luminous threads that acted as conduits for their attraction. He could feel her heat more strongly than ever, and he wondered what it would be like to make love to her, to be swallowed by that perception of heat. The instant he wondered this, she glanced up and smiled, as if sharing the thought. He wanted to ratify his sense of intimacy, to tell her something he had told no one else, and so—having only one important secret—he told her about the ritual.
She laid down her fork and gave him a penetrating look. ‘You can’t really believe that,’ she said.
‘I know it sounds—’
‘Ridiculous,’ she broke in. ‘That’s how it sounds.’
‘It’s the truth,’ he said defiantly.
She picked up her fork again, pushed around some grains of rice. ‘How is it for you,’ she said, ‘when you have a premonition? I mean, what happens? Do you have dreams, hear voices?’
‘Sometimes I just know things,’ he said, taken aback by her abrupt change of subject. ‘And sometimes I see pictures. It’s like with a TV that’s not working right. Fuzziness at first, then a sharp image.’
‘With me, it’s dreams. And hallucinations. I don’t know what else to call them.’ Her lips thinned; she sighed, appearing to have reached some decision. ‘When I first saw you, just for a second, you were wearing battle gear. There were inputs on the gauntlets, cables attached to the helmet. The faceplate was shattered, and your face… it was pale, bloody.’ She put her hand out to cover his. ‘What I saw was very clear, David. You can’t go back.’
He hadn’t described artilleryman’s gear to her, and no way could she have seen it. Shaken, he said, Where am I gonna go?’
‘Panama,’ she said. ‘I can help you get there.’
She suddenly snapped into focus. You could find her, dozens like her, in any of the R and R towns. Preaching pacifism, encouraging desertion. Do-gooders, most with guerrilla connections. And that, he realized, must be how she had known about his gear. She had probably gathered information on the different types of units in order to lend authenticity to her dire pronouncements. His opinion of her wasn’t diminished; on the contrary, it went up a notch. She was risking her life by talking to him. But her mystery had been dimmed.
‘I can’t do that,’ he said.
‘Why not? Don’t you believe me?’
‘It wouldn’t make any difference if I did.’
‘I…’
‘Look,’ he said. ‘This friend of mine, he’s always trying to convince me to desert, and there’ve been times I wanted to. But it’s just not in me. My feet won’t move that way. Maybe you don’t understand, but that’s how it is.’
‘This childish thing that you do with your two friends,’ she said after a pause. ‘That’s what’s holding you here, isn’t it?’
‘It isn’t childish.’
‘That’s exactly what it is. Like a child walking home in the dark and thinking that if he doesn’t look at the shadows, nothing will jump out at him.’
‘You don’t understand,’ he said.
‘No, I suppose I don’t.’ Angry, she threw her napkin down on the table and stared intently at her plate as if reading some oracle from the chicken bones.
‘Let’s talk about something else,’ said Mingolla.
‘I have to go,’ she said coldly.
‘Because I won’t desert?’
‘Because of what’ll happen if you don’t.’ She leaned toward him, her voice burred with emotion. ‘Because knowing what I do about your future, I don’t want to wind up in bed with you.’
Her intensity frightened him. Maybe she
‘You wouldn’t listen.’ She picked up her purse and got to her feet.
The waiter ambled over and laid the check beside Mingolla’s plate; he pulled a plastic bag filled with marijuana from his apron pocket and dangled it in front of Mingolla. ‘Gotta get her in the mood, man,’ he said. Debora railed at him in Spanish. He shrugged and moved off, his slow-footed walk an advertisement for his goods.
‘Meet me tomorrow then,’ said Mingolla. ‘We can talk more about it tomorrow.’
‘No.’
‘Why don’t you gimme a break?’ he said. ‘This is all coming down pretty fast, y’know. I get here this afternoon, meet you, and an hour later you’re saying, Death is in the cards, and Panama’s your only hope.’’ I need some time to think. Maybe by tomorrow I’ll have a different attitude.’
Her expression softened, but she shook her head, no.
‘Don’t you think it’s worth it?’
She lowered her eyes, fussed with the zipper of her purse a second, and let out a rueful hiss. ‘Where do you want to meet?’
‘How ’bout the pier on this side? ’Round noon.’
She hesitated. ‘All right.’ She came around to his side of the table, bent down, and brushed her lips across his cheek. He tried to pull her close and deepen the kiss, but she slipped away. He felt giddy, overheated. You really gonna be there?’ he asked.
She nodded but seemed troubled, and she didn’t look back before vanishing down the steps.
Mingolla sat awhile, thinking about the kiss, its promise. He might have stayed even longer, but three drunken soldiers staggered in and began knocking over chairs, giving the waiter a hard time. Annoyed, Mingolla went to the door and stood taking in hits of humid air. Moths were loosely constellated on the curved plastic of the Fanta sign, trying to get next to the bright heat inside it, and he had a sense of relation, of sharing their yearning for the impossible. He started down the steps but was brought up short. The teenage boys had gone; however, their captive iguana lay on the bottom step, bloody and unmoving. Bluish gray strings spilled from a gash in its throat. It was such a clear sign of bad luck, Mingolla went back inside and checked into the hotel upstairs.
The hotel corridors stank of urine and disinfectant. A drunken Indian with his fly unzipped and a bloody mouth was pounding on one of the doors. As Mingolla passed him, he bowed and made a sweeping gesture, a parody of welcome. Then he went back to his pounding. Mingolla’s room was a windowless cell five feet wide and coffin-length, furnished with a sink and a cot and a chair. Cobwebs and dust clotted the glass of the transom, reducing the hallway light to a cold bluish white glow. The walls were filmy with more cobwebs, and the sheets were so dirty that they appeared to have a pattern. He lay down and closed his eyes, thinking of Debora. About ripping off that red dress and giving her a vicious screwing. How she’d cry out. That both made him ashamed and gave him a hard-on. He tried to think about making love to her tenderly. But tenderness, it seemed, was beyond him. He went flaccid. Jerking off wasn’t worth the effort, he decided. He started to unbutton his shirt, remembered the sheets, and figured he’d be better off with his clothes on.
In the blackness behind his lids he began to see explosive flashes, and within those flashes were images of the assault on the Ant Farm. The mist, the tunnels. He blotted them out with the image of Debora’s face, but they kept coming back. Finally he opened his eyes. Two… no, three fuzzy-looking black stars were silhouetted against the transom. It was only when they began to crawl that he recognized them as spiders. Big ones. He wasn’t usually afraid of spiders, but these particular spiders terrified him. If he hit them with his shoe, he’d break the glass and they’d eject him from the hotel. He didn’t want to kill them with his hands. After a while he sat up, switched on the overhead, and searched under the cot. There weren’t any more spiders. He lay back down, feeling shaky and short of breath. Wishing he could talk to someone, hear a familiar voice. ‘It’s okay,’ he said to the dark air. But that didn’t help. And for a long time, until he felt secure enough to sleep, he watched the three black stars crawling across the transom, moving toward the center, touching one another, moving apart, never making any real progress, never straying from their area of bright confinement, their universe of curdled, frozen light.
CHAPTER TWO
