Life During Wartime

‘Naw, I just wanna walk a little. I’ll take Gilbey and Jack, and I’ll catch ya back here or at the pension.’

He turned to go, but she stepped in front of him. ‘Is anything wrong?’

It was a temptation to tell her all he’d been thinking, but he knew she wouldn’t buy it. Nothing serious,’ he said. ‘I’ll see ya later.’

As he headed for the door, various of the families acknowledged him with smiles and nods. So sincere, so unassuming. He smiled back, hating them all.

Clear night, the stars pointy and bright, so regularly spaced that the strip of blue darkness overhead looked like a banner laid across the rooftops. Mingolla felt at ease walking out among the dead. The dead could be trusted, at least. Their dim urges were not informed by greed or lust; their memories did not inspire perversity, but were merely unresolvable longings for a world they could not quite recall. He liked the silence of the street, too. Silence was a blue-dark flow through the claustrophobic canyons of the barrio, carrying his reflection smoothly along in the windows of the stores, past the logjams of shadowy figures in the gutters, and he thought it might not be so bad to enlist in those shadow armies, to breathe the poison that made them slow, to follow the orders that permitted them to indulge in the last real reason for living. He increased his pace, swinging his arms, marching, and Gilbey and Jack had to break into a stumbling run to keep up. At last he stopped in front of the store that once had sold religious items and looked at himself in the ranked mirrors. An infinity of starlit Mingollas, all of them dark, with glittering eyes. Studying the reflections calmed him. He turned his head, and the reflections followed suit. He put his hands on his hips, moved toward the window, and an army of Mingollas, bold and undaunted, approached for consultation.

Pity, he thought, that they weren’t magic mirrors. He’d summon his friends and family to appear, give them the benefit of his wisdom. Not that he had a lot to give. Just one word: Panama. He’d say it differently to each of them. Softly to old girlfriends, to Long Island Woman, letting them know how lucky they were as Americans to be insulated against so much painful reality. And to his old buddies, he’d offer it as an admonition, shock them into draft-dodgery. And to his father, yeah, to his father he’d pronounce it as a cross between a whisper and a hiss. The word would cloud the mirror, translating into a gas the color of the night sky and the shadows, one that would envelop his father’s head and convey to him the dark flash of being, send him reeling, choking on quintessential Panamanian truth, and a moment later actuarial reality would knock on the door, and Mom would have lovers in Florida till she was eighty. Wow! What a gal!

Panama.

Not what he’d expected, nosiree!

He hadn’t reached the topless country of white beaches, the tanned coast of movie star tits and coco locos, the loll of brochureportrait dewy daughters of the idle isles, and you got American money, Jim, this land is your land, for rape, rent, and shopping mall development… whatever’s your pleasure. No, he’d reached the bloody republic of history, where Colombian pirates raided the coast and screwed their victims’ corpses, where once a band of white sailors had become headhunters and cannibals, where Chinese railroad workers had drowned themselves by the hundreds when their opium ran out, where a little weed grew that gave you the power to raise armies of the dead.

Where a man named Carlito had been born.

Panama… little shiver of three syllables.

Then the word seemed to acquire a new meaning, to tell of green hills rising beyond a barricade, of Darien, the cloud forest, the lost tribes, the witch-men and their thoughts like streamers of mist.

That Panama, now… that might just be an option after all.

Jack and Gilbey edged closer as if his longing for escape had spoken to them, and something stirred in the gutter at Mingolla’s feet. A thin shred of a man wrapped in tatters of brown cloth, stinking of garbage. Mingolla went to his knees beside him, looked into eyes empty and doting as a dog’s. The man’s lips were scabbed, and his nose had been broken; strings of bloody mucus hung from his nostrils, thick and webbed like macrame. He reached out his hand, clutched at Mingolla’s arm, and Mingolla, his bitterness swept away, began to work on the man’s mind. Behind him, a rustling, a shifting, but he paid it no attention.

Then Gilbey said, ‘Watch it!’

Mingolla glanced up, saw figures silhouetted against the stars, looming above him, and one, cowled, its face an oval of darkness, swung at him with something long and crooked. He twisted away, but the club struck the side of his head, sending white lights shooting through his skull, and he fell on his back. Gilbey hauled him up, dragged him onto the sidewalk, and he had a dizzy glimpse of hundreds of people choking the street, shuffling forward, making no sound other than the glutinous passages of their breath. Eyes like holes cut in dirty sheets, and weapons at the ready.

Glass shattered.

Gilbey jerked him around to face the store. Jack was smashing the window with his crowbar, clearing away hanging icicles of glass. Gilbey dragged him through the window, into the mirrored showroom. He kept blacking out, floating back to consciousness, seeing himself in the mirrors. Open-mouthed; a black forking of blood from his hairline. Behind them, the army converged on the broken window, pressing inside, unmindful of the spears of broken glass that pierced them. Mingolla tried to strike at them with his mind, but couldn’t focus and was pulled past his floundering mirror images and down a narrow corridor toward the back door. The knob turned in Gilbey’s hand, the door gave a little, but was stuck. Gilbey dropped his machete and wrangled with the knob.

Mingolla leaned against the wall, looking down at the machete. It was a long way off, spinning, receding, and he wasn’t sure he could reach it. But if he could reach it… well, he knew about machetes. Yes, indeed! He bent at the waist, swayed, and in righting himself, managed to scoop up the machete. The hilt was greasy with Gilbey’s sweat, the rust and blood on the blade gleamed in the light from the transom. Its heft stabilized Mingolla, and he turned to face the army.

The corridor was just wide enough for two abreast, and the army surged into it, grunting, bumping into each other, unable to master the tactics of two-at-a-time. Mingolla swung at the first to come within range, slashed a chest, a belly, drawing lines of blood in gray flesh. Two of them fell, then a third. He chopped at the shoulder of an old woman whose shawl had slipped down to blind her, he spitted a young man and kicked him away. With a screech, the door came open, and Mingolla backed into an alley almost as narrow as the corridor. Blocked at one end by a high brick wall, at the other by more of the army. Gilbey took a stand beside him, wielding a two-by-four, and Mingolla, retreating toward the brick wall, slashed the gut of a shirtless man whose skin hung in folds about his waist. He should be feeling something, he thought. Fear at the least, because he likely was going to die: there were too many of them, their heads bobbing, eyes slits of ebony, pale skin showing through rents in their clothing. And regret at killing his ex-patients. Surely he should feel regret. But it was as if the blow to his head had reduced him to their state, to an emptiness empowered by a command, swinging the machete, a little faster and more accurate than they, yet equally singleminded. No shudders flowed along the blade—their lives weren’t stubborn enough to produce such phenomena—and when their blood spattered him, it dripped from his arms with the slowness of heavy machine oil. Flesh Dummies with Real-Life Organs. There was a sweet brainless appeal to cutting them down, a muscular pleasure in a stroke well conceived and nicely executed, and Christ, was he ever doing a good job! Piling up the bodies. They slipped and flailed as they clambered over the pile. Easy to pick off. He swung, connected, biting to the bone. Swung, connected, swung, connected. Should be a work song to sing while he chopped. Well, I’m gon’ take dis machete… Jesus fuck! The alley snapped into horrid focus for Mingolla. He saw his last victim writhing as slow as an earthworm at his feet, shoving guts back into his belly. Once again he tried a mental assault, and as he did, this time succeeding, he realized that in hiding his power from the families, he had hidden its true extent from himself as well.

He felt a sun was inside his head, a heavy black sun shedding lines of force, and he sensed the minds of the armies, those in the alley, those in the store and on the street, sensed them in the way a constellation might know the fires that comprised its shape. Sensed their fragility and vacancy. Some of those near him fell, others staggered and leaned against the walls for support. He had no pity for them. They were unimportant, incidental, and he had wasted too much time with them as it was. A feeling of grim righteousness stole over him, so profound an emotion that it seemed a physical condition, a cellular affirmation of the need to strike back at whoever had tried to kill him. He exulted in the feeling and imagined himself confronting his enemy.

Ruy.

Oh, yeah! Had to be Ruy!

The army rustled, stirred by the wind of Mingolla’s anger.