Hystopia: A Novel Read online

  * * *

  Then it began again, Rake coming in at night, feeding her Canadian pills, forcing them into her throat until she swallowed them, saying, That’s a good girl, that’s just fine, drink them down, and handing her a glass of water—the glass cool and damp—Drink them down, drink them down, and he said something was amiss in her eyes, something off (his mouth close to her ear, his fingers gripping her thigh), and she told him she was tired and wanted to sleep. I’m tired, she said, I’m tired, and he handed her a glass of water and another pill, another night; one night that was different from another, with the smell of the trees and the breeze and the sound of waves or the deep silence of no waves. He didn’t touch her, aside from gripping her thigh, or her arm, and she felt fear in the fact that he was withholding something. Stay up all night, he said, exhaustion brings a clarity to a new day, and then he reached over and held the back of her neck with one hand and brought her to him and forced her mouth against his own. Night sounds and smells, not only the lake itself—she could feel it, sense it, the great, massive body—but jasmine sweetness, the smell of honeysuckle.

  * * *

  For days Haze lurked around the edges of action. He stood out in the old barn smoking while Hank sat in a lawn chair and studied his tree guides, his maps, his histories of Michigan forestry. Early dog days. An early summer heat wave. Now and then, finding themselves alone, Hank and Meg whispered to each other words of encouragement.

  He’ll be going away again soon, Hank said. He’ll be back on the road. He can’t sit still for long. I’ll persuade him to leave you here. He’ll want to take Haze as a sidekick. Haze is the new Meg, you see, he said, and then he lifted his hand up as if to touch her and moved it away, looking out over the yard at MomMom, who, in a lawn chair, was making the sign of the cross and whispering prayers.

  When Hank asked she said no, no, he hadn’t done that, no, not that she could remember, and it was true. He fed her the pills and went off with Haze and left her alone, and then Hank looked at her, his eyes soft but careful, and when he asked her again—in a whisper—she gave him the same answer and he looked at the sky and let out a deep sigh. What is he doing to you at night, he asked, and she said she couldn’t remember.

  * * *

  The fact that so far he hasn’t done it again to you must mean something. (He wanted to say it, to say the word fuck to her, but he couldn’t.) I’m not sure what, exactly, but if he’s keeping his hands off you there must be a reason, Hank said the next day, out alongside the old shed. The eaves were full of nests. Wasps dipped down and flew off while others came swooping back in. The furious industry of it. Bees don’t do that, Hank explained. Bees have style and grace and only sting—I don’t need to tell you this—if they have to sting, but wasps have a destiny that comes from their form; they’re segmented with that narrow little band and they feel, well, they feel a sensation that at any moment they might break apart; they’re locked into the brutal logic that has been passed on to them and don’t even know it, but bees are a little like trees. They have a greater sense of their fate in relation to the work they put into time itself. He paused and then took a deep breath of the smell, the dusty bake of the shingles and a moist scent of fern drifting in from the woods. He stood over Meg as she dug a hole for the dog, which was nothing but rib bones and maggots and a sag where the ground met the decaying body and the body the ground, the two sides of the coin, after weeks in the warm spring sun, woven into each other. Let the dog sit until I tell you to do something with it, Rake had said days ago. You don’t go burying that dog until it has to be buried, or else you might forget what I did to it.

  Hank slapped her back once with his palm, swinging his arm back and making a show of force, because he knew that Rake was inside, watching.

  We’ll figure something out to get him to do himself in somehow, Hank said. Then he ordered her to dig harder.

  It has to be his idea. Stay in the role of Old Meg. Stay as deep as you can.

  What makes you think I’m acting? Meg said. What makes you think there even was a New Meg?

  Just keep digging. He can’t hear you but he can see you.

  * * *

  Quiet static days of summer. One day slipping into the next as Rake seemed to be recharging his anger batteries for another killing spree. I’m trying to catch a new technique, he explained. I’m tired of just popping people. I’m getting sick of the whole thing, he said one night. Another night he said he didn’t give a shit. He wasn’t tired of it, not at all.

  Whatever there was to know about Haze stayed hidden. He leaned against the kitchen wall and prodded the floor with his toes. He lurked around, just a shadow figure, waiting to be tested. Hank kept him in his line of sight and tried to probe, to figure it out. One afternoon he cornered him near the shed, loomed over him.

  Say something, Hank said. Tell me about your war.

  Something, Haze said. Tell me about your war.

  No, fucker, say something meaningful, make your presence known.

  Something meaningful, Haze said. There, I said it.

  You were in Nam. Did you fight with Rake?

  You’d know if I did, right. No, man. I fought all around, man. I got gooks anywhere I could. All shapes and sizes. I saw the guy they like to call the Phantom Blooper. I tried to kill him but he slipped away. And I understood the villages, man, and all that ancestor shit. See, I understood it. They were building those tunnels a long time before we got there, man. They were ready for us. They saw us coming long before we knew we were going.

  So you think you know who the Phantom Blooper is?

  Everyone knows the Blooper, Haze said.

  Not everyone.

  Everyone who saw action knows. He went over to join the other side, the Cong, the winning fucking side, the side that’s looking back into history, to the ancestors, man, to the worship of those who came before you.

  So you’re saying you saw him? Hank looked away over the yard. Rake had Meg tied up in a chair and was sitting across from her talking, smoking a cigarette, sipping a beer. The wind was high and the sound of waves came through the trees.

  I’m saying I was him, Haze said, and he bent forward slightly with his chin up as if to offer his face to a fist, his eyes wide open, a dapple of sweat on his brow. It was a face waiting to be struck. It was a testing position—his arms dropped to his side, his tiny hands open, not clenched. High winds were coming in from the west and the sound of the surf came and went, came and went, milky white against his eardrums. You must not fight, Hank told himself. His internal voice was sullen and sad-sounding, coming through the continual buzz of his own treatment. What had just happened with Haze was a skirting around the issue at hand, the sense that if he had been asked the question about where he fought he wouldn’t have been able to answer. Had Haze sensed this? All the cocky, bullshit wordplay, the twisting around of his questions.

  * * *

  MomMom began throwing visionary fits with wholehearted vigor. One afternoon, she went to the yard, tossed herself into the weeds, convulsed, and spoke in tongues. Go do something, Rake said. Stop your old lady, man. I’m having a bad enough trip without having to watch her freak out and talk God this and God that. I’ll do what I can, Hank said. He went and said, Mom, Mom, MomMom, you’ve got to stop. He listened and located a vague syntax in her nonsense phrases, a logic in the way she went on about the torment of vanquished peoples, a fiery end, as she heaved her calico chest into the air. Eventually, he dragged her deep into the brush near the barn where the sound would be buffered by the rotting wood structure.

  How’d you get her to stop, Rake said. He was at the kitchen table cutting up some product, chopping with quick, efficient strokes.

  I talked to her in her own tongue as much as I could, Hank said. I just said back to her what she was saying to me and that calmed her down.

  Rake prepared his product like a prep cook, moving from task to task.

  I hope you don’t do that with me? He looked up with glazed
eyes. In his right hand, shaking slightly, he held a box cutter.

  Do what? Hank said.

  Say back to me what I’m saying to you to calm me down.

  THE BLUE PILLS

  In the last few days of June they had started to arrive, more and more of them, coming down from the U.P. and up from the south, attracted by a rumor that was passing from vet to vet, from the VFW Hall in Hell, Michigan, to the streets of Detroit—a rumor that the original treatment had been twisted into something better than an acid trip, and that it included not only free grub and a place to hang out but also a chance to pay back command, to frag the guy who messed up your life forever. In a meeting, Singleton was briefed that the rumor’s originator was a man named Stan Newhope, who suffered from acute delusions and shell shock in addition to a run-of-the-mill schizophrenia that gave him visions of lumbering ships in the sky—not aircraft, but pirate ships. Newhope was throwing out a good rap, blowing it way out of proportion, saying: “Man, what I hear is they give you AK-47s, not some shitcan M16, but a Ruskie weapon that actually works, and you’re free to kill the officers who screwed you in the first place.” The weird specificity of the AK-47—the agent giving the brief had explained—was the vital element that had fueled the rumor. The key concept of the rumor was that you could do anything you wanted so long as you came out of a reenactment firefight a winner, on top, alive. By the time the rumor reached the hills of Kentucky, the briefer said, it had been put to music and was being sung like a ballad from the porches of backwoods shacks; by the time it got to Virginia, where only a few vets lived, after the great migration north, it had solidified into what seemed to be a solid slice of the truth. Now, thanks to the rumor, Flint had become a beacon of hope for those who hadn’t already come north, luring in the non-enfolded (the briefer said). Most didn’t qualify for the program. Some were too old, like Korean War vets, or too physically damaged. The Tripizoid simply wouldn’t work on subjects too far—in years, or in memory—away from the actual combat trauma. They were, as some of the vets liked to put it, those who had been back home so long they would never get home.

  * * *

  Singleton held the plastic baggie of bright blue pills and thought about the stunning sensations they might induce when ingested; no holding back, a bright sense of portent had led them to the window where they stood watching the ash heaps smoldering with a new intensity. A sliver of moon hung far out in the haze. The pills had come to Singleton via an intricate series of events—at least it seemed that way, passed from palm to palm secretly through old connections he hadn’t known existed, ending with the man who had approached him on the street with big, Howdy Doody ears, produced a snappy salute, and said, “Hey, Captain Singleton? Fucking A. That you? I’d know you anywhere. It’s me, man. It’s me, remember? Used to call me Chaplain because, well, basically I was the chaplain and all that. I had a feeling I’d bump into you soon.”

  The stranger was dressed in full regalia, old army-issue jacket, helmet liner with ballpointed peace symbols. Vets lurked around. “I’m over here to get into the program, sir,” the man on the street said to Singleton. “I’m gonna go sign up for the treatment and kill me some of those fresh-faced West Point fucks. Not men like you, sir. You didn’t act like a ring wearer. No West Point bullshit from you. It’s Wilson I want to kill for making us walk the middle of the roads when we told him we’d be sitting ducks. How are you doing, Sing?”

  “OK,” Singleton said.

  “Man, Captain Sing, I’ve been wondering what happened to you. I had a feeling if I bumped into you anywhere it would be here, man, because I’ve seen half the men in these streets.”

  Singleton took a step back and put his arm out as if to say, “Here I am.” “What do you do now?” he said.

  “I’m not doing God’s work, if that’s what you’re thinking. Left that behind me, too. Got all that preaching out of my system in Hue. But I didn’t forget, sir. I didn’t forget the promise I made. I promised to get you some good shit when we got home, and I got it for you.”

  * * *

  “Then the guy took this from his pocket and went through the motions, bowing and presenting, one survivor to another,” Singleton said at the window. “The magic shit I told you I could score, he said to me. I told you I’d get it for you, I promised, and I’m good on my word, he said. Then he gave it to me and before I could thank him he walked away.”

  Singleton handed her the bag and watched her hold it, fingering the pills. She took one out and sniffed it and dropped it back into the bag and then handed it gently back to him and shook her head.

  “I don’t think I’m describing him correctly. He had this helmet liner on, and a flack jacket, and his eyes were spooky but also made up a little bit, with eyeliner or glitter or something.”

  “So if this guy’s for real you might’ve been an officer, a West Pointer,” she said, pulling him away from the window. “That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.”

  “If I was an officer, I was laid-back about it, or maybe it was a nickname. It might make sense that he was a chaplain and might’ve called everybody Captain, because that’s what we did. We took a big word and made it small, got control of it, maybe messing with the real captain by calling everybody the same.”

  He closed his eyes. Perhaps he did remember a chaplain praying over the body of one of his buddies, ministering the last rites. Perhaps not. He went to the freezer and hid the bag in the back. Then he opened the freezer door again and made sure the bag was hidden completely, behind bags of frozen peas and corn coated in snowy fuzz. Wendy smoked a cigarette as he sat across from her and explained that they wouldn’t take them unless he could remember something—anything—about a man nicknamed Chaplain, something that confirmed he was for real, and they wouldn’t take them when they were already high—for sure—and he waited for her to say something and she did, speaking in a low, husky voice, asking him if he wanted her to say she thought maybe she could help him out with that, and he said yes, he wanted her to say that, and she said it, and then she took his hand and led him to the bedroom and made him sit on the end of the bed.

  * * *

  A sensation of going out and then returning was part of it, he’d think. She had sighed the word easy. Take it easy.

  When he came, he’d later think, it was weirdly a sensation deep inside himself and a white flash that vaporized all time and hollowed his mind and brought everything to a halt at the tip of his cock, deep in an open zone (he thought the word zone) of nonflesh surrounded by flesh, an airy free zone. He moved down into that zone and let his soul leave via that route. Just before he came he had a sharp awareness of being in the room and of touching her and of the fact that the future had been nullified and that the riots had left behind not only ash but something else: a consistent foreboding sense that the future might or might not exist. He felt, pushing forward, feeling the tightness as his scrotum drew itself up, that along with history and the end of the future any number of other things might terminate the mutual feeling they were sharing, the secretive, all-knowing bond of their two beings. She drove her pelvis forward as if to reduce the possibility of such an end, and then, when he didn’t think he’d be able to go further, he lost it and gave way and grew light and flew up with his thoughts; then, it seemed, he came again, grunting, while she did, too, her cries short, musical, and he was out of it, back in the world, and could smell her scent, slightly metallic, along with the smoke in the air.

  He fell to the side and admitted that he had unfolded. “We called him Chaplain, I think, because he was so pious, always praying and had this little family Bible that his father had carried in the Second World War and his father’s father in the First. I saw him going from one body to the next, making the sign of the cross, fingering rosary beads and saying a prayer. I’m sure we gave him shit about it all the time, but he fit with the unit, and I imagine he was probably a source of drugs, always connected in Saigon, a real hustler: God’s hustler. He talked Jesus. He talked
his boyhood in Oklahoma. He talked a farm, with a real windmill and other Wizard of Oz shit.”

  She remained silent. All that conveniently in an unfolded vision? her silence said. How convenient that you’d have this particular vision at this particular time, giving us permission to take the pills, it said.

  “All that conveniently in your unfold.” There was a worried edge in her voice.

  “He grew up on a farm and had all of those farm-boy ways of thinking that came from putting in hard work during the spring and then kicking back when summer came to watch the crops grow; so this guy was incredibly patient and didn’t mind waiting out the enemy…”

  He explained the battle for the Citadel and she sat listening, not moving. The five-day stalemate, mortar rounds and tank shells pounding what remained of the structure—thinking it was clear and then, a few hours later, receiving sniper fire. The weather had been heavy and air support couldn’t strike, so they dug in and held position and during the long, tense hours and days Chaplain told his life story; he told tales of Cain and Abel–style wrestling matches in the barn loft that started out playfully but then took on epic qualities: getting his brother, Pete, in a half nelson. He told stories of growing corn only to burn it in the fall to collect the no-grow subsidies. He talked for hours of barn construction—the placement of the barn in relation to the sun to maximize the heat in winter and the coolness in summer; talked about the storms that came charging across the flatness, a thin line of dark far off producing tiny, toylike lightning bolts (no thunder); he talked about the long evenings watching the storms approach, slowly at first, or at least seemingly so, and then raging down on them.

  “Truthfully, I don’t know if he told those exact stories, now that I think about it,” Singleton said. “Except for the battles with his brother. His brother was the one who got him to enlist. His brother went over to Nam, came back clean and bright. That must’ve been in ’67, or thereabouts. His brother had been a member of Tiger Force and probably committed as many atrocities as the next guy but still came back in fine shape. That was the only story he told, and the rest, like I’ve been saying, might’ve been landscape details. But then I guess he probably told us about his belief in God and how much he admired King David; he told us stories about King David all the time,” he said, trying to see her face in the dark, making out her lips, set tight. Her eyes were hidden. Night sounds came through the walls, deep, muffled television voices and the thumbed thump of a funky bass line. In the window across the room the curtains swirled and fell. She wasn’t buying it, he sensed, and when he asked, she told him she wasn’t. He was simply trying to fish around to find something true, to find a confirmation so they could pop the pills—which she wanted to pop, too, she admitted—and when he told her that he had seen the guy, Chaplain, in his vision, crossing the bodies, and that when the time came to take the pills they should feel free to do so, she nodded and touched his scar and then gave a soft, dismissive laugh. He told her it was fate that brought the pills, and as if in response, the bass line fell silent downstairs and there was, for a second, a lull in the noise level, an opening up of a deeper, speculative, judgmental silence, and then he heard himself explaining that fate was whatever you see when luck begins to make sense. It’s a retroactive thing, yeah, but it starts to speak and you listen to it and then it seems to have a shape, he said.