Life During Wartime

by Lucius Shepard

  “Like I said.” Coffee held up his hands. “Fang and claw.” He gestured at the men in the clearing. “The boys’ll make sure nobody gets illegal, and the rest is spread out in case anybody runs.” With a show of weariness, he got to his feet, and from Mingolla’s perspective his head appeared to merge with the canopy, making him look as tall and mysterious as the trees. “See ya in the mornin’,” he said.

  “This is bullshit, this crap ’bout a test!” said Mingolla, his fear breaking through like a moon escaping cloud cover. “You just need to kill somebody, to prove something to your men.”

  Coffee kicked a fern, moved off. “Why’s a car engine work, man? ’Cause ya turn the key in the ignition? ’Cause sparks fly from the generator? ’Cause you ’membered to gas up? ’Cause some law of physics says so? Naw, it’s ’cause of all that and a million things more we don’t know nothin’ about.” He strolled farther off, becoming a shadow among shadows. “Ain’t no such thing as cause and effect, ain’t but one law means shit in this world.” His voice came from utter darkness and seemed the sum of all the dark voices issuing from beyond the clearing. “Everything’s true, David,” he said. “Everything’s real.”

  Coffee had left sixteen ampules, and feeling irritable and nauseated, symptoms he could trace to the packet of frost back at his camp, Mingolla popped a couple right away. A rain squall swept in, and after it had passed, to Mingolla’s ears the plips and plops of dripping water blended into a gabbling speech; he imagined demons peeping from beneath the leaves, gossiping about him, but he wasn’t afraid. The ampules were doing wonders, withdrawing the baffles that had been damping the core of his anger. Confidence was a voltage surging through him, keying new increments of strength, and he smiled, thinking of the fight to come: even the smile was an expression of furious strength, of bulked muscle fibers and trembling nerves.

  Dawn came gray and damp, and birds set up a clamor, began taking their first flights, swooping over the heads of the three men in the clearing. The underbrush looked to be assuming topiary shapes. Violet auras faded in around ferns, pools of shadow quivered. Mingolla saw that the manlike objects affixed to the tree trunks were combat suits: ten slack, helmeted figures, each featuring some fatal rip or crack. Though he concluded that the suits might be equivalent to notches on Coffee’s belt, he was undismayed. The drugs had added a magical coloration to his thoughts, and he pictured himself moving with splendid athleticism, killing Coffee, becoming king of that dead man’s illusion and ruling over the Lost Patrol, robed in ferns and a leafy crown. But the battle itself, not its outcome, that was the important thing. To reach that peak moment when perfection drew blood, when you muscled aside confusion and—as large as a constellation with the act, as full of stars and blackness and primitive meaning—you were able to look down on the world and know you had outperformed the ordinary. This was the path he had been meant to take, the path of courage and character. A mystic star shone through a rent in the canopy, marooned in a lavender streak above the pink of sunrise. Mingolla stared at it until he understood its sparkling message.

  The light brightened, and butterflies flew up from the brush, fluttered low above the ferns. There were, Mingolla thought, an awful lot of them. Thousand upon thousands, an estimate he kept elevating until he reached the figure of millions. And he thought, too, that it was unusual for so many varieties to be gathered in one place. They were everywhere in the brush, perching on leaves and twigs, as if a sudden spring had brought forth flowers in a single night: some of the bushes were completely hidden, and the trunks were thick with them. Now and again they would rise from one of the bushes in a body and go winging in formation about the clearing. Mingolla had never seen anything like it, though he’d heard how butterflies would congregate in such numbers during the mating season, and he guessed that this was something similar.

  Beams of sun angled into the clearing from the east, so complexly figured with droplets of moisture that they appeared to embody flaws and fracture planes, like artifacts of golden crystal snapped off in midair. The three men stood and took positions at the rim of the clearing. Apprehension spidered Mingolla’s backbone, and he popped two ampules to clear his head. Then, tired of waiting, he walked to the center of the clearing, his nerves keyed by every shift of shadow, every twitching leaf. Clouds slid across the sun, muting the sky to a platinum gray; a palpable vibration underscored the stillness.

  Less than a minute later, Coffee came jogging toward him from the east, a grin splitting the wild thatch of his beard. Mingolla had expected formalities, but Coffee broke into a run, and he barely had time to brace himself before the man hurtled into him, his head catching Mingolla in the side and knocking him to the ground. He went with the fall, rolling out of it and up to his feet; he circled away, amazed by the fluidity of his movements, and though his ribs ached from the impact, he laughed in delight.

  “Aw, David!” Coffee balanced on one hand and a knee, still grinning. “I hate to rob ya of this joy.” He hopped to his feet, held both fists overhead as if squeezing power from the air.

  Laughter bubbled out of Mingolla. “You too crazy to live anymore, man. This ain’t a test…I’m here to relieve you of command.”

  “Are ya, no shit?” Coffee dropped into a crouch.

  “Come to me inna dream,” said Mingolla. “Your soul ascending into the light, your body all maggoty and hollow.”

  Coffee gave his head a good-natured shake, pawed at a butterfly that fluttered into his face. “I love ya, David. Swear I do.” He stared admiringly at Mingolla. “Wish there’s another way.”

  He lunged, swung his left fist, catching Mingolla on the cheekbone, rocking him; a second blow landed flush on the mouth, but he managed to keep his feet. His head spun, pain spiked his gums. He spat blood and the fragments of a tooth.

  “See what I’m sayin’, David?” Coffee flexed his left hand, swiped at some butterflies that danced before his eyes; two others had settled atop his head, like a bow tied in his stringy hair. “Just a matter of time.”

  He charged again, ducked Mingolla’s looping right, and nailed Mingolla twice to the head, knocking him down; he planted a kick in Mingolla’s ribs, the same spot he’d rammed with his head. Mingolla yelped, crawled away, and was flattened by another kick. Coffee hauled him to his knees, slapped him lightly as if to gain his attention.

  “Well, David,” he said. “It’s cryin’ time.”

  A couple of dozen butterflies were preening on Coffee’s scalp—a bizarre animate wig—and others clung to his beard; a great cloud of them was circling low above his head like a whirlpool galaxy of cut flowers. Coffee noticed those in his beard, and with a befuddled look, he swiped at them. Two more perched on his brow. Ignoring them, he threw a punch that landed on the side of Mingolla’s neck with stunning force. Threw another that clipped his jaw. He cocked his fist for a third punch. Mingolla fought to retain consciousness, but darkness was flittering at the edges of his vision, and when his head thudded against the ground, he blacked out.

  He came around to cap-pistol noises, to a sky that was a hallucinatory blur of color. Reds, blues, yellows. He couldn’t figure it out. Something odd lurched past, turning, staggering. Mingolla sat up, watched the thing reeling about the clearing. Matted with delicate wings, man-shaped, yet too thick and bulky to be a man. It screamed, tearing at the clotted wings tripling the size of its head, pulling off wads of butterflies, and then the scream was sheared away as if the hole had been plugged. Butterflies poured down in a funnel to thicken it further, and it slumped, mounded, its surface in constant motion, making it appear to be breathing shallowly. It continued to build, accumulating more and more butterflies, the sky emptying and the mound growing with the disconnected swiftness of time-lapse photography, until it had become a multicolored pyramid towering thirty feet above, like a temple buried beneath a million lovely flowers.

  Mingolla stared at it, disbelieving yet also terrified that it would fall on him, bury him under a ton of fragile weights. The
cap-pistol noises were coming more frequently, and a bullet zipped into the ferns beside him. He went flat, whimpered at the pain in his ribs, and belly-crawled through the ferns. Blight-dappled fronds pressed against his face, slid away with underwater slowness. It seemed he was burrowing through a mosaic of muted browns and greens into which even the concept of separateness had been subsumed, and so he didn’t notice the boot until his hand fell upon it: the rotting brown boot of a man lying on his stomach, holed at the ankles and with vines for laces. Several butterflies perched on the heel. He inched closer, spotted a rifle stock protruding from a mound of butterflies. Carefully, afraid to touch them, he pulled the rifle to him. About a dozen butterflies came with it, clinging to the barrel and the clip. One fluttered onto his hand, and he squawked, shaking it off. Then he eased around the body and into the margin of the jungle.

  The firing had become sporadic, and bullets were no longer striking near. Mingolla dragged himself behind a fallen tree trunk. He popped an ampule, had a resurgence of energy, but still felt like shit. His ribs were on fire, and the lumped bruises on his face were heavy and sick-feeling, full of poison. He spat more blood, probed with his tongue at the hole where his tooth had been. Then he turned onto his back, thinking about Coffee under all those butterflies, throat stuffed with their prickly legs, ticklish wings. He looked through a screen of brush at the clearing. Butterflies everywhere, a storm of them whirling and whirling. They’d be coming for him soon. And that was all right. He lay drained and thoughtless, watching the butterflies, not really seeing them, seeing instead the afterimages of their flights, streaks of color that lingered in the air. Time seemed to collapse around him, burying him under a ton of decaying seconds.

  Something snapped in the brush to his left, and a man stumbled out of the cover. The red-bearded man who had stood guard over him. He’d lost his little piece of mirror. Dirt freckled his cheeks, bits of fern ribboned his hair. A survival knife dangling from one hand. He blinked at Mingolla. Swayed. His fatigues were plastered to his ribs, and a big bloodstain mapped the hollow of his stomach. His cheeks bulged: it looked as if he wanted to speak but was afraid more than just words would come out. “Jesus,” he said sluggishly. His eyes rolled back, his knees buckled. Then he straightened, appeared to notice Mingolla, and staggered forward swinging the knife.

  Mingolla tried to bring the rifle up and found that the stock was pinned under his hip. But somebody else got off a round. The bullet pasted a red star under the man’s eye, stamped his features with a rapt expression, and he fell across Mingolla’s ribs, knocking the breath from him. Shouting in the distance. Mingolla heaved the man off, his eyes squeezed shut against the pain. The effort mined a core of dizziness inside him. He resisted it, but then realizing that there was nothing attractive about consciousness, nothing he cared to know about the someone in charge of death and butterflies, he let himself go spiraling down past layers of darkness and shining wings, darkness and mystical light, and a memory of pain so bright that it became a white darkness wherein he lost all track of being.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Lantern light washing shadows from a tin roof, fanning across a dirt floor, shining over walls of palmetto thatch, the fronds plaited into a weave like greenish brown scales. Smell of rain and decay. A wooden chair and table were the only furnishings aside from the pallet on which Mingolla lay, his ribs taped, jaw aching. And something bright was strung on the ceiling. Ribbons…or paper dolls. He rubbed his eyes, squinted, and made out hundreds of butterflies clinging to the roof poles, their wings stirring gently. He kept very still. He heard a man and woman speaking outside. Their words were unintelligible, but he thought he detected an accent in the man’s voice. German, maybe. A second later, the man entered the hut. He wore dark slacks and a blue polo shirt, and radiated an unnatural measure of heat. Mingolla pretended to be asleep.

  The man sat at the table, gazed thoughtfully at Mingolla. He was thin but well muscled, his short blond hair shot through with gray, and he had a cold ascetic handsomeness that in association with the accent called to mind evil SS officers in old war movies. One of the butterflies descended, perching on his knuckles. He let it walk across the back of his hand, then with a flick of his wrist, as if loosing a falcon, cast it aloft. “‘Transparent forms too fine for mortal sight,’” he said. “‘Their fluid bodies half-dissolv’d in light.’” He watched the butterfly alight on a roof pole. “And yet they can be quite formidable, can they not?”

  Mingolla kept up his pretense.

  “You are awake, I think,” said the man. “My name is Nate, and you, I’m told, are David.”

  “Who told you that?” asked Mingolla, giving it up.

  “A friend of yours…one who is convinced you are her friend.”

  “Debora?” Mingolla shrugged up, winced at a shooting pain in his side. “Where is she?”

  Nate shrugged, an economic gesture, the merest elevation of his shoulder. “‘Fluttering like some vain painted butterfly from glade to glade along the forest path.’ Matthew Arnold, from The Light of Asia.” He smiled. “You know, I believe I could construct an entire conversation from quotations about butterflies.”

  Mingolla pushed his mind toward Nate, began to exert influence, and several dozen butterflies flew down from the ceiling, fluttered in his face.

  “Please don’t,” said Nate. “There are a great many more outside.”

  There was something peculiar about Nate’s mind, a dominant pattern in the electrical flux unusual for its complexity and resistance to influence; it seemed to Mingolla that the pattern was weaving a mesh too fine for his own mind to penetrate. He was fascinated by it, but didn’t want to risk further exploration, “It was you back at the clearing, wasn’t it?” he said.

  Nate looked at him with disapproval. “That was a bad job…very bad. But she says you’re worth it.”

  The thing to do, Mingolla thought, would be to buddy up to Nate, gain his confidence. “You’ve obviously been through the therapy,” he said. “How’d you wind up here. You desert?”

  “Not at all,” said Nate. “Psicorps considered me a failure. I wasn’t able to achieve any effect until after my release. To tell you the truth, I doubt the therapy had much to do with the development of my abilities. I was close by Tel Aviv when it was destroyed, and not long afterward I began to show some signs of having power. A product of my anger, I’m thinking.” He stared up at the roof poles. “Butterflies. Hardly an appropriate tool for anger. Now if I’d managed an affinity with tigers or serpents…” He broke off, studied his clasped hands.

  “What was it like?” Mingolla asked.

  “What was what like?”

  “Tel Aviv.” Mingolla injected sympathy into his words. “Back in the States we heard about the suicides, the apathy.”

  “The bomb is a powerful symbol, powerful beyond its immediate effects. To see it…I can’t explain it.” He made a gesture of dismissal and glanced up at Mingolla. “Why are you hunting Debora?”

  Mingolla didn’t think he could lie successfully. “Things have changed,” he said.

  “Indeed, more than you know.”

  “I’ll talk to him now,” said Debora.

  She was blocked, standing at the door, an automatic rifle under one arm, and seeing her, all Mingolla’s preparations for this moment went skying. Of course the circumstances were different from those he had planned, but he had the feeling that even if everything had been as expected, his reaction would have been the same. It seemed his obsession was feeding on the sight of her, absorbing the loose fit of her jeans, the hollows in her cheeks, her hair—long uncut—falling to her waist, and composing of these elements a new portrait of obsession, a portrait of a leaner, more intense Debora. Her dark eyes reminded him in their steadiness of Hermeto Guzman’s, and the clean division of white blouse and dusky skin reminded him of his dream of possession. Only after he had satisfied himself that she was more or less as he remembered did his resentments surface, and even then they were not ven
geful, but the weaker, wistful emotions of a betrayed lover.

  Nate gave her his chair and, with a cautionary look at Mingolla, went outside, followed by a leaf storm of butterflies. Debora laid her rifle on the table and said, “Your disguise isn’t bad, but I liked you better as an American.”

  “So did I,” he said, and, after a silence, asked, “Why’d you save me? How’d you know I was coming?”

  She glanced at him, looked away. “It’s complicated. I’m not sure how much I want to tell you.”

  “Then why are we talking?”

  “I’m not sure about that, either.”

  Mingolla felt a bewildering mixture of anger and desire. “Are my ribs broken?”

  “Just bruised, I think. I couldn’t do much for your mouth. You’ll have to be careful…keep it clean.”

  “You patched me up?”

  “There wasn’t anyone else. Nate’s not much of a doctor.”

  “Yeah, but he’s good with butterflies.”

  “Yes.” Sadly.

  “What’s he alla ’bout, anyway?”

  “He used to be a journalist.” She had another quick look at him. “And he’s going with me to Panama.”

  “Panama, huh?”

  She nodded, toyed with the trigger guard of the rifle.

  “Why don’t you explain what’s going on?”

  “I can’t trust you.”

  “What am I gonna do…overwhelm ten zillion fucking butterflies?”

  “Your mind’s very strong,” she said. “You might be able to do something.”

  “We’re going to have to talk sometime.”

  “Maybe.”

  A dozen intents were colliding in his head, running into one another, bouncing off, like cartoon policemen trying to grab someone who had just vanished into thin air; and what had vanished, he realized, what kept materializing in different parts of the room, shouting, “Hey, over here!” and causing another collision, was his basic intent regarding her…which was something he didn’t care to confront and so made vanish time and again. But at the core of every intent was the tactic or the urge toward seduction. She lifted her head, and in the flickering light he thought he detected a scurrying of dark shapes behind her eyes, as if her purposes, too, were in collision.