Life During Wartime Read Online Free PDF Page A

half the stalls had shut down; those that remained open looked – with their thatched roofs and strung lights and beshawled women – like crude nativity scenes ranging the darkness. Beyond the stalls, neon signs winked on and off: a chaotic menagerie of silver eagles and crimson spiders and indigo dragons. Watching them burn and vanish, Mingolla experienced a wave of dizziness. Things were starting to appear disconnected as they had at the Club Demonio.
    ‘Don’t you feel well?’ she asked.
    ‘I’m just tired.’

    She turned him to face her, put her hands on his shoulders. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s something else.’
    The weight of her hands and the smell of her perfume helped to steady him. ‘There was an assault on the firebase a few days ago,’ he said. It’s still with me a little, y’know.’
    She gave his shoulders a squeeze and stepped back. ‘Maybe I can do something.’ She said this with such gravity, he thought she must have something specific in mind. ‘How’s that?’ he asked.
    ‘I’ll tell you at dinner … that is, if you’re buying.’ She took his arm, jollying him. You owe me that much, don’t you think, after all your good luck?’
    ‘Why aren’t you with Psicorps?’ he asked as they walked.
    She didn’t answer immediately, keeping her head down, nudging a scrap of cellophane with her toe. They were moving along an uncrowded street, bordered on the left by the river – a channel of sluggish black lacquer – and on the right by the windowless rear walls of some bars. Overhead, behind a latticework of supports, a neon lion shed a baleful green nimbus. ‘I was in school in Miami when they started testing here,’ she said at last. ‘And after I came home, my family got on the wrong side of Department Six. You know Department Six?’
    ‘I’ve heard some stuff.’
    ‘Sadists don’t make efficient bureaucrats,’ she said. ‘There were a lot of people taken into the prison the same day we were. We were all supposed to be tested, but the guards started beating people, and everything got confused. No one was sure who’d been tested and who hadn’t. It ended up that some of us were passed through without the tests.’
    Their footsteps crunched in the dirt; husky jukebox voices cried out for love from the next street over. ‘What happened?’ Mingolla asked.
    ‘To my family?’ She shrugged. ‘Dead. No one ever bothered to confirm it, but it wasn’t necessary. Confirmation, I mean.’ She went a few steps in silence. ‘As for me …’ A muscle bunched at the corner of her mouth. I did what I had to.’
    He was tempted to ask for specifics, but thought better of it.‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and then kicked himself for having made such a banal comment.
    They passed a bar lorded over by a grinning red-and-purple neon ape. Mingolla wondered it these glowing figures had meaning for guerrillas with binoculars in the hills: burned-out tubes signaling times of attack or troop movements. He cocked an eye toward Debora. She didn’t look despondent as she had a second before, and that accorded with his impression that her calmness was a product of self-control, that her emotions were strong but held in tight check and let out only for exercise. From the river came a solitary splash, some cold fleck of life surfacing briefly, then returning to its long, ignorant glide through the darkness … and his life no different really, though maybe less graceful. How strange it was to be walking beside this woman who gave off heat like a candle flame, with earth and sky blended into a black gas, and neon totems standing guard overhead.
    ‘Shit,’ said Debora under her breath.
    It surprised him to hear her curse. ‘What is it?’
    ‘Nothing,’ she said wearily. ‘Just “shit.” ’ She pointed ahead and quickened her pace. ‘Here we are.’
    The restaurant was a working-class place that occupied the ground floor of a hotel: a two-story building of yellow concrete block with a buzzing