and after a second his pretense manufactured a reality, a future he was becoming less and less able to deny. He was standing in a dimly lit room furnished with leather chairs and glassed-in bookcases and an antique globe and a massive Spanish-colonial-style desk. The walls were of a grainy dark wood, and the rug was midnight blue emblazoned with tiny stars, making it seem you were having an audience in the vault of heaven with its chief magistrate, Dr Izaguirre, who sat at the desk, astonished, his gray goatee waggling as he said, ‘We thought you were dead.’
Through the picture window behind Izaguirre, Mingolla could see the desert glowing luminous white beneath a half-moon, and on the horizon a seam of infernal red brilliance that he knew were the lights of Love City, where soon—after taking an overdose of the drug that had funded this entire bit of history, taking it out of despair, out of the hope that it would bring him a vision of some tolerable future—he would wander in a delirium. And despite knowing the result of the overdose, he would go through with it, because even certain knowledge could not defuse his hope.
Izaguirre slipped one hand beneath the desk, and Mingolla said, ‘The alarm’s been cut, Carlito. And they’re all dead out there.’
‘Except for upstairs,’ said Debora bitterly, moving up next to him. ‘They’re alive upstairs… at least they’re breathing.’
Izaguirre was wilting under their stares, his waxy skin losing its tone, his flesh appearing to sag off the bone. ‘What are you planning to do?’
‘It’s already been done,’ said Debora. ‘Almost all of it, anyway.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘All but three of you have been eliminated,’ said Mingolla. ‘The three in the Pentagon. And we’re going to let you take care of ’em for us.’
‘That’s impossible! Only yesterday I was talking…’
‘That was yesterday,’ said Mingolla.
‘I’m going upstairs,’ said Debora. ‘Maybe some of them are salvageable.’
‘Don’t injure them,’ said Izaguirre.
‘Injure them?’ Debora laughed. ‘I’ve been fixing your broken toys for five years… all that had enough left to fix.’ She turned to Mingolla. ‘Can you handle him?’
‘Yeah… go on.’
‘What will you do with me?’ Izaguirre asked as Debora closed the door behind her.
‘You can figure it out, Carlito. Strip you down to nothing, then put you back together. You’ll be a time bomb like Nate and the rest. You’ll be almost alive, like your friends upstairs.’
‘You killed them all… all but three?’ Izaguirre seemed unable to absorb it.
‘It wasn’t even a challenge. We’ve learned a lot the last five years.’ Five black coffin-shaped years, each filled with the ashes of violence and betrayal.
‘If only three are left,’ said Izaguirre haltingly, ‘then there’s no need to…’
‘You know I’m not going to listen to this.’
Izaguirre straightened, composed his features. ‘No, I suppose not.’ His Adam’s apple worked. ‘All the work…’ He passed a hand across his brow. ‘What will you do afterward?’
‘There’s nothing left to do.’
‘Oh, you’ll find something. You’ve become like us, and you’ll have to do something.’ There was a note of triumph in Izaguirre’s voice.
‘I’m going to put you to sleep now,’ Mingolla said.
Izaguirre opened his mouth, but didn’t speak for a long moment. ‘God,’ he said finally. ‘How could this happen?’
‘Could be you wanted it this way. Like your story about the boarding house… it ends with the death of the author. This ending’s got your style, Carlito.’
‘I’m… uh…’ Izaguirre swallowed again. ‘I’m afraid. I didn’t think I’d be afraid.’
Mingolla had often imagined how he would feel at this moment, and he was surprised to feel very little, mostly relief; he had the idea that despite Izaguirre’s fear, the old man felt much the same.
‘Isn’t there anything I can do?’ Izaguirre asked. ‘I could…’
‘No,’ said Mingolla, and started to make him drowsy. Izaguirre half-stood, then dropped back into the chair. He tried to rouse himself, shaking his head and gripping the edge of the desk. A look of panic crossed his face. He sagged in the chair. His eyes widened, focused on Mingolla. ‘Please.’ The word came thickly like a final drop squeezed from him, and his head lolled back. His chest rose and fell in the rhythms of sleep, and his eyelids twitched.
Everything in the room—the whine of the air-conditioning, the gleams on the antique furniture, the false night of the rug—seemed to have grown sharper, as if Izaguirre’s wakefulness had been a dulling agent. The hard clarity of the moment made Mingolla uneasy, and he spun around, certain that some trap had been sprung behind him. But there was only the closed door, the silence. He turned back to Izaguirre. The old man struck him now as a kind of monument, a sad misguided monster trapped in a tar pit, a repository of history, and he realized how little he knew about the families, that most of his knowledge was factual, fleshed out by sketchy impressions. He perched on the desk, engaged Izaguirre’s sleeping mind, and went flowing down the ornate corridors of the blood past the memories of his life and into the memories of other lives, the years igniting and fading like quick candles, and he was the boy Damaso Andrade de Sotomayor on the day of his majority, standing in the gloomy main hall of the old house in Panama. All the family was there, silent in their ebony chairs, the arms carved into serpent’s heads, letting their thoughts blend in the dream, and he could feel the drug in his belly, a distant ache, and he knew the dream as voices, thousands of them speaking at once, not in words but in a wordless whisper that was the soul of the passion. The pale figures of his parents and cousins and uncle and aunts began to flicker like white flames in cups of black wood, and he, too, was flickering, his flesh becoming insubstantial, and the dream firing his thoughts with the joy of vengeance and power. And when the dreaming was done, when he was strong and steeped in the passion, it was his time to travel the path of truth, and without a word he went down the stairs into the labyrinth beneath the house, into the lightless corridors that led to the seven windows, toward the one window that would show him his place in the pattern. He walked for hours, afraid that he would never find his window, that he would be lost forever in the chill, clammy depths. But the stones of the wall, mossy and rough, were friends, and touching them he felt the energies of the past guiding him into the future, which was only the pattern of the blood extending forever. They were ancestral stones, as much of his blood as his family, and their domed shapes had the familiar textures of the Sotomayor skulls in his father’s library, and from them he derived a sense of direction and grew able to choose turnings that had the feel of the blood knot. And when he came at last to his window, he did not see it but apprehended it as a tingling on his skin. He thought this strange. Shouldn’t a window admit light… and then he saw light. Two crimson ovals like pupilless eyes that burned brighter and brighter as he approached. The window, he realized, was made of smoked glass, the sections fitted together with lead mullions into the image of a coal- black man wearing a crown of thorns, the eyes left vacant so as to allow the light of the setting sun to penetrate. The image frightened him, but he was drawn to it, and he pressed against the glass, fitting his eyes to those empty ovals, and across the valley he saw the blocky stone house of the Madradonas, looking monstrous in the sanguine light, appearing to be crouched, preparing to spring. He had seen the house many times, but this view affected him as had none other. Rage choked him, and he came to feel at one with the black burning-eyed figure against which he stood. The network of lead mullions seemed to correspond to the weavings of his nerves, to channel the bloody color of the west along them, filling him with a fierce intent, sealing the image of the ebony Christ inside him, and he knew that of all the children of his generation, he had been chosen to lead the rest against the Madradonas, that he was the arrow notched to the family bow, and that his entire life would be a flight toward the heart of that dark beast hunched and brooding on the far hill.
Mingolla broke contact and got up from the desk, went to the window. Pressed his forehead against the pane. The glass was cool and transmitted the vibration of the air-conditioner. He looked off at the distant city lights, thinking about the Christian girl, the holograph of Jesus walking around on her hand. It had always seemed that beyond that moment lay a beginning, but he had never been able to know it, to make it clear. Probably, he thought, it was just another glimmer of hope. Izaguirre stirred in his chair, and Mingolla realized he was delaying the inevitable. It wasn’t that he was troubled by what he had to do; he was simply weary of the procedure, of exposing himself over and over to the bad news about the human condition implicit in the fact that you could strip the mind
