Life During Wartime

CHAPTER SIX

Paths that lead to the most profound destinations, to moments of illumination or change, have nothing to do with actual travel, but rather negotiate a mental geography. And so the walk Mingolla took one day from the door of a hotel on the island of Roatán to a patch of grass where he sat cross-legged, hemmed in against a high concrete wall by a thicket of aguacaste bushes, was only the final leg of both a journey and a transformation that had encompassed a week of tests and five months of drug therapy, yet had covered scarcely any distance at all. Beside him, the bole of a palm was tipped half out of the dirt, exposing filaments of its root system, and the trunk curved up to a cluster of green coconuts, their slick dimpled hulls looking from below like the faces of evil dolls. Some of the fronds were dead, gone a tawny orange, and the burst wrappings of the newer fronds had unfurled into corkscrew-shaped lengths as gray and raveled as used bandages. Mingolla watched them shift in the wind, pleased by their slowness, by the twisting, coiling movements that seemed to mirror his own slowness, the drifty cast of mind that hid him from his trainer.

‘Davy!’ A bassy shout. ‘Quit playin’ dese fool games!’

Two cashew trees stood up from the thicket, wrinkled yellow fruit tucked among spreads of dark leaves, and farther off, towering above the hotel, whose red tile roof was visible over the tops of the bushes, a ceiba tree drenched the under-growth in a pool of indigo shadow; wherever sunlight penetrated the canopy, the air had a soft golden luminosity, and insects hovering there glowed with the intensity of jewels in a showcase.

‘Don’t vex wit’ me, Davy!’

Fuck you, Tully!

From beyond the wall came the crash of surf piling in onto the reef, and listening to it, wishing he could see the waves, Mingolla thought it didn’t seem possible he had been confined for all those months. His memories of the time consisted of a rubble of disconnected moments, and whenever he tried to assemble them, to make of them a coherent measure, he could not put together sufficient material to fill more than a few weeks… weeks of needles slipping into his arm, faces blurring as the drugs took hold, of fever dreams planing into a fevered reality, of pausing by the pitted mirror in the hotel lobby and staring into his eyes, not seeking any inner truth, just hoping to find himself, some part of himself that had been left unchanged.

‘Goddammit, Davy!’

Only one day was clear in his memory. His twenty-first birthday…

‘Okay, mon! Dat’s how you want it!’

…Right after the plastic surgery. Dr. Izaguirre had cut off the drugs so he could receive a call from his parents on a video hookup in the hotel basement, and he had waited for the call lying on a sprung sofa, facing a screen that occupied most of an end wall. The other walls were paneled in plastic strips of imitation maple, some of which had peeled away to reveal the riverbed textures of mildewed wallboard, and in the dim track lighting the overstated grain of the paneling showed yellow and black like printed circuitry made of tiger skins. Mingolla pillowed his head on the arm of the sofa, fiddling with the remote control box, trying to map out what to say to his parents, but couldn’t get beyond, ‘Hi, how’s it going?’ He had trouble calling them to mind, let alone designing intimacy, and when the screen brightened to a shot of them in their living room, sitting stiffly as if posing for a photograph, he continued lying there, taking in his father’s insurance executive drag of blue suit and tie and stylishly long gray hair, his mother’s worn face and linen dress, noticing how the flatness of the image made them seem elements of the decor, anthropomorphic accessories to the leather chairs and frilly lamp shades. He had no reaction to them: he might have been viewing a portrait of strangers to whom he had a chance blood connection.

‘David?’ His mother started to reach out to him, then remembered touch was impossible. She glanced at his father, who patted her arm, affected a bemused smile, and said, ‘We had no idea they’d made you look so much like a…’

‘Like a beaner?’ said Mingolla, annoyed by his father’s unruffled manner.

‘If that’s your term of choice,’ his father said coldly.

‘Don’t worry. Little tuck and fold here and there, little dye job. But I’m still your all-American boy.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said his mother. ‘I knew it was you, but…’

‘It’s okay.’

‘…I was startled at first.’

‘Really, it’s okay.’

Mingolla had not had high expectations for the call, yet he had wanted to have high expectations, to love them, to be open and honest, and now, seeing them again, understanding that they would demand of him a conversation to match their wallpaper, nothing more, his emotions went blank, and he wondered if he would have to dredge up old feelings in order to relate to them at all. They told him about their trip to Montreal. Sounds pretty there, he said. They spoke of garden parties, of yachting off the Cape. Wish I’d been there, he said. They complained about asthma, allergies, and they asked how it felt to be twenty-one.

‘Tell ya the truth,’ he said, weary of stock responses. ‘I feel ’bout a thousand years old.’

His father sniffed. ‘Spare us the melodrama, David.’

‘Melodrama.’ A burst of adrenaline set Mingolla trembling. ‘That what it is, Dad?’

‘I should think,’ his father said, that you’d want this to be a pleasant experience, that you’d at least try to be civil.’

‘Civil.’ For a moment the word had no meaning to Mingolla, only a bitter, insipid flavor. ‘Yeah, okay. I was hoping we could talk to each other, but civil’s cool. Fine! Let’s do it! You ask how I’ve been, and I’ll say, “Great.” And I’ll ask how’s business, and you’ll say, “Not bad. ”And Mom’ll tell me ’bout my friends, what they’re up to these days. And then if I’m real, real civil, you’ll give a little speech ’bout how you’re proud of me and all.’ He hissed in disgust. There you are. Dad. We don’t even have to go through it now. We can just sit here and fucking stare at each other and pretend we’re having a pleasant experience!’

His father’s eyes narrowed. ‘I see no point in continuing this.’

‘David!’ His mother pleaded with him silently.

Mingolla had no intention of apologizing, enjoying his charge of anger, but after a long silence he relented. I’m kinda tense, Dad. Sorry.’

‘What I fail to understand,’ his father said, ‘is why you insist on trying to impress us with the gravity of your situation. We know it’s grave, and we’re concerned about you. We simply don’t believe it’s appropriate to discuss our concern on your birthday.’

‘I see.’ Mingolla bit off the words.

‘Apology accepted,’ said his father with equal precision.

For the remainder of the conversation, Mingolla fielded questions with a flawless lack of honesty, and after the screen had faded to gray, his anger also grayed. He lay punching the remote control buttons, flipping from car chases to talk shows and then to a haze of pointilist dots that resolved into a plain of bleached-looking ruins. He recognized Tel Aviv, remembered the ultimate bad omen of the city nuked on his birthday. The picture broke up, and he jabbed the next button. The ruins reappeared, the camera tracking past a solitary wall, twisted girders, and piles of bricks. Dark thunderheads boiled over the city, their edges fraying into silver glare; shards of buildings stood in silhouette against a band of pale light on the horizon, like black fangs biting the sky. There was no sound, but when Mingolla adjusted the fine tuning, he heard bluesy guitar chords, synthesizer, a noodling sax, and a woman’s voice… obviously the voiceover from another channel.

‘…Prowler’s latest, “Blues for Heaven,”’ she was saying. ‘Hope it ain’t too depressin’ for you music lovers. But, hey! Depression’s all over these days, right? Just consider it a mood alternative… like a drug, y’know. Little somethin’ to add texture to your usual upbeat feelin’, make it all that much sweeter.’

It had begun to rain in Tel Aviv, a steady drizzle, and the music seemed the aural counterpart of the rain, of the clouds and their fuming passage across the city.

‘Prowler,’ said the woman. ‘The fabulous Jack Lescaux on vocals. Tell ’em ’bout the real world, Jack.’

‘Laney’s in her half-slip, pacin’ up and down, chain-smokin’ Luminieres, watchin’ the second hand spin ’round.

I’m sittin’ at the window, pickin’ out a slow gray tune, and two shadows walkin’ east on Lincoln turn down Montclair Avenue.

“That mother he ain’t comin’ back,“ says Laney. “Y’can’t trust him when he’s broke. I just know he took my money.” She blows a blue-steel jet of smoke.

I say, “Take it easy, honey. Why don’t you do some of my frost.”

She laughs ’cause life without the proper poison is a joke at any cost.’

The song with its mournful disposition, its narrative of two junkies enduring a bad night, was like the voice of a ghost wandering the city, and it pulled Mingolla in, drew him along, making him feel that he—with his shattered memories and emotions—was himself half a ghost, and causing him to imagine that he would be at home among the spirits of Tel Aviv, able to offer them the consolation of flesh-and-blood companionship. There was a premonitory clarity to this thought, but he was too absorbed in the music and the city to explore it further. He saw that the ruins posed a dire compatibility for him, enforcing the self-conception that he was the ruin of a human being in whom a ruinous power was being bred.

‘David.’ Dr. Izaguirre’s voice behind him. ‘Time for your injection.’

‘Inna second… I wanna hear the rest of the song.’

Izaguirre made a noise of grudging acceptance and walked in front of the screen. He was pale, long limbed, with a salt-and-pepper goatee, thinning gray hair, and a perpetually ardent expression: an aquiline El Greco Christ aged to sixty or thereabouts and fleshed out a bit, dressed in a starched guayabera and slacks. He peered at the ruins as if searching them for survivors, then pulled a pair of glasses from his pocket and fitted them to his nose with an affected flourish. All his gestures were affected, and Mingolla believed this reflected a conscious decision. He had the impression that Izaguirre felt so in control of his life, so unchallenged, that he had tailored the minutiae of his personality in order to entertain himself, had transformed his existence into a game, one that would test his elegant surface against the dulling inelegance of the world.

‘Tel Aviv,’ said Izaguirre. ‘Terrible, terrible.’ He went back behind the couch and gave Mingolla’s shoulder a sympathetic squeeze just as a flight of armored choppers flew out of the east over the city. It may have been this sight that triggered Mingolla’s response, and perhaps Izaguirre’s squeeze had a little to do with it, but whatever the cause, Mingolla’s eyes filled, and he was flooded with a torrent of suddenly liberated emotions and thoughts, mingling shame over his behavior with his parents, irritation at Izaguirre’s witness, and loathing for the self-absorption that had prevented him from relating to the tragedy of Tel Aviv in other than trivial and personal terms.

‘…rain is falling harder, makin’ speckles on the walk, blankets stuffed in broken windows glow softly in the dark.

An old bum his hands in baggies, slumps in a doorway ’cross the street, his eyes are brown like worn-out pennies, got bedroom slippers on his feet.

Some wise-ass stops and says, “Hey buddy! Know where I can get some rags like that?”

The bum keeps starin’ into nowhere… he knows nowhere’s where it’s at.’

Mingolla was overwhelmed by the desolation of the ruins and the song. The white blossoms lay in the dust like crumpled pieces of paper, the camera zoomed in on one to show how it was blackening from the radiation, and his identification with the place was so complete, he felt the white thoughts lying in the dust of his mind beginning to blacken as well. The vacancy of Tel Aviv was a sleet riddling him, seeding him with emptiness, and he came to his feet, buoyed by that emptiness, gripping the sofa to keep from floating away.

‘Don’t you want to listen?’ Izaguirre sounded amused.

‘Naw, un-uh.’

‘Are you sure? We have time.’

Mingolla shook his head no, continued to shake it, trying to get rid of all his nos, all his negatives, each shake more vehement, and when Izaguirre put an arm around him, he was most grateful, desperate to be led away from Tel Aviv and Prowler, ready now for his injection.

A crunching in the brush. Mingolla looked this way and that, thinking it must be Tully, but spotted a scrawny black man standing about twenty feet away: one of the islanders who inhabited the outbuildings. They had taken to following him around, retreating whenever he tried to confront them, as if he possessed some dread allure. The man slipped deeper into the thicket, and Mingolla relaxed, stretching out his legs. An alp of cumulus edged across the sun, transforming its radiance into a fan of watery light; wind flattened the tops of the bushes. Mingolla closed his eyes, basking in the warmth, in a heady sense of peace.

‘You a damn fool, mon,’ said a rumbling voice above him.

He sat up with a start, blinking. Tully was a black giant, looming into the sky, hands on hips.

‘A true damn fool,’ said Tully. ‘I wastin’ my time teachin’ you dat block, ’cause dere you sit, winkin’ on and off like a fuckin’ caution light. What you doin’, mon? Daydreamin’?’

‘I…’

‘Shut your fool mouth. Now dis’—he tapped his chest—‘dis a good block. And dis ain’t.’ As if a furnace door had been slung open, Tally’s heat washed over Mingolla. ‘And dis what you doin’.’ The heat ebbed, vanished, flared again. ‘I should put my foot to you!’

The sun hung directly behind Tully’s head, a golden corona rimming a black oval. Mingolla felt weak and weakening, felt that threads of himself were being spun loose and sucked into the blackness. Panicked, acting in reflex, he pushed at Tully not with his hands, but with his mind, and he was panicked still more by the sensation that he had fallen into a school of electric fish, thousands of them, brushing against him, darting away. Tully’s fist swung toward him, but that electricity, and the attendant feelings of arousal and strength, was so commanding that Mingolla was frozen, unable to duck, and the blow struck the top of his head, knocking him flat.

‘You ain’t got de force to war wit’ me, Davy.’ Tully squatted beside him. ‘But, mon, I just been waitin’ for you to make dis breakt’rough. Now we can really get started.’

Mingolla’s head throbbed, grass tickled his lower lip. He stared at the tips of Tully’s tennis shoes, the cuffs of his blue trousers. He struggled up, leaned against the wall, groggy.

‘Caught me by surprise, mon, or I stay from bashin’ you.’ Tully grinned, gold crowns glittering among his teeth, his good humor given the look of a fierce mask by the deep lines etched around his mouth and eyes. He was huge, everything about him huge, hands that could swallow coconuts, chest plated with muscle, and had about him an air of elemental masculinity that never failed to unsettle Mingolla. His hair was flecked with gray, his neck seamed, eyes liverish, but his arms—straining a white T-shirt—had the definition of a man twenty years younger. Above his left eye was a pink hook-shaped scar, startling in contrast to his coal-black skin, like a vein of some rare mineral. ‘Damn,’ he said. ‘You goin’ to be somethin’ special! You almost ’whelm me wit’ dat touch.’

Mingolla turned his gaze to the hotel roof, watched a string of pelicans flying above it, appearing to spell out a string of cryptic syllables.

‘I know you wary, mon,’ said Tully. ‘You like a little boy, and you got to be strong ’fore you go to facin’ up to me… and dat’s natural. Dese drugs, dey put you in a new world, and dat’s a trial for anyone, ’specially somebody been t’rough it like you. But I for you, Davy. Dat you can count on. I just got to be hard wit’ you, ’cause dat’s how you goin’ to get hard ’nough for dis new world.’

Mingolla’s distrust must have showed in his face, for Tully let out a laugh as guttural and toneless as a lion’s cough. ‘Dis t’ing ’tween you and me gettin’ to be a bitch,’ he said. ‘’Mind me of me and my father. Now dere was a harsh mon, lemme tell you. He come home drunk for he supper, and he say to me, “Boy, you so ugly you make me lose my appetite. Get under de table! I no want to be lookin’ at you while I chew.’’ And I don’t do what he say, he put me under dat table!’ He gave Mingolla a friendly punch on the leg. ‘S’pose I tell you get under de table? What you goin’ to do?’

‘Tell you to fuck yourself,’ said Mingolla.

‘Dat right?’ Tully scratched his neck. ‘Lessee if dat’s de case. You stay outside tonight, Davy. Don’t come back to de hotel. Stay out here and t’ink ’bout what’s ahead.’

‘How’m I supposed to know what’s ahead?’

‘Got a point dere. All right, I give you a glimpse of de future. Once you t’rough wit’ trainin’ dere will be a test. We be sendin’ you to La Ceiba, and you goin’ into de Iron Barrio and kill a mon wit’ de force of your mind.’

The concept of killing as a test left Mingolla unmoved, but Tully’s mention of the Iron Barrio drained him of belligerence.

‘Stay clear of de hotel tonight, Davy.’ Tully stood, un-kinked his back, twisting from side to side. ‘Study on how you goin’ to deal wit’ de Barrio wit’out my help. And if I catch you inside ’fore mornin’, it will go hard for you. Dat much you don’t need to study on.’

Tucked into a corner of the concrete wall was a tin-roofed shed that had once been a dive shop, and later that afternoon Mingolla entered it, intending to wait there until everyone was asleep and then sneak into the hotel. As he stepped through the door, a ghost crab scuttled from beneath the wooden table that centered the shed and vanished down a gap in the boards, leaving a trail of delicate slashmarks in the dust. Golden light slanted from rips in the tin, painting splotches of glare on the floor; dust motes stirred up by Mingolla’s tread whirled in the light, making it appear that something was about to materialize in each of the beams. Resting on the table were four rusted air tanks, bridged by spans of cobweb and looking in the gloom like enormous capsules of dried blood.

Mingolla sat against the rear wall of the shed next to a stack of yellowed scuba diving magazines. To pass the time he leafed through one and was amused to discover ads for various of the island’s resorts in the front pages. Pirate’s Cove, Jolly Roger’s, and such. Their buildings now abandoned, beaches cordoned by patrol boats, tourists driven off by the threat of rockets… though the island had never come under attack. Which was perplexing. Roatán was a logical target, being isolated, home to a CIA computer base, and well within range of rockets, bombs, or even an assault. The fact that there hadn’t been an attack made no sense, but sense, he thought, was not something war made in any great quantity, and he supposed that some absurd reason underlay the island’s security, some meshing of Marxist and capitalist irrationality, maybe a trade-off of immunities, an agreement to leave each other’s computers alone in order to provide both sides with the capacity to mete out death and destruction along predictable lines. That he could have this thought, which seemed a very adult thought, the type of caustic and dispassionate judgment that people often characterize as symptomatic of a mature disinterest, was, he decided, a sign that he was on the mend, that he was growing inured to the corrosive passions of war, becoming capable of clear-sighted progress.

He turned to a photo spread of divers in red and yellow wet suits floating in a turquoise depth, lost among thousands of brightly colored fish. Something about the photograph struck him as familiar, and he recalled his experience with Tully earlier that day. That was how it had been: he had been a driver in Tully’s mind, hovering in those electric depths, surrounded by the fish of his thoughts. And he was certain there had been a greater depth beyond. A place he imagined to be as labyrinthine as a coral reef, housing thoughts as intricate as sea fans.

Dusk made it impossible to read. Storm clouds blew in from the north, a freshet of rain spattering the roof; darkness slipped in under cover of the clouds, and moonlight filtered through the ripped tin, daubing the floors with lavender gray. Mingolla noticed a light fixture above the table. He went to the door, flipped a wall switch, and was surprised when the bulb flickered on, shining a white radiance into every corner of the shed. Moths began batting around it, casting a shrapnel of shadow over the walls. He sat back down and returned to reading, half-listening to the wind, the crashing on the reef. Then something creaked, and, glancing up, he saw a thin black woman standing at the door, wearing a threadbare dress that had bleached a pale indefinite brown. Alarmed, he reacted as he had with Tully, pushing toward her with his mind. Again that feeling of immersion, of power and arousal. But this time, meeting no resistance, he found himself swimming—it was the only word applicable—swimming in a pattern, a convoluted knot, and instead of penetrating an unknown depth as he had imagined, it seemed he was tunneling, that the stuff of the woman’s thought was aligning around his pattern, hardening into form that he was dictating. He moved so rapidly, he was unable to trace the complexities of the pattern; however, satisfied at last by some intuitive criteria that it was complete, secure in this, he pulled back from the woman. An erection was ridging up his trousers.

The woman swayed, righted herself, gaping, apparently stunned. She was young—eighteen, nineteen—and cocoa skinned, with a dusting of freckles across her nose and cheeks; her face was pretty, with a cleverness of feature that reminded him of Debora, and framed by stubby dreadlocks.… He lost interest in the woman, puzzled by his use of Debora as a comparative after all these months. But then he realized that while she had not been foremost in his mind, she had been a subroutine in his thoughts, a place to which he had traveled in dreams, in idle moments. And he realized, too, that his knowledge of her had deepened: it was as if he had been carrying on a dialogue with her, assembling a portrait of her from clues implicit in her words, her smell, her manner.

‘I been feelin’ you come,’ said the woman in hushed tones.

Again Mingolla pushed toward her, aiming the desire he had been harboring for Debora, understanding as he did that desire had a shape he could feel… feeling it like a pitcher who, leaning in for his sign, grips the baseball behind his back, fingering the seams until he has found the proper position: an unconscious yet expert process. The woman’s face went slack, her breath quickened.

‘Been feelin’ you come most all dis week,’ she said, edging closer. ‘You got so much power, mon!’ She fondled a shell that was threaded on a string about her neck, painted with red and green designs.

‘Who are you?’ Mingolla asked, anxious, not really caring who she was, wanting an answer that might shed light on who he was becoming.

‘I Hettie.’ She sank to her knees a body-length away. ‘De power full on you now. More power dan I ever felt, and praise God more de luck.’

Mingolla’s anxiety increased. ‘What’re you talking ’bout?’

‘De power bring de luck. Dat how it be always. De new ones come to power, and dey touch us fah to make dem safe.’

He recalled his sense of security after completing the pattern.

‘We keep you safe, too.’

‘Tell me ’bout the luck,’ he said.

She wetted her lips. ‘De luck ain’t not’in’ to talk on.’

‘Why not?’

‘Talkin’ liable to ’splain it ’way.’

That struck a chord in Mingolla, putting him in mind of his ritual, how he had been reluctant to talk about it… except with Debora, in whom he had seen another configuration of luck. ‘Tell me,’ he said. And I’ll give you stronger luck.’

A mixture of disbelief and glee melted up from Hettie’s face, as if he had promised something both improbable and wonderful, like the promise of an afterlife. ‘You do dis fah me?’

‘Yes.’

She talked in a breathy whisper, fingering her shell, head bowed, offering a litany of explanation, describing lives bound by magical pattern, security guaranteed by the repetition of behavior, and Mingolla began to wonder about the similarity between Hettie’s luck and his ritual of survival, the idiosyncrasies of the chopper pilots and of various other acquaintances back in Guatemala. All these behaviors shared the same delusionary character, and given that Hettie was essentially a test subject upon which fledgling psychics worked their changes, it could be that psychics were responsible in every instance, that the delusions were the product of their influence. He tried to dismiss this as paranoia, but found that he could not.

Hettie sat back on her haunches, silent, waiting for luck to be bestowed; her dress had ridden up, exposing the shadowy division between her thighs. Mingolla had no luck to give her, only desire, the one emotion he knew how to shape. Yet desire was powerful in him now. He was alive with it, alive with the power behind it. Everywhere he looked it seemed that the world was being enriched by the pressure of his vision. The weathered boards, the light beading silver on the cobwebs, the ruddy wood of the table, all these things seemed to shine brighter than before. Maybe, he thought, if desire was strong enough, it would effect luck. As he directed it toward her, he saw that luck, the feeling of being blessed with good fortune, also had a shape, and he incorporated that into the push of desire.

With an indrawn breath, Hettie arched her back, and, hands spread wide, caressed her belly, her breasts, pressing their rounds flat, kneading them. Watching her, Mingolla understood that his gift of desire and luck could have a return, that he could make love to her, that here among the moths and cobwebs he could commit an act of pure usage, almost of violence, of pleasure taken without toll or penance. And he was tempted. There was a peculiar tension in his body, a mingling of confidence and indecision, the way he had felt after receiving a pass at the top of the key, watching the waist of the man guarding him, not knowing whether to break right or left, leaning forward like a reluctant diver and letting gravity slowly take him, waiting until his opponent had seen—or thought he’d seen—a hint of direction, had shifted his weight in anticipation, placing himself at a disadvantage that would allow Mingolla to penetrate the lane. Hettie’s head lolled, her hips lifted. Sweat beaded her upper lip, the hollow of her throat. Abandon had refined her looks to an animal delicacy, and Mingolla reached for her, thinking of Debora, her delicacy. But at that moment she cried out, went down on all fours, hips thrusting at nothing, crying out again, more softly, hoarsely, and in her mind there was flurrying as of a million fish responding to a danger sign, scattering, their space filled by a lazy current, a sluggish tingling wash.

Wind battered the shed, vibrating the tin roof. Hettie remained on all fours, staring dull-eyed at Mingolla through the fat coils of her dreadlocks. He was glad he hadn’t taken her, because she was too easy a beast, because he wanted someone whose mind had not been walked through time and again. He got to his feet, and she followed him with her eyes; he moved around her to the table, and she turned her head, displaying no more emotion than a cow.

‘Get up!’ he said, irritated. But irritation gave way to pity, and when she stood, hands limp at her sides, he asked if she was all right.

‘I…’ She made a halfhearted effort at smoothing wrinkles on her dress. ‘T’ings dey comin’ clear.’

‘What things?’

‘T’ings of de luck.’

Branches ticked the wall of the shed, a wave boomed on the reef.

‘Better we find de others.’ Hettie came a step toward Mingolla, eyes wide, fidgeting with her shell. ‘Dis luck ’nough to make dem all catch a fire.’

Silver-blue clouds scudded across the moon, and a seamless dark flowed over the hotel grounds. Then the moon sailed clear, and the grounds became a floating puzzle of light and shadow: the edges of fronds, sprigs of round leathery sea-grape leaves, bamboo stalks, all illuminated by swatches of moonlight, all bounded by toiling blackness, rustling, seething, a troubled noise audible above the whispery vowels of wind and sea. Hettie beckoned to Mingolla, saying, Come, you follow!’ Mingolla waved at her, picking his way cautiously through the thicket toward the hotel, its white stucco ablaze between the arching trunks of palms, the open windows black as caves. The thrashing of the pitch-dark foliage seemed to empower him: he felt he was growing stronger with every step, storing inside himself the wildness of the night.

They turned away from the hotel into thicker brush, a path choked with ferns and fleshy-leaved plants, and came to a large clearing of packed dirt surrounding a bungalow with board walls and a conical thatched roof. Candles flickered in the doorway, each point of flame centering an orange nimbus. ‘I bring dem fah you,’ Hettie said, and went inside the bungalow, leaving Mingolla standing beside a palmetto. He was antsy and couldn’t understand why. It must be the brilliance of the moon, the way it spotlit him, he thought, and to elude that silvery eye, he moved closer to the palmetto, entering the tickling embrace of its fronds.

One by one islanders emerged from the bungalow, nearly a dozen black men and women, old, young, uniformly undernourished and ragged, all holding painted shells or some other fetish. Shadows collected in the folds of their clothing, in their wrinkles and eyesockets, giving them the appearance of walking dead. Their silence seemed to be dimming the moon’s wattage, muting the voice of the wind. Hettie urged them forward, but Mingolla did not let them get near, lashing out with his mind and halting their shambling approaches, tying inside their heads that intricate knot with which he had bound Hettie, and then firing them with good fortune, with other emotions whose shapes he was coming to know. They grunted as he struck, their eyes rolled and flashed with pure charges of moonlight; they muttered prayerfully, backing away, taking up positions at the perimeter of the clearing, fixing him with awed stares. Each exercise of power enlivened him, and when he had done he sat down in the dirt, calm at the center of their stares, but sensing himself the epicenter of a strange weather, a storm with impalpable winds that blew from a world just around the corner and passed without leaving a trace of damage, yet changed everything. He felt a need for normalcy, and spotting Hettie in the door of the bungalow, he called her over, asked her to sit. She lowered to her knees beside him, her hands clasped demurely in her lap.

‘Where you live, Hettie?’ he asked.

‘I lives here.’

‘I mean before you came here… where’d you live then?’

The concept of ‘before’ seemed to befuddle her, but at length she said, ‘My daddy have a little place out to Flowers Bay.’ Then, after a considerable pause: ‘He raise ponies.’

‘Yeah?’ said Mingolla, thinking that ponies and Flowers Bay sounded idyllic. ‘Why’d you leave?’

‘It were de ponies. Dem little children, dey wild! All de time tossin’ dere heads, givin’ you de duppy eye. Make me fearful to be ’mong dem.’

One of the other islanders—a man sitting in the shade of a sea-grape bush—let out a keening wail and lifted his hands to the moon.

‘Ponies ain’t goin’ to hurtcha,’ Mingolla said.

‘Oh, yes! All t’ings be hurtful when dere duppy loose.’ Hettie brushed her fingers across his knee, a reassuring touch. ‘But you be too strong for de duppies, mon.’

Her expression was in partial eclipse, half-moonlit, half-shadowed, impossible to read, but he detected in her a clouded regret, the trace of some sadness whose particulars she could no longer remember. He had wanted to talk with her, to pretend he was having an ordinary conversation with a pretty girl; but she was only the husk of a pretty girl, and there was nothing ordinary about either of them.

His thoughts turned again to Debora, and again he was confused by his fixation on her. He didn’t believe he was in love with her, he didn’t see how that could be possible. But this sort of thing, this long, almost unconscious study of another person, had once led him to fall in love, and he hoped that wasn’t the case now. He had a low opinion of love, of its power to distract and injure, though he was forced to admit that distraction and injury were good teachers. The woman he’d loved was five years older than he, one of those pretty upper middle class housewives common to the better neighborhoods of Long Island, with a penchant for ceramic jewelry and denim skirts, for charitable works inspired by boredom with their husbands, always looking for a glimmer of excitement to brighten them, yet not really expecting anything, seduced by the role they had accepted into believing that their lives were ruled by a canon of mediocrity, that boredom was their lot. He had been teaching a sketching class at the Y, and two weeks after she had joined the class, they had begun an affair. Everything had been perfect at first, but as the affair progressed she had grown afraid, had tried to quantify love, to rank it against the security and stability of her marriage, and in the end she had broken it off with Mingolla, leaving him older, wiser, and his schoolwork neglected to such an extent that he had become eligible for the draft.

‘Look like trouble lay he hand on you,’ said Hettie.

‘It’s nothing,’ he said.

Wind shredded the thatch of the bungalow, and smoky blue clouds drove across the moon, spreading a shadowy film through the air, a darkness that—as the clouds thickened—grew absolute.

‘Trouble not find you here,’ said Hettie. ‘Here you safe wit’ us.’

He could hardly make her out, ebony against anthracite.

‘Safe from war, from de duppies.’

Safe, he thought. Safe in this eerie, lightless clearing, safe among dazed human relics, with the chaos on the reef sounding as final as artillery, and the wind howling a secret name.

Oh, yeah! He was safe all right!

‘Safe from all t’ings,’ said Hettie.

As a reward for Mingolla’s breakthrough. Dr Izaguirre presented him with an autographed copy of The Fictive Boarding House by Juan Pastorín, Mingolla’s favorite author. ‘I’ve noticed you admiring it on my shelf,’ said the doctor, and Mingolla, who did not want to give Izaguirre credit for having been sensitive to him in any way, said that he had merely been curious, that he’d never heard of the book.

‘It’s a limited edition,’ said Izaguirre as they entered the hotel lobby, a long narrow room—essentially an expanded corridor—with tall windows ranging the eastern wall, and the western wall inset by a stairway and French doors that opened into a dining room. Vines and leaves scrolled the window-panes, admitting an effusion of gray light; velvety dust covered every surface. The carpet was indoor-outdoor runner brocaded with mildew, and above the dining room entrance was a painted menu listing the breakfast specials: faded misspelled words in English such as hotcaks and freid potatas. It was a place in which entropy appeared to have triumphed.

Beside the main door was a mirror, and beneath the mirror a bottomed-out rattan chair. Izaguirre dusted the chair with a handkerchief and sat; he pulled at his goatee, seeming to stretch the waxy stuff of his flesh. ‘What did you want to ask me?’ he said.

In the light of day Mingolla was less certain of his theory concerning the effects of psychic manipulation on the troops in Guatemala, but he laid it out for Izaguirre.

‘Yes, it’s most unfortunate,’ Izaguirre said. ‘The electrical activity involved causes minor changes in the brain… especially in those subjects upon whom the psychic is working. But there’s also a broadcast effect, and people in the immediate vicinity are affected as well. Delusionary systems are reestablished or enforced. Superstitions and so forth.’

‘Minor changes? You gotta be kidding!’ Mingolla waved toward the grounds. ‘Those people out there are wrecked, and some of the people I knew in Guatemala weren’t much better.’

‘The more frequent the encounters, the more extreme the effects.’ Izaguirre crossed his legs, imperturbable. ‘I sympathize with your reaction, but one has to look at the long result.’

Mingolla walked over to the reception desk, laid down his book, and stared into the cobwebbed pigeonholes on the wall, unable to sort out his feelings. ‘So I guess I must not have been zapped too often.’

‘Often enough. For one thing, according to your debriefing you were likely subject to the wiles of a Sombra agent shortly before your departure from Guatemala.’

‘What’s Sombra?’

‘The Communist version of Psicorps. This woman was named’—Izaguirre tapped his forehead, encouraging memory—‘Debora Cifuentes.’ He chuckled. ‘Here’s an irony for you. Since trying to persuade you to desert, she herself has deserted, fled into the Petén. One of the people at headquarters suggested that if you came through training as well as we expect, we might send you to track her down. She’s quite powerful, but we feel you’d be more than a match.’

Mingolla was speechless with rage.

‘Would you like that?’ asked Izaguirre.

‘Yeah,’ said Mingolla. ‘Yeah, that’d be all right.’ He paced beside the desk. ‘Y’know, I can’t figure something out.’

‘Yes?’

‘Why the hell all the fuss ’bout me, ’bout her. I mean all Psicorps does is sit around and try to guess when the next attack’s coming. Crap like that.’

‘You and the Cifuentes woman are anomalies. There aren’t more than thirty agents of your caliber in the world. You’ll do more than make guesses,’ Izaguirre watched him pace. You seem upset.’

‘I’m okay. Why didn’t she just, y’know… blow me away or whatever?’

‘She could have taken control of you, but that would have ruined your talent, and I assume she was trying to recruit you… not destroy you. It’s troublesome for one psychic to exert a subtle influence over another. That sort of interaction strengthens the talents of both parties. It sets up a feedback system whose efficiency is related to the intensity of mutual focus. And since you had the greater natural talent, more room to grow, as she worked on you, you were gaining in strength more rapidly than she could have predicted. Thus the difficulty.’ He stood, walked toward Mingolla. Surely something has upset you.’

‘It’s not important.’

‘I’d like to hear about it anyway.’

‘That’s too bad.’ Mingolla flipped open the book and looked at Pastorin’s signature, a complex conceit of loops and flourishes.

‘David?’

Mingolla slammed the book shut. ‘I thought I was falling in love with her.’ Then, sarcastically: ‘That probably had something to do with the intensity of our mutual focus.’

‘I wonder,’ said Izaguirre, his tone distant, abstracted.

Mingolla went over to a window. The jungly growth of the grounds stirred sluggishly beneath dark running clouds. What ‘bout the shit I was doing to those people last night?’

‘What you called a “pattern”

‘Yeah.’

‘A paranoid mechanism.’ Izaguirre gave a delicate cough. ‘You simply struck at the woman, stunned her. It’s a common enough first reaction. You already have quite a good grasp of how your talent operates. The shaping of emotion into a weapon and such. All you need is practice.’

‘Jesus,’ said Mingolla. The shit with the pattern sounds like…

’ What?’

‘I don’t know… like something a wasp might do. Insect behavior.’

‘You’re not concerned about your humanity?’

‘Wouldn’t you be?’

‘I’d be delighted to learn my potentials transcended the human.’

‘Then why don’t you take the fucking drugs?’

‘I have… not intravenously. I’ve ingested them in their natural state. But I have no talent. I only wish I did.’

‘I thought the stuff was synthetic.’

‘No, it’s a weed.’

‘Huh.’ Mingolla traced a design in the dust on the windowpane, saw that he had drawn a D, and wiped it out. I want that assignment.’

‘The Cifuentes woman?’

‘Right.’

‘I can’t promise anything. You’ve still got six or eight weeks here ahead of you. But if she’s still at large… perhaps.’ Izaguirre took him by the arm. ‘Get some sleep, David. You’ll need it for tomorrow. I’ll be starting RNA to bring your Spanish up to snuff, and Tully can hardly wait to put you through your paces.’

Despite his anxieties, his alienation, Mingolla felt calmer. It struck him as odd that he should be soothed by Izaguirre’s bedside manner, because at a remove, everything about the doctor grated on him.

‘Oh, don’t forget your book.’ Izaguirre retrieved the Pastorín book from the reception desk and handed it to him. ‘It’s very, very good,’ he said.

The first story in The Fictive Boarding House told of two families who had feuded over the possession of a magic flower. Mingolla lost interest in it halfway through, finding it too mannered and concluding that all the members of the families were complete assholes. The title story, however, enthralled him. It detailed a strange contract made between an author and the residents of a boarding house in a Latin American slum. The author offered to educate the residents’ children, to guarantee them lives of comfort, if in return the residents would spend their remaining days living out a story written by the author, one he would add to year by year, incorporating those events over which he had no control. Being in desperate straits, the residents accepted the offer, and though at times they balked and tried to break the contract, gradually their individual wishes and hopes were overwhelmed, subsumed into the themes employed by the story. Their lives had taken on almost mythic significance as a result, their deaths proving to be passionate epiphanies. Only the author, whose health had been ruined by the expenditure of energy necessary to script their lives, who had conceived of the project as a whimsy yet had realized it as a work of transcendent charity, only he had endured an ordinary life and ignominious extinction.

Sleepy, Mingolla closed the book, turned off his bedside lamp, and settled back. Moonlight streamed in the window, bathing the walls in a bluish white glow, bringing up stark shadows beneath his writing desk and chair. Tacked to the walls were a number of sketches he had done during the months of drug therapy. They were unlike anything he had done before, all depicting immense baroque chambers of stone, with bridges arching from blank walls, ornate staircases leading nowhere, vaulted ceilings opening onto strange perspectives of still more outrageous architecture, and thronging the horizontal planes, hordes of ant-sized men, smudgy dots almost lost among the pencil shadings and lines. It made him uncomfortable to look at them now, not because of their alienness, but because he recognized the psychology underlying them to be his own, and he wasn’t certain whether that psychology had been laid bare by the drugs or was the product of a transformation.

His eyelids drooped, and he thought of Debora, both with anger and with longing. Despite Izaguirre’s revelations, his obsession had survived intact, and whenever he tried to apply the logic of recrimination, the fact of her betrayal was swept away by fantasy or by his insistence in believing that she must have had some real feeling for him. And so it was not at all surprising that he dreamed of her that night, a dream unusual for its lucidity. She was floating in a white void, clad in a gown of such whiteness that he could not see its drape or fold: she might have been a disembodied head and arms superimposed on a white backdrop. She was revolving slowly, tipping toward him, then away, allowing him to view her at every angle and each angle providing him with insights into her character, seeming to illustrate her resilience, her toughness, her capacity for devotion. There was no music in the dream, but her movements were so graceful, he had the notion they were being governed by an inaudible music that pervaded the void, perhaps a distillate of music that manifested as a white current. She drifted closer, and soon was near enough that—if the dream had been real—he could have touched her. She drifted closer yet, her limbs aligning with the position of his arms and legs, and in her pupils he saw tiny facsimiles of himself floating in whiteness. A keening noise switched on inside his head, and his desire for her also switched on; he wanted to shake off the bonds of the dream and pull her against him. Her lips were parted, eyes heavy-lidded, as if she, too, were experiencing desire. And then she drifted impossibly close, merging with him. He went rigid, terrified by a feeling of being possessed. She was inside him, shrinking, becoming as small as a thought, a dusky thought in a white dress wandering the corridors of…

He sat bolt upright in bed, sweating, breathing hard, and for a split second, confused by the moonstruck walls, he believed he had awakened in the white place of his dreams. Even after he recognized his surroundings, he couldn’t escape the thought that she was in the room with him. The geometries of moonlight and shadow appeared to be describing the presence of an invisible form. He was alert to every creak, every quiver of shadow, every sigh of wind. ‘Debora?’ he whispered, and when he received no answer he lay back on the bed, tense and trembling.

‘Goddamn you!’ he said.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Roatán was no tropical paradise. Though the barrier reef was lovely and had once nourished more than a dozen resorts, the interior consisted of low scrub-thatched hills, and much of the coast was given over to mangrove. A dirt road ran partway around the island, connecting the shantytowns of Coxxen Hole, French Harbor, and West End, and a second road crossed from Coxxen Hole to Sandy Bay on the north coast, where the hotel was located: a curving stretch of beach that one moment could seem beautiful and the next abysmally ugly. That, Mingolla realized, was the charm of the place, that you could be walking along on a beach of filthy yellow-brown sand, stepping carefully to avoid pig and cattle droppings, and then, as if a different filter had slid in front of the sun, you suddenly noticed the hummingbirds flitting above the sea grape, the hammocks of coco palms, the reef water glowing in bands of jade and turquoise and aquamarine, according to the varying depth and bottom. Sprinkled among the palms were several dozen shanties set on pilings, their tin roofs scabbed with rust; jetties with gap-boarded outhouses erected on their seaward ends extended out over the shallows, looking at a distance to have the artful crudity of charcoal sketches by Picasso.

It was along this beach that Mingolla learned control of his power through daily lessons with Tully. The lessons were—as Izaguirre had suggested—merely the practice of those things of which he had become aware that first night in the shed, serving to augment his strength and the capacity to know the shape of his emotions; yet he believed he was learning another sort of lesson as well, a lesson in personal competence, in the shouldering of power, the acceptance of its virtues and the practical denial of its liabilities. Though Tully still unnerved him, he saw that his trainer’s arrogance and forceful approach to life were qualities essential to the wielding of power; and though he continued to dream of Debora, to think of her in terms of longing, he came to view these dreams and thoughts in a grim light, to perceive her as a target.

One morning he and Tully sat floating in a dory just inside the reef. The tide was low, and iron-black coral heads lifted from the water like the parapets of a drowned castle, its crannies populated by whelks and urchins. Beyond the reef, the sea was banded in sun-spattered streaks of slate and lavender, and there were so many small waves, the water appeared to be moving in all directions at once. ‘I hate the goddamn sea,’ said Tully, and spat over the side. He leaned back in the stern, jammed a grease-stained baseball cap lower onto his ears; his skin was agleam with bluish highlights under the sun.

‘Thought you used to be a fisherman,’ said Mingolla.

‘Best on de island, mon. But dat don’t mean I got to like de sea. Ain’t not’in’ but a motherfuckin’ graveyard! Once dat come home to me, I never set foot ’pon her again. Look dere!’ He pointed to another dory passing close to the shore, maybe fifty yards off. ‘Call de mon over, Davy.’

Mingolla tried to engage the man’s mind, but failed. ‘Can’t reach him.’

‘Keep tryin’ till you catch a hold.’ Tully propped his feet beside an oarlock, and the dory rocked. ‘Nosir! Once I seen de way of t’ings, I left de sea for good’n all.’

‘How come?’

The man in the dory shouted, waving at the shanties tucked among the palms. ‘Got silkfish, satinfish! Got reef snapper and blues!’

‘How come?’ Tully snorted. ‘’Cause I were sixteen days stranded on dat graveyard sea. Dat were on de Liberty Bell, nice little craft. Tested hull, V-8. Had us some nice fish, too. ’Leven sacks kingfish, coupla sacks grouper.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘Sixteen days! And each one a longer day dan I have ever knowed. Drinkin’ fish blood, watchin’ men die crazy.’

The dory had come within twenty yards, and Mingolla made contact with its pilot, projecting amiability and curiosity into his mind. ‘Got him,’ he said as the man stopped rowing, shielded his eyes against the sun, and peered toward them.

‘Not bad,’ said Tully. ‘Don’t reckon I can do much better.’

Mingolla conveyed a sense of urgency to the man in the dory, wanting him to row faster.

‘Sixteen days,’ said Tully. ‘And by de time dat shrimper fetch us in tow, wasn’t but four of us left. The rest dey sun-killed or gone over de side.’

The man in the dory was bent over his oars, pulling hard.

‘Towed us clear to Bragman Key,’ Tully went on. ‘Dat were an upful place, Bragman. Dey lodged us in a hotel and treat our fevers. Give us fresh fruit, rum. And dere were dis little gal who gimme special comfort. ‘’Pears she just couldn’t stand to see me de way I was. We had us a time ’fore I left, me and dat gal. And I tell her I’s comin’ back for her, but I never did… I never did.’ Tully spat again. ‘I ’tended to, but when I get back to de island, everybody’s makin’ me out a hero, and I’m tellin’ my story, drinkin’. I just loose track of dat gal. I ’grets it sometimes, but it probably for de best.’

The man shipped his oars, let his dory drift near, and caught hold of the stern. ‘How you be, Tully?’ he said. He was a wiry brown man in his thirties, with glittering black eyes, the skin around them seamed and puckered. His genitals protruded from one leg of his shorts, and sweat matted the curly hairs on his chest.

‘Survivin’,’ Tully said. Davy, dis my half-brother, Donald Ebanks.’

Mingolla exchanged nods with the man.

‘What you catchin’, mon?’ asked Tully.

Donald lifted the corner of a canvas, revealing a couple of dozen fish in the bottom of the dory, some turquoise, some red, some striped yellow and black, shining like a salad of oddly shaped jewels around the centerpiece of a long fish with black sides, a white belly, and needle teeth: a barracuda.

‘How much for dat barra?’

Mingolla started to exert influence on Donald, trying for a free fish; but Tully kicked his ankle and said, ‘No, mon! Dat not how it goes.’

‘Why not?’ said Mingolla.

‘Take what you need, and give back what you can. Dat’s de only way to be in dis world.’

Tully’s stare quailed Mingolla, and he looked down at Donald’s fish, their gemmy sides pulsing with last breaths.

‘I ’spect I take four lemps for de barra,’ said Donald.

‘I ‘spect so,’ said Tully with a laugh. ‘’Spect you’d take more’n dat, and you find a big ’nough fool.’ He dug some wadded bills from his pocket. ‘Two lemps, mon. And don’t be rude wit’ me. Dat’s a fat price, and you know it.’

‘You a bitch, Tully.’ Donald picked up the barracuda, heaved it into their dory. ‘Strip de shadow from my back, I give you de chance.’

‘Don’t want your damn shadow, and if I did, I sure as hell not goin’ to pay you two lemps for it.’ Tully handed over the money.

Donald regarded the bills dolefully, pocketed them, and without another word he rowed off toward shore.

‘Sorry,’ Mingolla said. ‘Guess I shoulda figured him being your brother.…’

‘Half-brother!’ Tully snapped. ‘And dat don’t have a t’ing to do wit’ it. Son of a bitch ain’t no friend of mine. Been tryin’ to swindle me goin’ on dese ten years. What I told you, dat’s true for de world.’

Mingolla studied the barracuda’s doll eyes. ‘Didn’t know you could eat barracuda.’

‘Can’t all de time. You got to drop a crumb of de flesh on an anthill. If de ants take it, you can eat your fill. Fries up nice wit’ plantain.’

A northerly breeze sprang up, heavying the chop, stirring the palms along the shore, and the dory bobbed up and down.

‘Don’t take it to heart, Davy,’ said Tully. ‘You learnin’. Just take more time to be wise dan to be strong.’

Misty night, the moon a foggy green streak between the palm fronds, and the surf muffled, sounding like bones being crunched in the mouth of a beast. Light spilled from the windows of a small frame church set back from the shore, and sweet African harmony spilled from it, too, resolving into a final Amen. Young boys in white shirts, blue trousers, and girls in frilly white dresses came down the steps, passing within thirty feet of the log where Tully and Mingolla were sitting, their voices liquid and clear; they turned on flashlights as they moved off into the dark, playing the beams onto the shallows, lacquering the black water.

‘Dere,’ said Tully, indicating two teenage girls holding hymnals to their breasts. ‘De one on de left. But don’t mess wit’ de other… that my cousin ’Lizabeth.’

‘She’s not tryin’ to swindle you?’ said Mingolla.

Tully grinned. ‘Don’t be mouthin’ me. Naw, dat ’Lizabeth’s goin’ to stay sweet ’long as I can help it. But dat Nancy Rivers, she been wit’ half de island. You go on’n go crazy wit’ her if you want.’

Mingolla checked Nancy out: flat-chested, light-skinned, with a lean horsey face. He was not inspired to craziness, but nevertheless he touched her mind with desire. She glanced at him, whispered to Elizabeth, and after a second they walked over to the log.

‘How de night, Tully?’ Elizabeth asked.

‘It’s goin’ all right,’ said Tully. ‘And you?’

‘Not’in special, y’know.’ Elizabeth was sexy, tall, and had Tully’s coal-black skin; her heavy-lidded eyes and pouting mouth and broad nose reminded Mingolla of statuettes he’d seen in displays of African folk art. Nancy elbowed her, and she performed the introduction.

Mingolla grunted, gouged a trench in the sand with his toe.

‘Well,’ said Elizabeth after an uncomfortable silence. ‘Guess we’ll be marchin’. You come see us, Tully.’

‘Dat I will.’

The two girls ambled off, whispering, and Mingolla watched the roll of Elizabeth’s hips. Tully shoved him, knocking him off the log. ‘What’s wrong wit’ you, mon? T’ought you was after some squint?’

‘Not her, man… she’s ugly.’

‘Shit! You got eyes ’tween your legs? C’mon!’ Tully hauled Mingolla to his feet. ‘We goin’ to de Hole. Dey got bitches dere will tie a knot in it for you!’

They returned to the hotel, where Tully changed into slacks and a rayon shirt with the silk-screened photo of a blonde in a bikini on the back. He broke out a bottle of rum, and they drank from it as they hurtled over the bumpy hill road in the hotel’s Land Rover, swerving around tight corners, driving blind through patches of mist, past thatched farmhouses and banana plots, once nearly hitting a cow whose horns were silhouetted against the lesser blackness of the sky and faint stars. They seemed to be pulling the night along with them, to have the kind of delirious momentum that Mingolla associated with freeway flying, with speeding into nowhere, an angel in the backseat, a fortune in your veins, following the white lines to some zero point behind the horizon, the end of a black rainbow where the wrecked cars were piled to heaven and smiling corpses leaked golden blood. Tully sang reggae in a hoarse raucous voice, and Mingolla, not knowing the words, pounded a drumbeat on the dash. Then he sang a Prowler song: ‘Got see-thru windows, hyperventilation in my ride, and little Miss Behavior in a coma by my side…’

‘What kinda hollerin’ dat?’ said Tully. ‘Dat ain’t no damn song!’

And Mingolla laughed, knowing it was going to be a good time.

In Coxxen Hole, the yellow dirt streets were ablaze with glare from weathered shanties that perched on their pilings like ancient hens straining at empty nests, their slatboard shutters wobbling one-hinged, plastic curtains belling, rusted tin roofs curled at the edges. On the main street stood a two-story frame hotel. Hotel Coral, painted pink, with a light pole lashed to its second-floor balcony, and a cinderblock office building patrolled by Indian soldiers in camouflage fatigues. Between the offices and the hotel, a concrete pier extended out into the blackness of the sea; two stubby turtling boats with furled sails were moored at its extremity. Heat lightning flashed orange above the Honduran coast thirty miles away. Music blared from the shanty bars; fat women in print dresses and turbans to match waddled in stately pairs, staring down the black men—most as skinny as stick figures—who accosted them. Dogs skulked among the pilings, nosing at crab shells and broken bottles.

There was so much activity that Mingolla—accustomed to the peace of the hotel—became flustered and in order to escape the confusion went with the first prostitute who happened along. She led him into the back room of a large shanty whose sole designation as a bar was a hand-lettered sign nailed above the entrance that said FRENLY CLUB—NO RIOT. She stripped off all her clothes except her brassiere and lay down on a straw mattress that crackled like flames beneath her and held out her arms. She was mud colored, fat in the hips and thighs, with a face that might once have been pretty but had gone matronly and dull with—Mingolla thought—lack of expectation. For some reason her hopelessness aroused him. He tried to take off her bra, but she pushed his hands away. He squeezed her breasts, and she closed her eyes, enduring the pressure. He envisioned cancers or scars hidden by the brassiere, and he did not insist on her removing it. He fucked her quickly and hard, imagining that the drunken shouts from the bar were cheering him on. Her movements were mechanical, uninspired, and after he had rolled off, she wasted no time in pulling on her dress and sat on the mattress, lacing her tennis shoes. They hadn’t exchanged a word since he had asked her price. He resented her indifference, and although he hadn’t touched her mind during the act, now he made her sleepy. She yawned, passed a hand across her eyes.

‘Little tired?’ he said. ‘Why don’t you get some rest?’

She pinched the bridge of her nose. ‘Can’t,’ she said. ‘De room ain’t paid for.’

‘I’ll pay for it,’ he said. ‘Go to sleep.’

‘Why you do dat, mon?’

‘I’ll come back later and see you.’ He said this with menace, but she was too groggy to notice. She yawned again and flopped on the mattress. ‘Sleep tight,’ he said, and slammed the door behind him.

He paid the barman for the room, for a bottle of rum, and sat at a corner table, waiting for Tully, blinking against the light from an unshaded ceiling fixture. Red and black posters advertising local bands were taped to the board walls; a record player on the counter—unfinished planks laid over packing crates—ground out warped reggae tunes, their lyrics lost in the uproar. A black man was slumped face down across the table next to Mingolla’s, and crowding the rest of the tables were thirty or so black men who looked on their way to joining him; they were waving dog-eared aces and queens, shaking their fists, shouting. Their eyes rolled, they spilled drinks on their shirts and jetted smoke from their nostrils. Scuffles broke out, were put down, and new scuffles broke out between the peacemakers. Mingolla slugged back shot after shot, trying for a level of drunkenness to suit the environment. But the noise became more and more aggravating. And it wasn’t only the noise that bothered him, it wasn’t merely a hangover of bad temper from the prostitute. His anger seemed funded by a less identifiable yet more poignant offense, and he wanted quiet in which to figure out what it could be. To that end he began to orchestrate calm, muting rages, soothing ruffled sensibilities, conjuring smiles in the place of frowns. Before long, the bar was a scene of hushed conversations and polite debates over misplays.

‘I know de trey of clubs were played, Byrum,’ said a man nearby. ‘I ’member it were right ’fore Spurgeon lay de black queen.’ And Byrum, a grizzled old man in a captain’s hat from which most of the braid had been worn, said maybe so, but he just couldn’t recollect how the trey had sneaked into his hand.

Mingolla was delighted by the ease with which he had accomplished this, but was dissatisfied with the aesthetic result. What was needed, he thought, was not a sedate bridge-club atmosphere, but a diminution of the previous riot, a formal statement of its potential. He set the men at one table to laughing, those at another to weeping; then he sipped his rum, studying the effect and considering further changes. He kindled a shouting match between Byrum and another old man with a tobacco-stained prophet’s beard, provoked them to point fingers and throw ineffectual punches over the shoulders of the men keeping them apart. The needle of the record player stuck, and Mingolla convinced the barman that everything was fine, left him smiling, nodding his head in time to the repeated scratchy phrase. By the time he had completed these adjustments, Mingolla’s anger had faded. He sat contentedly, effecting decorative touches, modulating glee and despair, until the bar had acquired a theatrical atmosphere, that of a play set in the dayroom of an asylum, with the lunatics compartmentalized in different sections of the room according to the degree and character of their maladies.

‘Goddammit!’

Tully came weaving his way among the tables toward Mingolla, scowling; he rested his fists on the back of a chair and said, ‘Mon, you crazy! You straighten dis out right now!’ His fly was at half-mast, his shirt hung open, and he was having difficulty in focusing.

‘I like it like this,’ said Mingolla.

An instant later he had an urge to comply with Tully, with his good friend and mentor, a man who had always been the caretaker of his best interests. He felt shame at having let him down. But recognizing the sudden onset of these feelings and the vagueness accompanying them to be symptomatic of Tully’s influence, he shaped a wrecking ball of an emotion, of fear and insecurity, and launched it at Tully. Saw him wobble, catch the table for support. Tully fought back, and for a moment Mingolla could sense a border between them, a meeting ground of two streams of heat and electricity; but then that border crumbled, and Tully pulled back, slumped into the chair. Mingolla, too, pulled back. Had a sip of rum, smiled at Tully, who was rubbing his forehead with the heel of his hand.

‘Straighten dis out,’ he said.

‘Why should I?’

‘Ain’t everybody on de island your friend, mon? T’ink dere ain’t spies ’round, t’ink dey ain’t watchin’ for signs?’

Mingolla parodied his accent. ‘Den better you get to straight-enin’, mon, ‘cause I weary.’

Tully glowered, then lowered his eyes, scraping at the label on the rum bottle with his thumbnail. All around them the bar began to regain its previous level of noise and discord. Card games back in full swing, record player fixed, voices raised in complaint. A tide of normalcy covering up Mingolla’s folly. His pleasure at having defeated Tully ebbed. Tully’s superiority had been a buffer, an assurance of protection; now that he was top gun, he felt leery and at risk.

‘What de hell’s crawled up your asshole, mon?’ said Tully, leaning close. ‘And don’t gimme no bullshit answer! Dis ain’t your teacher axin’ why you cut class, dis serious business.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Mingolla sullenly.

‘Damn, you better start knowin’, Davy. You goin’ to be meat on somebody’s table, and you keep up dis messin’… understand?’

‘Yeah, I guess.’

‘All dis crap have soured my stomach!’ Tully shifted his chair, looking glum; he cocked an eye toward Mingolla. ‘You never take me if I been sober.’

‘Probably.’ Mingolla nudged the rum bottle toward him. ‘Have a drink.’

Tully took a swig, wiped his mouth. ‘Probably! Ain’t no probably ’bout it, mon!’ He had another swig, sighed. ‘Better be headin’ home soon.’

‘I wanna stay,’ said Mingolla. ‘All right?’

Tully chewed on the thought.

‘I won’t fuck up again.’

‘Can I trust dat?’

‘Far as I know.’

‘Far as you know… huh!’ Tully peeled away the rum label, wadded it. ‘Well, I got a little somethin’ waitin’ down de street, so I don’t mind. What you goin’ to do?’

‘I got somethin’ goin’ here.’

‘Somethtn’ in de back room?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘What I tell you ’bout dese island girls? Dey work out de kinks or don’t dey?’

‘They’re okay,’ said Mingolla.

‘Aw, hell!’ Tully levered up from the table. ‘You have your fun, mon. But just ’member… start messin’ again, and it goin’ to be your bones dat gets gnawed on, not mine.’

Mingolla had intended to return to the prostitute with a vengeance, to make her crazy in sex and learn the awful secrets of her breasts; but his need for vengeful action had passed. She was still asleep. Curled up on the mattress, dress bunched around her thighs, a chubby, unlovely woman cornered by poverty and inanition: the grain of the silvery gray floorboards seemed a script spelling out her sad story. The bed was the only piece of furniture in the room, and not wanting to disturb her, Mingolla sat on the floor, listening to the shouts from the bar gradually subside into muffled chatter. It began to rain, a heavy downpour that drummed so loudly on the tin roof, he thought it would wake the prostitute. But she slept on under his spell, and the rhythms of the rain soon made him drowsy. His thoughts came and went one at a time, without logical attachments or chains of causation, like hawks circling an empty sky. Thoughts of Debora, of his power, of Tully and Izaguirre, of home and war. And from their isolation, their profound disunity, he concluded that a mind was not something grown or evolved, but was a mosaic, a jackdaw’s nest of baubles and bits of glass between which lightning flickered now and again, connecting and establishing the whole for fractions of seconds, creating the illusion of a man, of a man’s rational and emotional convictions. Years before, months before, he might have denied this conception, put forward a romantic conception in its stead. But the constituency of his mind, his jackdaw’s nest, had changed, with war and prostitutes replacing home-cooking and girlfriends, and though a younger Mingolla would have rejected the bleakness of this self-knowledge, the current one found in it a source of strength, a justification for conscienceless action, for contempt of sentiment. Yet even this cold and contemplative stance was wedded to sentiment. He would have liked to curl up with the prostitute, to hold her. She was a fit consort for someone of his disposition. She would smell of clay and rain. His arms would gouge her malleable flesh, sink into her, merging with her substance, and they would dissolve in the rain, a brown fluid running out between the boards, puddling beneath the shanty, soaking into the earth and serving to hasten the hatching of insect and lizard eggs, sending forth a horde of mindless things to take their place.

He waked with a pale dawn light leaking through gaps in the shutter and went out into the bar. His head ached, his mouth felt dirty. He plucked a half-full beer from the counter and walked down the shanty stairs into the street. The sky was milky white, but the puddles of rainwater were a shade more gray, as if they held a soured residue; the slant of the roofpeaks looked askew and witchy. A dog slunk away from Mingolla as he headed for the center of town; crabs scuttled beneath an overturned dory, and a black man was passed out beneath one of the shanties, dried blood streaking his chest. Sleeping on a stone bench beside the pink hotel was an old man with a rifle in his lap. It seemed the tide of events had withdrawn, leaving the bottom dwellers exposed.

He walked down to the landward end of the concrete pier. The turtling boats had sailed, and the sky above the mainland had cleared to a pale aqua. He could see a chain of low smoky hills on the horizon. He had a swallow of warm beer, gagged, and spat it out; he tossed the bottle into the harbor, watched it float among oil slick and streamers of kelp, drifting back to clink against the barnacled concrete. Heaps of sudsy gray foam lifted on the swells, and just beneath the surface something stick-thin and opaque blew from its tubular mouth what looked to be a little ectoplasmic fog. The scents of brine and sweet rot on the offshore wind. Mingolla decided he felt pretty good, considering.

‘See you made it, Davy!’ Tully came up beside him. His eyes were bloodshot, and a chalky pallor suffused his skin.

‘Rough night?’ Mingolla asked.

‘Dey all rough, you get my age. But I usually can find some bitch be kindly to an ol’ man.’ Tully flung a hand out toward the coast. ‘You checkin’ out de Iron Barrio, huh?’

‘What you mean?’

Tully pointed to the low-lying hills. ‘Dat dere’s smoke from de Barrio, Breakfast fires, and maybe burnin’ bodies. Dey like to hang de bodies on de roof and set dem afire.’

‘Oh,’ said Mingolla.

‘Yeah, dey makes a big stink over dere every mornin’.’

Mingolla squatted, tried to make out the definition of the smoke. Now that he knew what it was, it appeared to be wavering, betraying flashes of red, redolent of demonic activity. ‘This man I’m supposed to kill…’

‘What ’bout him?’

‘Who is he?’

‘Some Nicaraguan name of de Zedeguí. Opolonio de Zedeguí. He one of Sombra’s top agents, used to be a professor or somethin’ ’fore de therapy.’ Tully hawked and spat. ‘Mon crazy to go try and hide heself in a prison.’

‘Why’s he hidin’ out?’

‘Deserted, I ’spect. But de mon bound to be crazy, and he t’ink de Barrio goin’ to keep him safe.’

Mingolla gazed at the smoke, wondering what lay beneath it.

‘You worried, Davy?’

‘Some… but not as much as I thought I’d be.’

‘Dat’s a good balance. You keep dat frame of mind, you be all right. Just don’t be worryin’ too much. Time you hit de Barrio, you goin’ to be a dangerous mon.’ Tully grunted. ‘Hell, you a dangerous mon already.’

Between lessons, Mingolla spent the hours reading and prowling the beach; occasionally Hetti or another of the derelicts would tag along, but he had grown tired of their attentions and worked to discourage this. Twice he ran into Tully’s cousin Elizabeth on the beach, and once she shared her lunch with him, showing him how to eat cashew fruit by thumbing out the black seeds and sprinkling the sour pulp with salt. She seemed to like him, and he toyed with the idea of starting something with her, but was reluctant to go against Tully. Weeks went by, and he grew bored and restless, now feeling as confined by the island as he had been by the wall around the hotel. His sleep was troubled by dreams of Debora, and whenever these dreams would wake him, he would put himself back to sleep by imagining scenarios of sexual vengeance.

One afternoon a couple of weeks before he was scheduled to leave for La Ceiba, Izaguirre gave him a final booster injection of the drug. The shot left him achy and nervous, the inside of his head tender-feeling; and that night, unable to sleep, plagued by flash hallucinations of unfamiliar streets and people’s faces that melted away too quickly for him to identify, he wandered through the hotel, ending up in Izaguirre’s office, which was never kept locked. It was a small room just off the lobby, outfitted with a desk, two chairs, a bookcase, and a filing cabinet. Mingolla sat in the doctor’s chair and went through the files, too distracted to understand much of what he was reading, ignoring the typed material—the letters seemed to be scurrying around like ants—and concentrating on the marginalia penned in Izaguirre’s florid script. He continued to have hallucinations, and when he ran across a note describing Izaguirre’s concern that he might have given Mingolla too large a dosage in the booster shot, the hallucinations grew more vivid. He saw part of a mural on a pebbled wall, a woman’s brown arm hanging off the edge of a mattress, rendered with a fey sensuality that put him in mind of Degas, and accompanying it, oppressive heat and the smell of dust and decay. This hallucination had the compelling clarity of a premonition, yet was so much more detailed than his usual premonitions that he became frightened. He stood up, felt queasy, dizzy, and shook his head. The walls darkened, whirled, brightened again, and he closed his eyes, trying to quell his nausea. Put his hand on the desk, and touched warm skin. Opened his eyes, saw a bag lady staring up at him from a curb, her fat cheeks webbed with broken capillaries, her nose bulbous, a scarf knotted so tightly under her chin, it warped her ruddy face into a knobbly vegetable shape.

‘This ain’t America,’ she said dolefully. ‘America wouldn’t treat nobody like this.’

Mingolla staggered, had an incoherent impression of orange sky, a night sky above a city, diseased-looking palm trees with brown fronds and scales on their trunks, and rain-slick asphalt reflecting nebular blurs of neon, and bars with glowing words above them. Sinewy music whose rhythms seemed to be charting the fluctuations of his nerves. Somebody bumped into him, said, ‘Whoops,’ an oily fat man with a moon face, sticking out his pink meat of a tongue on which a cobra had been tattooed, then smiling and mincing off to a world where he was beautiful.

‘See what I tol’ ya,’ said the bag lady.

Gaudily dressed crowds shuffling in and out of the low glassfront buildings, a history of the American perverse… Hookers in day-glo hotpants, leather boys, floozies in slit skirts, topless teenage girls with ANGEL stamped on their left breasts, and all the faces pale in the baking heat, characters in a strange language, circular dominoes with significant arrangements of dark eyes and mouths, borne along on the necks of fleshy machines, one thought per brain like a prize in a plastic egg, doing a slow drag down the devil’s row of bars and sex shops and arcades, under the numinous clouded light, under the smears of red and yellow words melting into the air, their voices a gabble, their laughter a bad noise, the rotten yolk of their senses streaking the night, and Mingolla knew the bag lady was wrong, that this was most definitely America, the void with tourist attractions, the Southern California bottomland experience, and somewhere or everywhere, maybe lurking behind a billboard, was a giant red-skinned flabby pig of a Satan, his gut hanging over his tights, horny and giggling, watching through a peephole the great undressing of his favorite bitch, the Idea of Order.…

The bag lady shook her head in despair. ‘We need a new Columbus, that’s what we need.’

‘Help out a vet,’ said a voice behind him, and Mingolla spun around to confront a weasly crewcut man on crutches, one-legged, wearing fatigues with a First Infantry Nicaragua patch, holding out a hand. In the darks of his eyes Mingolla saw the secrets of combat, the mysterious truths of shock.

‘Hey,’ said the vet. ‘Hey! I know you, man! ’Member me? The valley, man, the valley near Santander Jimenez.’ He hobbled a step forward, peering at Mingolla’s face. ‘Yeah, it’s you, man. You looked different… your hair was different or something. But yeah, I…’

‘Un-uh.’ Mingolla backed away, feeling unbelievably tall, worried that he might scrape his head on the orange sky; get wet with that polluted color. ‘You got the wrong guy.’

‘The fuck I do! You was there when I was hit, man. ’Member? The game with the beaner… y’gotta ’member the game!’

Mingolla stepped into the crowd, was carried away by their slow crush. He couldn’t remember the man, but then he couldn’t remember much of anything, and he was afraid someone else might recognize him, someone with an ax to grind.

‘You’re a vet, huh?’ A woman, a beautiful, pale, black-haired woman with carmine lips and high cheekbones, enormous eyes, and the voluptuous body used to mold pornographic beer glasses displayed beneath a full-length gown fabricated of tiny black-lace serpents and filmy mesh, a woman with silkburns on her hips and probably a really keen tattoo… she took his arm and pressed close. ‘I’m Sexula,’ she said. ‘And I’m free to vets.’

That started him laughing, thinking about the Gl Bill and benefits.

‘Hey, fuck you, Jim!’ She pushed him away. ‘I’m just tryin’ to be real, y’know. You some kinda faggot, get your ass over to The Boy’s Room!’

‘Faggot?’ Hilarity was peaking in him, graphing Himalayas of unvoiced laughter. ‘Want me to show you my dingus, prove my point? Want me to unholster my—’

‘I don’t have to listen this shit! Maybe the other rides like it, man, but not me. I…’

‘What you mean “rides”?’ The unfamiliar term brought him down to earth, reminded him that he was lost, that he’d lost… who the hell was it? The crowd moved them up against a window.

‘Rides, man!’ she said. ‘Like, y’know, this’—her gesture took in the street—‘this here’s the carnival, and I’m one of the rides.’ She caught up his hand. ‘You okay, man? You lookin’ pretty scorched.’

Laughter was mounting inside him again. He took in the woman’s body, incredible breasts, wild cherry nipples peeking from the twinings of black lace coils. Nice girl, he thought. A foreign student, no doubt. Working her way through junior college.

‘What’s in ya, man? Little too much frost?’

He remembered some more. ‘I’m looking for somebody… somebody’s looking for me.’

‘You found her,’ she said. ‘C’mon, let’s go see ’bout a room.’

He could use some rest, a place to get his thoughts together. Out from under the orange sky. But he didn’t trust her. He primed her for honesty, openness. ‘Why me?’

‘Like I said, man, you’re a vet… the town pays me for vets.’ She led him around the corner, through glass doors, along a carpet mapped with stains shaped like dark continents amid a burgundy sea, and into a narrow mirrored lobby at whose far end, hunched behind the reception desk, sat a gnomish old man with a beaked nose and tufts of white hair on the sides of his head reminiscent of goblin ears, and upon whose forehead the engraved word finality would not have been inappropriate. ‘Twenny for the room ya need drinks that’s more,’ he said without punctuation, without looking up, and Sexula said, ‘He’s a vet, Ludy.’

Ludy squinted at Mingolla, who could feel cracks spreading across his skin from the power of that blood-webbed blue eye. ‘Ya gotcha card?’ he asked.

‘Uh… I was mugged,’ said Mingolla.

‘Ain’t gotcha card gotta pay the twenny.’ Ludy turned the page of a magazine, and peeping over the edge of the desk, Mingolla saw photographs of naked young boys in sexy yet playful couplings.

‘Didn’tcha hear him.’ Sexula spanked the counter with her hand, calling Ludy back from gambols with pals named Jimmy and Butch and Sonny. ‘Man says he got mugged.’

Ludy scowled, an expression that caused his eyes nearly to vanish into folds of inflamed pink flesh, and said to her, ‘You wanna pay the twenny pay the twenny.’ He punctuated. ‘Don’t wanna pay get the fuck out.’

A tap on Mingolla’s shoulder, followed by a girlish, ‘Excuse me.’

Behind him stood a thin mousey girl of nineteen or twenty, whom Mingolla perceived to be at the peak of her good looks, poised between the incline of plainness and the decline of just plain ugly. Wearing jeans and a T-shirt bearing a rendering of the Last Supper and the legend THIS IS MY BODY, GIVEN FOR YOU. Toting a shopping bag. Her brown hair lusterless, her breasts with the conformation of upturned saucers.

‘The gift of love can be a transcendent experience, but not if paid for,’ she said, her words sounding rote. ‘I want to give to you, brother.’

‘Get outta here,’ said Sexula.

The girl ignored her. ‘I am qualified to give you everything she might, and I can give you—’

‘Give him a goddamn fatal disease, what with all the sleaze been poppin’ you.’ Sexula took a little walk around the girl, shaking her head in exaggerated disgust.

‘I can give you much more,’ the girl continued, swallowing back embarrassment. ‘Through the act of love, I can give you communion with our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, in…’

‘These cunts come ’round sayin’ that ’cause they’re doin’ it for God, it’s pure,’ said Sexula. ‘But the truth is, they can’t get laid ’less they give it away. They ain’t nothin’ but hips and a hole!’

Ludy laughed, a sound like something large and pulpy falling into an empty paper bag.

The girl’s face worked. ‘Jesus Christ, in whose service I’ve…’

Sexula sneered. ‘Jesus got nothin’ to do with it!’

That waxed it for the girl. ‘I don’t care what you say about me, but you… you…’ She hefted her shopping bag behind her back as if preparing to use it on Sexula. ‘What would you know ’bout Jesus? He’s never laid his hands on you!’

‘Man lays his hands on me,’ said Sexula with a wink to Ludy, ‘and I give him that ol’ time religion with a brand new twist.’

‘Please, don’t go with her!’ The girl’s hands fluttered at Mingolla’s chest. ‘The things I’ve seen the Lord do, the things that were done… the miracles! Miracles from ashes!’

Her speech grew more and more disconnected, her manner more pitiable, and Mingolla, suddenly concerned for her, touched her mind and listened to the static of her thought, a crackle of half-formed images and memories…

…the filthiest thing, that’s what I’ll do, I’ll do it no matter what, and it won’t be like the basement, the light through cobwebs, it won’t, through cobwebs on the cracked pane, gray like his heart, withered like his heart, and the pain right through me, bright, it had a color and bright, and I’ll do it, I’ll let him do it again, the pain so bright that God will notice, God will forgive, but not in the basement, not in the…

…what basement, what pain…

…is it you…

…what basement, what pain…

…it’s you, it really is, oh God, thank you, yes…

…what basement, what pain…

…the basement, yes, in the homeless shelter, and I was asleep in the basement, warm, it was warm with the furnace, the heat from the furnace, and I woke up and he was on me, almost in me, and not the right place, the place no one should see, and it hurt so much…

…who…

…one of the old ones, so many old ones, and I couldn’t see his face, just his hands on my shoulders, his yellow hands with one nail bruised, purple and black, like a claw, hooks in my shoulder forcing me down, my face in the dust, my tongue when I screamed tasting the dust, the ashes, and the furnace roaring, no one could hear me, except I could, I could hear my voice in the flames of the furnace, a voice singing in the flames, even with the pain it was singing, joyful, because there was so much to feel, and I wanted… is it you, really you, really…

…what did you want…

…the dust, to taste the dust again, but I couldn’t he was pulling my hair, pulling back my head, bending me, breaking me, he said he’d kill me if I told, but I didn’t want to tell, didn’t want anyone to know, I wanted the dust in my mouth…

…why…

…to swallow back the pain, like cats when they’re sick they swallow back the sickness, and they’re better, they just don’t let it lie there on the floor, they take it back inside and make it part of themselves, and when he’d gone I did it, I lapped up the dust like a cat laps up sickness until my tongue was gray, and…

…did the pain stop…

…yes, no, yes, for a while, but it’s always there, always coming up again, always thick and gray forever, and I have to keep lapping up more and more, and is it you, really, please, please tell me, is it you…

…

…please oh please…

…

…is it you, I need your voice, I never knew the voice would feel so hot, is it you, tell me…

…yes…

…oh God take it away, please, give me a color bright without pain, please…

…yes.…

…oh, oh, I…

…listen…

…I will, I will…

…picture the man who attacked you…

…I can’t, I…

…he’s old, jaundiced, his gray hair and ragged, his face a map of hollows and sorrows, of wrinkles and evils, his clothes are rags, his heart is rags, his teeth are gone, his gums are the color of blood, and his eyes are blue, watery, weepy, do you see him…

…yes, but…

…watch…

…he’s… dissolving, cracking, cracks are spreading all over him, and his skin, it’s flaking and…

…and what…

…light…

…watch…

…he’s beginning to glow, to glow from inside the cracks, and the light…

…what’s happening with the light…

…it’s… coming into me, shining out in beams, shining into me…

…cleansing, pure…

…yes, and he’s gone now, only light filling me…

…how do you feel…

…I don’t know, different, I feel different…

…stronger…

…yes…

…strong enough to leave, to start over, to begin to live a new way, a new life…

…but where…

…you must leave…

…how…

…leave this place, you must leave now, soon, and find another place, a small town, the country, white houses and farms, and there you will be beautiful, you will open, a flower, your heart full, your body clean and sweet, and you will breathe new air, new thoughts, and love…

…love…

…love will take you, lift you, heal you, and you will forget the basement, the pain, you will forget it now, you will never think of it again, and when there is the beginning of that old pain, not the thought of it, only the beginning, the bad feelings, the fear, you will hear my voice and know that only the joy is real, do you feel the joy…

…yes, yes…

…and never listen to another voice, only his voice is real, is joy…

…I won’t, I promise…

…and your beauty will be a perfume, a thought, a knowledge, a fire, and you will give only to one, to one who sees that beauty, whose touch will treasure you, whose heart will know your heart, and when he comes to you, my voice will confirm him, will feel your knowledge and will say his name…

…love…

…yes, love forever, love for now, and he will take you deep and darling into the heartland, into a color bright and painless…

…love…

…leave now, now, and seek your new home…

…but…

…I will be with you…

…always…

…yes, always, now go…

…I’m afraid…

…into light, go into light, into the promise of joy, go…

The girl backed away, her face perplexed but radiant. ‘I… I’ve got to go.’ She smiled. I’m sorry, I really have to.’

Sexula laughed nastily.

‘Here!’ The girl reached into her shopping bag, took something out, and pressed it into Mingolla’s hand: a plastic base atop which the holographic figure of a bearded man in a white robe walked around and around, his hands clasped in prayer. He thanked her, but she had already started for the door, walking fast, breaking into a run as she pushed out into the street.

Ludy said, ‘Don’t got the twenny get outta the lobby.’

Sexula rubbed against Mingolla, saying, ‘Ain’tcha got some way of provin’ you a vet?’ And he remembered everything now, his memory jogged by the exercise of power. He was lost, lost in America, in sadness and confusion, and when he found who he was looking for, although they had won, they would still be lost, without plan or purpose, without even any understanding of what had been won. Ludy began demanding the twenty, and Sexula told Mingolla that if he couldn’t get it together she was going to leave, because vet or not she wasn’t about to do it in no alley, and Mingolla stared through the glass doors into the country of his birth, into an animated mural of gaud and dissolution that seemed at once foreign and familiar, into painted faces and unseeing eyes, wondering what to do, while the tiny Jesus circled constantly in his hand…

… Izaguirre’s office walls faded in, and Mingolla jumped up from the chair, still sick and feeling more lost than ever in the winded silence of the hotel. His thoughts whirled, trying to comprehend what had happened. It had been so real! The future… that’s what it must have been. Yet there had been so much that smacked of hallucination. The way his thoughts had gone, the distortions. And the thing with the girl. Hearing her thoughts, answering them. But the most unbelievable thing had been his treatment of her. He’d recognized his paranoia and confusion. But that calm, compassionate soul, he hadn’t recognized that person at all. No, it had to have been a hallucination. He’d tell Izaguirre about it in the morning, and… On second thought, maybe he’d keep it under his hat. Just in case it had been both a hallucination and real.

The sea was glowing streaks of aqua, light purple, and brown over sand, kelp beds, and muddy shallows. Combers bright as toothpaste broke over the coral heads, and beyond them, the water was choppy and dark. Crabs flexed their bone-white claws and scuttled from beneath a jetty into the kelp fringe at the margin of the shore; a crane stepped with Egyptian poise through a reflecting film of water overlying a sand bar. Roosters crowed, call and response, Skinks scurried into the beach vine. A fisherman in shorts and a red hard hat poled a dory past, heading for the channel. Tied to a coco palm, a spotted hog rooted in the mucky sand not far from a compound wall of green cinderblock inset with a wooden gate. And Mingolla sat on a palm stump about fifty feet seaward from the hog, holding a baby hummingbird in his hand. Bottle green with a ruby throat, barely the size of his thumb joint.

Angry voices from farther down the beach, where Izaguirre and Tully were arguing. ’… no reason,’ was all Mingolla could hear.

A live jewel in his palm, the hummingbird throbbed with life, with anxiety, its throat pulsing. Mingolla had searched for its nest, but with no luck. He wished he could do something for the hummingbird; he couldn’t just leave it on the sand.

‘Shit!’ said Tully, waving his hand.

Izaguirre stood with his arms folded.

Mingolla wondered if he could calm the hummingbird down. He touched its mind cautiously, feeling the electrical contact as a tiny fire flickering at the edges of his thought, one that winked off abruptly. The hummingbird’s throat had quit pulsing.

‘All right, mon! You won’t hear no more ’bout it from me!’

Tully came stomping up, dropped onto the sand beside him, and Mingolla closed his fist around the hummingbird. It was warm, its beak stabbing his palm. A shiver passed through him, the ghost of an emotion.

‘Ever stop and t’ink dat dis damn war make no sense,’ said Tully grumpily.

Mingolla reached behind him, scooped a hollow in the sand, and gave the hummingbird a surreptitious burial.

‘I mean here dere’s war’—Tully swiped at the sand—‘and here dere’s none.’ He made another swipe next to the first one. ‘And damn fools are sendin’ other damn fools to do t’ings nobody have any business doin’.’

‘What’s the problem?’ Mingolla asked.

‘Dat Cifuentes squint was messin’ wit’ you…’

‘Yeah?’

‘Dey goin’ to send you after her, send you into de Petén to bring her back for interrogation.’ Tully sighed, exasperated. ‘I say to Izaguirre, “Mon, dat’s a waste of dis boy’s talent. He got better t’ings he can be doin’.” But de doctor he say dat’s how it goin’ to be.’

‘That’s fine with me,’ said Mingolla. ‘Just fine.’

Tully looked at him askance. ‘Don’t sound like you care much fah her.’

‘I care a lot,’ said Mingolla in a dead voice, watching grackles swoop out of the high sun like bits of winged matter blown from its core. A vulture landed with a crunch in a palm top.

‘You gettin’ strange, Davy,’ said Tully. ‘Gotta watch that.’

‘You ever hear words when you touch somebody’s mind?’ Mingolla asked.

‘Words? Not’in’ like dat… but I do hear ’bout one fella say he got words one time, just a little bit. Why you axin’?’

‘I had a dream ’bout it.’

‘What kinda dream?’ Tully was more than a little interested.

Mingolla shrugged, thought back to his hallucination, wondering if his communication with the Christian girl had been evidence of something or just a fantasy. ‘Weren’t you going to brief me on the Iron Barrio?’

Another sigh, and Tully pulled some papers from his hip pocket. ‘Yeah, all right. Dese here de plans, but ’fore you scan dem we better talk ’bout gettin’ in. Ain’t no big trick to that. De whores dat live dere…’

‘Whores?’

‘Oh, yeah. Lotsa people in de Barrio dey got family on de outside dat’s hostage, and to earn some extra money, de prison guards dey send some of de women out to work the street. Dey know de women ain’t goin’ to be ’scapin’ long as dere family have to pay de cost.’

Voices behind them.

A squat black man and a small boy were walking from the compound gate; the man was carrying a machete and a pistol.

‘Look like Spurgeon ’bout to slaughter he hog,’ said Tully. ‘Anyway, dere dis one whore… Alvina Guzman. De other prisoners treat her special ’cause her father Hermeto Guzman, de one who led de Army of de Poor up in Guatemala. Dey bot’ heroes to people in de Barrio. So you hook up wit’ her, and t’ings should go smooth.’

The hog watched the man’s approach, grunting softly as if expecting a treat. The man stopped half-a-dozen feet away and broke down the pistol.

‘You won’t have no trouble trackin’ her. Most nights she be in one of de bars on La Avenida de la Republica.’

Mingolla touched the hog’s mind, found it strong, and hovered at its edges.

‘We goin’ to give you some drugs for to barter, for to…’

‘Why? I can just take over whoever I need.’

‘Dat ain’t always de best way. Y’can’t take over everybody. And dem dat’s watchin’, dey might be gettin’ suspicious ’bout how come you havin’ such an easy time.’

The man snapped the cylinder of the pistol into place, and the boy said something in a high piping voice.

‘I won’t ’vise you how to deal wit’ it from dat point on. But gettin’ in ain’t a problem. You can handle de guards fine.’ Tully elbowed him. ‘Hey, mon! Listen up! T’ought you wanted dis briefin’.’

A shot rang out, and Tully jumped. But Mingolla, who had been anticipating it, gave no sign of having heard.

The afternoon before he left for La Ceiba, Mingolla closeted himself in his room, intending to read awhile and fall asleep early. He read the title story of The Fictive Boarding House again, lingering over his favorite parts, the description of the building itself, with its ancient swimming pool whose waters were so filthy that it looked like a lozenge of jade, and its owner, the old Korean man who sat in his wheelchair all day writing characters on strips of paper and tying them for luck to the vines in his garden, and the maid Serenita, the last survivor of the contract, whose final moments scripted the author’s death. It was odd, he thought, that the same author could write two stories that had such opposite effects upon him, because the story about the two feuding families continued to rankle him. However, he managed to read it all the way through this time and was disgusted to find that the plot went unresolved. He tossed the book into his dufflebag, put a pillow over his face, and tried to sleep. But sleep did not come, and finally, giving up the idea, he went for a walk on the beach, watching sunset casting wild glitters over the sea, fading to a rippling line of gold drawn across the empurpled water within the reef. Darkness, and he sat down by the hotel wall, gazing up at the pale lumps of cloud cruising among the stars and whacking the sand with a stick.

‘Best you not hit a toad wit’ dat stick,’ said a girl’s voice.

Elizabeth was walking toward him through the palm shadows, her white church dress aglow with striped moonlight, holding a hymnal. ‘Why not?’ he asked.

‘Dat a cassava stick,’ she said. ‘You hit a toad wit’ it, and dey will run you off de island.’

He laughed. ‘I’ll try to avoid it.’

‘Not’in’ funny ’bout it,’ she said. ‘Dis very thing have happen to Nadia Dilbert’s boy last year. De toads spray milk at him, make he life not worth livin’.’

‘I’ll be careful,’ he said, matching her graveness.

She came a few steps closer, and his eyes went to the cushy swell of her breasts backing the lace bodice.

‘Where’s your friend?’ he asked.

‘You mean Nancy? She off wit’ some boy.’ She glanced behind her. ‘I guess I’ll be…’

‘Stay and talk a minute.’

‘Oh, I can’t be late for church.’

Mingolla opened her to the possibility of tardiness, projecting desire. ‘C’mon,’ he said. ‘Just a minute or two.’

Her eyelids lowered, and she seemed to grow vacant, as if listening to an inner voice. ‘Well, a minute, maybe.’ She set her hymnal on the sand beside Mingolla and perched on it, careful not to soil her dress. She snatched a peek at him, then looked away, gone stiff, her breath quickening. ‘Tully,’ she said, ‘he tell me you be leavin’ soon.’

‘Did you ask him ’bout me?’

‘Oh, no… well, I did. But dat was for Nancy. She took wit’ you.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Mingolla tracked the purple riding lights of a shrimper inching across the horizon. ‘Yeah, I’m leaving.’

‘Dat’s too bad… you miss de carnival at French Harbor.’

He looked at Elizabeth’s beautiful face, her broad symmetrical nose and haughty mouth and sculpted cheekbones, a face that—if he were to draw it—would come off as registering an adult sensuality, but now seemed entirely youthful, eager yet under restraint; and he realized that he didn’t want her, that he wanted to mark her, and by so doing to mark Tully. He wasn’t sure why he wanted this. Despite their months together, Tully was an unknown quantity, hidden behind a front of braggadocio and crudity… though Mingolla suspected that the front was designed to disguise a simple and ingenuous self that Tully had long since rejected. And perhaps, Mingolla thought, what he really wanted was to establish his superiority by dismantling that front, revealing the fact that Tully cared about more than he would like to admit. It didn’t matter. His wanting was reason enough.

‘Elizabeth,’ he said, shifting, half-turning, resting a hand on her belly. She tensed, but didn’t pull away, and as his hand moved to her breast, slipped up to finger loose a button, then two, she held her breath and arched against his palm. But when he began to slip the dress from her shoulders, she clutched at the material, holding the halves together. I don’t know ’bout dis,’ she said. I don’t know.’ He whispered her name, making it a charm, urging desire upon her, and grazed her neck, her cheek, with his lips. She threw back her head, released her hold on the dress, let his mouth find the upper slopes of her breasts.

‘Ah, dat such a sweet feelin’, Davy.’

He lifted one breast free of the lace, its heft like a full wineskin, and admired its blackness agleam with sweat and starlight, tasted blackness on the nipple.

‘Davy, oh Davy.’

He was growing distant from her, distant even from his own desire. The stars, the mash of waves, this nubile island sophomore, it all smacked of some mixture of movie romance and high school follies, and he was beginning to get bored. More than bored. His very conception of evil mischief was at risk.

‘Oh, God… Davy! You do dat so nice…’

Christ, he thought, let’s remake the language of love, bring it into the world of intellect. When You Touch Me, My Self-Conception Dissipates, or at least a world of bad poetry, That Still Moment of Gladness After You Slip Inside, That Eyes-Closed Charge into Frenzy, and Later the Lights Beside Our Open Lips Are Senses Overused, or… He had an idea! An inspirational idea. He scrambled up, helped her to stand. Stood close, hands on her hips. And pushed love into her mind, the shaped flow of all he had felt for his Long Island woman, for Debora. ‘Let’s go in the water,’ he said. ‘I want to feel you close to me in the water.’ Amazing that she didn’t puke, the sugar he’d injected into those words. But, no, she bought it a hundred percent, love translating stupidity into the meaningful. She wanted to be with him in the water, too. Whatever that meant to her. A trip to Paradise, a ride on the fabulous Sexmobile, a pass to some glandular Disneyworld. She undressed with her back to him, and the sight of her ass, the supple columns of her thighs, reinstituted desire. But he held to his course. They waded out holding hands, stepping on God only knew what manner of offal, hog guts, fish brains, a thousand grotesque possibilities, holding hands, and breasted into a shallow dive, and stroked to within twenty feet of the reef, near enough that the white starlit sprays came cold onto their skin, yet not so far out that they couldn’t touch bottom. He pulled her close, kissed her deep, and the feel of her slippery hips, her nipples sliding across his chest, his cock gouging the cool rubber swell of her belly, once again kindled desire, causing him to consider having his cake and eating it, too. No, no! Stay with the plan. Unrequited and unconsummated. Her eyes glittered with fishy brilliance, her black mouth with its eel tongue poking out. Seeing her that way, he managed to disengage.

‘Davy!’ She tried to draw him back, but he eluded her, gliding farther away, until she was invisible against the dark wall of the reef.

‘I don’t know ’bout this,’ he said. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Davy!’ Panic in her shout.

He dived and stroked hard away, surfaced fifty feet away.

‘Where you at, Davy! Don’t be ’larmed!’

His laughter was drowned out by the surf, by a phosphorescent spray of water rising up like the teeth of a gigantic comb. He let the current carry him to the base of the reef and hid in a volute of rock, gripping a barnacled projection.

‘Davy!’ She was moving toward him. ‘You don’t gotta be ’fraid, Davy! I love you!’

She passed within a few feet, calling, searching, and with the stealth of a shark, he ducked beneath the surface and swam underwater toward the shore. He could still hear her calling out to him as he dressed. Before long, fearing that he’d been swept out through the channel, she’d chance searching beyond the reef. ‘Davy, Davy!’ she’d cry, bobbing off to Africa, her dark head sliding down the troughs between the waves, buoyed by love. Passing ships would toss life preservers, but she’d ask, ‘You seen my Davy?’ and when they said no, she’d tell them to sail on, she wasn’t going to stop until she found her man. He saw her washed up on Arab shores, wandering the deep forests, haunted, driven, ravished by terrorists, worshipped by multinational executives and sheikhs. ‘Who,’ they’d ask her, ‘is this Davy?’ And she would sigh, she would weep, stare listlessly toward the Angel of the West, and the sheikhs would fume, knowing they could never really possess her, that this mysterious Davy had ruined her for all men, that one perfect moment had been marbled and set pedestal-high in memory, overshadowing all others, and that true love would never die.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Avenida de la Republica in La Ceiba was a night street, wide and potholed, divided by a railroad spur belonging to the United Fruit Company. It ran along the waterfront between rows of stucco bars and rundown hotels, most of the latter painted a dark green, as if during some long-ago season of painting that color had been on special. The hotels had peaked roofs and rickety side stairs and interior courtyards where fat concierges held court at Formica tables, drinking Salvavida beer, joking with their friends, and bawling insults at the prostitutes who slept away the afternoons in the stuffy rooms. By day, the street was a scene of unparalleled torpor. Bits of cellophane and paper trash blew in the gutters, and there was little traffic apart from dogs, the occasional beggar searching for a doorway in which to sleep, and black-clad widows with corroded-looking skin, who would perch on the curbs, holding trays of cigarettes on their laps. From the docks beyond the seaward row of hotels came the constant grinding screech of metal under stress, and the heat was oppressive, every breath of wind filled with grit, rasping the skin like an animal’s tongue: Mingolla noted with amusement that the prices in the hotels were five lempira for a room without extras, ten for a room with a woman, and twenty-five for one with an air-conditioner, thus firmly establishing the value placed upon coolness by the citizenry.

He chose an inexpensive third-floor room and spent the afternoon going over the layout of the Barrio, which was situated several miles to the north, itself the size of a town, rumored to contain more than forty thousand souls, and studying photographs of Alvina Guzman and his target, Opolonio de Zedeguí. The Nicaraguan was a thin fit-looking man of middle years, with black hair, a high forehead, and skin the color of sandalwood. His sensitive features made it difficult for Mingolla to think of him as a formidable adversary, but then he doubted that his own photograph would strike fear into anyone, and he cautioned himself against overconfidence. At dark, he stowed these materials in a drawer and sat by the window, watching the street come to life. Prostitutes swarmed into the bars, packs of merchant seamen and dockworkers hard on their heels. Pushcart vendors sold ices and roasted shishkebobs of meat and onions on portable grills; children hawked candy and windup toys and necklaces of black coral. The pockets of the pool tables in the bars were blocked off and their felt surfaces used for dice games; the jukebox music seemed to be bearing up the shouts of winners on rich clouds of melody and rhythm. The entrances to the bars were wide and brightly lit, framing dancers and gamblers and brawlers, and it appeared to Mingolla that the street was the site of dozens of small theaters in which the same play was being performed.

At nine o’clock he walked two blocks south and entered the Cantina Las Vegas 99, the bar where Alvina Guzman plied her trade. He pushed through the crowd to the end of the counter and ordered a rum. Several men were ranged along the counter; the one nearest Mingolla favored him with a disconsolate stare, then went back to gazing into his glass. All the men at the counter were looking into their glasses, all gloomy, and Mingolla had the notion that if he were to imitate them, his thoughts would sail away at the speed of rum into some interior darkness. He engaged in a desultory conversation with the bartender, talking World Cup soccer and the weather, and critiqued the mural on the wall above the jukebox: sparkling dice and roulette wheels, playing cards and poker chips, each given the impression of enormity by the tiny people painted beneath them, their hands upflung in awe. Every couple of minutes he scanned the crowd for Alvina, and at last he picked her out. She was standing by the jukebox, feeding it a coin. A blocky, diminutive Indian woman with adobe-colored skin and full breasts and hips. Her black hair was woven into a single braid that fell to her mid-back, and her clothing—a white blouse and print skirt—showed signs of long usage. Like Hettie, her face conjured up Debora, not by its prettiness, for Alvina was not pretty, but by its impassivity. She stood unmoving, her squarish face without expression, and when a romantic ballad came on the jukebox, she began to dance alone, turning in tight graceful circles, her eyes fixed on the floor. Mingolla had been about to approach her, but held back, seeing in the dance, its sad abandon and its relation to the melodramatic Spanish of the lyrics, something he did not want to interrupt.

Alvina looked lost when the record ended, as if she had awakened to find herself in another world. Mingolla beat his way through the crowd, put a hand on her arm, and her face seemed to drain of an energy whose presence he hadn’t noticed before. ‘Ten lempira,’ she said.

‘Sí, pues,’ he said. ‘Y por la noche?’

‘Your accent,’ she said. It’s Guatemalan.’

‘Yes, I’m from the Petén. San Francisco de Juticlan.’

‘I’m Guatemalan, too. From the Altiplano,’ Her interest flagged. ‘For the night it’s fifty. You have a hotel?’

‘It’s nearby.’

She took a step toward the door, then said, ‘I don’t do the thing with my mouth… understand?’

Mingolla said that wasn’t important.

They walked without speaking to Mingolla’s hotel and up the stairs to his room. Inside was a cot, a chipped sink, a night table, and a ceiling fixture. The walls were dark green boards, striped with light showing through from the adjoining rooms, and from the room on the right came the sounds of strenuous lovemaking. Alvina started to unbutton her blouse, but Mingolla told her to wait.

‘What is it?’ she asked nervously.

‘Sit down.’ He switched on the light. ‘I want to talk with you.’

‘Why?’ Very nervous. ‘What do you want to know?’

‘Please, sit down.’

She did as he asked, but darted a glance toward the door.

‘My name is David, and I know that you’re Alvina Guzman.’

‘It’s no secret,’ she said, affecting calm, but again looked at the door.

‘I want your help,’ he said, infecting her with feelings of friendship and trust.

She lifted her hand as if to touch her face, but left the gesture uncompleted. ‘What help can I be? I’m a prisoner.’

‘I’m going into the Barrio.’

‘You don’t need my help for that.’ She rested a hand on the pillow, then patted it again, testing its softness, its firmness, as if it were a very fine thing, indeed. ‘Why do you want to do this?’

‘There’s a man, a Nicaraguan named de Zedeguí…’

‘Never heard of him.’

‘He killed my family.’ Mingolla fleshed out the story, his desire for revenge, continuing to exert influence on Alvina, and explained that he wanted to pass himself off as her cousin and thus fall under the relative immunity accorded her family.

‘A friend of mine, he may know this de Zedeguí.’ She looked at him with concern. ‘You may be tortured, and you’ll probably never get out.’ In the adjoining room a prostitute gave a patently false cry of delight, and Alvina twitched her head toward the sound. ‘But if you insist on trying,’ she said. ‘I’ll meet you at the Ninety-Nine just before three o’clock.’

‘What’ll you do till then?’

‘Work… the guards expect their money.’

Muttered conversation from the next room, the sound of breaking glass.

‘Here.’ He handed her a clip containing a thick fold of bills.

‘This is too much,’ she said after counting it.

‘It’s not enough.’

She raised no further objection, tucked the money into her blouse pocket, and sat with hands on knees, as stolid and glum as an idol. ‘Could I sleep until three?’ she asked.

‘Sure.’

Her back to him, she unbuttoned her blouse, shrugged it off. Red weals of scar tissue crossed her shoulders, and when she slipped off her skirt, he saw that more severe scars figured her dimpled buttocks and thighs. The scars centered her for Mingolla, made clear her long history of hopeless striving and terror, of jungle hideouts and hard traveling. She folded her clothes at the foot of the bed and slid beneath the covers, sitting up, engaging Mingolla’s stare. Her breasts were pendulous, the areolas large and brown. The pucker of an old bullet wound on her right shoulder.

‘You’ve paid,’ she said.

He knew she was merely offering to fulfill a contract, and yet, aroused by his contact with her mind, he would have liked to make love to her. She wasn’t attractive, but she was plain in the way history is plain, its contrivance lending the world a symmetry that implies hidden beauty; and it seemed to him that her impassivity was symptomatic of the quiet confidence with which beauty confronts the world. There was beauty in her, he thought, and the scars bore this out. However, he didn’t want to use her: hers was not the sort of beauty he would feel comfortable using.

‘You wear your scars well,’ he said.

This displeased her. ‘Some men like them.’

‘That’s not how I meant it.’

She continued to meet his eyes. ‘You haven’t answered me.’

‘Yes, I have.’

A fleshy smack in the next room, a cry that was not feigned.

‘I’ll turn out the light in a minute,’ Mingolla said.

He sat on the edge of the bed and opened the drawer of the night table, removing a knife, a calf sheath, and a largish packet filled with white powder. He tapped some of the powder onto the overfold of the packet and began dividing it into lines with the knife.

‘What’s that?’ Alvina leaned in over his shoulder. ‘

‘Frost.’ He chopped at a granular lump. ‘It’s like cocaine… stronger. Want some? You won’t be able to sleep.’

‘No, not now. Aren’t you going to sleep?’

‘I don’t want to be groggy at three.’

He fitted a drinking straw to his nostril and snorted five fat lines in rapid succession. The skin on his forehead tightened.

‘The guards will take that from you.’

‘We’ll see,’ he said.

He did three more lines. His thoughts began an agitated dance, and he imagined blue-white crackles of electricity sparking at his temples. The drain was bitter at the back of his throat.

‘Get some sleep now,’ he told her.

He extinguished the light and sat by the door. The lights were off in the adjoining room as well, and only a faint glow penetrated from the street, along with faint music and babble. Patches of shinier black like worn velvet appeared to be floating on the dark, and Mingolla wondered if—just as the chipped porcelain of the sink, the dinged cot, the splintered table—the darkness in cheap hotel rooms bore signs of previous occupancy. He thought about the Nicaraguan and was a little worried. Although he was stronger than Tully, and Tully was one of the best, he would be facing the Nicaraguan on his own territory… a dangerous territory. He would have to be very cautious. What most worried him was the Nicaraguan’s craziness, the morbidity that must have prompted him to seek refuge in the Iron Barrio. Craziness was a variable for which he could not prepare, and he only hoped it would prove a weakness.

Alvina snored lightly. He made out the shape of her body, lying on her side, facing away from him. The frost had boosted his natural horniness, and he kept having to grapple with his erection, shifting it to a more comfortable position. He really would like to fuck her. To fuck history, do it doggy-style, kneeling and balls-deep in history’s meat, overlooking its scarred plain and chunky ass. And he thought that was in essence what he was doing by working for Psicorps. Fucking the history of rebellion, of the Army of the Poor, of brutalized peasants and Indians. He was the bad guy now. This had crossed his mind before, but never with such immediacy, and fired by the exhilarating clarity of the frost, he pictured himself on a movie poster, MINGOLLA in flaming letters, his figure towering above burning villages and screaming hordes, mento-rays beaming from his eyes. Then he saw it from another viewpoint. Saw himself sneaking along a corpse-choked alley, hunting for a victim. He couldn’t understand how he had come to this pass; he could perceive the events leading to it, but that alone explained nothing. It seemed to him that he must have been tricked, or that he had tricked himself, or… Alvina mumbled in her sleep. Damn, he wanted to fuck her! Not even fuck her, just be close to her, with someone. He was scared, and he wasn’t ashamed to admit it. Anybody would be scared with the Barrio in their future. He would lie down next to her, that’s all, lie down and hold her, feel his drugged heart slugging against her scarred back, and know that if she could survive horror and deprivation, he could make it, too. He needed that consolation, that creature comfort. He stripped, padded to the bed, and eased in beside her. She stirred but did not wake. But when he put an arm around her, inadvertently touching her breast, she looked at him over her shoulder, the whites of her eyes luminous. ‘Go back to sleep,’ he said. He couldn’t help cupping the breast, letting the stem of the nipple slip between his fingers, making it stiff. His erection pronged her ass. Without a word, she cocked her knee, and he slid between her legs, rubbing back and forth, feeling her moisten. He worked a finger into her cunt, then two fingers, swirled them around, her muscles sucking him deeper, hips grinding. She must want him, he thought. In her mind they would be brother and sister in league against a Nicaraguan monster. And he wanted her, not just anyone, her, wanted her big Commie ass to milk him dry, wanted union and redemption and control. He flipped her onto her stomach, came to his knees behind her, and slipped in with a slick effortless motion, pushing inside until none of him was showing. He held her by the waist, liking the elevation, the combined sense of intimacy and distance. He withdrew a little, watched himself move in and out. He ran his hands along her flanks, molding them. Reached down and squeezed a hanging breast, folding her face into the pillow. Not a sound from her, but that was guerrilla tactics, biting back their cries to keep their position secret, screwing under cover of midnight and ferns. He rode her hard, trying to drive sound out of her, trying to make her squeal, relishing the way her ass churned, forgetting to listen for her cries, and everything, fear and lust and drugs, balling up into a blazing knot, tightening and then unraveling into a thread of sweet languor, leaving him sweaty and gasping atop her.

She turned away after he withdrew, tension signaling her resentment. ‘I didn’t mean…’ he began.

‘You paid,’ she said coldly.

He was ashamed, and he saw he would have to repair the damage done, shore up her trust, maybe establish affection. But he was also contented, pleased with himself, with his conquest of history. The repairs could wait, he thought; for now he wanted her to know exactly whom she was dealing with, even if he didn’t know himself.

At three-thirty Mingolla and Alvina stood among a group of women—a couple of dozen at least—waiting for the bus that would transport them to the Barrio. Nobody spoke. The night was starless, moonless, and wind seethed in the grasses along the side of the road, pouring off the unfeatured blackness of the sea. Behind them lay a collection of huts, a true barrio, their thatch looking as bedraggled as molting feathers in the wash of light from their doorways. Headlights came from the north, swelled and resolved into a white schoolbus with neat black lettering above the windshield that read DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS. The bus braked with a squeal, its door hinged open, and three short wiry men piled out, their pistols drawn. They wore street clothes, and red masks like those worn by wrestlers covered their heads. Mingolla saw that the masks were not merely red, but depicted flayed faces with anatomically correct renderings of muscle and tendon. Horrid things that made the men’s eyes look glittery and false, their mouths becoming simple black holes each time they spoke. When they spotted Mingolla they cut him out from the milling women, pushed him down in the grass, and trained their pistols on him. ‘Wait!’ he said, projecting camaraderie and trust. The pistols wavered, lowered.

‘Who are you?’ asked one of the men, helping him up.

Mingolla led the men aside, gave his name, and told them he was with the government, that he intended to work undercover in the Barrio, seeking intelligence from a certain prisoner. He asked their names.

‘Julio.’

‘Martin.’

‘Carlito.’

He asked if they would be on duty the next night, and they said yes; he told them to expect him to be among the women when it came time to drive them to work. He thought it strange that he could so easily work his will upon men with such fearsome visages, and his dominance made clear the petty resources of the evil that funded them. They hustled him onto the bus, and as he had instructed, they shoved him into the seat beside Alvina. ‘How did you manage it?’ she whispered after the engine had kicked over.

‘Bribes,’ he said.

She absorbed this and nodded. ‘You’ll do well in the Barrio.’

They drove for half an hour past coconut plantations and brush, then turned onto an unmarked road; the road widened into the plain of packed dirt that fronted the Barrio. Mingolla had seen aerial photographs of the place, showing it to be a singlestory building with a roof of corrugated iron that spread across miles of defoliated jungle. Seeing the building at ground level was in some ways less impressive, for it had the appearance of a long warehouse atop which masked guards were posted—not an unexpected sight in Latin America; yet he felt rather than perceived its size, as if it possessed a gravity and atmosphere subtly different from the surrounding land. And closer, deeper within that sphere of influence, able to make out particulars, he understood the full menace of the prison. Spotlights swept over the roof from the nearby jungle, the beams causing the bloody masks of the posted guards to flare like matches, illuminating thick coils of smoke that twisted blue and ponderous like the tails of demons whose bodies were lost to sight in the heavens. Above the main gate—a sliding metal door—and also swept by the spotlights, the bodies of eight men and women were depended from crude gallows, all gashed and burned to such an extent that Mingolla couldn’t believe any of them had survived to be hanged. Through the windows of the bus came a terrible smell compounded of charcoal cookery, smoke, the cloying mustiness of death, the sickly sweetness of people living cramped together, and God knew what else… a thousand smells blended into an evil perfume that made Mingolla gag. And as the bus pulled up to the gate, which was partway open, he heard a noise that—like the smell—was a combination of elements, of laughter and babble and screams, yet was remarkable neither for its constituency nor its whole, but for its rhythms, how it ebbed and faded with the inconsistent unity of jungle noise, of birds and insects obeying the designs and principles of an organic environment.

‘Keep close,’ Alvina said as they were herded through the gate, and Mingolla caught up her hand. The gate grated shut behind them, stranding them in sultry heat and dimness, and their three guards disappeared into a door set into a side wall. Before them was another gate perforated with slits from which issued the noise and the smell and an orange glow: Mingolla felt as if he had been swallowed by a beast with metal jaws and fire in its guts. With a screech, the interior gate was hoisted, and they walked rapidly into the shadows on the right. They fetched up against a rough stone surface, and Alvina whispered, ‘Leon?’

‘Who’s with you?’ came a raspy voice.

‘My cousin… he’s all right.’

‘Charmed,’ said the voice.

Mingolla acknowledged the greeting, but was mesmerized by the patterns of smoke and flame and shadow within the Barrio, a constant shifting of darks and lights so allied with fluctuations in the noise that it was several seconds before he could assemble a coherent image of the place. A forest of blackened beams supported the roof, lending perspective to what had at first seemed an infinite depth, and among the beams stood all manner of shelters: lean-tos, tents, huts, piles of brick hollowed by caves. The walls were the walls of small stucco houses with shuttered windows; in other parts of the Barrio, according to Mingolla’s plans, were labyrinths of such houses, remnants of the town that had once occupied the land. Fires bloomed everywhere. Along the walls, in grills and oil drums. And the resultant light was a smoky orange gloom through which packs of prisoners shuffled, many with knives in hand.

‘Bitch of a hometown, huh?’ said Leon, emerging from the shadows. A middle-aged Indian almost as short as Alvina, with a seamed face and sunken cheeks and black bowl-cut hair. Despite the heat, his shoulders were draped in a blanket.

‘This is the friend I told you about,’ Alvina said. ‘You can trust him to help you.’

‘Don’t volunteer me for free.’ Leon grinned, revealing seven or eight rotting teeth tipped at rustic angles like gravestones.

‘You’ll be paid,’ said Mingolla.

Leon’s face hardened in reaction to Mingolla’s curtness. ‘What do you need?’ And when Mingolla gave him de Zedeguí’s photograph, he said, ‘I’ll find him… we’ll talk in the morning.’ He drew a knife from beneath his blanket. ‘You have a weapon, man?’

Mingolla unsheathed his own knife.

‘Then let’s go,’ said Leon.

During that walk across the Barrio, through zones of flame, patches of sticky-looking darkness, and layers of intolerable stench, Mingolla saw many memorable things, many things that beggared explanation; yet he asked no explanation, for though he grew sick at heart from seeing, he realized that the Barrio was its own explanation, a world with its own rules of right action and process of good and evil. The Barrio seemed to be displaying itself for him, offering him a sampling of its treasures. As he turned his head a frayed curtain would be drawn back from a lean-to, or a group of people gathered around an oil drum, silhouetted like ragged crows, would step aside, opening avenues of sight down which his eyes would travel toward some horrible or pitiful or—infrequently—beautiful sight or event. He saw gang rapes and beatings, a spectrum of the crippled and the diseased. He saw a man whose hand had been replaced by a wooden stump in which a fork was embedded, and another man bearing a tray of mouse carcasses like tiny bloody candies. He saw two matronly women painting a design of crescents on an infant, and beyond them, a young woman crucified to a beam, her waxy breasts painted with this same design. Once a section of the roof was lifted, a noose dropped over the head of a sleeping man, and he was hauled up kicking and spasming by a handful of guards; and farther on, another section was lifted, and a barrel of water was poured onto some children who laughed and licked the droplets from one anothers’ skin. And the windowless one-room house shared by Alvina and her father provided a further instance of the Barrio’s process. Chained to its door was a boy of about twelve armed with a machete; he appeared content to be chained and held out the lock to Leon, who opened it and gave him a mango. Then Leon bade them good night, reminding Mingolla of their meeting the next morning.

Inside, the walls were pale blue, flaking, inscribed with a decade of graffiti; the room was lit by thin candles and dominated by two mattresses, on one of which lay Hermeto Guzman: an ancient white-haired man with skin the reddish dark of raw iron, his bony frame scarcely making an impression on the sheet that was tucked around him. The smell of feces was strong, and Alvina spent the better part of an hour cleaning the old man, while Mingolla sat on the other mattress, leafing through a pile of paperback romance novels. Alvina didn’t bother to perform introductions, and it was unclear whether the old man had seen Mingolla; but as she tipped up his head, helping him drink from a bottle of mineral water, he stared at Mingolla with eyes that were dark yet touched with light, stoic and alive. They seemed to be drinking him in with the same avidity as that with which he gulped down the water. The eyes made Mingolla feel young and unknowing, and he thought the old man’s frail whisper must be commenting upon him.

‘What’s he saying?’ he asked Alvina.

‘He says the water tastes good… reminds him of a time back in the old days.’

‘Right after we killed that bastard Arenas.’ Hermeto struggled up, fell back. ‘Remember, Alvina?’

She soothed him, cautioned him to be quiet.

‘She doesn’t like me talking about the old days,’ Hermeto said.

‘What’s there to talk about?’ she said roughly.

‘The struggle,’ said Hermeto. ‘The struggle was…’

‘The struggle!’ Alvina pretended to spit. ‘All we did was die.’

Mingolla felt sad for the old man. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘You…’

‘No, she’s right. We achieved nothing.’ Hermeto’s voice rose in pitch at the end, making the sentence sound like a question, as if he couldn’t believe it himself. ‘We thought we were fighting men, and because we killed so many, we thought we were winning. But we weren’t fighting men. We were fighting tides… tides caused by two giants splashing the water thousands of miles away. We didn’t have a chance.’

‘We didn’t have a choice, either.’ Alvina opened a tin box, took out bread and cheese. ‘They were killing us.’

The old man’s voice became inaudible even to Alvina, and she asked him to repeat what he had said.

‘My brother’—he made the sign of the cross—‘may God deliver him.’

Alvina stroked his hair.

He asked for more water, gulped it down. ‘But don’t you remember that time, Alvina? Up in the Cuchumatanes?’

‘Yes, I remember,’ she said wearily.

‘They had us trapped in the high passes,’ he said to Mingolla. ‘We didn’t have water, hardly any food. We could see the river down below, but we couldn’t get to it. The sky was filled with the hum of helicopters. We were so thirsty, we ate the flowers of shrub palms, and everybody got cramps. Once we found a place where animals drank, a little pond filled with scum. Finally the helicopters left, and we staggered down to the river. It was such a strange day… thunder and mist. We looked like skeletons, but whenever the sun touched us we glowed like angels, our flesh almost transparent. Like angels throwing themselves into a river.’

‘You make it sound beautiful,’ said Alvina disparagingly.

‘It was beautiful,’ said the old man.

She began feeding him crumbs of bread and cheese. Mingolla was glad for the interruption, because the old man’s description had been hard for him to bear. He settled back against the wall, listening to the noise from outside, thinking about the struggle, the Army of the Poor; to banish thought he opened the packet of frost and snorted a quantity. He loaded a smaller packet with a supply for Leon, then lay down and closed his eyes. Through his lids the candle flames acquired a dim red value, and the bloodiness of the color started him thinking about Hermeto and Alvina. He realized that if he were to relax his guard, he would begin to sympathize with them, and his sympathy would be as ingenuous and ill-informed as his lack of concern. He had no way of understanding what it would be like to starve in the hills. The hardships he had endured seemed by comparison a privileged form of agony, and just knowing that made him want to pay some penance.

The candles were snuffed out, and Alvina lay down beside him. He edged away, afraid of contact, afraid she might contaminate him with principle and lead him down a risky path. She smelted of earth, of musky heat, and those smells and the action of the drug inflamed his desire. And as if she sensed this, she said, ‘If you want me again, you have to pay.’

He couldn’t frame a reply that would convey his mood, but at last he said, ‘I can get you out of here.’

‘No, you can’t.’

‘But I can.’ He propped himself on an elbow, trying to see her in the dark. ‘I…’

‘The government has my sister and her children. If we were to escape, they’d die.’

‘They could be located, they—’

‘Stop it,’ she said.

They lay in silence, and the screams and gabble of the Barrio seemed to add a pressure to the darkness, squeezing black air from his lungs.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘You… I don’t know you well, and I don’t like you very much, yet I trust you.’

‘I’m sorry you don’t like me.’

‘Don’t feel put upon,’ she said. ‘I don’t like most people.’

Implicit in her statement, Mingolla thought, was a studied rejection of life, and he pictured how she must have been back in the days when politics was in the hills, when everything seemed possible: an ordinarily pretty Indian girl imbued with extraordinary zeal and passion. He wished he could help her, do something for her, and remembered the stack of romance novels.

‘Do you like making love?’ he asked. ‘I don’t mean do you like… your work, but would you like it with someone you cared about?’

‘Go to hell,’ she said.

‘I’m serious.’

‘So am I.’

‘I could make you like it.’

She laughed. ‘I’ve heard that before.’

‘No, really. Suppose I could hypnotize you, make you feel passion? Would you want me to do that?’

The mattress rustled as she turned to face him, and he could feel her eyes searching him out. ‘Ten lempira,’ she said. ‘And you can make me crow like a rooster.’

‘That’s not what I’m talking about.’

She reached down, fondled his genitals. ‘Come on, man,’ she said bitterly. ‘Ten lempira. You’ll forget all about the other girls.’

Humiliated, he pushed her hand away.

‘No?’ she said. ‘Well, maybe when you’re feeling better.’

He was tempted to coerce her pleasure, but couldn’t bring himself to do it, unable to shake the conviction that she was his superior.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Alvina after a while. ‘I just can’t figure anything out anymore.’

Morning in the Barrio was different from night only in that when sections of the roof were lifted, chutes of gray light spilled in, and people stood beneath the open sky, risking mortal harm for a glimpse of freedom; otherwise the same smoky orange gloom prevailed among the black beams and fires. The center of the Barrio, where Leon and Mingolla sat in a shadowed niche, featured a row of stucco houses strung out across the width of the prison; and in one of them, a house with a white wall and black shutters, and an oil drum fire burning at its corner, lived Opolonio de Zedeguí. ‘See those four guys out front?’ said Leon, inserting the tip of his knife into his packet of frost. ‘They’re always there. His bodyguards. You’ll have to do something to get rid of them. A diversion, maybe.’ He inhaled from the knife blade. His black eyes widened, his cheeks hollowed. ‘Chingaste! This is good stuff!’

The four men ranged in front of de Zedeguí’s house were young and well muscled, and Mingolla could tell from their slack attitudes that they were under psychic control. De Zedeguí was being terribly incautious: these men might well have been the signal that had alerted American agents to his presence.

‘If you’ve got more of this stuff, I know some guys who can help,’ said Leon.

‘We’ll talk about it later.’ Mingolla did a bladeful of frost and looked around. He was beginning to get used to the noise and the smell, and he wondered if the place was growing on him. He chuckled, and Leon asked what was funny. ‘Nothing,’ said Mingolla.

Leon laughed, too, as if ‘nothing’ were a hilarious concept. Sharp lines spread from the comers of his eyes, making his reddish brown skin look papery. ‘So,’ he said after a silence, ‘you’re her cousin, eh? Strange she never mentioned you. She talks about family all the time.’

‘She didn’t know me,’ said Mingolla. ‘Different branch of the family.’

‘Ah,’ said Leon. ‘That explains it.’

Mingolla had more of the drug. It was doing nice things to his head, but was tearing up his nose, and he thought he should start taking it under his tongue. Or stop taking it altogether. But he had become so used to being drugged, the indulgence seemed natural.

‘I thought all her people lived around Coban,’ said Leon.

‘Guess not.’

‘Y’know,’ said Leon, ‘it’s crazy you coming here just to kill this guy. In here, he’s dead already.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘So what’s your real reason?’

Mingolla saw that he would have to do something soon about Leon’s suspicious nature, but he felt too loose and composed to want to bother with it now. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said, coming to his feet.

They set off toward Alvina’s, and Mingolla wondered if the place had grown on him, though more likely it was the drug that caused the Barrio to appear… not beautiful, exactly, but painterly. Everywhere were tableaux that had the inner radiance and important stillness he associated with the Old Masters. There, three men roughing up a woman, who was clawing, kicking, and all of them looking up as the roof above opened to admit a shaft of white sunlight that played over them, freezing and transfiguring the action. And there, almost lost in the shadow of a thatched lean-to, an old hag straight out of Goya, her ravaged face framed by a black shawl, staring with perplexed astonishment at a feather in her hand. And the whole of the place with its black divisions, its smoky orange segments of misery, leaping flames, and silhouetted imps, was a collection of pre-Renaissance triptyches. He could be like the guy who painted murals in the bombed villages, he could stay here forever and ensure immortality by memorializing a life of terror and deprivation.… A change in the noise, a wave of louder and more agitated noise rolling toward them, brought him alert. In the distance he saw a line of masked guards with whips and rifles driving a mob ahead of them.

‘This way!’ Leon grabbed his arm, yanking Mingolla toward the wall of houses. ‘We’ll be safe in there.’

Mingolla had a bad feeling. ‘Why there?’

‘They’re not hunting anybody… it’s just a sweep.’ Leon pulled at him. ‘They always do it about this time; they never check the houses.’

People were running in every direction, shouting, screaming, bright spears of sound that shattered at their peak, and Mingolla was slammed into a beam by someone’s shoulder. Diseased flowers swirling, eddying around him, all the same kind, with patterns of black mouths and empty eyes and mottled brown petals like skin, a wilted vaseful of them washing down a drain. Forked twig hand clutching his arm, wrinkled mouth saying, Please, please, and being swept away. He fought toward Leon, but was thrown off course by the tidal flow of the mob. The guards were closing, he could see the patterns of bloody muscle on their masks, hear their whips cracking, and shouts of pain were mixed in now with those of panic. A little boy clung to his leg with the desperation of a small animal hanging onto a branch in a gale, but was scraped off as Mingolla beat a path through a clot of people stopping up the flow. The screams fed into the smoky light, making it pulse, making the flames leap higher in the oil drums, and Mingolla had the urge to lose control, to begin cutting with his knife and screaming himself. He wound up beside the door Leon had entered, wedged it open, and a teenage boy slipped past him into the dimly lit room… slipped past and cried out as a knife flashed across his neck. Leon’s startled face peering out Mingolla pushed inside and backhanded Leon to the floor, and Leon rolled up into a crouch, the knife poised. But he faltered, his expression growing puzzled, then woeful under Mingolla’s assault of guilt and friendship betrayed. The knife dropped from his hand.

Mingolla bolted the door, kneeled beside the boy, and checked for a pulse; his fingers came back dyed with red. Leon had slumped against the rear wall and was weeping, his face buried in his hands. In the corner beside him, ringed by guttering candles, wrapped in blankets as gray as her skin, an old woman was trembling, staring fearfully at Mingolla. He snatched one of her blankets and used it to cover the dead boy. He picked up Leon’s kinfe, squatted next to him. ‘Who are you working for?’ he asked. Leon just sobbed, and Mingolla jabbed his leg with the knife, repeating the question.

‘Nobody, nobody.’ Leon’s Adam’s apple bobbed, his voice broke. ‘I wanted the rest of the drugs.’

Leon’s treachery brought home to Mingolla the full extent of his foolhardiness. The manchild strolling around Hell, contemplating its aesthetic, playing ineffectual good Samaritan. He was damned lucky to be alive. No more bullshit, he thought. He’d finish his business and get out. Leon’s tears glistened, he sobbed uncontrollably, and Mingolla intensified his assault, slowly elevating Leon’s guilt to a suicidal pitch. He held the knife to the side of Leon’s neck.

‘No, please… God, no!’ The old woman crawled toward him, dragging a train of blankets. ‘I’ll die, I’ll die!’ Her voice articulated and decrepit, like a grating pain, like broken ribs grinding together. Her face a gray death mask with hairy moles, lumped cheekbones. Her death an accomplice after the fact to the dead thing of her life. Mingolla looked away from her, repelled, ready to cut Leon, full of cold judgment.

‘It’s not his fault,’ whined the old woman. ‘He’s not responsible.’

Mingolla had an answer for that, courtesy of Philosophy 101, but withheld it. ‘Whose fault is it, then?’ he asked, pointing at the boy with the knife.

‘You don’t know,’ she said. ‘You don’t know what he’s…’ A tear the size of a pearl leaked from one of her rheumy dark eyes. ‘The things they made him do, the awful things… but he fought back. Ten years in the jungles. Ten years living like an animal, fighting all the time. You don’t know.’

Leon’s sobs racked his chest.

‘Who are you?’ Mingolla asked.

‘He’s my son… my son.’

‘Did you know he was going to do this?’

She didn’t hesitate. ‘Yes, and you’d have done the same. All those drugs, so much money. You’re no different from us.’

‘No,’ said Mingolla, pointing again to the boy. ‘I wouldn’t have done this.’

‘Fool,’ said the old woman, and the screams and shouts from without, receding but still a measure of chaos, seemed to be echoing the word. ‘What do you know? Nothing, you know nothing. Leon… Oh, God! When he was seventeen, just married, the soldiers came to our village. They took all the young men and armed them with rifles and drove them in a truck to the next village, where the people were suing a big landowner. A real villain. And the soldiers ordered the young men to kill all the young women of that village. They had no choice. If they hadn’t obeyed, the soldiers would have killed their women.’ She looked sadly at the gray walls as if they were explanations, reasons. ‘You know nothing.’

‘Forgive me,’ said Leon. ‘God, oh God, forgive me!’

‘I know he tried to kill me,’ said Mingolla. ‘I don’t care what made him this way.’

‘Why should I bother?’ Leon’s mother gazed at the ceiling, her hands upheld in supplication. ‘Let him take my son, let me starve. Why should I live any longer?’ She turned a look of pure hatred on Mingolla. ‘Go ahead!’ she shrilled. ‘Kill him! See’—she pointed a knobbly finger at Leon—‘he doesn’t care, either. What’s it matter, life or death. In this place it’s the same.’ She screeched at him. ‘I hope you live forever in this godforsaken hole! I hope life eats you away an inch at a time.’ She tore at her blouse, ripping away buttons, baring the empty sacks of her breasts. ‘Kill me first! Come on, you devil! Kill me! Me!’ And when he did nothing, she tried to pull his hand away from Leon’s neck, to drive the knife into her chest. Her eyes as full of bright mad life as a bird’s, her claw fingers unnaturally strong. Breath whistling in her throat. He shoved her down, and she lay panting, teeth bared, an old gray bitch-wolf gone into fear, gone beyond it into a kind of exultation, lusting for death. He didn’t feel merciful toward her; mercy would have been inappropriate. She neither wanted nor needed it. He put her to sleep to rid himself of an annoyance. Withholding judgment on Leon, he settled in the far corner among the blankets… they even smelled gray.

To fend off weariness he did more frost. He rejected the idea of returning to Alvina’s. There he would be drawn to listen to Hermeto’s reminiscences, feel renewed appreciation for Alvina, and that would only weaken him. He would wait here until midnight and then take care of de Zedeguí. Take care of him in a straightforward fashion. No diversions, no tricks. He wanted a gunfight, a test of strength. Subtlety was not his forte, and he would be prone to bouts of foolhardiness until he gained more experience; he needed to reassure himself of the efficacy of brute force. A certain lack of prudence was corollary to the wielding of power, he thought; a credential of boldness. And if this attitude reflected a diminished concern for his survival, so be it: such a diminished concern would be an asset to a killer, for if one valued one’s own life too highly, such a valuation would be difficult to dismiss in regard to other lives.

Leon’s weeping began to perturb him, and he let him join his mother in sleep. He pulled out de Zedeguí’s photograph, inspected it for clues. But that bland professorial face gave nothing away, unless its unreadability was itself a clue to subtlety. He hoped that was the case, that their struggle would be one of strength against subtlety: that would be the best proving ground of all. He dipped up more frost with the edge of the photograph. The drug was a solid form in his head, a frozen vein of electricity that soon began to prevent any thought aside from a perception of its own mineral joy. Mingolla’s nasal membranes burned, his heart raced, and he sat unmoving. He gazed at a spot on the wall, his resolve building into anger, like a warrior envisioning the coming battle, living it in advance, yet for the moment secure amid hearth and home, with his dogs sleeping at his feet.

It began to rain shortly before six o’clock, a hard downpour that drummed like bullets on the iron roof, drowning out every other noise. All over the Barrio, sections of the roof were being lifted, allowing tracers of rain to slant through the orange gloom, the separate drops fiery and distinct. People cast off their rags and danced, their mouths open, their torsos growing slick and shiny, and others caught the water in buckets, and others yet dropped to their knees, their hands upheld to heaven. Fires hissed and burned low. Smoke fumed, and a damp chill infiltrated the air. There was a general lightening of mood, a carnival frenzy, and, taking advantage of it, Mingolla strolled up to the oil drum fire at the comer of de Zedeguí’s house and joined three old men who had gathered around it, convincing them that his presence was expected and welcome; out of the corner of his eye, he studied the four guards flanking de Zedeguí’s door. He blocked, becoming invisible to the uncommon senses of the man he intended to kill, and thought how best to deal with the guards.

The old men were roasting snakes that had been pierced by lengths of wire; the snakes were crisp and blackened, their eyes shattered opaque crystals, their jaws leaking thin smoke, and underlit by the fire, the men’s faces were made into cadaverous masks of shadow and glowing skin. They offered Mingolla a portion of the meat, but he suggested instead that they share their bounty with the guards. This struck the three as a marvelous idea. Why hadn’t they thought of it themselves? They extended whispered invitations, and de Zedeguí’s guards hurried over. When the guards slumped to the ground, put to sleep by Mingolla’s exertions, the old men expressed consternation, worrying that the meat might be tainted; but Mingolla reassured them and urged them to drag the guards off behind a pile of rubble, where they might rest more comfortably. That done, the old men returned to their snakes, paring slices of meat, tasting, and declaring that the snakes could use another turn, all as if nothing unusual had happened.

Five minutes later, de Zedeguí came to stand at his door. He wore jeans and a green shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and he was more slender than Mingolla had assumed; his hair had grown long, falling in black curls to his shoulders, and his dark face was composed. He, too, was blocked, but on noticing the absence of his guards, he let the block slip. His heat was strong, but not as strong as Tully’s, and this gave Mingolla the confidence to let his own block slip. De Zedeguí sought him among the men gathered by the oil drum and spread his hands in a show of helplessness; then he beckoned, and Mingolla, committed to a concept of forth-right challenge, walked over to his side. The drumming of the rain seemed to be issuing from within his body, registering his rush of adrenaline.

‘I’ve been expecting you,’ said de Zedeguí in a soft, cultured voice.

Mingolla said nothing, afraid that speech, that any interaction would undermine his determination.

‘I knew they’d eventually send someone, and I knew it would be someone strong. But you’—de Zedeguís smile was thin and rueful—‘it seems they’ve adopted a policy of overkill.’ He rubbed his jaw with his middle finger as if smoothing away some imperfection. ‘You have come to kill me?’

Mingolla maintained his silence.

‘Yes, well…’ Again de Zedeguí held out his hands palms up. ‘I promise you I won’t resist. Even if I did, I wouldn’t have a chance… I’m sure you’re aware of that.’ He gave a nervous laugh. ‘So unless you’re in a rush, why don’t you come inside, let me have a last smoke, some wine. I’m a stickler for the formalities, and I’ve always been of the opinion that a man’s death should be an occasion of rigorous formality.’

Nothing was going as Mingolla had imagined. De Zedeguí’s surrender had disconcerted him, and he could not help sympathizing with the man.

‘Nobody’s hiding in there,’ said de Zedeguí. ‘Check through the window if you want.’

Mingolla went to the window, flung open the shutter, and peered inside. Cot against the rear wall, cushions on the floor in the opposite corner, and hung from a ceiling hook, a kerosene lamp that shed an unsteady orange glow. Stacked on the floor were canned goods, bottles, and a large number of books. Everything was very clean.

‘All right,’ said Mingolla. ‘Let’s go.’

Once inside, de Zedeguí turned the lantern flame down to a crescent, throwing the room into near darkness. ‘Don’t be alarmed,’ he said. ‘No tricks. I prefer it dark.’ He picked up a wine bottle and sat on the cot. ‘I won’t offer you anything, I’ve no wish to compromise you. As a matter of fact, I’ve been impatient for you to arrive.’

‘You want to die?’ Mingolla asked, taking a seat on the cushions.

A match flared, the coal of a cigarette was puffed into life, and de Zedeguí lay back, merging with the shadows. ‘Not exactly. It’s just that I no longer care to be who I am.’

Mingolla felt disadvantaged, realizing that he had enlisted in the problem of de Zedeguí’s existence; he wondered if he could go through with the act.

‘You may reach the same conclusion someday,’ de Zedeguí went on. You’re no different from me.’

The rain was slackening, the drumming dwindling away, and the brutal music of the Barrio was regaining dominance. ‘What made you come here?’ Mingolla asked.

‘I understood that I had become a criminal,’ said de Zedeguí. ‘I should have understood it long ago, but I was too’—he laughed—‘too much in love with my criminality to recognize it as such. But when I did, I wanted to be at the heart of the law, subject to its lessons, its wise institutions. As I told you, I’m a stickler for formality.’

‘Penance?’ said Mingolla.

‘Justice. Of course justice has always been confused with punishment. Men have exerted their creativity to contrive just punishments for ages. Did you know, for instance, that an author named Bexon once proposed an entire tableau of penitential heraldry? He suggested that condemned prisoners be brought to the gallows dressed in red or black, that parricides should wear black veils and embroidered daggers, and the shirts of poisoners be decorated with serpents. Astonishing! What would it matter to me the color of my shirt at death? I merely want the justice my crimes demand, and now’—he toasted Mingolla with the bottle—now you’ve come.’

‘If you feel so strongly, why didn’t you kill yourself?’

‘You haven’t been listening. I want justice, and I would certainly be more merciful than you.’ De Zedeguí had a long swallow of wine. ‘There’s no point telling you anything. You’re too young, too inexperienced. But when you reach Sector Jade, you’ll understand… though perhaps you won’t care. Most of us don’t.’

‘Sector Jade? What’s that?’

‘You’ll find out soon enough,’ said de Zedeguí. ‘And I doubt you’d believe me now.’

‘I can make you tell me.’

‘Why don’t you? I’ll tell you why. Because you’re feeling sorry for me… or if not sorry, you’re feeling something. And you’ve been so stripped of feeling by the process that birthed you, you want to hang on to any feeling, no matter how inconsequential. But in the end you’ll do your duty. You’re a creature of power, and now you’re too enamored of its usage to understand the damage’—his voice grew strained—‘the horrid self-inflicted damage you will incur.’

Mingolla, angered by de Zedeguí’s description of him, was made afraid by the passion embodied by this last statement.

De Zedeguí threw himself off the cot, and Mingolla tensed. But the Nicaraguan only paced back and forth, passing from shadow into dim light and back. He stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Prisons… fascinating subject. Books have been written on the psychology of their construction. Bentham, for example. The Panopticon. A marvelous design! A circular building with a tower at the center of an interior courtyard, and the tower has wide windows that face the inner wall of the ring, and the cells in the ring are backlit so they can be viewed from the tower like thousands of little stages. And of course the watchers in the tower, they’re hidden from the eyes of the prisoners. Their invisibility guarantees order. Who’s going to try to escape when they’re being watched all the time? The Panopticon is similar to the carceral concept being developed in Sector Jade, though not half so effective. But the truth of the matter is that Sector Jade is a joke… the joke power has played on itself.’ He shook his forefinger. ‘Wait till you get there! You won’t believe what’s going on! The little family feud this war involves. The Madradonas and the Sotomayors.’

‘I’ve heard those names before,’ said Mingolla, plumbing his memory. ‘In a story I read… I think.’

De Zedeguí laughed. ‘‘It’s no story, believe me. You’ll find that out.’ He continued to pace, planting his feet forcefully as if stamping out small fires, and his words came in impassioned bursts. ‘Did you know that confession was once considered a primary form of justice? Men declaring their guilt from the gallows. “Oh, Lord! Forgive my execrable deed, my lamentable sin!” Here in Honduras we keep the tradition alive. Rustlers are photographed holding strips of beef, their guilt published in the press. Myself, I once saw two murderers supporting the body of their drowned victim. What a horrible sight! His eyes were like hardboiled eggs, all white and bulging… the little children who passed by were probably afflicted for life. But who would believe my confession? What evidence should I hold?’ He flung the wine bottle against the wall, and the splintering glass wired Mingolla’s nerves. ‘We’re living in the Dark Ages! The countryside’s beset with pillories and gibbets and wheels. A fiesta of punishment! And I helped to…’ He stopped pacing, stood by the door. ‘I think you should go ahead now, I really do.’

Mingolla lowered his head, defeated. The Nicaraguan was insane, pathetic, his sensibility scoured raw by guilt, and there would be no battle, no gunfight. To kill him would be an act of extermination.

‘What are you waiting for?’

‘Let it alone, all right,’ said Mingolla.

‘Oh, have I touched your soul?’ said de Zedeguí in a tone of mock concern. ‘Dredged up some scrap of humanity? Having a little trouble with our motivation, are we? Here, I’ll help you.’ He walked over to Mingolla and kicked him hard in the thigh.

Mingolla cried out, grabbed the injured spot.

‘Want more motivation?’ said de Zedeguí. ‘All right.’ He spat in Mingolla’s face.

Revolted, yet restraining a reaction, Mingolla wiped his cheek on his sleeve.

‘What control!’ De Zedeguí clapped his hands. ‘Why, you’re a remarkable likeness of the human! But’—he dropped his voice to a nasty whisper—‘you and I both know you’re not. Come on, asshole! All that power crawling around in there, all that sick wormy juice, and you’ve never really used it. You know you want to… so come on! Here I am! Blind me with your lightnings!’ He broke into a giddy laugh that went sky high and kicked Mingolla in the hip.

‘Dammit!’ Mingolla rolled away, came up into a crouch, his eyes narrowed in a hateful squint.

‘Marvelous!’ said de Zedeguí. ‘The hound snarls, his eyes redden!’

Mingolla’s anger was building to critical, fed by the self-loathing that de Zedeguí was making him feel, and he thought how appropriate it would be to return the favor. The Nicaraguan spat once again, catching Mingolla with the spray. It’s so amusing to stand here and see you trying to pretend you’re a real boy, when you’re nothing but a filthy little spider about to spew poison on one of his weaker brothers.’ Another kick. ‘Don’t hold back! Just think of the ecstasy that murder will bring, your thoughts arrowing into me… what’s that the Americans say? Fucking with my mind. What a perfect phrase! And that’s what you’ll be doing, coming all over yourself as you fuck my mind to death. How you can stand waiting? Or is this just the foreplay, the anticipation?’

He aimed another kick, but as he drew back his leg, Mingolla struck with all his power, with power he’d never known he had, sending waves of self-loathing at de Zedeguí. The Nicaraguan stumbled back into the shadow beside the door, and Mingolla heard a steamy hiss, a whimper that went higher and higher like a teakettle on the boil. De Zedeguí clapped his hands to his head and staggered through the door, swayed, a black mad figure against the orange murk, then turned the corner, with Mingolla following behind.

The three men were still grouped around the oil drum fire, and lurching, out of control, de Zedeguí pushed them aside. He stood beside the drum, shaking violently, then gripped the edges of the drum with both hands. The metal must have been superheated, yet he gave no cry. One of the men started toward him, his knife drawn, but before he could cut, de Zedeguí—with the formal precision of a deep bow—ducked his head into the drum. The glow reflected on the interior of the drum brightened by half, and when de Zedeguí straightened, his head was burning, his shirt was burning, foot-high flames licking up from his scalp like weird reddish orange hair marbled with threads of black. Shouts, the rustling of voices, many voices rolling away as swiftly as wind through a forest, spreading the news. For a moment Mingolla thought de Zedeguí would survive, that he would jam his hands in his pockets and stroll casually off into the Barrio. But then he toppled, sparks flying out on impact, and was soon blocked from view by the curious and those trying to remove his shoes and watch.

Mingolla couldn’t gather his thoughts and was briefly afraid that they had been sucked down the drain of de Zedeguí’s death, whirled away into some garbage heap of stale brainwaves. He backed into the house and felt calmer in the dark room. It was early… what was he going to do with all that time? Somebody peeped in the door, and he yelled at them. He dug out the packet of frost, was horrified to see de Zedeguí’s smiling photograph inside it; he sailed it away into the corner, and sat on the cot. Scooped up the white powder with his knife, shoveled it in. Too fast, spilling powder on his knees, the floor. He nicked his nose with the blade. Calm down, he told himself; it wasn’t your fault. He hadn’t wanted de Zedeguí to stick his head in the fire. He didn’t know what he had wanted. For the man to keel over, sudden and painless. Yeah, that would have been acceptable. He did more frost. More. Shoveling it in faster, blood mixing with the powder on the blade, forming a crust. God, he was ripped! Dazzles like stars, like miniature burning heads, floating on the dark, and his heart doing poly-rhythms. Painless. That’s what he’d wanted. Sure, right, he said. You were glorying in the possibilities of violence, picturing skulls split by pitchfork thoughts, and you didn’t give a crap about the guy. Well, so what? The guy was into death, wasn’t he? A little more frost? Why, certainly. Couldn’t hurt. Painless, in fact. Like that nosebleed you got, man? Christ, he hadn’t noticed. All over his damn mouth, his chin. In Hell, he wrote in his mental diary, Mingolla was afflicted by a nosebleed and avoided serious involvement; he neither drank the water nor sampled the cuisine, and… Shut up! Why don’tcha make me! Blow an ugly thought into my brain, and whoosh! I’m all aflame. Stop it! Whoosh, crackle. Did you catch that smell? Worse than those fucking snakes! Better snort that shit on the blade, man, or you’re gonna drop it, the way you’re shaking. Yeah, that’s it. Do a little more… little more. See how it shuts down the voices, the memories? Smoothing everything out. Wiring shut the mouth of the brain with stitches of blue-white electricity, and soon there won’t be anything except cool blue-white sparkling silence. But you know what, David, Davy, Dave, Mister Mingolla, you know what?

No, what?

Even that’ll be damning.

On the drive back to La Ceiba through the moonless dark, Mingolla sat in front with the guards, with Carlito, Martín, and Julio. He avoided looking at Alvina, who was a few rows back, and instead studied the masks of the guards. It seemed he was beginning to be able to read them, to assign expression to the maps of bloody tendon and muscle. He hated the masks, but that was not indicative of any specific grudge or attitude. Hate was coming to be something he kept in a secret compartment, something statistical and impersonal, yet a signal of his identity, like a license to carry a gun. He listened to the guards joking about the banalities of their lives, the funny things they’d witnessed back at the Barrio, and he made a decision. It was only fair, he thought. Eye for an eye, and like that.

The bus stopped on the edge of town, and the whores walked off in a body toward the lights of the Avenida de la Republica. Mingolla sat with his head down, waiting for motive to surface, for anything that would create a reason to act: he was that empty. ‘Don’t you have to report?’ one of the guards asked.

Mingolla saw the three anonymous faces turned his way. ‘There’s danger,’ he said, backing up the statement with emotional evidence. ‘Get off the bus.’ He told them to leave their rifles, picked one up, and unchecked the safety.

Wind poured off the sea in a cold unbroken rhythm, sweeping through the roadside grass, pebbling his arms with goose-flesh. The guards huddled to the right of the door, their shirttails flapping, hugging themselves against the chill. Their faces were puzzled twists of tendon, confused alignments of muscle. ‘You mustn’t be seen,’ Mingolla told them. Lie down in the grass, and I’ll let you know when the danger’s passed.’

Two of them moved off into the grass, but one asked, ‘What sort of danger?’

‘Terrible danger,’ said Mingolla, wielding more influence. ‘Hurry now! Hurry!’

They lay down in the grass, hidden from sight, and he felt they had fallen from the earth, plummeted in a long dark curve. Why was he doing this? he wondered. What difference did it make? Whose moral imperative did it serve? Blackness everywhere he turned. Black sea, black grass, black air. Only the bus was white, and that was a lie. One guard poked up his head, and that little red face with its surprised hole of a mouth punctuating the turbulent black poem of the winded grass… it irritated Mingolla. ‘Get down!’ he cried. ‘Get down!’ And opened fire. The bursts barely audible above the wind. He raked the grasses until the clip was exhausted. He took the gun by the barrel and slung it toward the sea. He listened. Nothing, no moans, no screams. The mortal silence was astounding in its depth. All that had once been alive might now be dead. He liked it like that. The silence touched his heart with a cold snaky kiss, and he wondered if he should inspect the bodies. Check for breath. Nope, he thought; no need. He scented the air. Briny and clean. He’d done his duty, done it well. He could have stayed there forever, serene with accomplishment, but at last he climbed back into the bus and drove into town.

He strolled along the Avenida de la Republica, peering into the bars, feeling distant from the music and laughter, immune to the atmosphere. He bought a lime sno-cone from a vendor and sucked at ice chips as he walked, smiling at everyone, shaking his head at the kids who pushed black coral jewelry into his face. A whore stumbled out of a bar, bumped him, and he caught her around the waist to keep her from falling. She was skinny, with light freckled skin, reminding him of Hettie, and she was very drunk. He helped her back to her hotel, keeping a grip on her waist, and when they reached the door, she asked if he wanted to go upstairs.

‘Wish I could,’ he said. ‘I’ve got an appointment.’

‘Well’—she patted her hair into shape, smiled foggily—‘you very nice to gimme a hand.’

‘My pleasure,’ he said, and sauntered off.

At the end of the street was a public square with tall hibiscus bushes at the corners, flowering pink and red. Coconut palms looming along concrete paths that crossed at diagonals, stone benches, a central fountain like a stone lily. Facing the square was a large white stucco church with two tiers of steps leading up to its brightly lit facade. Mingolla chose a bench near the fountain, did some frost for alertness, enough to put an extra shine on the splashing water. Clumped in the shadow of a hibiscus farther down the path was a group of shoeshine boys. Chattering, smoking cigarettes. Their kits were decorated with mosaics of broken glass, and to Mingolla they looked like midgets with diamond-studded satchels. He wished he had a cigarette; he had never smoked, but recalling friends who did, he thought that this seemed the perfect time for a cigarette, the sort of significant lull during which a smoke is helpful in focusing one’s thoughts. He did a tad more frost, instead. The shoeshine boys watched with interest, but showed no sign of going for the police. Not that he cared. He could handle the police. He got a nice drain off the frost and kicked back, crossing his legs, thinking that he had overreacted to de Zedeguí’s death. Still, he realized a certain amount of reaction was inescapable. He would be better prepared in the future. He would go to the Petén, take care of Debora, and after that… well, after that the future would take care of itself.

The faint drift of music from the bars brought back nights on a Florida beach with an old girlfriend, the car door left open so they could hear the radio while they made out on the sand or screwed in the shallows. You could walk out a hundred yards and only be in up to your thighs. Tepid, calm water. Lighted buoys winking like fallen stars. Kids drinking in the other cars, throwing bottles to smash against the sea wall. These thoughts cheered him. He had come through a bad time, but it was behind him now, and he had his memories back. All of them. He did a bladeful of frost to celebrate, and suddenly felt that he was David Mingolla, David fucking Mingolla, the guy he had nearly lost track of, the guy of whom great things had been predicted, his old self again… only more so.