Life During Wartime

they were stronger in some ways. Because they were hidden, because they couldn’t be detected.’

Flies droned in the thatch, a chicken clucked. It was hot, and sweat burned in the creases of Mingolla’s neck. He breathed through his mouth. ‘It’s weird,’ he said. ‘When I was in therapy, I never worried about failures or fuck- ups with the drugs… even though they gave me an overdose once. I just assumed everything was fine. Beats me why I leapt to that assumption, but I did.’

‘You think that’s what happened to Amalia… a failure with the drugs?’

‘Don’t you?’

‘Maybe. But she might not have been sound before they gave them to her.’

‘Either way, it’s not a pretty picture.’

‘I should warn you,’ Debora said. ‘She’s strong… very strong. And her thoughts are chaotic.’

He glanced at her, held her eyes. Her skin was almost the same shade of ashen brown as the air, and for an instant the eyes appeared to be disembodied, floating toward him. She moved back, nervous, and put a hand on the hammock ropes.

‘I’ll give it a shot,’ he said.

Chaotic was too mild a term to describe the process of Amalia’s thoughts; they seemed a fiery shrapnel spraying around inside her skull. The electric sensation was overwhelming, and the subsequent arousal shocking in its suddenness. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he said.

‘Can’t you do it?’ Anxiety in Debora’s voice.

‘I’m not sure.’ He rubbed his temples; the pain there was more an inflammation than an ache.

After several tries he became acclimated and began to project alertness and well-being. Though painful and dizzying, his contact with Amalia’s mind proved instructive. He was beginning to understand that what he had perceived as random flux was in fact an infinity of patterns, most of them so minimal that they tended to obscure one another; and he found that what he was doing intuitively was reinforcing certain of them, channeling his energy and strength along their course. Some of Amalia’s patterns were—like that one of Nate’s—powerful, easily perceived, and the longer he worked on her, the more dominant these grew. However, half an hour went past, and he still had not been able to wake her.

‘I could be here all day,’ he said to Debora. ‘Why don’t we work on her together?’

Debora frowned, plucked at the hammock ropes. ‘I guess it’s worth a try,’ she said. She ducked under the ropes and stationed herself on the opposite side of the hammock. ‘All right.’

Mingolla’s attention was focused on Amalia, on the boil of her thought, and at first he failed to notice the presence of a new and more controlled electrical flow, one whose borders kept withdrawing from his own. When he did notice it, he mistook it for one of Amalia’s patterns and pushed toward it with all his strength. At the moment of contact he had an impression of two streams of crackling energy knitting together, entwining, tightening, forming a kind of liquid knot that grew more and more complex, twisting in and out of itself, and his focus became limited to completing that knot, to contriving its ultimate expression, until even that intent was absorbed into a blaze of sexuality: like a man clutching a live wire, his thoughts sparking, conscious only of the voltage pouring through him. And then he found himself staring at Debora, unsure of who had broken the circuit and of how it had been accomplished. She looked terrified, her mouth open, breathing labored, and appeared on the verge of bolting from the hut. He wanted to say something to calm her, to stop her, because he saw that a barrier between them had been eliminated. He saw this very clearly, and he believed he had also seen down to the core of their mutuality; he didn’t understand what he had seen—its shape was as complicated as the knot they had created—but the fact that he could see it at all debunked the notion that his feelings for her had been manufactured. Enhanced, maybe. Their progress sped up, hurried along. But not manufactured. He believed she saw this, too.

‘Debora?’ Amalia’s voice, weak and whispery.

Her eyes were open, and she thrashed about as if being swallowed by the hammock.

‘How do you feel?’ Debora leaned down to her, stroked her hair.

Amalia stared at Mingolla. Though not in the least pretty, asleep she had embodied a youthful healthiness; now a sullen energy had gained control of her features, and she looked to be a fat little prig of a girl, the one with whom nobody wants to play.

‘Why do you love him?’ she asked Debora. ‘He does evil things to people.’

‘He’s a soldier, he has to do bad things sometimes. And I don’t love him.’

‘You can’t fool me,’ Amalia said. ‘I know!’

‘Think what you like,’ said Debora patiently. ‘Right now we want you to tell us more about Panama.’

‘No!’ Amalia twisted onto her side, facing toward Mingolla, her dumpling belly netted by the hammock mesh. ‘I want to play with you.’

‘Please, Amalia. We’ll play later.’

Mingolla started to exert his influence on her, but the instant he touched Amalia’s mind, a pattern he hadn’t noticed, one that must have been buried beneath the surface, began flowing back and forth, creating an endless loop that seemed to be threading through his thoughts, fastening itself to them with stitches of bright force. A point of heat bloomed in the center of his forehead, grew into a white-hot sun of pain filling his skull. He felt the jolt of a fall, heard Debora crying out. The pain dwindled, and he saw Amalia sitting up, skewering him with a look of piggy triumph.

‘I want him to play, too,’ she said.

‘We’ll both play with you afterward,’ said Debora. ‘After you tell us about Panama.’

‘You play with her.’ Mingolla pushed himself up. He gingerly touched the back of his head, found a lump. Then, alarmed by Amalia’s scowl, he backed toward the door.

‘Don’t hurt him,’ said Debora.

A sly smile spread across Amalia’s face. ‘Say you love him, and I won’t.’

Debora cast a grim look toward Mingolla.

‘Say it!’ Amalia insisted.

‘I love him.’

‘And you’ll keep loving him forever and ever, won’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can I have something to eat afterward?’

Mingolla almost laughed at the greediness that came across Amalia’s face, it was so comically extreme an expression.

‘I’ll cook you chicken and rice,’ Debora said. ‘I promise.’

‘All right!’ Amalia lay back in the hammock, arms folded across her immature breasts. ‘What do you want to know?’

‘Tell us ’bout Sector Jade,’ said Mingolla.

She glared at him, then turned her eyes to the ceiling. The innocence of sleep seemed to possess her once again. She remained silent for a long moment, and Mingolla said, ‘Is she…’

‘Shh!’ Debora waved to him to quiet. ‘She’ll tell us.’

‘Into…’ Amalia wetted her lips. ‘…Vanished… all vanished beneath… as smooth as stone, like a sector of jade amid the bright tiles, and he imagined that they would never reappear, that they were traveling an unguessable distance to a country beneath the shell of the world to which Panama was affixed like a curious pin on a swath of blue silk, and there, in that faraway country, the blood knot would be unraveled and the peace would be forged.’ Her intonation grew firmer. ‘Not the peace that passeth understanding, no, this would be a most comprehensible peace, one purchased with banknotes of blood and shame, with the coinage issued by those who at last have realized that what is fair in war must be incorporated into the tactics of peace, and from this issue would be established an unnatural yet stable order, a counterfeit of salvation, which is in itself a counterfeit of hope, and once… and once…’ She sighed, lapsed again into silence.

‘I’ve heard that before… those words.’ Mingolla couldn’t jog his memory.

‘Where?’

‘It’ll come to me. Ask her about “the others.”’

This time there was a longer pause after Debora had put the question, but when Amalia began to speak it was with more certainty.

‘…Only the latest incidence in the centuries-long feud, which was called by the Madradonas the War of the Flower, this euphemistic characterization exemplary of their tendency to embroider reality. Now Diego Sotomayor