Hystopia: A Novel Read online

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  To my sister, Julie

  and

  To Max, Miranda, and Genève

  Traumatic memory is not narrative. Rather, it is experience that reoccurs, either as full sensory replay of traumatic events in dreams or flashbacks, with all things seen, heard, smelled, and felt intact, or as disconnected fragments.

  —Jonathan Shay, M.D., Ph.D., Achilles in Vietnam

  So you people don’t believe in God. So you’re all big smart know-it-all Marxists and Freudians, hey? Why don’t you come back in a million years and tell me all about it, angels?

  —Jack Kerouac

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  Certain historical facts have been twisted to fit Eugene Allen’s fictive universe. The fires his text describes did consume most of Detroit and parts of Flint, and raged through the state to the north, but they did not, of course, burn the entire state from top to bottom. Details of the seventh assassination attempt made on John F. Kennedy, now known as the Genuine Assassination, have been changed slightly in Allen’s narrative, which has it taking place on a mid-August afternoon in Galva, Illinois. As we know, Kennedy was killed a month later, on September 17, as he drove through the town of Springfield, Illinois, on one of his intimate wave-by tours, “throwing [his] fate to the whims of the nation,” as he said so often in his later speeches.

  That Kennedy deliberately endangered himself in public outings as a way to defy previous attempts made on his life is historical fact, and historians will be debating for years the effectiveness this gesture had in reducing, or increasing, the number of attempts on his life (six), and whether it helped to extend his physical life along with his political life. The great ash heaps—still smoldering as Allen worked on the novel—certainly could be seen from an apartment at 22 Main, in Flint, in which Myron Singleton and Wendy Zapf had their first furtive lovemaking session. But the ash heap didn’t stop—as Allen claims—at Bay City (which burned for three years) but extended all the way up into the thumb region before petering out. Another backdrop of Allen’s narrative, the second great lumber boom, was simply a creation of his vivid imagination. Most of northern Michigan had remained reforested, with the exception of a few areas afflicted with white pine blister rust (even here, in most cases, the rust didn’t kill the trees but damaged branches and reduced lumber value). The great second lumber boom (1975) didn’t begin until shortly after the novel was finished. Certainly there were men like Hank (last name unknown), who stole into the state forests to poach lumber, acting as cruisers, locating the larger trees, and then going in at night (covertly) to cut. It is likely that Allen was inspired by his neighbor Ralph Sutton, a former lumberman who took him under his wing and taught him the intricacies of lumber poaching, even going so far as to take the boy on a few excursions, cutting trees from local parks.

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  On August 15, 1974, Allen was given a standard postmortem psychological examination, drawing upon the text of his manuscript and interviews with surviving family members, friends, and casual acquaintances. John Maudsley led the investigative team at the Michigan State Mental Facility. An excerpt from his extensive report, already considered a classic of the genre, is worth quoting:

  Eugene Allen had a tendency to self-isolate and was prone to bouts of Stiller’s disease, a common condition in the Middle West of the United States. Although the diagnosis is relatively new, still under study, symptoms include a desire to stand in attic windows for long stretches; a desire to wander back lots, abandoned fairgrounds, deserted alleys, and linger in sustained reveries; a propensity for crawling beneath porch structures and into crawl spaces in order to peer up through cracks and other apertures to witness the world from a distance and within secure confines, the reduced field of vision paradoxically effecting a wider view by way of a tightening sensation around the eyeballs and eyelids. Clinical interviewees support that these moments of reverie, sometimes lasting as long as an entire afternoon, often include delusional historical memories. Stiller’s disease in older teens can lead to wayward tendencies, antisocial ideation, and profound spiritual visions leading to a desire for artificially induced visions. Evidence in the case of Allen includes the following: he spent a great deal of time in his grandfather’s vast attic space, most often in the northwestern corner, facing Stewart Avenue (one photograph shows him seated in a Hitchcock chair, knees pressed together, his chin slightly raised, and his eyes subdued). An interview with Harold B. Allen, age ninety, is here quoted in full:

  He was a good kid, somewhat quiet, and of course he had to suffer through a great deal of turmoil related to his sister Meg. He was a splendid boy until he reached the age of sixteen and grew somewhat morose. One afternoon I heard footsteps in the attic. Our gardener and handyman, Rodney, was downstairs trimming the hedge. I went into the yard to talk to him, and when I looked up I saw Eugene in the attic window, which wasn’t unusual because he liked to go up there with one of his books—he was reading Dickens that summer. I didn’t think of him again until a few hours later when I returned home and looked again and he was still there. So I went up to the attic and said, What are you doing? And he remained silent. It was baking hot up there. You could hear Rodney downstairs, clipping the lawn, and down the street some kids playing, and so I said something to the effect of You should be out enjoying this beautiful summer day. And Eugene looked up at me and said, in an extremely formal voice, I’d rather not. There was something in his tone that shook me. Something weighty and cold in the way he said it, and I said, Well, you’d better come downstairs anyway and sit in the kitchen while your grandmother cooks supper, or watch the news with me, and he said, I’d rather not, and I said something like, Well, I’m going to have to give you a grandfatherly order and insist you come down, and he stayed quiet for a minute and then said, in the same formal voice, Well, Grandfather, we’re all subjugated to someone, somehow, and I suppose in this instant I’m subjugated to you, and then he stood up, his knees cracking, and wiped the sweat from his eyes, and we walked down to my bedroom and I gave him a fresh shirt, told him to clean up, and then went down to the kitchen, where Ethel and I had a laugh over the vagaries of teenage behavior. In any case, the boy didn’t come down, and I went back to the attic and found him in the chair, already sweating through my shirt, and I said, Come down, son, right now, and I suspect—I wasn’t certain—that his propensity for odd behavior was directly connected with his sister. Don’t get me wrong. I had my suspicions, but I told myself that the boy was enjoying some quiet time alone. The view from the window was splendid, looking out on the street—and I might add that it was and still is a beautiful street, a bit worn around the edges now, and zoned as a historical area (it was protected during the riots, one of the ringed blocks, and it survived the looting and so forth). There’s a large oak out front that survived the blight—at any rate, I didn’t see his behavior as out of the ordinary, at least not the first time. He was always a boy who woul
d wander off on his own. I’d find him between our garage and the neighbor’s, or in the little plot of grass back behind the breezeway, sitting alone. I didn’t see anything unusual in it at the time and I’m still not sure I do.

  Maudsley’s report went on to conclude that it was highly probable that a connection existed between the holing-up syndrome (Stiller’s disease) and Allen’s suicide, years later, although the exact factors were indeterminate and open to speculation.

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  Suicide is an act around which we construct an assortment of potential causal conditions, none of which is provable. In his notebooks, Allen proposed a number of ways to commit the act. Here, below, is a list, transcribed as it appeared in his early notebooks:

  • Go to the top of the new parking structure on Howard Street and toss myself off. But first spend some time tightrope-walking along the edge; make birdlike gestures and attract attention from those down below until a crowd gathers. Wave back at them and establish a rapport of some kind until someone yells, Jump, jump.

  • Dig deep hole in Sleeping Bear sand dunes and then somehow rig sand slide to bury self if p— [illegible pencil scrawl].

  • Get Billy Thompson angry enough to kill me when he comes back—if he comes back … [illegible pencil scrawl].

  • Immolation in the style of monk, pour accelerants and ignite self outside the library—or in Bronson Park; make sure it’s done in an off-the-cuff manner and sit still during the raging fire, as stately still as possible.

  • Jump straight into an ice fishing hole on King Lake, with feet pointed—during daytime—and then come up under the ice to the side and stare up through ice until blackout and suffocation transpire.

  • Locate and join group of Wayward Tendency fuckups—full regalia, Harley cycles and etc.—and get self into some police/wayward battle.

  • Start riot fire—anywhere in town, in a circular pattern so that fires converge and eventually entrap me. [Indiscernible scribble] … fire somehow guided by forces back to my body. No gasoline. None of that.

  • Hold on to lightning rod wire—along the side of the house out at East Lake—and pray deeply for a bolt to strike, and when it does, hold on tight. Remember that time you were sleeping out there [illegible scrawl] and the cottage was hit; the wire going bright blue and then red and glowing while the ground turned to glass and … [illegible ink scrawl].

  • Spontaneous-human-combustion-type fire, self-willed, urging my own cells to fuel themselves into a giant conflagration.

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  A fragment from Allen’s journals:

  We drove over to Ann Arbor last night to hear the Stooges play at the Fifth Forum theater. Billy Thompson drove and we smoked a joint and shot the shit about Meg, mostly. Iggy was fantastic. Woke up in parking lot. Head against parking bumper. Iggy nudging my head with his boot. I woke to Iggy and Iggy seemed to wake to me. He told me to get the fuck up and to shake it off. That’s what he said. Shake it off, man, he said, and then he laughed and walked away before I could get up. Then Billy said the same thing. Shake it off, he said.

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  The manuscript was found in the drawer in Allen’s room by his mother, Mary Ann Allen, who gave it to Byron Riggs, professor of English at the University of Michigan, who in turn passed it on to his good friend, the writer Fran Johnson, who subsequently sent the manuscript to her agent, who, with the permission of the Allen family, submitted it to publishers, who, as they say, went into a frenzied bidding war that had little to do with the so-called marketability of the novel itself because, as most admitted, openly, the book was hardly fit for the fiction market at the time (or any time) but was publishable because of the marketability of the so-called backstory: a twenty-two-year-old Vietnam vet sits at his desk and composes a fictive world that is—as the critic Harold R. Ross stated—“bent double upon itself, as violent and destabilized as our own times, as pregnant and nonsensical.”

  Hystopia was written during the hot summer a year after the Detroit/Flint riots. Allen continued his work on the novel into the fall, devoting all his time to it. The reader might take the liberty of picturing a slender man leaning down over a typewriter in the upstairs window of a house in Kalamazoo, Michigan, trying to concentrate while, downstairs, perhaps, a fight takes place. What is known about the family is somewhat limited; files on Meg Allen are, of course, sealed, but it is generally acknowledged that his sister suffered from adult-onset schizophrenia. (Later her diagnosis—confused by shifting categories—was changed to borderline.) It is also general knowledge that she had relations with a young man named Billy Thompson, who died in Vietnam.

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  Evidence from Allen’s journals and notes suggests that his fictional Grid zone, a safe, controlled area in which treated patients were released from treatment, was based on the proposed Unleashed Wayward Program of 1969, which was part of the Mental Health Corps Program (Psych Corps), part of the Kennedy administration’s initiative to solve the mental illness “problem” in general and the returning Vietnam vet problem in particular. Certain geographical specifics—the so-called Gleel Glen, where the Saginaw River cuts into Michigan—can be assumed to be products of the author’s imagination.

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  Below is an edited selection of interviews with friends and relatives of Allen who, upon reading the manuscript of Hystopia (rough text, unedited), offered responses.

  Stanley Crop

  Well, yeah, gangs of marauding motorcycle riders like the Black Flag group, the Summer of Hate, and Kennedy keeping the meat grinder in Vietnam up to full speed … all correct. Don’t accuse the kid of bending history. Accuse history of bending the kid. And the war, the war bent him, too. Like so many, he came back changed.

  Markus Decourt

  Maybe the treatment process wasn’t called enfolding, but the process I went through was similar to what he describes. As far as I knew, it was top-secret shit, so I suppose he got wind of it from Billy Thompson when he came home on leave, or he heard about it during his tour of duty. All the same, man, he got it right, mostly, and there were reenactment facilities where they messed you up. And the drug called Tripizoid. He gets that right, too, mostly. Little greenies, we called them, no bigger than a saccharine tablet. Pop one of those suckers, go through the reenactment of your original trauma—we’re talking controlled, man, scripted, staged right down to the gestures, the whole show run by these Shakespearian motherfuckers—and you’d come out cured. We were doing scenes from the Iliad, Hector and all that, and anyway he got it right and how he got it right in his book is a wonder to me, man, except to say he did.

  Gerald McCarthy

  You’d think it’s crazy that three buddies would go from Benton Harbor, Michigan, to Nam—all laughing and joking way over there—but it happened all the time and the Buddy Program was the reason. That Rake character is fucking real. I mean really real. You get home and aren’t really home and you’re charged up anyway. That guy was a psychopath to start. I believe him. I see his ghost all over the place.

  Norman Joseph

  I came home from Nam and went back to school. As a scholar of Vietnam literature I can say, with all frankness, that Hystopia is one of the strangest documents to come out of the war years. I can’t say it’s the most honest. A parataxic construct of sorts.

  Buddy Anderson

  That character named Singleton is a lot like me, man, and I take that as a compliment because I was Eugene’s best friend. Hell, my tour was only two years ago. When I sleep, which isn’t often, I have the same kind of dreams and I wish I’d’ve been treated, enfolded myself. Enfold me, man, I keep thinking, but then I guess a man has to carry what he has to carry. But let me tell you this, all the books I’ve read get it wrong, except for the ones where the main character is KIAed, or goes AWOL, or whatever; but the gung-ho ones are off, each time; too clean, too neat and tidy, even when you get a few killed—you’re stuck knowing that the dude telling the story, t
he writer, man, lived to tell it, and for me that always makes it unrealistic.

  Jason Smith

  Look, the guy had more than Stiller’s (or holing-up syndrome). That guy was wacko. I’m sorry he killed himself, but after trying to read this I’d say it was all for the best.

  Tanner Bradfield

  Reminded me of my great-uncle Lester, at least in the stories my family used to tell. He came home with a bad case of wind-up from the Great War, the story goes, shell-shocked to all hell, and used to sit out in the yard at night. Well, one night there a new car lot was opening and had hired a searchlight to get attention, and, the story goes, when he saw the light up in the clouds he went completely nuts and ran naked through the streets of town and had to be put up there in the state hospital, where Meg Allen was treated for a while.

  Reginald (Shaky Jake) Jackson

  Detroit burning. He got that right. Only thing he got wrong is that he saved some parts of Flint. The rest of Flint’s gonna be gone in a year. Bet on it.

  Stan White

  My brother, Drew, knew the guy Billy-T was based on. They were in the same unit together. Drew told me he was one of those sweet, down-home motherfuckers, always high on something, shooting at ghosts, is what he said. If anyone would’ve saw an angel, it would’ve been Billy Thompson, a.k.a. Billy-T. I believe him. He was there.

  Kurt Bronson

  Yeah, there was the Buddy Program. You’d enlist with a friend or two and they’d assure you that you’d end up in the same unit; same platoon, same squad, usually. Remember all three: Singleton, quiet, had his act together; Billy Thompson, or Beachboy, we called him. Big-eyed and sweet as cherry pie until he saw action and then he got those dark eyes. Not too bad but bad enough. Met him in Saigon early in the war. We were watching some rich chicks having a séance. He was into that supernatural stuff, man, Billy-T was, and he said something, I can’t recall exactly what, but it was along the lines of: I’m gonna have some visions, too, something like that. Maybe that explains something. Maybe not. Rake I don’t want to talk about. He was crazy from the start.