Life During Wartime (14 page)

‘You think I’m lyin’?’ said the copilot angrily. You think I’d be bullshittin’ you ’bout somethin’ like this? Man, I ain’t lyin’! I’m givin’ you the good goddamn word!’

They flew east into the sun, whispering death, into a world disguised as a strange bloody enchantment, over the dark green wild where war had taken root, where men wearing brass scorpions on their berets, where crazy lost men wandered the mystic light of Fire Zone Emerald and mental wizards brooded upon things not yet seen. The copilot kept the black bubble of his visor angled back toward Mingolla, waiting for a response. But Mingolla just stared, and before too long the copilot turned away.

… I wish I had an army of a million guys like me,

I’d break the chains that bind the Beast

And pull the wings off Liberty.

I’d storm the Holy City and watch how long

The angels took to die,

Then bustin’ into the Great Throne Room

I’d be surprised to find

That God ain’t nothin’ but an old gray man

Who can’t remember why.

from ‘Marching Song’
—Jack Lescaux

Paths that lead to the most profound destinations, to moments of illumination or change, have nothing to do with actual travel, but rather negotiate a mental geography. And so the walk Mingolla took one day from the door of a hotel on the island of Roatán to a patch of grass where he sat cross-legged, hemmed in against a high concrete wall by a thicket of aguacaste bushes, was only the final leg of both a journey and a transformation that had encompassed a week of tests and five months of drug therapy, yet had covered scarcely any distance at all. Beside him, the bole of a palm was tipped half out of the dirt, exposing filaments of its root system, and the trunk curved up to a cluster of green coconuts, their slick dimpled hulls looking from below like the faces of evil dolls. Some of the fronds were dead, gone a tawny orange, and the burst wrappings of the newer fronds had unfurled into corkscrew-shaped lengths as gray and raveled as used bandages. Mingolla watched them shift in the wind, pleased by their slowness, by the twisting, coiling movements that seemed to mirror his own slowness, the drifty cast of mind that hid him from his trainer.

‘Davy!’ A bassy shout. ‘Quit playin’ dese fool games!’

Two cashew trees stood up from the thicket, wrinkled yellow fruit tucked among spreads of dark leaves, and farther off, towering above the hotel, whose red tile roof was visible over the tops of the bushes, a ceiba tree drenched the under-growth in a pool of indigo shadow; wherever sunlight penetrated the canopy, the air had a soft golden luminosity, and insects hovering there glowed with the intensity of jewels in a showcase.

‘Don’t vex wit’ me, Davy!’

Fuck you, Tully!

From beyond the wall came the crash of surf piling in onto the reef, and listening to it, wishing he could see the waves, Mingolla thought it didn’t seem possible he had been confined for all those months. His memories of the time consisted of a rubble of disconnected moments, and whenever he tried to assemble them, to make of them a coherent measure, he could not put together sufficient material to fill more than a few weeks … weeks of needles slipping into his arm, faces blurring as the drugs took hold, of fever dreams planing into a fevered reality, of pausing by the pitted mirror in the hotel lobby and staring into his eyes, not seeking any inner truth, just hoping to find himself, some part of himself that had been left unchanged.

‘Goddammit, Davy!’

Only one day was clear in his memory. His twenty-first birthday …

‘Okay, mon! Dat’s how you want it!’

… Right after the plastic surgery. Dr. Izaguirre had cut off the drugs so he could receive a call from his parents on a video hookup in the hotel basement, and he had waited for the call lying on a sprung sofa, facing a screen that occupied most of an end wall. The other walls were paneled in plastic strips of imitation maple, some of which had peeled away to reveal the riverbed textures of mildewed wallboard, and in the dim track lighting the overstated grain of the paneling showed yellow and black like printed circuitry made of tiger skins. Mingolla pillowed his head on the arm of the sofa, fiddling with the remote control box, trying to map out what to say to his parents, but couldn’t get beyond, ‘Hi, how’s it going?’ He had trouble calling them to mind, let alone designing intimacy, and when the screen brightened to a shot of them in their living room, sitting stiffly as if posing for a photograph, he continued lying there, taking in his father’s insurance executive drag of blue suit and tie and stylishly long gray hair, his mother’s worn face and linen dress, noticing how the flatness of the image made them seem elements of the decor, anthropomorphic accessories to the leather chairs and frilly lamp shades. He had no reaction to them: he might have been viewing a portrait of strangers to whom he had a chance blood connection.

‘David?’ His mother started to reach out to him, then remembered touch was impossible. She glanced at his father, who patted her arm, affected a bemused smile, and said, ‘We had no idea they’d made you look so much like a …’

‘Like a beaner?’ said Mingolla, annoyed by his father’s unruffled manner.

‘If that’s your term of choice,’ his father said coldly.

‘Don’t worry. Little tuck and fold here and there, little dye job. But I’m still your all-American boy.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said his mother. ‘I knew it was you, but …’

‘It’s okay.’

‘… I was startled at first.’

‘Really, it’s okay.’

Mingolla had not had high expectations for the call, yet he had wanted to have high expectations, to love them, to be open and honest, and now, seeing them again, understanding that they would demand of him a conversation to match their wallpaper, nothing more, his emotions went blank, and he wondered if he would have to dredge up old feelings in order to relate to them at all. They told him about their trip to Montreal. Sounds pretty there, he said. They spoke of garden parties, of yachting off the Cape. Wish I’d been there, he said. They complained about asthma, allergies, and they asked how it felt to be twenty-one.

‘Tell ya the truth,’ he said, weary of stock responses. ‘I feel ’bout a thousand years old.’

His father sniffed. ‘Spare us the melodrama, David.’

‘Melodrama.’ A burst of adrenaline set Mingolla trembling. ‘That what it is, Dad?’

‘I should think,’ his father said, that you’d want this to be a pleasant experience, that you’d at least try to be civil.’

‘Civil.’ For a moment the word had no meaning to Mingolla, only a bitter, insipid flavor. ‘Yeah, okay. I was hoping we could talk to each other, but civil’s cool. Fine! Let’s do it! You ask how I’ve been, and I’ll say, “Great.” And I’ll ask how’s business, and you’ll say, “Not bad. ”And Mom’ll tell me ’bout my friends, what they’re up to these days. And then if I’m real, real civil, you’ll give a little speech ’bout how you’re proud of me and all.’ He hissed in disgust. There you are. Dad. We don’t even have to go through it
now. We can just sit here and fucking stare at each other and pretend we’re having a pleasant experience!’

His father’s eyes narrowed. ‘I see no point in continuing this.’

‘David!’ His mother pleaded with him silently.

Mingolla had no intention of apologizing, enjoying his charge of anger, but after a long silence he relented. I’m kinda tense, Dad. Sorry.’

‘What I fail to understand,’ his father said, ‘is why you insist on trying to impress us with the gravity of your situation. We know it’s grave, and we’re concerned about you. We simply don’t believe it’s appropriate to discuss our concern on your birthday.’

‘I see.’ Mingolla bit off the words.

‘Apology accepted,’ said his father with equal precision.

For the remainder of the conversation, Mingolla fielded questions with a flawless lack of honesty, and after the screen had faded to gray, his anger also grayed. He lay punching the remote control buttons, flipping from car chases to talk shows and then to a haze of pointilist dots that resolved into a plain of bleached-looking ruins. He recognized Tel Aviv, remembered the ultimate bad omen of the city nuked on his birthday. The picture broke up, and he jabbed the next button. The ruins reappeared, the camera tracking past a solitary wall, twisted girders, and piles of bricks. Dark thunderheads boiled over the city, their edges fraying into silver glare; shards of buildings stood in silhouette against a band of pale light on the horizon, like black fangs biting the sky. There was no sound, but when Mingolla adjusted the fine tuning, he heard bluesy guitar chords, synthesizer, a noodling sax, and a woman’s voice … obviously the voiceover from another channel.

‘… Prowler’s latest, ‘‘Blues for Heaven,“ ’ she was saying. ‘Hope it ain’t too depressin’ for you music lovers. But, hey! Depression’s all over these days, right? Just consider it a mood alternative … like a drug, y’know. Little somethin’ to add texture to your usual upbeat feelin’, make it all that much sweeter.’

It had begun to rain in Tel Aviv, a steady drizzle, and the music seemed the aural counterpart of the rain, of the clouds and their fuming passage across the city.

‘Prowler,’ said the woman. ‘The fabulous Jack Lescaux on vocals. Tell ’em ’bout the real world, Jack.’

‘Laney’s in her half-slip, pacin’ up and down, chain-smokin’ Luminieres, watchin’ the second hand spin ’round.

I’m sittin’ at the window, pickin’ out a slow gray tune, and two shadows walkin’ east on Lincoln turn down

Montclair Avenue.

“That mother he ain’t comin’ back,“ says Laney. “Y’can’t trust him when he’s broke.

I just know he took my money.“She blows a blue-steel jet of smoke.

I say, “Take it easy, honey. Why don’t you do some of my frost.“

She laughs ’cause life without the proper poison is a joke at any cost.’

The song with its mournful disposition, its narrative of two junkies enduring a bad night, was like the voice of a ghost wandering the city, and it pulled Mingolla in, drew him along, making him feel that he – with his shattered memories and emotions – was himself half a ghost, and causing him to imagine that he would be at home among the spirits of Tel Aviv, able to offer them the consolation of flesh-and-blood companionship. There was a premonitory clarity to this thought, but he was too absorbed in the music and the city to explore it further. He saw that the ruins posed a dire compatibility for him, enforcing the self-conception that he was the ruin of a human being in whom a ruinous power was being bred.

‘David.’ Dr. Izaguirre’s voice behind him. ‘Time for your injection.’

‘Inna second … I wanna hear the rest of the song.’

Izaguirre made a noise of grudging acceptance and walked in front of the screen. He was pale, long limbed, with a salt-and-pepper goatee, thinning gray hair, and a perpetually ardent expression: an aquiline El Greco Christ aged to sixty or thereabouts and fleshed out a bit, dressed in a starched guayabera and slacks. He peered at the ruins as if searching them for survivors, then pulled a pair of glasses from his pocket and fitted them to his nose with an affected flourish. All his gestures were affected, and Mingolla believed this reflected a conscious decision. He had the
impression that Izaguirre felt so in control of his life, so unchallenged, that he had tailored the minutiae of his personality in order to entertain himself, had transformed his existence into a game, one that would test his elegant surface against the dulling inelegance of the world.

‘Tel Aviv,’ said Izaguirre. ‘Terrible, terrible.’ He went back behind the couch and gave Mingolla’s shoulder a sympathetic squeeze just as a flight of armored choppers flew out of the east over the city. It may have been this sight that triggered Mingolla’s response, and perhaps Izaguirre’s squeeze had a little to do with it, but whatever the cause, Mingolla’s eyes filled, and he was flooded with a torrent of suddenly liberated emotions and thoughts, mingling shame over his behavior with his parents, irritation at Izaguirre’s witness, and loathing for the self-absorption that had prevented him from relating to the tragedy of Tel Aviv in other than trivial and personal terms.

‘… rain is falling harder, makin’ speckles on the walk, blankets stuffed in broken windows glow softly in the dark.

An old bum his hands in baggies, slumps in a doorway ’cross the street,

his eyes are brown like worn-out pennies, got bedroom slippers on his feet.

Some wise-ass stops and says, “Hey buddy! Know where I can get some rags like that?”

The bum keeps starin’ into nowhere … he knows nowhere’s where it’s at.’

Mingolla was overwhelmed by the desolation of the ruins and the song. The white blossoms lay in the dust like crumpled pieces of paper, the camera zoomed in on one to show how it was blackening from the radiation, and his identification with the place was so complete, he felt the white thoughts lying in the dust of his mind beginning to blacken as well. The vacancy of Tel Aviv was a sleet riddling him, seeding him with emptiness, and he came to his feet, buoyed by that emptiness, gripping the sofa to keep from floating away.