shelf.

My body quivered and my pupils dilated. I knew he was speaking to me. The corners of my eyes were creased with wrinkles, moistened by tears and sweat, and dappled with specks of pearl white clay. Clay that had arisen from the ground, lifted by the wind, and rested into the crevices and cracks in my skin.

Because of the elements and my weakened health, my eyes and ears had lost their efficacy to filter the particles around me. Those that appeared as dust to my eyes and those that arrived in words to my ears.

My mind and body infinitesimally expanded in an attempt to openly receive the information coming to me before contracting back into their neutral position. I was pallid, and unable to see or hear much of anything beyond my pain, hunger, and thirst. Could that be considered neutral? Nevertheless, I was now fully awake and attentive.

Slade slouched behind me and despite his enormous heft he knew how to hide. I was the lone target to answer Captain Pritchard. ‘You there,’ he bellowed again. Pritchard rode his horse down the canyon wall and dismounted some ten yards in front of me. He approached with two PeaceKeepers trailing behind him.

The two who followed him fanned out like wings of a fighter jet. The PeaceKeepers were a disciplined mercenary force that worked as a unit and followed orders to oversee myself and my comrades. We were called refugees, not prisoners. I managed the strength to address the approaching Captain Pritchard. His beard preceded the rest of him.

It was a surprising notion that I was willing to talk to Pritchard, considering I hadn’t said a word in weeks. My refusal to engage in any banal conversations always upset Slade. His anger would gradually subside to resented confidence, wherein by my silence he was encouraged to express, entrusting me to hear his struggles. How he’d been ridiculed for having been so obscenely large. He was an easy target for those who were cruel.

I’m a great listener to conflict and the lessons it brings, with the exception of my own. That’s why I’ve come here and why I’ve marched in the sweltering heat for these weeks and months unknown. As well as to dry out from drinking. Alcohol was the cause of countless fights between my wife and I. But I’ve had enough of painful memories. If I could only forget or have my mind erased. Both of us buckled under the pressure sustained by the grievances of marriage, the passage of time, and the grips of addiction. Regrets have strong bearing on my present moment, and so I’ve been summoned by these PeaceKeepers to correct the past, and I am expected to perform in ways I never could as a husband and father.

I’m faced with three PeaceKeepers of equal stature. Each bore the same expression and moved as one unit.

‘Yes, you. Moss,’ Confirmed Pritchard.

I tried to gather my thoughts, to see if any logic inside me remained. He called me Moss. This left me wondering how he knew my name, only to realize that my name was stitched on the left breast pocket of my jacket in vermilion cursive.

‘Yes, sir.’

With great effort, the words escaped my lips. Slade was silent, eager to hear my every word, as if for him my voice proved my existence, even if it did not, at least in his mind, make my presence more substantial.

‘Moss. Refugee number nine-nine-one-nine-one, is it?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I said.

My words were impeded by the sand in the air which added to my desperation and required more energy to respond. In moments of distress, I’m often compelled to cloak my weaknesses. Far too many to conceal. So I puffed my chest up to let Pritchard know I could be counted on.

The other two PeaceKeepers, obviously his inferiors, were in no way keen regarding the task of managing us Refugees. I was one misfit among many, including Slade who shirked behind me to avoid any interaction. Slade had yet ascertained, despite the journey thus far, how to overcome his cowardice. Perhaps it takes a great man, such a one I’ve never met, to face the impurities inside of him before harnessing the capacity to overcome them.

I was slowly learning how to face them. I sensed its substance floating inside me. Like an opaque velvety fog, obscuring all directions. Coursing through my veins. Pressurized inside my bones. I sensed all my past misfortunes and selfish decisions, surfacing to my mind and then fading. The sensations were followed by shadows cast across my mind’s attention, the shadow that signified I hated myself.

Then would come my paranoia in believing I was trapped there and I was convinced everyone knew. I’d eventually arrive at the conclusion that my paranoia was futile yet still held me captive. My interior darkness couldn’t easily be seen. It could only be sensed by a certain few who had in their lives turned and faced the very thing that haunted them. Or detected, as I do now, the terror that I’d be left to walk alone. That my comrades would die. That the sun would never set, and my destination would always be out of reach.

‘Dig,’ said Pritchard, handing me a shovel and a pickaxe, their edges sharpened against each other, while the three of them stood expectantly, hands poised over their weapons, guns holstered, waiting for my compliance.

‘Bury the dead,’ Slade whispered from over my shoulder, more pleasant to my ear than the incessant yammering he’d been doing ever since leaving YorkTown.

I slightly turned my head towards Slade, wondering if what he’d said had been heard by Pritchard and his two cronies. The bustle on the shelf of the canyon, the clattering sounds of the pickaxe and shovel in my hands, Slade’s breathing - all sounds fell silent, waiting for my response.

‘You must be thirsty,’ said Pritchard merrily, exhibiting the capricious humor that overtakes men of a certain power position.

Pritchard signaled for the man to his right to unclasp his velcro pouch and secure a canteen of water hanging from his belt. The PeaceKeeper glanced at Pritchard to confirm his request. Their motivation to quench my thirst wasn’t derived from decency but instead from the need for an additional digger to join a small team of Refugees on the canyon shelf above.

The PeaceKeeper passed me the canteen. Its water echoed inside the metallic flask and tempered me to their demands. I’m under their custody but strangely felt I could leave at any point. Is my banishment voluntary? I’m far from having the integrity needed to be a loving husband and father. My emotional and spiritual estrangement preceded the physical one, long before I was taken by the PeaceKeepers and asked to join this failed lot of wayward comrades.

I made no move to take the canteen. Pritchard expectantly shifted his glare between it and my red dried eyes, impatient for my reaction. His stare growing more stern with each passing second I ignored his offer.

‘Take it,’ said Slade, breaking the silence, desperation in his voice, on the verge of losing control to his thirst, threatening to overpower any manners he may have had.

‘Quiet, ape,’ warned the PeaceKeeper standing to Pritchard’s left.

Slade ignored the warning and continued. ‘Take it, Moss,’ in a tone that was increasingly desperate and louder in volume. He punctuated this with a shove to my back with the force of a man under possession. I fell forward, forced off balance, and winced from the pain before landing on the ground. Pritchard and his men stepped back to avoid my fall. PeaceKeepers have no compassion for falling men. But perhaps I’m wrong. Only time will tell.

My head whipped back, my joints popped, and I fell to the ground without a cry or a shriek, compelled to keep my cool and save some face. The moments of a man under duress often reveal the most character. I’d rather be old and frail than give Pritchard the satisfaction of witnessing my pain or vulnerability.

I won’t flee from adversity, not anymore, despite my past failures and poor behavior. I welcome the next challenge, any impediment that might thwart my search for love. The type of love I could give my child, or my wife, or to myself in ways I’ve never been able to find or fulfill. What’s my destiny? What am I here to do? Surprisingly I asked these questions daily, considering I’m a man who, prior to coming here, prior to this trek, the pain, and the brutal sun, was a man ignorant to the needs of others, much less those of his family and friends.

I fell to the ground and landed with an inescapable groan. I saw Pritchard’s dark green boots with their reflective brass buckles shift in my direction. His steel toes pointed as if lining up for a kick. It wouldn’t surprise me if he did, kick me that is. If anyone knew how to kick a man when he was down, it was Pritchard. I lay heaped in a silent and dusty mess.

In the next moments, all I’d heard was what transpired between Pritchard, the PeaceKeepers, and Slade. I was unable to budge and unable to summon the energy to rise. I tried to get up but remained unleavened. There was nothing but the August heat of the earth below me, scorching my chest, cheek, and hands, a scalding motivator to get back up.

As good as it felt to lay down, it isn’t my place and never has been to allow myself any sustained rest. I’ve never found moments of repose satisfying. I’d always believed in living fast, as fast as I could, outside of the box I’d managed to build for myself and was pressured to stay in. It has taken me a long time to learn how to slow down to the point where I could let the moments instruct me and where my quiet mind could feel the presence of truth and love.

For me, as for all my comrades, I was looking for answers. Wanting the search to be easy and needing the answers to be available. Perhaps they could give me the confidence to rise from the ground and welcome the adversity I’m faced with. Only then could I look my comrades and captors in the eye and hold my ground against all suffering and pain. Only then, when challenged by doubts, could I affirm and greet them. Only then could I survive. For without my having had the courage to search for the truth, without my having had the gall to leave, the life I left would have killed me. My purpose was to get back to my wife and son. But I have to find the man my wife and son have never met. Especially in moments such as these.

I lifted my searing face from off the canyon floor and turned laterally to catch, if not a peek, then at least a vague notion of the action around me. I winced against the sun’s glaring effulgence and turned back to face the ground. The vast red sun had nearly descended behind the canyon wall and prevented me from witnessing the events unfolding around me. Pritchard had demanded I join three of my comrades along the canyon’s shelf as part of a burial team whose task it would be to dig a grave for a newly fallen comrade.

I looked towards the horizon, in the direction of the sun, strained my eyes against the glare, and saw Pritchard and the two PeaceKeepers running past me towards Slade, ready to restrain his outburst over the canteen. To see Slade reduced to his essential fears and desires reminded me of the obedience to my own urges. Because I lived with unfulfilled wishes and regrets inside me, I was enslaved to primal needs. I had unconsciously encouraged other men to do the same, so then I wouldn’t be alone in the dark, wandering in the desert, ostracized from civilization for an indeterminate amount of time, and in a perpetual state of hunger and thirst for more. Out here where I’m unable to devour all that hasn’t ever been rightfully mine to consume.

Here I keep company with outliers. There’s failure all around me. I determined a few days ago that my intuition’s sensitivity had increased which wandering the desert for months had the tendency to reveal and develop. I’ve discovered the deeper capacity to feel and understand the thoughts and emotions of my comrades. Whereby my sensations about their struggles have been distilled from murky impressions into clearer definitions. They’ve been communicated to my mind and body from whom the men those thoughts originally came. These new abilities I have ultimately give me an upper hand and lend me the strength not to vanquish in the face of conflict, no matter how grandiose or infinitesimal.

’Stand down, ape!’ yelled the PeaceKeeper to Pritchard’s left.

Six boots in unison moved towards Slade and tore the clay beneath them, forcing tiny white clouds to rise from the ground. The PeaceKeepers stiffened their legs and used their muscles to engage and destabilize the formidable Slade. He was far too thirsty and desperate for them to underestimate. Four shadowy figures contrasted against the pale red glare of the horizon beyond.

‘He said stand down,’ yelled the PeaceKeeper to Pritchard’s right.

I tried to stand, raising the top half of my body into a pushed up position but submitted once again to the exhaustion and collapsed. I didn’t have the strength and knew my rest is invaluable.

I overheard the quarrel between Slade and the PeaceKeepers, and as a means of tuning out the commotion, distracted myself by focusing on Isabelle’s face. I saw her form appear by memory, by imagination, composited onto the ground below me, close enough to notice her embarrassment and the repercussions she faced by not having her husband there. She carried the internal stigmata of a woman abandoned and scorned. Blemishes that weren’t readily seen but when I looked closely enough, as I do now, I could see marks on her face, shapes that indicated her internal strife. With every new skirmish inside her heart, or any tinge of the shame she now kept fair company with each sting reminded her of me and dug themselves into lines on her face. I could see her tracking her anxiety to its source, to me, amplifying her resentment in the process. Her face, here in the clay, endured my focus and remained intact. Until she had, beyond any possible doubt, communicated with me, despite the hundreds of miles between YorkTown and this forsaken place. Her face deludes me into believing she awaits my return and tries to convince me that she never wanted me to leave.

‘Things’ll be different,’ she said the day I left.

‘They already are,’ I thought but never said. She was resolute in her decision.

And now, here in the middle of nowhere, we’re having the same debate, the same conversation.

‘Are things different for you now?’ Her whispers, directed at me, rose from out of the ground. ‘Have you found what you’re looking for Nick?

She doesn’t know all of this is for the sake of my boy, for them both. She thought my righteousness, undeserved and unrelenting as it was, was merely a distraction. But I’m a father who’s encouraged by conscience to be a loving parent. I don’t want him to become a man like me. A man revered by name but soiled in reputation.

I glanced in the direction of the quarrel behind me. Isabelle’s face dissolved but I often find there’s no explanation as to the appearance and disappearance of images, memories, or faces. I shifted my eyes back to the ground, desperate to continue the hallucination and too tired to keep looking towards Slade, Pritchard, and the rest. I half expected to see her again but she was gone. In spite of my pain and exhaustion, I managed to rise into a seated position. My head was planked between my knees, and bobbed up and down like an apple on water. I suspected Pritchard’s men had seized control of Slade, considering that all sounds of his protest had been silenced.

I raised my head to see Slade on his knees, his wrists bound with rope. He whimpered when a PeaceKeeper snatched his hair and pulled his head back, exposing his throat to a blade held softly against him.

‘Wait! I won’t do it again,’ Slade pleaded.

Unfortunately for him, this wasn’t his first offense. This was his third and with it, it was likely that