Life During Wartime

by Lucius Shepard

  He turned to a photo spread of divers in red and yellow wet suits floating in a turquoise depth, lost among thousands of brightly colored fish. Something about the photograph struck him as familiar, and he recalled his experience with Tully earlier that day. That was how it had been: he had been a driver in Tully’s mind, hovering in those electric depths, surrounded by the fish of his thoughts. And he was certain there had been a greater depth beyond. A place he imagined to be as labyrinthine as a coral reef, housing thoughts as intricate as sea fans.

  Dusk made it impossible to read. Storm clouds blew in from the north, a freshet of rain spattering the roof; darkness slipped in under cover of the clouds, and moonlight filtered through the ripped tin, daubing the floors with lavender gray. Mingolla noticed a light fixture above the table. He went to the door, flipped a wall switch, and was surprised when the bulb flickered on, shining a white radiance into every corner of the shed. Moths began batting around it, casting a shrapnel of shadow over the walls. He sat back down and returned to reading, half-listening to the wind, the crashing on the reef. Then something creaked, and, glancing up, he saw a thin black woman standing at the door, wearing a threadbare dress that had bleached a pale indefinite brown. Alarmed, he reacted as he had with Tully, pushing toward her with his mind. Again that feeling of immersion, of power and arousal. But this time, meeting no resistance, he found himself swimming—it was the only word applicable—swimming in a pattern, a convoluted knot, and instead of penetrating an unknown depth as he had imagined, it seemed he was tunneling, that the stuff of the woman’s thought was aligning around his pattern, hardening into form that he was dictating. He moved so rapidly, he was unable to trace the complexities of the pattern; however, satisfied at last by some intuitive criteria that it was complete, secure in this, he pulled back from the woman. An erection was ridging up his trousers.

  The woman swayed, righted herself, gaping, apparently stunned. She was young—eighteen, nineteen—and cocoa skinned, with a dusting of freckles across her nose and cheeks; her face was pretty, with a cleverness of feature that reminded him of Debora, and framed by stubby dreadlocks…He lost interest in the woman, puzzled by his use of Debora as a comparative after all these months. But then he realized that while she had not been foremost in his mind, she had been a subroutine in his thoughts, a place to which he had traveled in dreams, in idle moments. And he realized, too, that his knowledge of her had deepened: it was as if he had been carrying on a dialogue with her, assembling a portrait of her from clues implicit in her words, her smell, her manner.

  “I been feelin’ you come,” said the woman in hushed tones.

  Again Mingolla pushed toward her, aiming the desire he had been harboring for Debora, understanding as he did that desire had a shape he could feel…feeling it like a pitcher who, leaning in for his sign, grips the baseball behind his back, fingering the seams until he has found the proper position: an unconscious yet expert process. The woman’s face went slack, her breath quickened.

  “Been feelin’ you come most all dis week,” she said, edging closer. “You got so much power, mon!” She fondled a shell that was threaded on a string about her neck, painted with red and green designs.

  “Who are you?” Mingolla asked, anxious, not really caring who she was, wanting an answer that might shed light on who he was becoming.

  “I Hettie.” She sank to her knees a body-length away. “De power full on you now. More power dan I ever felt, and praise God more de luck.”

  Mingolla’s anxiety increased. “What’re you talking ’bout?”

  “De power bring de luck. Dat how it be always. De new ones come to power, and dey touch us fah to make dem safe.”

  He recalled his sense of security after completing the pattern.

  “We keep you safe, too.”

  “Tell me ’bout the luck,” he said.

  She wetted her lips. “De luck ain’t not’in’ to talk on.”

  “Why not?”

  “Talkin’ liable to ’splain it ’way.”

  That struck a chord in Mingolla, putting him in mind of his ritual, how he had been reluctant to talk about it…except with Debora, in whom he had seen another configuration of luck. “Tell me,” he said. “And I’ll give you stronger luck.”

  A mixture of disbelief and glee melted up from Hettie’s face, as if he had promised something both improbable and wonderful, like the promise of an afterlife. “You do dis fah me?”

  “Yes.”

  She talked in a breathy whisper, fingering her shell, head bowed, offering a litany of explanation, describing lives bound by magical pattern, security guaranteed by the repetition of behavior, and Mingolla began to wonder about the similarity between Hettie’s luck and his ritual of survival, the idiosyncrasies of the chopper pilots and of various other acquaintances back in Guatemala. All these behaviors shared the same delusionary character, and given that Hettie was essentially a test subject upon which fledgling psychics worked their changes, it could be that psychics were responsible in every instance, that the delusions were the product of their influence. He tried to dismiss this as paranoia, but found that he could not.

  Hettie sat back on her haunches, silent, waiting for luck to be bestowed; her dress had ridden up, exposing the shadowy division between her thighs. Mingolla had no luck to give her, only desire, the one emotion he knew how to shape. Yet desire was powerful in him now. He was alive with it, alive with the power behind it. Everywhere he looked it seemed that the world was being enriched by the pressure of his vision. The weathered boards, the light beading silver on the cobwebs, the ruddy wood of the table, all these things seemed to shine brighter than before. Maybe, he thought, if desire was strong enough, it would effect luck. As he directed it toward her, he saw that luck, the feeling of being blessed with good fortune, also had a shape, and he incorporated that into the push of desire.

  With an indrawn breath, Hettie arched her back, and, hands spread wide, caressed her belly, her breasts, pressing their rounds flat, kneading them. Watching her, Mingolla understood that his gift of desire and luck could have a return, that he could make love to her, that here among the moths and cobwebs he could commit an act of pure usage, almost of violence, of pleasure taken without toll or penance. And he was tempted. There was a peculiar tension in his body, a mingling of confidence and indecision, the way he had felt after receiving a pass at the top of the key, watching the waist of the man guarding him, not knowing whether to break right or left, leaning forward like a reluctant diver and letting gravity slowly take him, waiting until his opponent had seen—or thought he’d seen—a hint of direction, had shifted his weight in anticipation, placing himself at a disadvantage that would allow Mingolla to penetrate the lane. Hettie’s head lolled, her hips lifted. Sweat beaded her upper lip, the hollow of her throat. Abandon had refined her looks to an animal delicacy, and Mingolla reached for her, thinking of Debora, her delicacy. But at that moment she cried out, went down on all fours, hips thrusting at nothing, crying out again, more softly, hoarsely, and in her mind there was flurrying as of a million fish responding to a danger sign, scattering, their space filled by a lazy current, a sluggish tingling wash.

  Wind battered the shed, vibrating the tin roof. Hettie remained on all fours, staring dull-eyed at Mingolla through the fat coils of her dreadlocks. He was glad he hadn’t taken her, because she was too easy a beast, because he wanted someone whose mind had not been walked through time and again. He got to his feet, and she followed him with her eyes; he moved around her to the table, and she turned her head, displaying no more emotion than a cow.

  “Get up!” he said, irritated. But irritation gave way to pity, and when she stood, hands limp at her sides, he asked if she was all right.

  “I…” She made a halfhearted effort at smoothing wrinkles on her dress. “T’ings dey comin’ clear.”

  “What things?”

  “T’ings of de luck.”

  Branches ticked the wall of the shed, a wave boomed on th
e reef.

  “Better we find de others.” Hettie came a step toward Mingolla, eyes wide, fidgeting with her shell. “Dis luck ’nough to make dem all catch a fire.”

  Silver-blue clouds scudded across the moon, and a seamless dark flowed over the hotel grounds. Then the moon sailed clear, and the grounds became a floating puzzle of light and shadow: the edges of fronds, sprigs of round leathery sea-grape leaves, bamboo stalks, all illuminated by swatches of moonlight, all bounded by toiling blackness, rustling, seething, a troubled noise audible above the whispery vowels of wind and sea. Hettie beckoned to Mingolla, saying, “Come, you follow!” Mingolla waved at her, picking his way cautiously through the thicket toward the hotel, its white stucco ablaze between the arching trunks of palms, the open windows black as caves. The thrashing of the pitch-dark foliage seemed to empower him: he felt he was growing stronger with every step, storing inside himself the wildness of the night.

  They turned away from the hotel into thicker brush, a path choked with ferns and fleshy-leaved plants, and came to a large clearing of packed dirt surrounding a bungalow with board walls and a conical thatched roof. Candles flickered in the doorway, each point of flame centering an orange nimbus. “I bring dem fah you,” Hettie said, and went inside the bungalow, leaving Mingolla standing beside a palmetto. He was antsy and couldn’t understand why. It must be the brilliance of the moon, the way it spotlit him, he thought, and to elude that silvery eye, he moved closer to the palmetto, entering the tickling embrace of its fronds.

  One by one islanders emerged from the bungalow, nearly a dozen black men and women, old, young, uniformly undernourished and ragged, all holding painted shells or some other fetish. Shadows collected in the folds of their clothing, in their wrinkles and eyesockets, giving them the appearance of walking dead. Their silence seemed to be dimming the moon’s wattage, muting the voice of the wind. Hettie urged them forward, but Mingolla did not let them get near, lashing out with his mind and halting their shambling approaches, tying inside their heads that intricate knot with which he had bound Hettie, and then firing them with good fortune, with other emotions whose shapes he was coming to know. They grunted as he struck, their eyes rolled and flashed with pure charges of moonlight; they muttered prayerfully, backing away, taking up positions at the perimeter of the clearing, fixing him with awed stares. Each exercise of power enlivened him, and when he had done he sat down in the dirt, calm at the center of their stares, but sensing himself the epicenter of a strange weather, a storm with impalpable winds that blew from a world just around the corner and passed without leaving a trace of damage, yet changed everything. He felt a need for normalcy, and spotting Hettie in the door of the bungalow, he called her over, asked her to sit. She lowered to her knees beside him, her hands clasped demurely in her lap.

  “Where you live, Hettie?” he asked.

  “I lives here.”

  “I mean before you came here…where’d you live then?”

  The concept of “before” seemed to befuddle her, but at length she said, “My daddy have a little place out to Flowers Bay.” Then, after a considerable pause: “He raise ponies.”

  “Yeah?” said Mingolla, thinking that ponies and Flowers Bay sounded idyllic. “Why’d you leave?”

  “It were de ponies. Dem little children, dey wild! All de time tossin’ dere heads, givin’ you de duppy eye. Make me fearful to be ’mong dem.”

  One of the other islanders—a man sitting in the shade of a sea-grape bush—let out a keening wail and lifted his hands to the moon.

  “Ponies ain’t goin’ to hurtcha,” Mingolla said.

  “Oh, yes! All t’ings be hurtful when dere duppy loose.” Hettie brushed her fingers across his knee, a reassuring touch. “But you be too strong for de duppies, mon.”

  Her expression was in partial eclipse, half-moonlit, half-shadowed, impossible to read, but he detected in her a clouded regret, the trace of some sadness whose particulars she could no longer remember. He had wanted to talk with her, to pretend he was having an ordinary conversation with a pretty girl; but she was only the husk of a pretty girl, and there was nothing ordinary about either of them.

  His thoughts turned again to Debora, and again he was confused by his fixation on her. He didn’t believe he was in love with her, he didn’t see how that could be possible. But this sort of thing, this long, almost unconscious study of another person, had once led him to fall in love, and he hoped that wasn’t the case now. He had a low opinion of love, of its power to distract and injure, though he was forced to admit that distraction and injury were good teachers. The woman he’d loved was five years older than he, one of those pretty upper middle class housewives common to the better neighborhoods of Long Island, with a penchant for ceramic jewelry and denim skirts, for charitable works inspired by boredom with their husbands, always looking for a glimmer of excitement to brighten them, yet not really expecting anything, seduced by the role they had accepted into believing that their lives were ruled by a canon of mediocrity, that boredom was their lot. He had been teaching a sketching class at the Y, and two weeks after she had joined the class, they had begun an affair. Everything had been perfect at first, but as the affair progressed she had grown afraid, had tried to quantify love, to rank it against the security and stability of her marriage, and in the end she had broken it off with Mingolla, leaving him older, wiser, and his schoolwork neglected to such an extent that he had become eligible for the draft.

  “Look like trouble lay he hand on you,” said Hettie.

  “It’s nothing,” he said.

  Wind shredded the thatch of the bungalow, and smoky blue clouds drove across the moon, spreading a shadowy film through the air, a darkness that—as the clouds thickened—grew absolute.

  “Trouble not find you here,” said Hettie. “Here you safe wit’ us.”

  He could hardly make her out, ebony against anthracite.

  “Safe from war, from de duppies.”

  Safe, he thought. Safe in this eerie, lightless clearing, safe among dazed human relics, with the chaos on the reef sounding as final as artillery, and the wind howling a secret name.

  Oh, yeah! He was safe all right!

  “Safe from all t’ings,” said Hettie.

  As a reward for Mingolla’s breakthrough, Dr. Izaguirre presented him with an autographed copy of The Fictive Boarding House by Juan Pastorín, Mingolla’s favorite author. “I’ve noticed you admiring it on my shelf,” said the doctor, and Mingolla, who did not want to give Izaguirre credit for having been sensitive to him in any way, said that he had merely been curious, that he’d never heard of the book.

  “It’s a limited edition,” said Izaguirre as they entered the hotel lobby, a long narrow room—essentially an expanded corridor—with tall windows ranging the eastern wall, and the western wall inset by a stairway and French doors that opened into a dining room. Vines and leaves scrolled the windowpanes, admitting an effusion of gray light; velvety dust covered every surface. The carpet was indoor-outdoor runner brocaded with mildew, and above the dining room entrance was a painted menu listing the breakfast specials: faded misspelled words in English such as hotcaks and freid potatas. It was a place in which entropy appeared to have triumphed.

  Beside the main door was a mirror, and beneath the mirror a bottomed-out rattan chair. Izaguirre dusted the chair with a handkerchief and sat; he pulled at his goatee, seeming to stretch the waxy stuff of his flesh. “What did you want to ask me?” he said.

  In the light of day Mingolla was less certain of his theory concerning the effects of psychic manipulation on the troops in Guatemala, but he laid it out for Izaguirre.

  “Yes, it’s most unfortunate,” Izaguirre said. “The electrical activity involved causes minor changes in the brain…especially in those subjects upon whom the psychic is working. But there’s also a broadcast effect, and people in the immediate vicinity are affected as well. Delusionary systems are reestablished or enforced. Superstitions and so forth.”

 
; “Minor changes? You gotta be kidding!” Mingolla waved toward the grounds. “Those people out there are wrecked, and some of the people I knew in Guatemala weren’t much better.”

  “The more frequent the encounters, the more extreme the effects.” Izaguirre crossed his legs, imperturbable. “I sympathize with your reaction, but one has to look at the long result.”

  Mingolla walked over to the reception desk, laid down his book, and stared into the cobwebbed pigeonholes on the wall, unable to sort out his feelings. “So I guess I must not have been zapped too often.”

  “Often enough. For one thing, according to your debriefing you were likely subject to the wiles of a Sombra agent shortly before your departure from Guatemala.”

  “What’s Sombra?”

  “The Communist version of Psicorps. This woman was named”—Izaguirre tapped his forehead, encouraging memory—“Debora Cifuentes.” He chuckled. “Here’s an irony for you. Since trying to persuade you to desert, she herself has deserted, fled into the Petén. One of the people at headquarters suggested that if you came through training as well as we expect, we might send you to track her down. She’s quite powerful, but we feel you’d be more than a match.”