Life During Wartime

by Lucius Shepard

  The old men were roasting snakes that had been pierced by lengths of wire; the snakes were crisp and blackened, their eyes shattered opaque crystals, their jaws leaking thin smoke, and underlit by the fire, the men’s faces were made into cadaverous masks of shadow and glowing skin. They offered Mingolla a portion of the meat, but he suggested instead that they share their bounty with the guards. This struck the three as a marvelous idea. Why hadn’t they thought of it themselves? They extended whispered invitations, and de Zedeguí’s guards hurried over. When the guards slumped to the ground, put to sleep by Mingolla’s exertions, the old men expressed consternation, worrying that the meat might be tainted; but Mingolla reassured them and urged them to drag the guards off behind a pile of rubble, where they might rest more comfortably. That done, the old men returned to their snakes, paring slices of meat, tasting, and declaring that the snakes could use another turn, all as if nothing unusual had happened.

  Five minutes later, de Zedeguí came to stand at his door. He wore jeans and a green shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and he was more slender than Mingolla had assumed; his hair had grown long, falling in black curls to his shoulders, and his dark face was composed. He, too, was blocked, but on noticing the absence of his guards, he let the block slip. His heat was strong, but not as strong as Tully’s, and this gave Mingolla the confidence to let his own block slip. De Zedeguí sought him among the men gathered by the oil drum and spread his hands in a show of helplessness; then he beckoned, and Mingolla, committed to a concept of forthright challenge, walked over to his side. The drumming of the rain seemed to be issuing from within his body, registering his rush of adrenaline.

  “I’ve been expecting you,” said de Zedeguí in a soft, cultured voice.

  Mingolla said nothing, afraid that speech, that any interaction would undermine his determination.

  “I knew they’d eventually send someone, and I knew it would be someone strong. But you”—de Zedeguí’s smile was thin and rueful—“it seems they’ve adopted a policy of overkill.” He rubbed his jaw with his middle finger as if smoothing away some imperfection. “You have come to kill me?”

  Mingolla maintained his silence.

  “Yes, well…” Again de Zedeguí held out his hands palms up. “I promise you I won’t resist. Even if I did, I wouldn’t have a chance…I’m sure you’re aware of that.” He gave a nervous laugh. “So unless you’re in a rush, why don’t you come inside, let me have a last smoke, some wine. I’m a stickler for the formalities, and I’ve always been of the opinion that a man’s death should be an occasion of rigorous formality.”

  Nothing was going as Mingolla had imagined. De Zedeguí’s surrender had disconcerted him, and he could not help sympathizing with the man.

  “Nobody’s hiding in there,” said de Zedeguí. “Check through the window if you want.”

  Mingolla went to the window, flung open the shutter, and peered inside. Cot against the rear wall, cushions on the floor in the opposite corner, and hung from a ceiling hook, a kerosene lamp that shed an unsteady orange glow. Stacked on the floor were canned goods, bottles, and a large number of books. Everything was very clean.

  “All right,” said Mingolla. “Let’s go.”

  Once inside, de Zedeguí turned the lantern flame down to a crescent, throwing the room into near darkness. “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “No tricks. I prefer it dark.” He picked up a wine bottle and sat on the cot. “I won’t offer you anything, I’ve no wish to compromise you. As a matter of fact, I’ve been impatient for you to arrive.”

  “You want to die?” Mingolla asked, taking a seat on the cushions.

  A match flared, the coal of a cigarette was puffed into life, and de Zedeguí lay back, merging with the shadows. “Not exactly. It’s just that I no longer care to be who I am.”

  Mingolla felt disadvantaged, realizing that he had enlisted in the problem of de Zedeguí’s existence; he wondered if he could go through with the act.

  “You may reach the same conclusion someday,” de Zedeguí went on. “You’re no different from me.”

  The rain was slackening, the drumming dwindling away, and the brutal music of the Barrio was regaining dominance. “What made you come here?” Mingolla asked.

  “I understood that I had become a criminal,” said de Zedeguí. “I should have understood it long ago, but I was too”—he laughed—“too much in love with my criminality to recognize it as such. But when I did, I wanted to be at the heart of the law, subject to its lessons, its wise institutions. As I told you, I’m a stickler for formality.”

  “Penance?” said Mingolla.

  “Justice. Of course justice has always been confused with punishment. Men have exerted their creativity to contrive just punishments for ages. Did you know, for instance, that an author named Bexon once proposed an entire tableau of penitential heraldry? He suggested that condemned prisoners be brought to the gallows dressed in red or black, that parricides should wear black veils and embroidered daggers, and the shirts of poisoners be decorated with serpents. Astonishing! What would it matter to me the color of my shirt at death? I merely want the justice my crimes demand, and now”—he toasted Mingolla with the bottle—“now you’ve come.”

  “If you feel so strongly, why didn’t you kill yourself?”

  “You haven’t been listening. I want justice, and I would certainly be more merciful than you.” De Zedeguí had a long swallow of wine. “There’s no point telling you anything. You’re too young, too inexperienced. But when you reach Sector Jade, you’ll understand…though perhaps you won’t care. Most of us don’t.”

  “Sector Jade? What’s that?”

  “You’ll find out soon enough,” said de Zedeguí. “And I doubt you’d believe me now.”

  “I can make you tell me.”

  “Why don’t you? I’ll tell you why. Because you’re feeling sorry for me…or if not sorry, you’re feeling something. And you’ve been so stripped of feeling by the process that birthed you, you want to hang on to any feeling, no matter how inconsequential. But in the end you’ll do your duty. You’re a creature of power, and now you’re too enamored of its usage to understand the damage”—his voice grew strained—“the horrid self-inflicted damage you will incur.”

  Mingolla, angered by de Zedeguí’s description of him, was made afraid by the passion embodied by this last statement.

  De Zedeguí threw himself off the cot, and Mingolla tensed. But the Nicaraguan only paced back and forth, passing from shadow into dim light and back. He stubbed out his cigarette. “Prisons…fascinating subject. Books have been written on the psychology of their construction. Bentham, for example. The Panopticon. A marvelous design! A circular building with a tower at the center of an interior courtyard, and the tower has wide windows that face the inner wall of the ring, and the cells in the ring are backlit so they can be viewed from the tower like thousands of little stages. And of course the watchers in the tower, they’re hidden from the eyes of the prisoners. Their invisibility guarantees order. Who’s going to try to escape when they’re being watched all the time? The Panopticon is similar to the carceral concept being developed in Sector Jade, though not half so effective. But the truth of the matter is that Sector Jade is a joke…the joke power has played on itself.” He shook his forefinger. “Wait till you get there! You won’t believe what’s going on! The little family feud this war involves. The Madradonas and the Sotomayors.”

  “I’ve heard those names before,” said Mingolla, plumbing his memory. “In a story I read…I think.”

  De Zedeguí laughed. “It’s no story, believe me. You’ll find that out.” He continued to pace, planting his feet forcefully as if stamping out small fires, and his words came in impassioned bursts. “Did you know that confession was once considered a primary form of justice? Men declaring their guilt from the gallows. ‘Oh, Lord! Forgive my execrable deed, my lamentable sin!’ Here in Honduras we keep the tradition alive. Rustlers are photographed holding strips of beef, thei
r guilt published in the press. Myself, I once saw two murderers supporting the body of their drowned victim. What a horrible sight! His eyes were like hardboiled eggs, all white and bulging…the little children who passed by were probably afflicted for life. But who would believe my confession? What evidence should I hold?” He flung the wine bottle against the wall, and the splintering glass wired Mingolla’s nerves. “We’re living in the Dark Ages! The countryside’s beset with pillories and gibbets and wheels. A fiesta of punishment! And I helped to…” He stopped pacing, stood by the door. “I think you should go ahead now, I really do.”

  Mingolla lowered his head, defeated. The Nicaraguan was insane, pathetic, his sensibility scoured raw by guilt, and there would be no battle, no gunfight. To kill him would be an act of extermination.

  “What are you waiting for?”

  “Let it alone, all right,” said Mingolla.

  “Oh, have I touched your soul?” said de Zedeguí in a tone of mock concern. “Dredged up some scrap of humanity? Having a little trouble with our motivation, are we? Here, I’ll help you.” He walked over to Mingolla and kicked him hard in the thigh.

  Mingolla cried out, grabbed the injured spot.

  “Want more motivation?” said de Zedeguí. “All right.” He spat in Mingolla’s face.

  Revolted, yet restraining a reaction, Mingolla wiped his cheek on his sleeve.

  “What control!” De Zedeguí clapped his hands. “Why, you’re a remarkable likeness of the human! But”—he dropped his voice to a nasty whisper—“you and I both know you’re not. Come on, asshole! All that power crawling around in there, all that sick wormy juice, and you’ve never really used it. You know you want to…so come on! Here I am! Blind me with your lightnings!” He broke into a giddy laugh that went sky high and kicked Mingolla in the hip.

  “Dammit!” Mingolla rolled away, came up into a crouch, his eyes narrowed in a hateful squint.

  “Marvelous!” said de Zedeguí. “The hound snarls, his eyes redden!”

  Mingolla’s anger was building to critical, fed by the self-loathing that de Zedeguí was making him feel, and he thought how appropriate it would be to return the favor. The Nicaraguan spat once again, catching Mingolla with the spray. “It’s so amusing to stand here and see you trying to pretend you’re a real boy, when you’re nothing but a filthy little spider about to spew poison on one of his weaker brothers.” Another kick. “Don’t hold back! Just think of the ecstasy that murder will bring, your thoughts arrowing into me…what’s that the Americans say? Fucking with my mind. What a perfect phrase! And that’s what you’ll be doing, coming all over yourself as you fuck my mind to death. How you can stand waiting? Or is this just the foreplay, the anticipation?”

  He aimed another kick, but as he drew back his leg, Mingolla struck with all his power, with power he’d never known he had, sending waves of self-loathing at de Zedeguí. The Nicaraguan stumbled back into the shadow beside the door, and Mingolla heard a steamy hiss, a whimper that went higher and higher like a teakettle on the boil. De Zedeguí clapped his hands to his head and staggered through the door, swayed, a black mad figure against the orange murk, then turned the corner, with Mingolla following behind.

  The three men were still grouped around the oil drum fire, and lurching, out of control, de Zedeguí pushed them aside. He stood beside the drum, shaking violently, then gripped the edges of the drum with both hands. The metal must have been superheated, yet he gave no cry. One of the men started toward him, his knife drawn, but before he could cut, de Zedeguí—with the formal precision of a deep bow—ducked his head into the drum. The glow reflected on the interior of the drum brightened by half, and when de Zedeguí straightened, his head was burning, his shirt was burning, foot-high flames licking up from his scalp like weird reddish orange hair marbled with threads of black. Shouts, the rustling of voices, many voices rolling away as swiftly as wind through a forest, spreading the news. For a moment Mingolla thought de Zedeguí would survive, that he would jam his hands in his pockets and stroll casually off into the Barrio. But then he toppled, sparks flying out on impact, and was soon blocked from view by the curious and those trying to remove his shoes and watch.

  Mingolla couldn’t gather his thoughts and was briefly afraid that they had been sucked down the drain of de Zedeguí’s death, whirled away into some garbage heap of stale brainwaves. He backed into the house and felt calmer in the dark room. It was early…what was he going to do with all that time? Somebody peeped in the door, and he yelled at them. He dug out the packet of frost, was horrified to see de Zedeguí’s smiling photograph inside it; he sailed it away into the corner, and sat on the cot. Scooped up the white powder with his knife, shoveled it in. Too fast, spilling powder on his knees, the floor. He nicked his nose with the blade. Calm down, he told himself; it wasn’t your fault. He hadn’t wanted de Zedeguí to stick his head in the fire. He didn’t know what he had wanted. For the man to keel over, sudden and painless. Yeah, that would have been acceptable. He did more frost. More. Shoveling it in faster, blood mixing with the powder on the blade, forming a crust. God, he was ripped! Dazzles like stars, like miniature burning heads, floating on the dark, and his heart doing poly-rhythms. Painless. That’s what he’d wanted. Sure, right, he said. You were glorying in the possibilities of violence, picturing skulls split by pitchfork thoughts, and you didn’t give a crap about the guy. Well, so what? The guy was into death, wasn’t he? A little more frost? Why, certainly. Couldn’t hurt. Painless, in fact. Like that nosebleed you got, man? Christ, he hadn’t noticed. All over his damn mouth, his chin. In Hell, he wrote in his mental diary, Mingolla was afflicted by a nosebleed and avoided serious involvement; he neither drank the water nor sampled the cuisine, and…Shut up! Why don’tcha make me! Blow an ugly thought into my brain, and whoosh! I’m all aflame. Stop it! Whoosh, crackle. Did you catch that smell? Worse than those fucking snakes! Better snort that shit on the blade, man, or you’re gonna drop it, the way you’re shaking. Yeah, that’s it. Do a little more…little more. See how it shuts down the voices, the memories? Smoothing everything out. Wiring shut the mouth of the brain with stitches of blue-white electricity, and soon there won’t be anything except cool blue-white sparkling silence. But you know what, David, Davy, Dave, Mister Mingolla, you know what?

  No, what?

  Even that’ll be damning.

  On the drive back to La Ceiba through the moonless dark, Mingolla sat in front with the guards, with Carlito, Martín, and Julio. He avoided looking at Alvina, who was a few rows back, and instead studied the masks of the guards. It seemed he was beginning to be able to read them, to assign expression to the maps of bloody tendon and muscle. He hated the masks, but that was not indicative of any specific grudge or attitude. Hate was coming to be something he kept in a secret compartment, something statistical and impersonal, yet a signal of his identity, like a license to carry a gun. He listened to the guards joking about the banalities of their lives, the funny things they’d witnessed back at the Barrio, and he made a decision. It was only fair, he thought. Eye for an eye, and like that.

  The bus stopped on the edge of town, and the whores walked off in a body toward the lights of the Avenida de la Republica. Mingolla sat with his head down, waiting for motive to surface, for anything that would create a reason to act: he was that empty. “Don’t you have to report?” one of the guards asked.

  Mingolla saw the three anonymous faces turned his way. “There’s danger,” he said, backing up the statement with emotional evidence. “Get off the bus.” He told them to leave their rifles, picked one up, and unchecked the safety.

  Wind poured off the sea in a cold unbroken rhythm, sweeping through the roadside grass, pebbling his arms with goose-flesh. The guards huddled to the right of the door, their shirttails flapping, hugging themselves against the chill. Their faces were puzzled twists of tendon, confused alignments of muscle. “You mustn’t be seen,” Mingolla told them. “Lie down in the grass, and I’ll let you know when
the danger’s passed.”

  Two of them moved off into the grass, but one asked, “What sort of danger?”

  “Terrible danger,” said Mingolla, wielding more influence. “Hurry now! Hurry!”

  They lay down in the grass, hidden from sight, and he felt they had fallen from the earth, plummeted in a long dark curve. Why was he doing this? he wondered. What difference did it make? Whose moral imperative did it serve? Blackness everywhere he turned. Black sea, black grass, black air. Only the bus was white, and that was a lie. One guard poked up his head, and that little red face with its surprised hole of a mouth punctuating the turbulent black poem of the winded grass…it irritated Mingolla. “Get down!” he cried. “Get down!” And opened fire. The bursts barely audible above the wind. He raked the grasses until the clip was exhausted. He took the gun by the barrel and slung it toward the sea. He listened. Nothing, no moans, no screams. The mortal silence was astounding in its depth. All that had once been alive might now be dead. He liked it like that. The silence touched his heart with a cold snaky kiss, and he wondered if he should inspect the bodies. Check for breath. Nope, he thought; no need. He scented the air. Briny and clean. He’d done his duty, done it well. He could have stayed there forever, serene with accomplishment, but at last he climbed back into the bus and drove into town.

  He strolled along the Avenida de la Republica, peering into the bars, feeling distant from the music and laughter, immune to the atmosphere. He bought a lime sno-cone from a vendor and sucked at ice chips as he walked, smiling at everyone, shaking his head at the kids who pushed black coral jewelry into his face. A whore stumbled out of a bar, bumped him, and he caught her around the waist to keep her from falling. She was skinny, with light freckled skin, reminding him of Hettie, and she was very drunk. He helped her back to her hotel, keeping a grip on her waist, and when they reached the door, she asked if he wanted to go upstairs.