As a stand-in for the Lord Jesus was Durba’s only daughter, Marie, who’d once been his first sergeant and second-in-command. What made this proxy arrangement disconcerting (even more so than Durba’s own self-promotion within the spiritual hierarchy) was the fact that Marie had been killed more than six months ago—pierced through by a cavalryman’s lance on the Sispetain moors during a disastrous attempt by Connelly’s indigs to hold the last of the region’s high ground against an onslaught by overwhelming numbers of someone else’s. Marie’d been in the dirt now for some time, but that never stopped Durba from speaking of her as though she’d just gone ’round the other side of some tree for a piss. It got to a point where it began to bother some of the pilots and, one night, Carter asked him if he, Durba, still thought Marie sang the Lord’s praises so prettily with half a foot of native hardwood through her lungs.
“All souls live eternally in the light of God’s righteous fury,” said Durba.
“That count for the monkeys, too?” Carter asked.
“The natives here are abominations in his eyes,” said Durba. “Heathens who worship trees and clouds.”
“Well, if Marie loved Jesus and is dead and the monkeys pray to sticks and dirt but are still alive, whose fucking god does the math say is winning?”
At that point, the theological discussion devolved into punching, and the two of them had to be pulled apart and hustled out opposite doors. It was Fennimore Teague, Carter’s friend, who’d dragged him outside, shoved him backward, and held him off with one hand flat on Carter’s chest while Carter spit part of a broken tooth into the dirt.
“Baby, that was somewhat less than hospitable,” Fenn said, smiling while watching Carter close. “What do we say? No talking about politics, sex, or religion at the dinner table.”
Carter said that Durba had started it. That all he’d done was ask a question. That everyone was just as tired of hearing about Durba’s dead cunt of a daughter as he was and that no amount of talking was going to bring her back.
“Talking is what the man has left, Kev,” Fenn said. “To keep her close. Though I grant you, at this point, odds on her resurrection are running very long indeed.”
They laughed. What else was there to do? Everyone knew Durba was too sensitive. Eventually, Carter apologized and showed Durba the tooth he’d broken and showed him how he could spit whiskey through the hole like a sniper. The war went on and on.
Durba took position across the ford without firing a shot, though it was again rumored that Connelly, in a panic, had nearly ordered his 4th company to retreat once more when he’d heard the riflemen moving up in the night behind him.
The men—the pilots—laughed about this. “Connelly…,” said Tommy Hill. “Fought every battle he ever saw walking backward.” They shook their heads, rattled their drinks, and said Connelly’s name over and over again the way one might speak of a younger brother or favorite pet, forever mixed up in something complicated beyond their years or wit.
“Connelly… Going to outlive us all.”
“Connelly… Fucking Connelly.”
“Connelly…,” said Albert Wolfe. “That man is going to chickenshit himself right through this war. Afraid of the dark. Whoever heard of such a thing?”
Again, it was dark, so the planes couldn’t fly.
WHEN TED PRINZI SLEPT, HE DREAMED OF SLEEPING. Of clean white sheets and clean white spaces. Of cool plastic curves, aquiline cambers that existed nowhere in nature, and the competence of institutional design. He dreamed of a space among a thousand spaces. A million. More. And of a deprivation of the senses as pure as summer sunlight filtered through a sheet.
It wasn’t a lot, but it was his: Ted Prinzi’s clean and aired-out place. Dry, warm, bright, and completely artificial. Manufactured. In the moments before sleep would come to him—if he was having difficulty letting it overtake him—he would imagine this room. Furnish it. Add small fillips of detail, shave down a curve here, soften the glow of a hidden light there. It was no place that he knew, but it was close to several. A station berth he’d kept for some time once. Acceleration stasis aboard the Swift. Any one of a half-dozen hospital rooms, each as sterile and generic as a uniform.
He dreamed of nothing but interstices: The moment of slipping, for the first time, between those stiff, cool, white sheets, toenails hissing against the cloth. The moment of waking to a white purity of artificial light and artificial heat and artificial air, all so perfect and formless and affectless that it was itself like a kind of blind, deaf and brainless dispossession of the senses. Nothing ever happened in his dreams. Nothing ever had to. It was enough to be warm and clean and bathed in light, to reach out and touch a soft, plastic curve and know that it had never been any natural or dirt-bound thing.