Part of him wanted to wait, to see whether she had changed for the innocent, for the ordinary. But he couldn’t trust her, couldn’t trust himself, and after a brief hesitation he took off running once again.
Mingolla caught the ferry to the west bank, thinking that he would find Gilbey, that a dose of Gilbey’s belligerence would ground him in reality. He sat in the bow next to a group of five other soldiers, one of whom was puking over the side, and to avoid a conversation he turned away and looked down into the black water slipping past. Moonlight edged the wavelets with silver, and among those crescent gleams it seemed he could see reflected the broken curve of his life: a kid living for Christmas, drawing pictures, receiving praise, growing up mindless to high school, sex, and drugs; growing beyond that, beginning to draw pictures again, and then, right where you might expect the curve to assume a more meaningful shape, it was sheared off, left hanging, its entire process demystified and explicable. He realized how foolish the idea of the ritual had been. Like a dying man clutching a vial of holy water, he had clutched at magic when the logic of existence had proved untenable. Now the frail linkages of that magic had been dissolved, and nothing supported him: he was falling through the dark zones of the war, waiting to be snatched by one of its monsters. He lifted his head and gazed at the west bank. The shore toward which he was heading was as black as a bat’s wing and inscribed with arcana of violent light. Rooftops and palms were cast in silhouette against a rainbow haze of neon; gassy arcs of bloodred and lime green and indigo were visible between them: fragments of glowing beasts. The wind bore screams and wild music. The soldiers beside him laughed and cursed, and the one guy kept on puking. Mingolla rested his forehead on the wooden rail, just to feel something solid.
At the Club Demonio, Gilbey’s big-breasted whore was sitting at the bar, staring into her drink. Mingolla pushed through the dancers, through heat and noise and veils of lavender smoke. When he walked up to her, the whore put on a professional smile and made a grab for his crotch. He fended her off and asked if she’d seen Gilbey. She looked befuddled at first, but then the light dawned. ‘Meen-golla?’ she said, and when he nodded, she fumbled in her purse and pulled out a folded paper. ‘Ees frawm Geel-bee. Forr me, five dol-larrs.’
He handed her the money and took the paper. It proved to be a Christian pamphlet with a pen-and-ink sketch of a rail-thin, aggrieved-looking Jesus on the front, and beneath the sketch, a tract whose opening line read, The last days are in season.’ He turned it over and found a handwritten note on the back. The note was pure Gilbey. No explanation, no sentiment. Just the basics:
I’m gone to Panama. You want to make that trip, check out a man in Livingston named Ruy Barros. He’ll fix you up. Maybe I’ll see you.
Mingolla had believed that his confusion had peaked, but the fact of Gilbey’s desertion wouldn’t fit inside his head, and when he tried to make it fit, the rank and file of his thoughts was thrown into disarray. It wasn’t that he didn’t understand what had happened. He understood perfectly; in fact, he might have predicted it. Like a crafty rat who had seen his hole blocked by a trap, Gilbey had simply chewed a new hole and vanished into the woodwork. The thing that confused Mingolla was his total lack of reference. He and Gilbey and Baylor had triangulated reality, located one another within a coherent map of duties and places and events. Now that they both were gone, he felt utterly bewildered. Outside the club, he let the crowds push him along. Stared at the neon animals atop the bars. Giant blue rooster; golden turtle; green bull with fiery eyes. Great identities regarding his aimless course with dispassion. Bleeds of color washed from the signs, staining the air to a garish paleness, giving everyone a mealy complexion. Amazing, Mingolla thought, that you could breathe such grainy discolored stuff, that it didn’t start you choking. It was all amazing, all nonsensical. Everything he saw struck him as unique and unfathomable, even the most commonplace of sights. He found himself staring at people—whores, street kids, an MP who was patting the fender of his jeep as if it were his big olive-drab pet—and trying to figure out what they were really doing, what special significance their actions held for him, what clues they presented that might help him unravel the snarl of his own existence. At last, realizing that he needed peace and quiet, he set out toward the airbase, intending to find an empty bunk in some barracks. But when he reached the cutoff that led to the unfinished bridge, he turned down it, deciding that he wasn’t ready to deal with sentries and duty officers. Dense thickets abuzz with crickets narrowed the cutoff to a path, and at its end stood a line of sawhorses. He climbed over them and soon was mounting a sharply inclined curve that appeared to lead to a point not far below the oblate silvery moon.
Despite a litter of rubble and cardboard sheeting, the concrete looked pure under the moon, blazing bright, like a fragment of snowy light not quite hardened to the material; and as he ascended he thought he could feel the bridge trembling to his footsteps with the sensitivity of a white nerve. He seemed to be walking into darkness and stars, a solitude the size of creation. It felt good and damn lonely, maybe a little too much so, with the wind flapping pieces of cardboard and the sounds of the insects left behind. After a few minutes, he glimpsed the ragged terminus ahead. When he reached it, he sat down carefully, letting his legs dangle. Wind keened through the exposed girders, tugging at his ankles. His hand throbbed and was fever-hot. Below, multicolored brilliance clung to the black margin of the east bank like a colony of biotuminescent algae. He wondered how high he was. Not high enough, he thought. Faint music was fraying on the wind—the inexhaustible delirium of San Francisco de Juticlan—and he imagined that the flickering of the stars was caused by this thin smoke of music drifting across them.
He tried to think what to do. Not much occurred. He pictured Gilbey in Panama. Whoring, drinking, fighting. Doing just as he had in Guatemala. That was where the idea of desertion failed Mingolla. In Panama he would be afraid; in Panama—though his hand might not shake—some other malignant twitch would develop; in Panama he would resort to magical cures, because he would be too imperiled by the real to derive strength from it. And eventually the war would come to Panama. Desertion would have gained him nothing. He stared out at the moon-silvered jungle, and it seemed that some essential part of him was pouring from his eyes, entering the flow of the wind and rushing away past the Ant Farm and its smoking craters, past guerrilla territory, past the seamless join of sky and horizon, being pulled irresistibly toward a point into which the world’s vitality was emptying. He felt himself emptying as well, growing cold and vacant and slow. His brain became incapable of thought, capable only of recording perceptions. The wind brought green scents that made his nostrils flare. The sky’s blackness folded around him, and the stars were golden pinpricks of sensation. He didn’t sleep, but something in him slept.
A whisper drew him back from the edge of the world. At first he thought it had been his imagination, and he continued to stare at the sky, which had lightened to the vivid blue of a predawn darkness. Then he heard the whisper again and glanced over his shoulder. Strung out across the bridge about twenty feet away, a dozen or so children. Some crouched, some standing. Most were clad in rags, a few wore coverings of leaves and vines, and others were naked. Watchful; silent. They were all emaciated, their hair long and matted. Knives glinted in their hands. Recalling the dead children he had seen that morning, Mingolla was for a moment afraid. But only for a moment. Fear flared in him like a coal puffed alight by a breeze and died an instant later, suppressed not by any rational accommodation, but by a perception of these ragged figures as an opportunity for surrender. He had no desire to put forth more effort in the cause of survival. Survival, he had learned, was not the soul’s ultimate priority. He studied the children. The way they were posed reminded him of a Neanderthal grouping in the Museum of Natural History. The moon was still graphite. Finally Mingolla turned back to face the horizon, now showing as a distinct line of green darkness.