Life During Wartime

by Lucius Shepard

  Looking pleased, Gilbey shook Jack and said, “Wake up, man. Hey, Jack! Wake up.”

  Jack rolled over, blinked, his face a map of fatigue and befuddlement.

  “I wanna tell ya this thing,” said Gilbey eagerly. “It’s like…” His eagerness evaporated, and he gazed off toward the barricade. “Goddammit, man! Ya missed it.” Then he added in a tone of pride, “I ’membered this really cool thing.”

  Mingolla had never questioned the existence of the old Oriental man in the wheelchair until he disappeared. Every previous morning, he had sat beside his garden, fiddling with his strips of paper, his back to the courtyard. But on this particular morning he was nowhere to be seen, and the maid Serenita informed Mingolla that he had been taken to the hospital. Disconcerted, Mingolla went to stand by the plot and was surprised to see that the garden had long since gone to seed, implying that the old man’s conscientiousness had been either a product of senility or mind control. But this wasn’t the thing that troubled Mingolla. He had been interested in the old man, had always intended to speak to him, and the fact that he hadn’t brought home the verity that this was how it went with other people: you had intentions toward them, imagined yourself developing relationships, fulfilling certain goals, and—as if intent were all that mattered, as if the function of other people were merely to provide a sort of inadequate moral tinder—you never realized any of them. Like with Tully, for instance. He kept thinking that they were going to grow close, but they had both been too busy to spare time for each other, he with his fraudulent acts of kindness and Tully with Corazon; the sense of imminent closeness had been sufficient to make him believe that they were satisfying the requirements of the bond of experience between them. It occurred to Mingolla that his father had been right about war, that it had, indeed, made a man out of him. He could see intricacies that he had never before suspected, he understood the nature of his responsibilities and felt able to handle them. But the problem was that he had not become a very nice man. Not even average. His capacity for violence and indifference bore that out.

  The garden was small, about twelve by twelve, the dirt crumbly and pale brown, interwoven by crispy tomato vines, lumped by shriveled melons and the husks of dried squash. Wanting to feel dirt under his feet, Mingolla kicked off his shoes and stepped over the retaining wires. Clods broke apart between his toes, vines snagged his ankles, pebbles bruised his soles. He stood at the center of the garden, looking up at the white globe of the sun veiled by frays of gray cloud, and felt—as if the garden were a plot of free land—that from this vantage he could see the twisted processes of history that had brought the world to this moment: the invasions, the mercenaries, the manipulations of the United Fruit Company, the blundering American do-gooder, the development bankers and their evil puppets, the vast unprincipled sprawl of business interests. All that on one hand, and on the other, the bizarre tapestry of murder and revenge fabricated by the two families, a Borgia-like progression of poisonings, stabbings, explosions, and kidnappings that spread across the centuries, enacting its bloody scenarios in mansions and poverty-stricken villages and on battlefields. And these two vines of history grappling, twining, crowding out every other growth, leaching the earth, reducing it to an arid garden in which nothing would grow except an old man’s fantasies.

  “David! Where are you?” Debora’s voice calling from the courtyard. She came running through the breezeway. Behind her, Sotomayors and Madradonas were gathered at the entrance to the pension, shaking hands and talking. “David,” she said. “It’s over. We’ve done it!”

  He was unable to break himself out of his shell of gloomy speculation and stood waiting for her to continue.

  “Peace,” she said. “There’s going to be peace.”

  Her face looked like peace. A beautiful, dusky, smiling Third World peace. But he couldn’t relate. “Good,” he said, stepping out of the garden. He sat on the tiled walk, began putting on his shoes.

  “Don’t you understand?” Her smile had faded. “The negotiations are over. The treaty’s going to be drawn up tonight and signed tomorrow at the party.”

  “A party?” That, he thought, would be an appropriate absurdity.

  “Yes, there’s going to be a celebration at the palace.”

  “Swell.”

  She frowned. “You act like nothing’s happened.”

  “Look…” he began. “Never mind.”

  Her face softened, and she knelt beside him. “I know you haven’t had much faith in all this, but it really has worked. You haven’t seen how hard these people have been trying.”

  “Hope so.”

  She drew back from him as if needing a new perspective. “Do you? Sometimes I think you hope just the opposite, though I can’t understand why.”

  He felt distracted, disinterested. Her words seemed parental in their reflex and cautionary morality.

  She slipped an arm around his shoulders. “You’ve been working too hard. But you’ll see. Come with me. Talk to everybody. That’ll make you feel better.”

  He was torn between the urge to convince her of a sober truth and the hope that she would remain happy. But deciding that a moment’s peace was better than nothing, he let her lead him out into the congratulatory melee of the courtyard.

  That night, an overcast night with a few stars showing between glowing strips of cloud, he fell into a conversation with Tully outside the pension. Gilbey and Jack were sitting by a potted fern in the entranceway, and Tully was standing with Mingolla about a dozen feet away, talking about Corazon.

  “Sometime I t’ink she gonna drop de act,” he said. “But den de nex’ minute, she go inside herself again and I can’t touch her. Damn, I’m gettin’ used to it…used to bein’ wit’ a woman dat frown when she feel a smile comin’ on.”

  “Maybe she’ll still come around.” Mingolla looked back into the courtyard, where, illuminated by spills of light from the windows, three Sotomayors were sitting and chatting in aluminum chairs by the pool.

  “I guess it ain’t ’portant whether she do or she don’t,” said Tully. “I be fah her even if she start t’rowin’ t’ings at me.” He sucked at his teeth and pointed at the Sotomayors. “What you be t’inkin’ ’bout dis shit, Davy?”

  “Tell ya the truth, I haven’t thought much about it at all.” He studied the Sotomayors, taking the measure of their languid gestures. “Debora seems convinced that everything’s great.”

  “Dat don’t tell me what you feelin’.”

  Mingolla let the question penetrate. “I guess I figure they’ll screw things up somehow. But there’s nothing I can do ’bout it.”

  “Yeah, dat’s my feelin’.” Tully scuffed the sidewalk. “You still got dat map I give you?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You hang on to it, y’hear?”

  “You thinking ’bout running?”

  “All de time, mon. All de time.” Tully stretched his arms overhead, his elbow joints popping. “Dis de kind of night it be good to have a drink or two.”

  “I gotta bottle.”

  “Dat’s not my meanin’,” said Tully. “I’m wantin’ some riot.” He clapped Mingolla on the back. “Like dem nights over in Coxxen Hole. ’Member dem?”

  “Sure do,” said Mingolla. “That was all right.”

  “Better dan all right.” Tully made a disgusted noise. “Dat’s how I know dis barrio ain’t got no future. Dere ain’t no riot, no livin’ wild. De place dead already. Y’can’t make peace in a graveyard and ’spect anyt’ing good to come of it.” He cast a sad eye on Jack and Gilbey. “How de fuck I ever wind up here?”

  “Beats me,” said Mingolla. “I used to hate Roatán, but it’d sure look good to me now.”

  “Yeah, dat little island not so bad.” Tully kicked a loose pebble on the concrete. “Ain’t it fuckin’ strange, Davy. How you start out wantin’ to rule the worl’, and in de end all you wanna do is hide from it?”

  Mingolla had the impulse to open up to Tully about all his co
nflicting emotions, his regrets, but couldn’t find the words.

  “Look like you ’bout to choke on somethin’, mon.”

  “I was just thinking about intentions.”

  “Intentions? What ’bout ’em?”

  “Seems to me that if something gets to be an intention, that’s a guarantee it’s not going to get to be any more than that.”

  “What you talkin’ ’bout?”

  “Just bullshit, man. I’m all fucked up.”

  “Well, you ain’t alone in dat.”

  They talked some more, but said little, and when Tully headed back to his hotel, Mingolla—followed by Jack and Gilbey—went back into the courtyard. The Sotomayors had vacated the pool area, and Mingolla sat in one of the chairs. Gilbey and Jack settled on the tiles nearby. The murky water in the pool shimmered with light from the windows along the courtyard, and watching the play of the ripples, Mingolla recalled the story in which it had been featured, described as “a sector of jade.” The story had told how each afternoon the local newsboys would come running into the pension after selling their papers and dive in, vanishing beneath the surface, and the author had imagined them plunging down through moss and kelplike growths to some mysterious country. Feeling desolate, disoriented, Mingolla pretended his gaze had penetrated the depths and was carving a tunnel through the water, and after a second his pretense manufactured a reality, a future he was becoming less and less able to deny. He was standing in a dimly lit room furnished with leather chairs and glassed-in bookcases and an antique globe and a massive Spanish-colonial-style desk. The walls were of a grainy dark wood, and the rug was midnight blue emblazoned with tiny stars, making it seem you were having an audience in the vault of heaven with its chief magistrate, Dr. Izaguirre, who sat at the desk, astonished, his gray goatee waggling as he said, “We thought you were dead.”

  Through the picture window behind Izaguirre, Mingolla could see the desert glowing luminous white beneath a half-moon, and on the horizon a seam of infernal red brilliance that he knew were the lights of Love City, where soon—after taking an overdose of the drug that had funded this entire bit of history, taking it out of despair, out of the hope that it would bring him a vision of some tolerable future—he would wander in a delirium. And despite knowing the result of the overdose, he would go through with it, because even certain knowledge could not defuse his hope.

  Izaguirre slipped one hand beneath the desk, and Mingolla said, “The alarm’s been cut, Carlito. And they’re all dead out there.”

  “Except for upstairs,” said Debora bitterly, moving up next to him. “They’re alive upstairs…at least they’re breathing.”

  Izaguirre was wilting under their stares, his waxy skin losing its tone, his flesh appearing to sag off the bone. “What are you planning to do?”

  “It’s already been done,” said Debora. “Almost all of it, anyway.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “All but three of you have been eliminated,” said Mingolla. “The three in the Pentagon. And we’re going to let you take care of ’em for us.”

  “That’s impossible! Only yesterday I was talking…”

  “That was yesterday,” said Mingolla.

  “I’m going upstairs,” said Debora. “Maybe some of them are salvageable.”

  “Don’t injure them,” said Izaguirre.

  “Injure them?” Debora laughed. “I’ve been fixing your broken toys for five years…all that had enough left to fix.” She turned to Mingolla. “Can you handle him?”

  “Yeah…go on.”

  “What will you do with me?” Izaguirre asked as Debora closed the door behind her.

  “You can figure it out, Carlito. Strip you down to nothing, then put you back together. You’ll be a time bomb like Nate and the rest. You’ll be almost alive like your friends upstairs.”

  “You killed them all…all but three?” Izaguirre seemed unable to absorb it.

  “It wasn’t even a challenge. We’ve learned a lot the last five years.” Five black coffin-shaped years, each filled with the ashes of violence and betrayal.

  “If only three are left,” said Izaguirre haltingly, “then there’s no need to…”

  “You know I’m not going to listen to this.”

  Izaguirre straightened, composed his features. “No, I suppose not.” His Adam’s apple worked. “All the work…” He passed a hand across his brow. “What will you do afterward?”

  “There’s nothing left to do.”

  “Oh, you’ll find something. You’ve become like us, and you’ll have to do something.” There was a note of triumph in Izaguirre’s voice.

  “I’m going to put you to sleep now,” Mingolla said.

  Izaguirre opened his mouth, but didn’t speak for a long moment. “God,” he said finally. “How could this happen?”

  “Could be you wanted it this way. Like your story about the boarding house…it ends with the death of the author. This ending’s got your style, Carlito.”

  “I’m…uh…” Izaguirre swallowed again. “I’m afraid. I didn’t think I’d be afraid.”

  Mingolla had often imagined how he would feel at this moment, and he was surprised to feel very little, mostly relief; he had the idea that despite Izaguirre’s fear, the old man felt much the same.

  “Isn’t there anything I can do?” Izaguirre asked. “I could…”

  “No,” said Mingolla, and started to make him drowsy. Izaguirre half-stood, then dropped back into the chair. He tried to rouse himself, shaking his head and gripping the edge of the desk. A look of panic crossed his face. He sagged in the chair. His eyes widened, focused on Mingolla. “Please.” The word came thickly like a final drop squeezed from him, and his head lolled back. His chest rose and fell in the rhythms of sleep, and his eyelids twitched.

  Everything in the room—the whine of the air-conditioning, the gleams on the antique furniture, the false night of the rug—seemed to have grown sharper, as if Izaguirre’s wakefulness had been a dulling agent. The hard clarity of the moment made Mingolla uneasy, and he spun around, certain that some trap had been sprung behind him. But there was only the closed door, the silence. He turned back to Izaguirre. The old man struck him now as a kind of monument, a sad misguided monster trapped in a tar pit, a repository of history, and he realized how little he knew about the families, that most of his knowledge was factual, fleshed out by sketchy impressions. He perched on the desk, engaged Izaguirre’s sleeping mind, and went flowing down the ornate corridors of the blood past the memories of his life and into the memories of other lives, the years igniting and fading like quick candles, and he was the boy Damaso Andrade de Sotomayor on the day of his majority, standing in the gloomy main hall of the old house in Panama. All the family was there, silent in their ebony chairs, the arms carved into serpent’s heads, letting their thoughts blend in the dream, and he could feel the drug in his belly, a distant ache, and he knew the dream as voices, thousands of them speaking at once, not in words but in a wordless whisper that was the soul of the passion. The pale figures of his parents and cousins and uncle and aunts began to flicker like white flames in cups of black wood, and he, too, was flickering, his flesh becoming insubstantial, and the dream firing his thoughts with the joy of vengeance and power. And when the dreaming was done, when he was strong and steeped in the passion, it was his time to travel the path of truth, and without a word he went down the stairs into the labyrinth beneath the house, into the lightless corridors that led to the seven windows, toward the one window that would show him his place in the pattern. He walked for hours, afraid that he would never find his window, that he would be lost forever in the chill, clammy depths. But the stones of the wall, mossy and rough, were friends, and touching them he felt the energies of the past guiding him into the future, which was only the pattern of the blood extending forever. They were ancestral stones, as much of his blood as his family, and their domed shapes had the familiar textures of the Sotomayor skulls in his father’s library, and f
rom them he derived a sense of direction and grew able to choose turnings that had the feel of the blood knot. And when he came at last to his window, he did not see it but apprehended it as a tingling on his skin. He thought this strange. Shouldn’t a window admit light…and then he saw light. Two crimson ovals like pupilless eyes that burned brighter and brighter as he approached. The window, he realized, was made of smoked glass, the sections fitted together with lead mullions into the image of a coal-black man wearing a crown of thorns, the eyes left vacant so as to allow the light of the setting sun to penetrate. The image frightened him, but he was drawn to it, and he pressed against the glass, fitting his eyes to those empty ovals, and across the valley he saw the blocky stone house of the Madradonas, looking monstrous in the sanguine light, appearing to be crouched, preparing to spring. He had seen the house many times, but this view affected him as had none other. Rage choked him, and he came to feel at one with the black burning-eyed figure against which he stood. The network of lead mullions seemed to correspond to the weavings of his nerves, to channel the bloody color of the west along them, filling him with a fierce intent, sealing the image of the ebony Christ inside him, and he knew that of all the children of his generation, he had been chosen to lead the rest against the Madradonas, that he was the arrow notched to the family bow, and that his entire life would be a flight toward the heart of that dark beast hunched and brooding on the far hill.

  Mingolla broke contact and got up from the desk, went to the window. Pressed his forehead against the pane. The glass was cool and transmitted the vibration of the air-conditioner. He looked off at the distant city lights, thinking about the Christian girl, the holograph of Jesus walking around on her hand. It had always seemed that beyond that moment lay a beginning, but he had never been able to know it, to make it clear. Probably, he thought, it was just another glimmer of hope. Izaguirre stirred in his chair, and Mingolla realized he was delaying the inevitable. It wasn’t that he was troubled by what he had to do; he was simply weary of the procedure, of exposing himself over and over to the bad news about the human condition implicit in the fact that you could strip the mind to zero. He’d wait a few minutes more, he decided. A few minutes wouldn’t hurt. He pushed Izaguirre’s chair to the side and began emptying the desk drawers, wondering where the old man kept his drugs…