unrepatriable dreamers of all languages hoping through will, fists, prayer to bring back kings, republics, pretenders, summer anarchisms that perished before the first crops were in… some dying wretchedly, nameless, under ice-and-snow surfaces of bomb craters out in the East End not to be found till spring, some chronically drunk or opiated for getting through the day's reverses, most somehow losing, losing what souls they had, less and less able to trust, seized in the game's unending chatter, its daily self-criticism, its demands for total attention… and what foreigner is it, exactly, that Pirate has in mind if it isn't that stateless lascar across his own mirror-glass, that poorest of exiles…
Well: he guesses They have euchred Mexico into some such Byzantine exercise, probably to do with the Americans. Perhaps the Russians. "The White Visitation," being devoted to psychological warfare, harbors a few of each, a Behaviorist here, a Pavlovian there. It's none of Pirate's business. But he notes that with each film delivery, Roger's enthusiasm grows. Unhealthy, unhealthy: he has the sense of witnessing an addiction. He feels that his friend, his provisional wartime friend, is being used for something not quite decent.
What can he do? If Mexico wanted to talk about it he could find a way, security or not. His reluctance is not Pirate's own over the machinery of Operation Black Wing. It looks more like shame. Wasn't Mexico's face tonight, as he took the envelope, averted? eyes boxing the corners of the room at top speed, a pornography customer's reflex… hmm. Knowing Bloat, perhaps that's what it is, young lady gamming well-set-up young man, several poses-more wholesome than anything this war's ever photographed… life, at least…
There's Mexico's girl, just entering the room. He spots her immediately, the clarity around her, the absence of smoke and noise… is he seeing auras now? She catches sight of Roger and smiles, her eyes enormous… dark-lashed, no make-up or none Pirate can see, her hair worn in a roll down to the shoulders-what the hell's she doing in a mixed AA battery? She ought to be in a NAAFI canteen, filling coffee cups. He is suddenly, dodderer and ass, taken by an ache in his skin, a simple love for them both that asks nothing but their safety, and that he'll always manage to describe as something else-"concern," you know, "fondness…"
In 1936, Pirate ("a T. S. Eliot April" she called it, though it was a colder time of year) was in love with an executive's wife. She was a thin, speedy stalk of a girl named Scorpia Mossmoon. Her husband Clive was an expert in plastics, working out of Cambridge for Imperial Chemicals. Pirate, the career soldier, was having a year or two's relapse or fling outside in civilian life.
He'd got the feeling, stationed east of Suez, places like Bahrein, drinking beer watered with his own falling sweat in the perpetual stink of crude oil across from Muharraq, restricted to quarters after sundown-98% venereal rate anyway-one sunburned, scroungy unit of force preserving the Sheik and the oil money against any threat from east of the English Channel, horny, mad with the itching of lice and heat rash (masturbating under these conditions is exquisite torture), bitter-drunk all the time-even so there had leaked through to Pirate a dim suspicion that life was passing him by.
Incredible black-and-white Scorpia confirmed not a few Piratical fantasies about the glamorous silken-calved English realworld he'd felt so shut away from. They got together while Clive was away on a trouble-shooting mission for ICI in, of all places, Bahrein. The symmetry of this helped Pirate relax about it some. They would attend parties as strangers, though she never learned to arm herself against unexpected sight of him across a room (trying to belong, as if he were not someone's employee). She found him touching in his ignorance of everything-partying, love, money-felt worldly and desperately caring
Well: he guesses They have euchred Mexico into some such Byzantine exercise, probably to do with the Americans. Perhaps the Russians. "The White Visitation," being devoted to psychological warfare, harbors a few of each, a Behaviorist here, a Pavlovian there. It's none of Pirate's business. But he notes that with each film delivery, Roger's enthusiasm grows. Unhealthy, unhealthy: he has the sense of witnessing an addiction. He feels that his friend, his provisional wartime friend, is being used for something not quite decent.
What can he do? If Mexico wanted to talk about it he could find a way, security or not. His reluctance is not Pirate's own over the machinery of Operation Black Wing. It looks more like shame. Wasn't Mexico's face tonight, as he took the envelope, averted? eyes boxing the corners of the room at top speed, a pornography customer's reflex… hmm. Knowing Bloat, perhaps that's what it is, young lady gamming well-set-up young man, several poses-more wholesome than anything this war's ever photographed… life, at least…
There's Mexico's girl, just entering the room. He spots her immediately, the clarity around her, the absence of smoke and noise… is he seeing auras now? She catches sight of Roger and smiles, her eyes enormous… dark-lashed, no make-up or none Pirate can see, her hair worn in a roll down to the shoulders-what the hell's she doing in a mixed AA battery? She ought to be in a NAAFI canteen, filling coffee cups. He is suddenly, dodderer and ass, taken by an ache in his skin, a simple love for them both that asks nothing but their safety, and that he'll always manage to describe as something else-"concern," you know, "fondness…"
In 1936, Pirate ("a T. S. Eliot April" she called it, though it was a colder time of year) was in love with an executive's wife. She was a thin, speedy stalk of a girl named Scorpia Mossmoon. Her husband Clive was an expert in plastics, working out of Cambridge for Imperial Chemicals. Pirate, the career soldier, was having a year or two's relapse or fling outside in civilian life.
He'd got the feeling, stationed east of Suez, places like Bahrein, drinking beer watered with his own falling sweat in the perpetual stink of crude oil across from Muharraq, restricted to quarters after sundown-98% venereal rate anyway-one sunburned, scroungy unit of force preserving the Sheik and the oil money against any threat from east of the English Channel, horny, mad with the itching of lice and heat rash (masturbating under these conditions is exquisite torture), bitter-drunk all the time-even so there had leaked through to Pirate a dim suspicion that life was passing him by.
Incredible black-and-white Scorpia confirmed not a few Piratical fantasies about the glamorous silken-calved English realworld he'd felt so shut away from. They got together while Clive was away on a trouble-shooting mission for ICI in, of all places, Bahrein. The symmetry of this helped Pirate relax about it some. They would attend parties as strangers, though she never learned to arm herself against unexpected sight of him across a room (trying to belong, as if he were not someone's employee). She found him touching in his ignorance of everything-partying, love, money-felt worldly and desperately caring
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