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 It seemed the tide of events had withdrawn, leaving the bottom dwellers exposed.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 Zedegui. Opolonio de Zedegui. 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.
