Life During Wartime

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 Pastorin, 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 Peten. 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