Life During Wartime

corporal punched a buzzer, an inner door swung open to a round white room with a desk and chairs, charts on the walls, and a cot in one corner.

Major Cabell was in her thirties, a tanned reedy woman whose lusterless brown hair and strained expression had hardened her good looks into a spinsterly primness redolent—Mingolla thought—of a frontier schoolmarm who had been forsaken by her lover and left to age in the prairie winds. She threw on a dressing gown over her T-shirt and fatigue pants, and invited them in. She agreed to send them across the valley with a recon patrol the next morning; but when he suggested a chopper she told him that they’d be safer with a patrol: they lost a lot of choppers on missions to the far side of the valley. She checked her watch, offered them the use of bunks and shower facilities, but asked Mingolla if he would mind staying behind and talking. Official business, she said. Once the others had gone off with her aide, she unwound, seeming to drop four or five years along with her brittle air; she broke out a bottle of gin and pulled up a chair beside Mingolla, who was becoming unsettled by her attitude toward him.

‘I hope you don’t mind talking,’ she said, filling Mingolla’s glass. ‘It’s been so long since I’ve been able to talk with a man.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘This place… the intrigues are unbelievable. It’s medieval! Lieutenants scheming against captains, captains against each other, against me. It’s because there’s no resolution to the battle. People get bored, and for lack of anything else to do they start planning career moves.’

‘You serious?’

‘Oh, yes! If they’d let me win the battle—and I could, in a matter of days—everything would be all right. But command insists upon a holding action. God knows why!’ She began to rub the ball of her right thumb across the knuckles of her left hand. ‘It’s really unbelievable. People trying to make fools of one another… that gets a lot of them killed. They write reports on each other’s eccentricities, and sometimes things get back to the injured party. I’ve caught some of the reports they’ve written about me. If I did half what they say…’ She gave a dramatic shudder. ‘And so I’m cut off from any possible… relationships. Stuck in this room. I have this recurring nightmare about it. I’m on a beach… White sand, heat. I live in a house in the dunes. I’m always exhausted from walking on the beach, because it’s so boring. There’s nothing to look at… even the colors are all bleached and ugly. I’m not helping anyone by being there. It’s not an escape or a retreat. I’m just supposed to be there. It’s like my profession. No one needs me, no one speaks to me. In fact, I don’t even know how to speak. I’ve always been there.’ She gave a nervy little laugh. ‘It’s not far from the truth. So’—she affected casualness—‘you’re from New York. God, it’s been years since I’ve been in New York.’

‘Been a while for me, too,’ he said, glancing around the room. There was a stack of confession magazines on a night table beside the cot, and set beneath it was a small TV, a VCR, and a number of videotapes, the word Love prominent in many of the titles. There was a dominant pattern in the major’s thoughts, one that had obviously been trifled with, and from the contents of the room it was clear what particular delusion the pattern reflected.

To fend her off—she had begun trailing her fingers across his arm and knee—he asked about her background. He didn’t want to reject her outright, to hurt her. Despite her delusion, there was something impressive about the major, a core dignity and strength that forced you to disregard her flaws, to relate to her without pity. It had been a long time since he had met anyone whom he didn’t pity.

‘I enlisted because my mother died,’ she said. ‘People do the damnedest things under pressure. God knows what I was thinking. It seems now that I wanted structure. Structure!’ She laughed. ‘The army’s got all the structure in the world, but it’s all topsy-turvy.’

She described her mother’s illness, how she’d coped. ‘I did labor,’ she said. ‘I built a masonry wall around the house. I worked in the garden. Cutting away rotten roots… tough as clenched knuckles.’ She swirled the gin in her glass, stared into it as if hoping the liquid would reveal some oracle. ‘People are so simple, really. When I came home to take care of her, she put my clothes away in a drawer she’d cleared. No big deal. Just this simple inclusion in her life. Sometimes she’d ball all her pain up into a simple order, get rid of it that way. I remember once she said, “See the seeds of that lily… balanced on the leaves. Get the big ones. Don’t let them dry out too much. Plant them on the far side of the garden.” And after I’d done it, she felt better.’ The major freshened Mingolla’s drink. ‘My sister came to help out. I hadn’t seen her for years. She’d acquired a southern accent and had taken to wearing a gold map of Texas on a necklace. She said she loved me, and I hardly recognized her. She’d married this Texas boy who wrote horror novels. I read some of them. They were okay, but I didn’t care for it. At best it was this sort of sensual pessimism. Maybe I just couldn’t identify with the self-loathing of vampires.’

She got up, walked to the door, and stood looking back at him over her shoulder; when he met her eyes, she paced away. ‘I can’t understand how I wound up in charge here,’ she said. ‘I can see the events that led to it, the colonel dying and all. But it doesn’t make sense.’ She laughed. ‘Of course I’m not in charge. Nobody is… or if they are, they don’t have much of a plan. You know I lose over a hundred men a day even when it’s slow. A hundred men!’ She walked back to the door, fiddled with the knob. ‘I shouldn’t be talking this way to an I-Op. You might report me.’

‘I’m not going to report you.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, coming toward him. ‘I didn’t mean that. I’m just having trouble being around you.’

‘Maybe I should go.’

‘Maybe you should.’ She dropped into a chair. ‘Why does this keep happening?’

‘What keeps happening?’

She turned away, embarrassed. ‘I keep being attracted to… to men, to strangers. It’s… it’s not even a real attraction. I mean I can feel it beginning, y’know. Feel my body reacting. And I try to control it. My mind’s not involved, y’see. Not at first, anyway. But I can’t stop it, I can’t slow it down at all. And then my mind is involved… though even then I know it’s not real, it’s just… I don’t know what it is. But it’s not real.’ She seemed to be asking for reassurance.

‘I might be able to help,’ he said.

‘How could you possibly? You don’t know what’s wrong, and even if you did…’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘What are you up to?’

‘Nothing,’ he said, and began to make her drowsy.

‘Who’re you working for?’ she said, then yawned.

Among the patterns of her mind was one that showed evidence of tampering, its structure more resilient and less easy to influence than the rest, and as she nodded in her chair, he worked at modifying the pattern, reducing its dominance. The work was painstaking. He realized he could easily go too far and destroy the pattern. Destroy her mind, turn her into a clever reconstruction of human wreckage like Don Julio and Amalia and Nate. A feeling of serenity stole over him as he worked, and accompanying this serenity was a new comprehension of the mind’s nature. He sensed that the patterns of thought were obeying some master template, that over the span of a life they weaved an intricate preordained shape that was linked to those of a myriad other minds; and he wondered if his old belief in magic and supernatural coincidences had not been a murky perception of the processes of thought, and if the mystical character he had assigned reality had actually had some validity. There was so much to think about, to try to understand. The woman’s arm in the mural, the Christian girl he’d treated in some possible future; the idea that he had somehow dealt with Izaguirre. Even the serenity he felt was something that needed to be understood; it seemed a symptom of a deeper and more complete understanding that lay yet beyond him. And these things taken together implied a universe whose complexity defied categorization, whose true character could not be fitted inside the definitions of magic or science. He doubted he would ever understand it all, but he thought he might someday understand more than he had once believed plausible.

When he awakened the major, she sat up, looking confused. ‘You must have been dead tired,’ he said.

She laughed dispiritedly. I’m always tired.’ She pressed her palms against her temples.

‘How do you feel?’ he asked.

‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘Clearer, maybe.’ She probed him with a stare. ‘You did do something to me.’

‘No, I swear… Sleep must have been what you needed.’

‘But I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘A minute ago I was desperate to…’

‘Probably stress,’ he suggested. ‘That’s all. Stress can do funny things.’

‘God, that’s what this place does to you,’ she said. ‘It even makes you suspicious of feeling good.’