Lucius Shepard: Life During Wartime

The boy said something to her; he swung the burlap sack over his shoulder, and after a rapidfire exchange of Spanish he ran off toward the river. The crowds were still thick, but more than half the stalls had shut down; those that remained open looked—with their thatched roofs and strung lights and beshawled women—like crude nativity scenes ranging the darkness. Beyond the stalls, neon signs winked on and off: a chaotic menagerie of silver eagles and crimson spiders and indigo dragons. Watching them burn and vanish, Mingolla experienced a wave of dizziness. Things were starting to appear disconnected as they had at the Club Demonio.

‘Don’t you feel well?’ she asked.

‘I’m just tired.’

She turned him to face her, put her hands on his shoulders. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s something else.’

The weight of her hands and the smell of her perfume helped to steady him. ‘There was an assault on the firebase a few days ago,’ he said. It’s still with me a little, y’know.’

She gave his shoulders a squeeze and stepped back. ‘Maybe I can do something.’ She said this with such gravity, he thought she must have something specific in mind. ‘How’s that?’ he asked.

‘I’ll tell you at dinner… that is, if you’re buying.’ She took his arm, jollying him. You owe me that much, don’t you think, after all your good luck?’

‘Why aren’t you with Psicorps?’ he asked as they walked.

She didn’t answer immediately, keeping her head down, nudging a scrap of cellophane with her toe. They were moving along an uncrowded street, bordered on the left by the river—a channel of sluggish black lacquer—and on the right by the windowless rear walls of some bars. Overhead, behind a latticework of supports, a neon lion shed a baleful green nimbus. ‘I was in school in Miami when they started testing here,’ she said at last. ‘And after I came home, my family got on the wrong side of Department Six. You know Department Six?’

‘I’ve heard some stuff.’

‘Sadists don’t make efficient bureaucrats,’ she said. ‘There were a lot of people taken into the prison the same day we were. We were all supposed to be tested, but the guards started beating people, and everything got confused. No one was sure who’d been tested and who hadn’t. It ended up that some of us were passed through without the tests.’

Their footsteps crunched in the dirt; husky jukebox voices cried out for love from the next street over. ‘What happened?’ Mingolla asked.

‘To my family?’ She shrugged. ‘Dead. No one ever bothered to confirm it, but it wasn’t necessary. Confirmation, I mean.’ She went a few steps in silence. ‘As for me…’ A muscle bunched at the corner of her mouth. I did what I had to.’

He was tempted to ask for specifics, but thought better of it. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and then kicked himself for having made such a banal comment.

They passed a bar lorded over by a grinning red-and-purple neon ape. Mingolla wondered it these glowing figures had meaning for guerrillas with binoculars in the hills: burned-out tubes signaling times of attack or troop movements. He cocked an eye toward Debora. She didn’t look despondent as she had a second before, and that accorded with his impression that her calmness was a product of self-control, that her emotions were strong but held in tight check and let out only for exercise. From the river came a solitary splash, some cold fleck of life surfacing briefly, then returning to its long, ignorant glide through the darkness… and his life no different really, though maybe less graceful. How strange it was to be walking beside this woman who gave off heat like a candle flame, with earth and sky blended into a black gas, and neon totems standing guard overhead.

‘Shit,’ said Debora under her breath.

It surprised him to hear her curse. ‘What is it?’

‘Nothing,’ she said wearily. ‘Just “shit.”’ She pointed ahead and quickened her pace. ‘Here we are.’

The restaurant was a working-class place that occupied the ground floor of a hotel: a two-story building of yellow concrete block with a buzzing Fanta sign hung above the entrance. Hundreds of moths swarmed about the sign, flickering white against the darkness, and in front of the steps stood a group of teenage boys who were throwing knives at an iguana. The iguana was tied by its hind legs to the step railing. It had amber eyes, a hide the color of boiled cabbage, and was digging its claws into the dirt and arching its neck like a pint-size dragon about to take flight. As Mingolla and Debora walked up, one of the boys scored a hit in the iguana’s tail and it flipped high into the air, shaking loose the knife. The boys passed around a bottle of rum to celebrate.

Except for the waiter—a pudgy young man leaning beside a door that opened into a smoke-filled kitchen—the place was empty. Glaring overhead lights shined up the grease spots on the plastic tablecloths and made the uneven thicknesses of the yellow paint appear to be dripping. The concrete floor was freckled with dark stains that Mingolla discovered to be the remains of insects. The food turned out to be decent, however, and Mingolla shoveled down a plateful of chicken and rice before Debora had half-finished hers. She ate delicately, chewing each bite a long time, and he had to carry the conversation. He told her about New York, his painting, how a couple of galleries had shown interest even though he was just a student. He compared his work to Rauschenberg, to Silvestre. Not as good, of course. Not yet. He had the notion that everything he told her—no matter its irrelevance to the moment—was securing the relationship, establishing subtle ties: he pictured the two of them enwebbed in a network of luminous threads that acted as conduits for their attraction. He could feel her heat more strongly than ever, and he wondered what it would be like to make love to her, to be swallowed by that perception of heat. The instant he wondered this, she glanced up and smiled, as if sharing the thought. He wanted to ratify his sense of intimacy, to tell her something he had told no one else, and so—having only one important secret—he told her about the ritual.

She laid down her fork and gave him a penetrating look. ‘You can’t really believe that,’ she said.

‘I know it sounds—’

‘Ridiculous,’ she broke in. ‘That’s how it sounds.’

‘It’s the truth,’ he said defiantly.

She picked up her fork again, pushed around some grains of rice. ‘How is it for you,’ she said, ‘when you have a premonition? I mean, what happens? Do you have dreams, hear voices?’

‘Sometimes I just know things,’ he said, taken aback by her abrupt change of subject. ‘And sometimes I see pictures. It’s like with a TV that’s not working right. Fuzziness at first, then a sharp image.’

‘With me, it’s dreams. And hallucinations. I don’t know what else to call them.’ Her lips thinned; she sighed, appearing to have reached some decision. ‘When I first saw you, just for a second, you were wearing battle gear. There were inputs on the gauntlets, cables attached to the helmet. The faceplate was shattered, and your face… it was pale, bloody.’ She put her hand out to cover his. ‘What I saw was very clear, David. You can’t go back.’

He hadn’t described artilleryman’s gear to her, and no way could she have seen it. Shaken, he said, Where am I gonna go?’

‘Panama,’ she said. ‘I can help you get there.’

She suddenly snapped into focus. You could find her, dozens like her, in any of the R and R towns. Preaching pacifism, encouraging desertion. Do-gooders, most with guerrilla connections. And that, he realized, must be how she had known about his gear. She had probably gathered information on the different types of units in order to lend authenticity to her dire pronouncements. His opinion of her wasn’t diminished; on the contrary, it went up a notch. She was risking her life by talking to him. But her mystery had been dimmed.