Life During Wartime

by Lucius Shepard

  Mingolla was speechless with rage.

  “Would you like that?” asked Izaguirre.

  “Yeah,” said Mingolla. “Yeah, that’d be all right.” He paced beside the desk. “Y’know, I can’t figure something out.”

  “Yes?”

  “Why the hell all the fuss ’bout me, ’bout her. I mean all Psicorps does is sit around and try to guess when the next attack’s coming. Crap like that.”

  “You and the Cifuentes woman are anomalies. There aren’t more than thirty agents of your caliber in the world. You’ll do more than make guesses,” Izaguirre watched him pace. “You seem upset.”

  “I’m okay. Why didn’t she just, y’know…blow me away or whatever?”

  “She could have taken control of you, but that would have ruined your talent, and I assume she was trying to recruit you…not destroy you. It’s troublesome for one psychic to exert a subtle influence over another. That sort of interaction strengthens the talents of both parties. It sets up a feedback system whose efficiency is related to the intensity of mutual focus. And since you had the greater natural talent, more room to grow, as she worked on you, you were gaining in strength more rapidly than she could have predicted. Thus the difficulty.” He stood, walked toward Mingolla. “Surely something has upset you.”

  “It’s not important.”

  “I’d like to hear about it anyway.”

  “That’s too bad.” Mingolla flipped open the book and looked at Pastorín’s signature, a complex conceit of loops and flourishes.

  “David?”

  Mingolla slammed the book shut. “I thought I was falling in love with her.” Then, sarcastically: “That probably had something to do with the intensity of our mutual focus.”

  “I wonder,” said Izaguirre, his tone distant, abstracted.

  Mingolla went over to a window. The jungly growth of the grounds stirred sluggishly beneath dark running clouds. “What ’bout the shit I was doing to those people last night?”

  “What you called a ‘pattern’?”

  “Yeah.”

  “A paranoid mechanism.” Izaguirre gave a delicate cough. “You simply struck at the woman, stunned her. It’s a common enough first reaction. You already have quite a good grasp of how your talent operates. The shaping of emotion into a weapon and such. All you need is practice.”

  “Jesus,” said Mingolla. “The shit with the pattern sounds like…”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know…like something a wasp might do. Insect behavior.”

  “You’re not concerned about your humanity?”

  “Wouldn’t you be?”

  “I’d be delighted to learn my potentials transcended the human.”

  “Then why don’t you take the fucking drugs?”

  “I have…not intravenously. I’ve ingested them in their natural state. But I have no talent. I only wish I did.”

  “I thought the stuff was synthetic.”

  “No, it’s a weed.”

  “Huh.” Mingolla traced a design in the dust on the windowpane, saw that he had drawn a D, and wiped it out. “I want that assignment.”

  “The Cifuentes woman?”

  “Right.”

  “I can’t promise anything. You’ve still got six or eight weeks here ahead of you. But if she’s still at large…perhaps.” Izaguirre took him by the arm. “Get some sleep, David. You’ll need it for tomorrow. I’ll be starting RNA to bring your Spanish up to snuff, and Tully can hardly wait to put you through your paces.”

  Despite his anxieties, his alienation, Mingolla felt calmer. It struck him as odd that he should be soothed by Izaguirre’s bedside manner, because at a remove, everything about the doctor grated on him.

  “Oh, don’t forget your book.” Izaguirre retrieved the Pastorín book from the reception desk and handed it to him. “It’s very, very good,” he said.

  The first story in The Fictive Boarding House told of two families who had feuded over the possession of a magic flower. Mingolla lost interest in it halfway through, finding it too mannered and concluding that all the members of the families were complete assholes. The title story, however, enthralled him. It detailed a strange contract made between an author and the residents of a boarding house in a Latin American slum. The author offered to educate the residents’ children, to guarantee them lives of comfort, if in return the residents would spend their remaining days living out a story written by the author, one he would add to year by year, incorporating those events over which he had no control. Being in desperate straits, the residents accepted the offer, and though at times they balked and tried to break the contract, gradually their individual wishes and hopes were overwhelmed, subsumed into the themes employed by the story. Their lives had taken on almost mythic significance as a result, their deaths proving to be passionate epiphanies. Only the author, whose health had been ruined by the expenditure of energy necessary to script their lives, who had conceived of the project as a whimsy yet had realized it as a work of transcendent charity, only he had endured an ordinary life and ignominious extinction.

  Sleepy, Mingolla closed the book, turned off his bedside lamp, and settled back. Moonlight streamed in the window, bathing the walls in a bluish white glow, bringing up stark shadows beneath his writing desk and chair. Tacked to the walls were a number of sketches he had done during the months of drug therapy. They were unlike anything he had done before, all depicting immense baroque chambers of stone, with bridges arching from blank walls, ornate staircases leading nowhere, vaulted ceilings opening onto strange perspectives of still more outrageous architecture, and thronging the horizontal planes, hordes of ant-sized men, smudgy dots almost lost among the pencil shadings and lines. It made him uncomfortable to look at them now, not because of their alienness, but because he recognized the psychology underlying them to be his own, and he wasn’t certain whether that psychology had been laid bare by the drugs or was the product of a transformation.

  His eyelids drooped, and he thought of Debora, both with anger and with longing. Despite Izaguirre’s revelations, his obsession had survived intact, and whenever he tried to apply the logic of recrimination, the fact of her betrayal was swept away by fantasy or by his insistence in believing that she must have had some real feeling for him. And so it was not at all surprising that he dreamed of her that night, a dream unusual for its lucidity. She was floating in a white void, clad in a gown of such whiteness that he could not see its drape or fold: she might have been a disembodied head and arms superimposed on a white backdrop. She was revolving slowly, tipping toward him, then away, allowing him to view her at every angle and each angle providing him with insights into her character, seeming to illustrate her resilience, her toughness, her capacity for devotion. There was no music in the dream, but her movements were so graceful, he had the notion they were being governed by an inaudible music that pervaded the void, perhaps a distillate of music that manifested as a white current. She drifted closer, and soon was near enough that—if the dream had been real—he could have touched her. She drifted closer yet, her limbs aligning with the position of his arms and legs, and in her pupils he saw tiny facsimiles of himself floating in whiteness. A keening noise switched on inside his head, and his desire for her also switched on; he wanted to shake off the bonds of the dream and pull her against him. Her lips were parted, eyes heavy-lidded, as if she, too, were experiencing desire. And then she drifted impossibly close, merging with him. He went rigid, terrified by a feeling of being possessed. She was inside him, shrinking, becoming as small as a thought, a dusky thought in a white dress wandering the corridors of…

  He sat bolt upright in bed, sweating, breathing hard, and for a split second, confused by the moonstruck walls, he believed he had awakened in the white place of his dreams. Even after he recognized his surroundings, he couldn’t escape the thought that she was in the room with him. The geometries of moonlight and shadow appeared to be describing the presence of an invisible form. He was alert to every cr
eak, every quiver of shadow, every sigh of wind. “Debora?” he whispered, and when he received no answer he lay back on the bed, tense and trembling.

  “Goddamn you!” he said.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Roatán was no tropical paradise. Though the barrier reef was lovely and had once nourished more than a dozen resorts, the interior consisted of low scrub-thatched hills, and much of the coast was given over to mangrove. A dirt road ran partway around the island, connecting the shantytowns of Coxxen Hole, French Harbor, and West End, and a second road crossed from Coxxen Hole to Sandy Bay on the north coast, where the hotel was located: a curving stretch of beach that one moment could seem beautiful and the next abysmally ugly. That, Mingolla realized, was the charm of the place, that you could be walking along on a beach of filthy yellow-brown sand, stepping carefully to avoid pig and cattle droppings, and then, as if a different filter had slid in front of the sun, you suddenly noticed the hummingbirds flitting above the sea grape, the hammocks of coco palms, the reef water glowing in bands of jade and turquoise and aquamarine, according to the varying depth and bottom. Sprinkled among the palms were several dozen shanties set on pilings, their tin roofs scabbed with rust; jetties with gap-boarded outhouses erected on their seaward ends extended out over the shallows, looking at a distance to have the artful crudity of charcoal sketches by Picasso.

  It was along this beach that Mingolla learned control of his power through daily lessons with Tully. The lessons were—as Izaguirre had suggested—merely the practice of those things of which he had become aware that first night in the shed, serving to augment his strength and the capacity to know the shape of his emotions; yet he believed he was learning another sort of lesson as well, a lesson in personal competence, in the shouldering of power, the acceptance of its virtues and the practical denial of its liabilities. Though Tully still unnerved him, he saw that his trainer’s arrogance and forceful approach to life were qualities essential to the wielding of power; and though he continued to dream of Debora, to think of her in terms of longing, he came to view these dreams and thoughts in a grim light, to perceive her as a target.

  One morning he and Tully sat floating in a dory just inside the reef. The tide was low, and iron-black coral heads lifted from the water like the parapets of a drowned castle, its crannies populated by whelks and urchins. Beyond the reef, the sea was banded in sun-spattered streaks of slate and lavender, and there were so many small waves, the water appeared to be moving in all directions at once. “I hate the goddamn sea,” said Tully, and spat over the side. He leaned back in the stern, jammed a grease-stained baseball cap lower onto his ears; his skin was agleam with bluish highlights under the sun.

  “Thought you used to be a fisherman,” said Mingolla.

  “Best on de island, mon. But dat don’t mean I got to like de sea. Ain’t not’in’ but a motherfuckin’ graveyard! Once dat come home to me, I never set foot ’pon her again. Look dere!” He pointed to another dory passing close to the shore, maybe fifty yards off. “Call de mon over, Davy.”

  Mingolla tried to engage the man’s mind, but failed. “Can’t reach him.”

  “Keep tryin’ till you catch a hold.” Tully propped his feet beside an oarlock, and the dory rocked. “Nosir! Once I seen de way of t’ings, I left de sea for good’n all.”

  “How come?”

  The man in the dory shouted, waving at the shanties tucked among the palms. “Got silkfish, satinfish! Got reef snapper and blues!”

  “How come?” Tully snorted. “’Cause I were sixteen days stranded on dat graveyard sea. Dat were on de Liberty Bell, nice little craft. Tested hull, V-8. Had us some nice fish, too. ’Leven sacks kingfish, coupla sacks grouper.” He shook his head sadly. “Sixteen days! And each one a longer day dan I have ever knowed. Drinkin’ fish blood, watchin’ men die crazy.”

  The dory had come within twenty yards, and Mingolla made contact with its pilot, projecting amiability and curiosity into his mind. “Got him,” he said as the man stopped rowing, shielded his eyes against the sun, and peered toward them.

  “Not bad,” said Tully. “Don’t reckon I can do much better.”

  Mingolla conveyed a sense of urgency to the man in the dory, wanting him to row faster.

  “Sixteen days,” said Tully. “And by de time dat shrimper fetch us in tow, wasn’t but four of us left. The rest dey sun-killed or gone over de side.”

  The man in the dory was bent over his oars, pulling hard.

  “Towed us clear to Bragman Key,” Tully went on. “Dat were an upful place, Bragman. Dey lodged us in a hotel and treat our fevers. Give us fresh fruit, rum. And dere were dis little gal who gimme special comfort. ’Pears she just couldn’t stand to see me de way I was. We had us a time ’fore I left, me and dat gal. And I tell her I’s comin’ back for her, but I never did…I never did.” Tully spat again. “I ’tended to, but when I get back to de island, everybody’s makin’ me out a hero, and I’m tellin’ my story, drinkin’. I just loose track of dat gal. I ’grets it sometimes, but it probably for de best.”

  The man shipped his oars, let his dory drift near, and caught hold of the stern. “How you be, Tully?” he said. He was a wiry brown man in his thirties, with glittering black eyes, the skin around them seamed and puckered. His genitals protruded from one leg of his shorts, and sweat matted the curly hairs on his chest.

  “Survivin’,” Tully said. “Davy, dis my half-brother, Donald Ebanks.”

  Mingolla exchanged nods with the man.

  “What you catchin’, mon?” asked Tully.

  Donald lifted the corner of a canvas, revealing a couple of dozen fish in the bottom of the dory, some turquoise, some red, some striped yellow and black, shining like a salad of oddly shaped jewels around the centerpiece of a long fish with black sides, a white belly, and needle teeth: a barracuda.

  “How much for dat barra?”

  Mingolla started to exert influence on Donald, trying for a free fish; but Tully kicked his ankle and said, “No, mon! Dat not how it goes.”

  “Why not?” said Mingolla.

  “Take what you need, and give back what you can. Dat’s de only way to be in dis world.”

  Tully’s stare quailed Mingolla, and he looked down at Donald’s fish, their gemmy sides pulsing with last breaths.

  “I ’spect I take four lemps for de barra,” said Donald.

  “I ’spect so,” said Tully with a laugh. “’Spect you’d take more’n dat, and you find a big ’nough fool.” He dug some wadded bills from his pocket. “Two lemps, mon. And don’t be rude wit’ me. Dat’s a fat price, and you know it.”

  “You a bitch, Tully.” Donald picked up the barracuda, heaved it into their dory. “Strip de shadow from my back, I give you de chance.”

  “Don’t want your damn shadow, and if I did, I sure as hell not goin’ to pay you two lemps for it.” Tully handed over the money.

  Donald regarded the bills dolefully, pocketed them, and without another word he rowed off toward shore.

  “Sorry,” Mingolla said. “Guess I shoulda figured him being your brother…”

  “Half-brother!” Tully snapped. “And dat don’t have a t’ing to do wit’ it. Son of a bitch ain’t no friend of mine. Been tryin’ to swindle me goin’ on dese ten years. What I told you, dat’s true for de world.”

  Mingolla studied the barracuda’s doll eyes. “Didn’t know you could eat barracuda.”

  “Can’t all de time. You got to drop a crumb of de flesh on an anthill. If de ants take it, you can eat your fill. Fries up nice wit’ plantain.”

  A northerly breeze sprang up, heavying the chop, stirring the palms along the shore, and the dory bobbed up and down.

  “Don’t take it to heart, Davy,” said Tully. “You learnin’. Just take more time to be wise dan to be strong.”

  Misty night, the moon a foggy green streak between the palm fronds, and the surf muffled, sounding like bones being crunched in the mouth of a beast. Light spilled from the windows of a small fra
me church set back from the shore, and sweet African harmony spilled from it, too, resolving into a final Amen. Young boys in white shirts, blue trousers, and girls in frilly white dresses came down the steps, passing within thirty feet of the log where Tully and Mingolla were sitting, their voices liquid and clear; they turned on flashlights as they moved off into the dark, playing the beams onto the shallows, lacquering the black water.

  “Dere,” said Tully, indicating two teenage girls holding hymnals to their breasts. “De one on de left. But don’t mess wit’ de other…that my cousin ’Lizabeth.”

  “She’s not tryin’ to swindle you?” said Mingolla.

  Tully grinned. “Don’t be mouthin’ me. Naw, dat ’Lizabeth’s goin’ to stay sweet ’long as I can help it. But dat Nancy Rivers, she been wit’ half de island. You go on’n go crazy wit’ her if you want.”

  Mingolla checked Nancy out: flat-chested, light-skinned, with a lean horsey face. He was not inspired to craziness, but nevertheless he touched her mind with desire. She glanced at him, whispered to Elizabeth, and after a second they walked over to the log.

  “How de night, Tully?” Elizabeth asked.

  “It’s goin’ all right,” said Tully. “And you?”

  “Not’in special, y’know.” Elizabeth was sexy, tall, and had Tully’s coal-black skin; her heavy-lidded eyes and pouting mouth and broad nose reminded Mingolla of statuettes he’d seen in displays of African folk art. Nancy elbowed her, and she performed the introduction.

  Mingolla grunted, gouged a trench in the sand with his toe.

  “Well,” said Elizabeth after an uncomfortable silence. “Guess we’ll be marchin’. You come see us, Tully.”

  “Dat I will.”

  The two girls ambled off, whispering, and Mingolla watched the roll of Elizabeth’s hips. Tully shoved him, knocking him off the log. “What’s wrong wit’ you, mon? T’ought you was after some squint?”