The War in 2020

quiet place. The silence was bigger in his ears than the sound of the helicopters had been.

He heard the faint jangle of spurs.

His shooting hand felt as wet as if he had dipped it in a bucket. He checked the slippery pistol, making sure that he had a round chambered.

The music of the spurs grew louder. He could hear booted footsteps.

Someone began to whistle.

It was morbid. Terrible. The melody was far too light and joyful. The notes cascaded through the morning, swooping like a small bird in flight. The tune was almost something to make a man dance.

The boots approached the cantina. Then everything stopped. No more metal tangle of spurs. No footsteps. The whistling, too, ceased abruptly.

Vargas hunkered lower. Unwilling to look, unwilling to risk being seen. He felt himself shaking. It was unthinkable that he might die here, in such dusty unimportance. He was not ready.

He realized that he was weeping. And praying. It had begun automatically, and he could not stop himself. Mother of God…

He heard the soft rustle of cloth, and he knew it was the blanket being drawn away from the doorframe. It was the perfect time to rise and fire. But he could not will himself to move.

The melody of the spurs began again. But the tempo was slower now, like the music at a funeral. Vargas followed each next footfall across the room. There was a heavier note as the intruder stepped over Morita's body. The spurs became unbelievably, unbearably loud.

Somewhere in the middle of the room, his opponent stopped.

Silence.

Vargas made himself ready. Hurriedly he crossed himself with the pistol in his hand. He seemed unable to fill his lungs with the breath he needed.

'Don't move, gringo,' he shouted. But he could not move himself. He remained crouched in his hiding place, staring up from the canyon behind the bar, able to see only the blistered paint on the ceiling.

He clutched his gun, tightening his bowels. Imagining the other man somewhere out in the vast freedom of the room.

'I know your fucking rules, man,' Vargas called out. 'You can't kill me. I'm a prisoner of war, man.'

Silence. It went on so long that dust seemed to settle and stale on a man's ears. Then a slow voice spoke in perfect Spanish.

'Throw your weapons over the bar. Then raise your hands. Keep the palms open and turned toward me. Get up slowly.'

'All right, man,' Vargas shouted, his voice hitting its highest pitch. He was already rising. He still held the gun in his hand, swinging it around toward the other man's voice. He squeezed the trigger too soon.

The last thing Vargas saw was the face of a devil.

PART II The Russians

4

Moscow

2020

The real veterans, the women who had been here so many times they had lost count, said it was nothing. Less of a bother than having a tooth pulled. But the slow cramping deep inside made Valya want to draw her knees as close to her chin as bones and sinews allowed. Yet she did not move. She felt as though all of the energy had been bled out of her, and the comforting movement of her knees remained a vision, a futile dream. Her legs lay still, extended. Dead things. Only her head had turned out of the corpselike position in which the assistants had left her. She faced the wall at the end of the ward, facing away from herself, away from her life, away from everything. Staring at chipped pipes and plaster that had not been painted or even scrubbed down for decades.

She focused casually on a spray of brown droplets that trailed along the gray wall. Old stains, the beads and speckles seemed to have grown into the surface, and it was impossible to tell now whether their substance was old blood or the residue of waste. The business had been hard on her before. But Valya did not remember it as being quite this hard. Yes, it had seemed like a punishment then too. But not such a blunt punishment. Windows painted over, discoloring the cold daylight. The iron of the bedstead. She was conscious of a sharp, metallic clattering and terse voices in the open ward. But her humiliating inability to move, the dead weight of sickness in her belly, seemed to insulate her from practical concerns. If they could not help her, she would settle for being left alone on this bed whose sheets had not been changed under the day's succession of women.

Behind the masking smell of disinfectant, a morbid odor brewed. Valya sensed that she knew its identity very well, I but each time she almost named it, the label dissolved on her tongue, teasing her, prickling her ruined nerves. And her failure to find the word, to anchor reality with the hard specificity of language, left her somehow more alone than she had been in the emptiness of the previous moment. She thought of the lies she had needed to tell, another use of words, to escape from the routine of the school for a day. Wondering how much they knew or divined. Superiors sour with small authority. And the children with no color in their faces. The usage of definite and indefinite articles in the English language….

No. She would not think of that now. Especially not of the children. Nor of Yuri. And where was he now? God, the war. How could there be a war? It was impossible to imagine. There was no sound of war. Only the sameness; of the evening news. Yuri was fighting in a war. She knew it to be a fact. Yet, it held no meaningful reality for her. And it was unclean to think of Yuri now.

She wished she could clear her mind of all thought. To purge herself of present knowing like some mystic. But the harder she tried to empty her mind, the more insistently the images of her life tumbled out of their mental graves. Beds, lies, betrayals. The worst thieveries. And the feel of a new man's whiskers scrubbing her chin. The distinctiveness of the breath.

More than anything else, she hated the weakness. She hated any kind of weakness in herself, struggling against it. Only to grow weaker still, a greater fool. And now this dull physical weakness tethering her to this bed. And the faint, constant nausea.

Most of the other women in the ward remained silent. There was no desire to make new friends here, or to be known even by sight. Like a dirty train station, the clinic was a place through which to pass as quickly and anonymously as possible.

A girl became hysterical. Valya tried to keep her total focus on the plaster desert of the wall. But the voice, young and stupid with pain, would not relent. Valya thought that, if only she could find the strength to rise, she would slap the girl. Hard.

'First-timer,' a woman's voice announced to anonymous neighbors. The remark was answered by cackling laughter and snickers.

Footsteps came down the ward.

An unwilling alertness in Valya isolated the sound. Heavy. Mannish. Cheap shoes on broken tile. Valya closed her eyes. She felt as though she would give anything she owned to lie undisturbed just a few minutes longer. Her best dress, the red perfect dress from America. The jacket from France that Naritsky had given her to wear to the party with the foreigners. The few precious shreds of her life. Take them.

'Patient!' The word was dreary from years of repetition. 'Patient. Your time is up.'

Reluctantly, Valya opened her eyes, turning her head slightly.

'Patient. Time to go.'