ain’t lyin’! I’m givin’ you the good goddamn word!’
They flew east into the sun, whispering death, into a world disguised as a strange bloody enchantment, over the dark green wild where war had taken root, where men wearing brass scorpions on their berets, where crazy lost men wandered the mystic light of Fire Zone Emerald and mental wizards brooded upon things not yet seen. The copilot kept the black bubble of his visor angled back toward Mingolla, waiting for a response. But Mingolla just stared, and before too long the copilot turned away.
THE GOOD SOLDIER
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 Roatan 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!’
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
