Life During Wartime

by Lucius Shepard

  “Stop it, David.” Debora pushed the barrel aside, pressed close to him. “Stop it,” she said softly. Calm seemed to flow from her, and though Mingolla wanted to reject it, he couldn’t. He lowered the gun, looked over her head at Spurlow, who was frozen, stiff-legged. “Fuck,” he said, realizing how close he had come to losing it, to reverting to his old insanity.

  Spurlow scuttled behind the cameraman and, using him for a shield, made for a doorway. Once inside, he poked out his head and said, “You’re out of your mind, you know that? You better get him some help, lady! You better get him some help!” It looked as if his head had been added to the frieze of figures on the wall beside him: a young couple arm in arm, and two old men who were apparently whispering about them. Mingolla had the urge to make his own movie. Hound Spurlow through the ruins day after day, filming his fearful decline, taping his increasingly incoherent rants on the state of art, rants that made more and more sense in relation to both the project of the film and the artifact of its setting. Call it The Curator. But he supposed there must be better things to do…though at the moment he couldn’t think of any.

  “Let’s go,” said Debora, taking his hand.

  They started off up the slope toward the Bronco, where a group of soldiers had gathered.

  “That’s right!” Spurlow screamed. “Walk away! You’ve desecrated a work of art, and now you just walk away.” He came a few steps out of the doorway, encouraged by their distance. “Don’t come back! You do, and I’ll be ready! I’ll get a gun! It doesn’t take intelligence to fire a gun!” He came farther toward them, shaking his fist, the last defender of his little painted fortress. He said something to the cameraman, then continued his shouting, his voice growing faint, almost lost in the crush of their footsteps on the carpet of pine needles. “You laugh!” he called out to them. “You laugh at me, you think I’m a fool to care about beauty, about the power of these walls! You think I’m crazy!”

  Spurlow waited until the cameraman had moved around to get an angle on him that would incorporate the murals.

  “But I’m not!” he shrieked, scuttling toward them a few steps, then darting away.

  From the crest of a high hill, they could see the body of the war. A green serpentine valley stretched from the base of the hill, cut by trails so intricately interwoven that they looked to be the strands of an ocher web, and scattered among them, like the husks of the spider’s victims, were charred tanks and fragments of jeeps and the shells of downed helicopters. Dark smoke veiled the crests of the distant hills, leaked up in black threads from fresh craters, and directly below, an armored personnel carrier had been blown onto its side and was gushing smoke and flame from a ragged hole in its roof. Several dead men in combat suits lay around the carrier, and a group of men in olive-drab T-shirts and fatigue pants were loading body bags, while two others were spraying foam from white plastic backpacks onto the flames. All the smoke threw a haze over the sun, reducing it to an ugly yellow-white glare, the color of spoiled buttermilk. Choppers were swarming everywhere—close by, in the middle distance, and thick as flies at the extreme curve of the valley. Hundreds of them. Their whispering beats seemed to convey an agitated rhythm to the movements of the firefighters and body baggers. Now and then a far-off explosion, a crump, a new billow of smoke, and the choppers would flurry around it, fire lancing from their rocket pods. Despite all the activity, despite the urgency of the men below, the sounds of battle, Mingolla sensed a lassitude to the scene, a kind of unhurried precision that accrued to the responses of both choppers and men, and he was not surprised to learn that the battle for the valley had been many months in progress.

  “Can’t nobody figure why, neither,” said the sergeant who escorted the four of them on an elevator down through the middle of the hill. “Seem like we coulda overrun the beaners anytime, but we keep holdin’ back. Guess ya gotta have faith somebody knows what the fuck they doin’.”

  The sergeant was a short, balding army lifer in his late forties, pale, thick-armed, and potbellied, and was obviously a man to whom faith was not a casual affair. He wore two silver crosses around his neck, he pretended to be knocking on wood whenever he said something optimistic, and on his right biceps were tattooed the words ALLEGED FAST LUCK, surrounded by representations of cornucopias, dollar signs, arrow-pierced hearts, and the number 13 surrounded by wavy radiating lines to indicate its sparkling magical qualities. He was a bit slow on the uptake, scratching his head at their every question, and when not talking, he vagued out, staring dully at the elevator door. Mingolla recognized the signs.

  The corridor into which they emerged from the elevator was covered with white foam like the tunnels of the Ant Farm, and was thronged with harried-looking junior-grade officers. The sergeant conducted them through a door at the end of the corridor, and told the corporal at the desk that the I-Ops were here to see Major Cabell. The corporal punched a buzzer, an inner door swung open to a round white room with a desk and chairs, charts on the walls, and a cot in one corner.

  Major Cabell was in her thirties, a tanned reedy woman whose lusterless brown hair and strained expression had hardened her good looks into a spinsterly primness redolent—Mingolla thought—of a frontier schoolmarm who had been forsaken by her lover and left to age in the prairie winds. She threw on a dressing gown over her T-shirt and fatigue pants, and invited them in. She agreed to send them across the valley with a recon patrol the next morning; but when he suggested a chopper she told him that they’d be safer with a patrol: they lost a lot of choppers on missions to the far side of the valley. She checked her watch, offered them the use of bunks and shower facilities, but asked Mingolla if he would mind staying behind and talking. Official business, she said. Once the others had gone off with her aide, she unwound, seeming to drop four or five years along with her brittle air; she broke out a bottle of gin and pulled up a chair beside Mingolla, who was becoming unsettled by her attitude toward him.

  “I hope you don’t mind talking,” she said, filling Mingolla’s glass. “It’s been so long since I’ve been able to talk with a man.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “This place…the intrigues are unbelievable. It’s medieval! Lieutenants scheming against captains, captains against each other, against me. It’s because there’s no resolution to the battle. People get bored, and for lack of anything else to do they start planning career moves.”

  “You serious?”

  “Oh, yes! If they’d let me win the battle—and I could, in a matter of days—everything would be all right. But command insists upon a holding action. God knows why!” She began to rub the ball of her right thumb across the knuckles of her left hand. “It’s really unbelievable. People trying to make fools of one another…that gets a lot of them killed. They write reports on each other’s eccentricities, and sometimes things get back to the injured party. I’ve caught some of the reports they’ve written about me. If I did half what they say…” She gave a dramatic shudder. “And so I’m cut off from any possible…relationships. Stuck in this room. I have this recurring nightmare about it. I’m on a beach…White sand, heat. I live in a house in the dunes. I’m always exhausted from walking on the beach, because it’s so boring. There’s nothing to look at…even the colors are all bleached and ugly. I’m not helping anyone by being there. It’s not an escape or a retreat. I’m just supposed to be there. It’s like my profession. No one needs me, no one speaks to me. In fact, I don’t even know how to speak. I’ve always been there.” She gave a nervy little laugh. “It’s not far from the truth. So”—she affected casualness—“you’re from New York. God, it’s been years since I’ve been in New York.”

  “Been a while for me, too,” he said, glancing around the room. There was a stack of confession magazines on a night table beside the cot, and set beneath it was a small TV, a VCR, and a number of videotapes, the word Love prominent in many of the titles. There was a dominant pattern in the major’s thoughts, one that had obviously been trifled with, and f
rom the contents of the room it was clear what particular delusion the pattern reflected.

  To fend her off—she had begun trailing her fingers across his arm and knee—he asked about her background. He didn’t want to reject her outright, to hurt her. Despite her delusion, there was something impressive about the major, a core dignity and strength that forced you to disregard her flaws, to relate to her without pity. It had been a long time since he had met anyone whom he didn’t pity.

  “I enlisted because my mother died,” she said. “People do the damnedest things under pressure. God knows what I was thinking. It seems now that I wanted structure. Structure!” She laughed. “The army’s got all the structure in the world, but it’s all topsy-turvy.”

  She described her mother’s illness, how she’d coped. “I did labor,” she said. “I built a masonry wall around the house. I worked in the garden. Cutting away rotten roots…tough as clenched knuckles.” She swirled the gin in her glass, stared into it as if hoping the liquid would reveal some oracle. “People are so simple, really. When I came home to take care of her, she put my clothes away in a drawer she’d cleared. No big deal. Just this simple inclusion in her life. Sometimes she’d ball all her pain up into a simple order, get rid of it that way. I remember once she said, ‘See the seeds of that lily…balanced on the leaves. Get the big ones. Don’t let them dry out too much. Plant them on the far side of the garden.’ And after I’d done it, she felt better.” The major freshened Mingolla’s drink. “My sister came to help out. I hadn’t seen her for years. She’d acquired a southern accent and had taken to wearing a gold map of Texas on a necklace. She said she loved me, and I hardly recognized her. She’d married this Texas boy who wrote horror novels. I read some of them. They were okay, but I didn’t care for it. At best it was this sort of sensual pessimism. Maybe I just couldn’t identify with the self-loathing of vampires.”

  She got up, walked to the door, and stood looking back at him over her shoulder; when he met her eyes, she paced away. “I can’t understand how I wound up in charge here,” she said. “I can see the events that led to it, the colonel dying and all. But it doesn’t make sense.” She laughed. “Of course I’m not in charge. Nobody is…or if they are, they don’t have much of a plan. You know I lose over a hundred men a day even when it’s slow. A hundred men!” She walked back to the door, fiddled with the knob. “I shouldn’t be talking this way to an I-Op. You might report me.”

  “I’m not going to report you.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, coming toward him. “I didn’t mean that. I’m just having trouble being around you.”

  “Maybe I should go.”

  “Maybe you should.” She dropped into a chair. “Why does this keep happening?”

  “What keeps happening?”

  She turned away, embarrassed. “I keep being attracted to…to men, to strangers. It’s…it’s not even a real attraction. I mean I can feel it beginning, y’know. Feel my body reacting. And I try to control it. My mind’s not involved, y’see. Not at first, anyway. But I can’t stop it, I can’t slow it down at all. And then my mind is involved…though even then I know it’s not real, it’s just…I don’t know what it is. But it’s not real.” She seemed to be asking for reassurance.

  “I might be able to help,” he said.

  “How could you possibly? You don’t know what’s wrong, and even if you did…” Her eyes narrowed. “What are you up to?”

  “Nothing,” he said, and began to make her drowsy.

  “Who’re you working for?” she said, then yawned.

  Among the patterns of her mind was one that showed evidence of tampering, its structure more resilient and less easy to influence than the rest, and as she nodded in her chair, he worked at modifying the pattern, reducing its dominance. The work was painstaking. He realized he could easily go too far and destroy the pattern. Destroy her mind, turn her into a clever reconstruction of human wreckage like Don Julio and Amalia and Nate. A feeling of serenity stole over him as he worked, and accompanying this serenity was a new comprehension of the mind’s nature. He sensed that the patterns of thought were obeying some master template, that over the span of a life they weaved an intricate preordained shape that was linked to those of a myriad other minds; and he wondered if his old belief in magic and supernatural coincidences had not been a murky perception of the processes of thought, and if the mystical character he had assigned reality had actually had some validity. There was so much to think about, to try to understand. The woman’s arm in the mural, the Christian girl he’d treated in some possible future; the idea that he had somehow dealt with Izaguirre. Even the serenity he felt was something that needed to be understood; it seemed a symptom of a deeper and more complete understanding that lay yet beyond him. And these things taken together implied a universe whose complexity defied categorization, whose true character could not be fitted inside the definitions of magic or science. He doubted he would ever understand it all, but he thought he might someday understand more than he had once believed plausible.

  When he awakened the major, she sat up, looking confused. “You must have been dead tired,” he said.

  She laughed dispiritedly. “I’m always tired.” She pressed her palms against her temples.

  “How do you feel?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “Clearer, maybe.” She probed him with a stare. “You did do something to me.”

  “No, I swear…Sleep must have been what you needed.”

  “But I don’t understand,” she said. “A minute ago I was desperate to…”

  “Probably stress,” he suggested. “That’s all. Stress can do funny things.”

  “God, that’s what this place does to you,” she said. “It even makes you suspicious of feeling good.”

  “Do you still want me to leave?”

  She appeared to be checking inside herself, sounding for an answer. “No,” she said, brightening. “Why don’t you have another drink and tell me about New York. About yourself. You’ve hardly told me anything. Of course that’s always how it is with I-Ops…they’re secretive even about trivialities.” She reached for the gin bottle, paused. “But you’re no I-Op, are you?”

  “What gives you that idea?”

  “Every I-Op I’ve ever met has been cold and given to drinking bourbon and gazing moodily toward the Red Menace as if he was yearning to have a Commie in his sights. You’re not like that.”

  “I guess I’m a new breed.”

  She studied him for a long time before pouring. “I just bet you are,” she said.

  The patrol that escorted them across the valley consisted of ten men, bulky and alien-looking in their combat gear, their faceplates aglow with green letters and numerals from the computer displays inside the helmets, their minds awhirl with Sammy. There was no moon at first, but as they moved through the thickets, hugging the side of a hill, flares burst above them, explosions sent blooms of orange flame boiling up toward the clouds, and iridescent rains of tracers poured down from circling gunships: a constant incidence of roaring light that silhouetted twigs and leaves, and shimmered in blazes on the faceplates of the soldiers. When the moon sailed clear of the clouds, its radiance was almost unnoticeable. Mingolla and the rest had been outfitted with throat mikes and miniature speakers affixed to their ears so they could communicate with the soldiers, and he listened to their tinny voices with amazement, wondering at their delight in this environment, which seemed to him infernal.

  “Son of a bitch!” said one, a kid named Bobby Boy. “See that muthafucka go, man! Musta hit a fuel cell.”

  And the sergeant of the patrol, a wiry light-skinned black named Eddie, said, “That ain’t shit, man! Wait’ll you see one of them little tanks get it. Man, one of them goes, it’s the fuckin’ Fourth of July. All them missiles touchin’ off…red and green streaks of fire. That’s somethin’, that’s really somethin’.”

  “I seen that,” said Bobby Boy querulously. “You tryin’ to say I ain
’t seen that? I been here ’bout as long as you, man.”

  Eddie grunted. “You be so fuckin’ high, you liable to see anything.”

  “Hey,” said another voice. “You fuckers watch yo’ mouth! We got us a lady present.”

  “Shut the fuck up, Sebo,” came back Bobby Boy. “That ol’ girl’s I-Op. They probably bugged her yummy ’fore they sent her out here. They…Wow! Awright! See that bitch blow, man? See that gold color in the heart? That’s fuckin’ weird! Wonder what the Fritos got burns gold.”

  “Probably all the grease they eat,” said somebody new.

  Mingolla, made uneasy by all this, walked closer to Debora. In the flashes of the explosions, her eyes burned red, her shadow hands looked to be seven-fingered. “You okay,” he said, just to say something, forgetting the throat mike.

  “I do believe,” said Bobby Boy, “those two I-Ops got a little somethin’ goin’.”

  “Bet she knows how to throw it,” said Sebo. “Bet I-Op teaches ’em all kinda slick tricks.”

  “Shut ya hole!” said Eddie.

  “Bet she gotta educated love muscle…make ya shoot silver bullets.”

  “I tol’ ya, shut up!”

  “Can’t stop me from dreamin’,” said Sebo. “I dreamin’ ’bout both of ’em, slim there and the one with the rose eye.”

  “You can dream,” said Tully. “But you be watchful, or dere gonna be one big nigger in your dream…unnerstan’?”

  “Wouldn’t mess with him, Sebo,” said Eddie. “The man sound serious.”

  “Serious? Shit!” Sebo giggled. “This the wrong goddamn war for serious.”

  “I think,” said Ruy nervously, “it would be best for everyone to keep their minds on the crossing.”

  “That’s that skinny beaner talkin’, ain’t it?” said Billy Boy. “Hey, Frito! I don’t like you, man! You gimme the excuse, you ain’t gonna have to worry ’bout no crossin’.”