Life During Wartime (31 page)

‘Don’t be alarmed,’ said the computer.

‘I’m not alarmed, I just don’t see the point.’

‘The point will be made manifest. I’m not trying to prove anything, David. I simply feel that a brief intimacy between us will benefit you in the days ahead.’

‘It’s up to you,’ said Nate. ‘But I’ve found it quite restful.’

‘You’ve been inside?’

‘A number of times.’

Mingolla looked again at the hole and decided it would be stupid to give in to nervousness. ‘Why the fuck not?’

Nate lowered him by the arms, released him after he had gained a footing. The chopper shifted, vines creaked, and vegetable debris rained down. Mingolla dropped to his hands and knees, crawled over to the hole, and went in headfirst, carefully negotiating the sharp peels of metal. He slid to the end of the deck, positioned himself against the computer facing.

He had expected that – despite its protestation to the contrary – the computer would attempt his conversion; but there was only silence, and though he felt stupid sitting there, he didn’t want to create the impression that he was afraid by crawling back out. The air was cool, drier than the outside air, like an expression of the computer’s voice, and as Nate had said, it was restful inside the chopper, with the blinking lights and the faint whine of the power system and the edges of the hole framing a ragged circle of greenish gold light like an opening into Eden. From this vantage it was hard to believe that in that light lived loonies and jaguars and poisonous snakes. And maybe that was the truth of the computer’s delusion, of all religious delusion: that if you were to limit yourself
to such a narrow view, hold within yourself a ray of greenish gold light, a pocket of cool dry air, you might cultivate an innocence that to some extent would repel the violence of the world. Maybe if he had been armored with faith instead of power he could have avoided much that had come to harrow him. He folded his arms, closed his eyes, letting himself steep in the peace of the dead chopper and its deluded oracle, the image of God appropriate to the age. His thoughts idled. Memories of the Barrio, the Lost Patrol, and the Ant Farm flitted past like scenes from a damaged print of an old silent film, their colors faded, the exaggerated displays of their characters redolent of an antiquated school of acting, and he saw in every instance how irredeemably wrong his own actions had been.

‘That should be enough, David.’ The computer’s voice seemed to surround him. ‘If you start back to the village now, I think you’ll find that Debora is available.’

Mingolla started to ask how the computer knew Debora’s business; but then he understood that whether it was a matter of reasoning or innate knowledge,
his
judgment was unimportant. Willing to accept this much of delusion, he crawled out from the dark computer deck and let himself be hauled up into the light.

Debora was waiting by the river, and he had the idea from her pose – sitting with knees drawn up, chin resting on her folded arms – that she had been waiting for some considerable time. She was unblocked, shedding heat in waves like the radiation from an open fire, and when she glanced at him, he detected strain in the unnatural steadiness of her gaze. He noticed that her loss of weight had added a sculptural quality to the shape of her face; making it a more suitable framework for her sensual features. Her beauty had been the main focus of his dreams and fantasies, and she
was
beautiful, albeit less so than his memories of her; yet considering her now, he perceived a bright particularity of which beauty was only a small part. The movements of her body, the black curls hanging over the front of her blouse like the tail feathers of exotic birds, the way the wind pressed the fabric against her breasts: these things were more significant and precious in their familiarity than the fact of her good looks. He
rebelled against this perception, trying to resurrect his sense of outrage and betrayal; but he was beginning to realize that didn’t matter anymore, that whatever the reasons underlying the attraction, he wanted to immerse himself in it, to wash away the stains he had accumulated since he had left her.

She invited him to sit, but when he did she shifted her position, creating a wide space between them. He gazed out at the jungle fringing the opposite bank. The sun was an explosive white glare whitening the sky, causing the greens of the vegetation to appear a single livid, overripe color. Birds with scythe-shaped wings made low runs across the treetops; a silver arc and splash out on the river. ‘Are we gonna talk?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’ She let the answer stand.

The bank fell away sharply, and below Mingolla’s feet the surface of the water was figured with eddies forming around the slick brown tips of a submerged branch; black flies hovered above them, and shadowy fingerlings darted in the green murk of the shallows. Farther along the bank a row of tree ferns leaned out over the river, their stalks ten or twelve feet long, their plumy fronds nodding: the nodding gave them the semblance of an animal vitality, and they seemed to be signaling their approval of all that passed before their strange eyeless heads, measuring the peace of Fire Zone Emerald.

‘All right,’ said Mingolla finally. ‘I’ll start. You told me you learned stuff that made what you were doing meaningless. What was it?’

She drew a line in the clay with her forefinger. ‘There’s another war being fought. A war within a war.’

His impulse was to ridicule her, but her glumness was convincing. ‘What sorta war?’

‘Not really a war,’ she said. ‘A power struggle. Between two groups of psychics, I think.’

Maybe she was crazy after all. ‘How’d you find out ’bout it?’

‘My superiors told me. That’s how they work. They build you up, give you power, watch how you handle it. And when they think you’re so involved with the power that all you want is more, they admit you to their’ – her voice quavered – ‘their goddamn fraternity! They tell you a little at a time, they give you clues to see
how you’ll react. Well, they told me too damn much!’ She looked at Mingolla, anguish in her face. ‘I believed in the revolution. I gave it everything … everything! And there isn’t any revolution! There isn’t even a counterrevolution! It’s all camouflage.’

Mingolla remembered Tully’s outburst about the war not making sense, remembered de Zedeguí’s cryptic statements. He told Debora about Tully, and she said, ‘That’s it! That’s how they begin, by seeding doubt. And next they tell you about special operations, drop hints about underlying purposes. Then they present the whole picture … nothing specific, because they still don’t trust you. Nobody trusts anybody. That’s the one verity. Everything is suspect, everyone’s after power. And no one gives a damn about anything else. The cause is a joke!’ She looked at him again, calmer now. ‘Do you know why I deserted, the final straw? It was because of what they told me about you.’

He waited for her to go on.

‘They said you were going to be assigned to kill me. I know how the training goes, how isolated you are. Never more than a couple of other people around. If you’d been given an assignment, only your trainer and the person in charge of the therapy would know about it, and that meant that one of them had to be in league with one of my superiors. With all the other information I had, I realized that what was really going on must be so elitist, so complicated and filled with intrigues, I’d never figure it out … not while I was still involved in it.’

Mingolla kept his eye on the eddying water, watching strands of dark scum being spun loose from a clot of mud caught on the tip of the submerged branch. ‘It’s hard to swallow,’ he said. ‘But I’ve heard some things, too.’

‘There’s more,’ she said. ‘Amalia knows it.’

‘Amalia?’

‘She’s another clue. A little girl. She’s in my hut. Sleeping. That’s all she does now.’ Debora rubbed the back of her neck as if the subject were making her weary. ‘That’s why I rescued you. I’m not strong enough to wake her anymore. I need your help.’

‘That’s all … that’s the only reason?’

‘Why else would I? You were hunting me.’ She said this with defiance, but he could hear the lie.

‘Not now … I’m not hunting you now.’

‘No, but that isn’t by choice.’

‘Debora,’ he said. ‘I was just …’

She jumped up, walked a couple of paces off.

‘I wasn’t thinking clearly,’ he said.

The wind veiled her mouth with a sweep of dark hair; behind her, three old shirtless Indian men were sitting beside one of the huts, staring at them with fascination. ‘Do you want to help or not?’ she asked harshly.

‘Sure,’ said Mingolla. ‘That’s what I want.’

Amalia was a chubby Indian girl of twelve or thirteen, with a psychic’s heat and a melanin deficiency that had dappled her reddish brown skin with pink splotches; in the candlelit gloom of Debora’s hut the splotches looked raw and vivid, like scars made by poisoned flowers pressed to her face. She lay with one arm hanging over the side of a hammock and wore a dirty white dress imprinted with a design of blue kittens. Her breathing was deep and regular, her eyelids twitched, and according to Debora she had been asleep for almost a week.

‘She just ran down,’ Debora said. ‘Like a windup toy moving slower and slower. Then she stopped. But even before that she wasn’t right. I thought she was retarded. She’d lie there and stare at the walls and make noises. Then she’d have violent spells … break things and scream. Once in a while she’d be lucid, and I could get her to talk. She talked about Panama, about a place she called Sector Jade … she said everything was being decided there. A lot of what she said sounded rote, like pieces of poems and stories she’d memorized.’

The last of Mingolla’s doubts vanished. ‘I’ve heard stuff about Sector Jade.’

‘What did you hear?’

‘Just the name, and that it was important.’

A starved-looking cow stopped by the door and looked inside the hut, its ripe smell filtering in. Its mottled red-and-white skin was sucked in over its cheekbones like a caved-in map, and its unpruned horns had grown into circles that almost met its eyes. It snorted, then moseyed off.

‘What else did she say?’ Mingolla asked.

‘She’d talk about where she used to live. With one of “the others,” she’d say. She said she was one of his “broken toys.” I asked what she meant by “the others,” and she said they were like us, but not as strong … though they were stronger in some ways. Because they were hidden, because they couldn’t be detected.’

Flies droned in the thatch, a chicken clucked. It was hot, and sweat burned in the creases of Mingolla’s neck. He breathed through his mouth. ‘It’s weird,’ he said. ‘When I was in therapy, I never worried about failures or fuck-ups with the drugs … even though they gave me an overdose once. I just assumed everything was fine. Beats me why I leapt to that assumption, but I did.’

‘You think that’s what happened to Amalia … a failure with the drugs?’

‘Don’t you?’

‘Maybe. But she might not have been sound before they gave them to her.’

‘Either way, it’s not a pretty picture.’

‘I should warn you,’ Debora said. ‘She’s strong … very strong. And her thoughts are chaotic.’

He glanced at her, held her eyes. Her skin was almost the same shade of ashen brown as the air, and for an instant the eyes appeared to be disembodied, floating toward him. She moved back, nervous, and put a hand on the hammock ropes.

‘I’ll give it a shot,’ he said.

Chaotic
was too mild a term to describe the process of Amalia’s thoughts; they seemed a fiery shrapnel spraying around inside her skull. The electric sensation was overwhelming, and the subsequent arousal shocking in its suddenness. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he said.

‘Can’t you do it?’ Anxiety in Debora’s voice.

‘I’m not sure.’ He rubbed his temples; the pain there was more an inflammation than an ache.

After several tries he became acclimated and began to project alertness and well-being. Though painful and dizzying, his contact with Amalia’s mind proved instructive. He was beginning to understand that what he had perceived as random flux was in fact an infinity of patterns, most of them so minimal that they tended to obscure one another; and he found that what he was doing
intuitively was reinforcing certain of them, channeling his energy and strength along their course. Some of Amalia’s patterns were – like that one of Nate’s – powerful, easily perceived, and the longer he worked on her, the more dominant these grew. However, half an hour went past, and he still had not been able to wake her.

‘I could be here all day,’ he said to Debora. ‘Why don’t we work on her together?’

Debora frowned, plucked at the hammock ropes. ‘I guess it’s worth a try,’ she said. She ducked under the ropes and stationed herself on the opposite side of the hammock. ‘All right.’

Mingolla’s attention was focused on Amalia, on the boil of her thought, and at first he failed to notice the presence of a new and more controlled electrical flow, one whose borders kept withdrawing from his own. When he did notice it, he mistook it for one of Amalia’s patterns and pushed toward it with all his strength. At the moment of contact he had an impression of two streams of crackling energy knitting together, entwining, tightening, forming a kind of liquid knot that grew more and more complex, twisting in and out of itself, and his focus became limited to completing that knot, to contriving its ultimate expression, until even that intent was absorbed into a blaze of sexuality: like a man clutching a live wire, his thoughts sparking, conscious only of the voltage pouring through him. And then he found himself staring at Debora, unsure of who had broken the circuit and of how it had been accomplished. She looked terrified, her mouth open, breathing labored, and appeared on the verge of bolting from the hut. He wanted to say something to calm her, to stop her, because he saw that a barrier between them had been eliminated. He saw this very clearly, and he believed he had also seen down to the core of their mutuality; he didn’t understand what he had seen – its shape was as complicated as the knot they had created – but the fact that he could see it at all debunked the notion that his feelings for her had been manufactured. Enhanced, maybe. Their progress sped up, hurried along. But not manufactured. He believed she saw this, too.