‘The more frequent the encounters, the more extreme the effects.’ Izaguirre crossed his legs, imperturbable. ‘I sympathize with your reaction, but one has to look at the long result.’
Mingolla walked over to the reception desk, laid down his book, and stared into the cobwebbed pigeonholes on the wall, unable to sort out his feelings. ‘So I guess I must not have been zapped too often.’
‘Often enough. For one thing, according to your debriefing you were likely subject to the wiles of a Sombra agent shortly before your departure from Guatemala.’
‘What’s Sombra?’
‘The Communist version of Psicorps. This woman was named’—Izaguirre tapped his forehead, encouraging memory—‘Debora Cifuentes.’ He chuckled. ‘Here’s an irony for you. Since trying to persuade you to desert, she herself has deserted, fled into the Petén. One of the people at headquarters suggested that if you came through training as well as we expect, we might send you to track her down. She’s quite powerful, but we feel you’d be more than a match.’
Mingolla was speechless with rage.
‘Would you like that?’ asked Izaguirre.
‘Yeah,’ said Mingolla. ‘Yeah, that’d be all right.’ He paced beside the desk. ‘Y’know, I can’t figure something out.’
‘Yes?’
‘Why the hell all the fuss ’bout me, ’bout her. I mean all Psicorps does is sit around and try to guess when the next attack’s coming. Crap like that.’
‘You and the Cifuentes woman are anomalies. There aren’t more than thirty agents of your caliber in the world. You’ll do more than make guesses,’ Izaguirre watched him pace. You seem upset.’
‘I’m okay. Why didn’t she just, y’know… blow me away or whatever?’
‘She could have taken control of you, but that would have ruined your talent, and I assume she was trying to recruit you… not destroy you. It’s troublesome for one psychic to exert a subtle influence over another. That sort of interaction strengthens the talents of both parties. It sets up a feedback system whose efficiency is related to the intensity of mutual focus. And since you had the greater natural talent, more room to grow, as she worked on you, you were gaining in strength more rapidly than she could have predicted. Thus the difficulty.’ He stood, walked toward Mingolla. Surely something has upset you.’
‘It’s not important.’
‘I’d like to hear about it anyway.’
‘That’s too bad.’ Mingolla flipped open the book and looked at Pastorin’s signature, a complex conceit of loops and flourishes.
‘David?’
Mingolla slammed the book shut. ‘I thought I was falling in love with her.’ Then, sarcastically: ‘That probably had something to do with the intensity of our mutual focus.’
‘I wonder,’ said Izaguirre, his tone distant, abstracted.
Mingolla went over to a window. The jungly growth of the grounds stirred sluggishly beneath dark running clouds. What ‘bout the shit I was doing to those people last night?’
‘What you called a “pattern”
‘Yeah.’
‘A paranoid mechanism.’ Izaguirre gave a delicate cough. ‘You simply struck at the woman, stunned her. It’s a common enough first reaction. You already have quite a good grasp of how your talent operates. The shaping of emotion into a weapon and such. All you need is practice.’
‘Jesus,’ said Mingolla. The shit with the pattern sounds like…
’ What?’
‘I don’t know… like something a wasp might do. Insect behavior.’
‘You’re not concerned about your humanity?’
‘Wouldn’t you be?’
‘I’d be delighted to learn my potentials transcended the human.’
‘Then why don’t you take the fucking drugs?’
‘I have… not intravenously. I’ve ingested them in their natural state. But I have no talent. I only wish I did.’
‘I thought the stuff was synthetic.’
‘No, it’s a weed.’
‘Huh.’ Mingolla traced a design in the dust on the windowpane, saw that he had drawn a D, and wiped it out. I want that assignment.’
‘The Cifuentes woman?’
‘Right.’
‘I can’t promise anything. You’ve still got six or eight weeks here ahead of you. But if she’s still at large… perhaps.’ Izaguirre took him by the arm. ‘Get some sleep, David. You’ll need it for tomorrow. I’ll be starting RNA to bring your Spanish up to snuff, and Tully can hardly wait to put you through your paces.’
Despite his anxieties, his alienation, Mingolla felt calmer. It struck him as odd that he should be soothed by Izaguirre’s bedside manner, because at a remove, everything about the doctor grated on him.
‘Oh, don’t forget your book.’ Izaguirre retrieved the Pastorín book from the reception desk and handed it to him. ‘It’s very, very good,’ he said.
The first story in The Fictive Boarding House told of two families who had feuded over the possession of a magic flower. Mingolla lost interest in it halfway through, finding it too mannered and concluding that all the members of the families were complete assholes. The title story, however, enthralled him. It detailed a strange contract made between an author and the residents of a boarding house in a Latin American slum. The author offered to educate the residents’ children, to guarantee them lives of comfort, if in return the residents would spend their remaining days living out a story written by the author, one he would add to year by year, incorporating those events over which he had no control. Being in desperate straits, the residents accepted the offer, and though at times they balked and tried to break the contract, gradually their individual wishes and hopes were overwhelmed, subsumed into the themes employed by the story. Their lives had taken on almost mythic significance as a result, their deaths proving to be passionate epiphanies. Only the author, whose health had been ruined by the expenditure of energy necessary to script their lives, who had conceived of the project as a whimsy yet had realized it as a work of transcendent charity, only he had endured an ordinary life and ignominious extinction.
Sleepy, Mingolla closed the book, turned off his bedside lamp, and settled back. Moonlight streamed in the window, bathing the walls in a bluish white glow, bringing up stark shadows beneath his writing desk and chair. Tacked to the walls were a number of sketches he had done during the months of drug therapy. They were unlike anything he had done before, all depicting immense baroque chambers of stone, with bridges arching from blank walls, ornate staircases leading nowhere, vaulted ceilings opening onto strange perspectives of still more outrageous architecture, and thronging the horizontal planes, hordes of ant-sized men, smudgy dots almost lost among the pencil shadings and lines. It made him uncomfortable to look at them now, not because of their alienness, but because he recognized the psychology underlying them to be his own, and he wasn’t certain whether that psychology had been laid bare by the drugs or was the product of a transformation.
His eyelids drooped, and he thought of Debora, both with anger and with longing. Despite Izaguirre’s revelations, his obsession had survived intact, and whenever he tried to apply the logic of recrimination, the fact of her betrayal was swept away by fantasy or by his insistence in believing that she must have had some real feeling for him. And so it was not at all surprising that he dreamed of her that night, a dream unusual for its lucidity. She was floating in a white void, clad in a gown of such whiteness that he could not see its drape or fold: she might have been a disembodied head and arms superimposed on a white backdrop. She was revolving slowly, tipping toward him, then away, allowing him to view her at every angle and each angle providing him with insights into her character, seeming to illustrate her resilience, her toughness, her capacity for devotion. There was no music in the dream, but her movements were so graceful, he had the notion they were being governed by an inaudible music that pervaded the void, perhaps a distillate of music that manifested as a white current. She drifted closer, and soon was near enough that—if the dream had been real—he could have touched her. She drifted closer yet, her limbs aligning with the position of his arms and legs, and in her pupils he saw tiny facsimiles of himself floating in whiteness. A keening noise switched on inside his head, and his desire for her also switched on; he wanted to shake off the bonds of the dream and pull her against him. Her lips were parted, eyes heavy-lidded, as if she, too, were experiencing desire. And then she drifted impossibly close, merging with him. He went rigid, terrified by a feeling of being possessed. She was inside him, shrinking, becoming as small as a thought, a dusky thought in a white dress wandering the corridors of…