Hystopia: A Novel Page 16

  What else could you do in a firefight but imagine the possibilities at hand, just ahead?

  Did I imagine my fate was just ahead of me? You bet I did. Did I stand there at dawn, a Nam dawn creeping across our weary faces and fleshing out the colors in the jungle, and imagine my death? You bet. Because what else could we do between firefights but try to foresee the possibilities at hand, all of them, including our own deaths? What else could we do? Along with imagining what it would be like to take you, Meg, into my arms and to nuzzle up against your warm sweet neck, to take your earlobe in my mouth.

  * * *

  Hank led her to the shore and went and got a towel from his ruck and dried her. Then he held her from behind as she leaned back into his arms. Then told her to rest and went for cigarettes. The beach seemed emptier than before, beneath the smoky white sky. It was a late spring, early summer beach with dark stones and black sand before a vast body of water, with a lone young woman hunching in a towel. Hank wanted to lift her out of her solitude, but he knew that he couldn’t. His duty was to continue to protect her from Rake. It was that simple. He lifted his head, blew out smoke, and sniffed the air. The wind was coming down from the Canadian Shield and he could catch the scent of the boreal forest, the long, lonely, isolated strands of untouched forest, the last remaining purity. He had things he wanted to say, things that might make her feel better. He’d tell her that she reminded him of a balsam willow. It wouldn’t mean much to her, but it would mean something to him. He felt limited in his ability to make metaphors beyond trees. He’d say a balsam willow. They make good smoke, they have uses if you know what they are. He’d tell her that maybe she was like a sandbar willow, because they were slightly forsaken, no board feet in the species, but they had good uses, made sweet smoke, great charcoal from the bark. Or maybe he’d go with the crack willow, because it was for baskets, for weaving, and even, if you worked the fibers the right way, pounded them down, for blankets.

  When he got back to her she was crying into her open hands. She looked up and he could see in her gaze—the firmness of it—that she had unfolded something and that something had changed in her. She stood up and pulled him into an embrace. She felt firmer, stronger, and when she looked at him again her mouth was also set in a different way, not grim, not slack with sadness, but firm.

  That felt good, she said. That felt really, really good. Someone spoke to me, and I know who he was and I think I understood most of what he was saying. Rake was part of it, and I’ll explain it if I can, once I figure it out. I was part of something in the past—obviously—and it’s up here, she said, touching her head. Her hair was tangled and beautiful, and the gooseflesh on her neck seemed to bring out the hidden paleness of her skin. A breeze was picking up now, and they just stood holding each other. Yes, a tree was calling to him from far up in Canada. He could taste the yellow pollen along with the dry residue of the shore. It wasn’t that he knew exactly what she was going to say or do. She’d come out of the water, walking over the hard stones, bracing herself against the cold. It would not be enough to say she had awoken from the dream or terror that she had been moving through. There was more to it than that. When they finally let go of each other she was smiling, the freckles on her face around her eyes and on her cheeks, and he was smiling, too. Released from the embrace, she looked radiant, lovely, as perfect as anything nature had ever cooked up.

  THE BLUE PILL KICKS

  It was gonna happen, man. It was gonna happen because he was out there, testing the odds, making public appearances, driving around in an open limo, with Jackie at his side, doing the hand-wave, the little movement, halfhearted, just a flick of the wrist, all slo-mo, the way the motorcade moved—with the cops on choppers out front, clearing the way, checking the crowd for a sign of disgruntled vets, or Black Flag members in their jackets and colors; the president with his bright white smile, his shoulder sagging on the side where he had been hit the first time, a hunk missing, the bone gone. In retrospect, looking back—if they ever had time—they’d remember the tension in the air that day, the sky over Flint blazing with heat. When he got to her apartment, after hearing the news from someone in the Corps headquarters lobby, she was in the doorway waiting.

  “I got the news and left right away. You must’ve been stuck in a meeting. They’re saying the shot might’ve killed him this time,” she said, pulling him into the living room. Her face was flushed from crying, but her eyes were angry, not sad, and as they held each other she kept saying, “Men kill fucking men.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “Yeah, it’s that simple now. Without something to enfold there’s no enfolding. Men go out and make sure they have something to treat.”

  Outside, in the streets, there were shouts. The sound of breaking glass, far off. The phrase “national mourning” on the television, something about a dark day in a tone that seemed unbecoming in relation to the figure on the screen, the great Walter Cronkite, father of all authority, the most trusted man in America, as he took off his glasses, held them to the side, stared watery-eyed into the camera and, with his voice cracking, made the announcement that Kennedy had been shot again not far from Springfield, Lincoln’s birthplace.

  “We can’t say we didn’t see it coming,” Singleton said. He went to the window and looked out. Below, a few people milled. Someone carried a bouquet of flowers, bright white, and someone else was placing another bouquet onto the edge of the ash heap. “We can’t say we’re horrifically sad.”

  “Well, I’m horrifically sad. And I want to do something about it,” she said.

  “He threw men into the fire and then felt guilty and had to face fear himself,” Singleton said. He went into the kitchen, got a beer, checked the freezer for the pills and decided not to take them out—not yet, not until they’d been through some kind of tense deliberation, because the pills, whatever they were, seemed destined to be a point of contention. Back in the living room, she was in front of the television set, listening attentively.

  “OK, I am sad,” he said. It seemed like the right thing to say. If he didn’t say it, he was one more soul dead to history. The buzz in his ears sang from one side of his head to the other. He went to the window and looked down and the street was now empty. The flowers, even brighter now, in the fading twilight, were piled on the edge of the heap. A few people leaned from their windows, looking out. When he turned she was gone, and he heard the freezer door open and shut, and when she came out she had the bag in her hands and was holding it out like an offering, or something tainted.

  Twenty minutes later they lay in bed. He fingered the pills. They had talked it out, the sense that Kennedy had simply pushed it too far, the weird day, the way the streets had felt before the news came in, the tension in the air that they knew came only out of retrospect. It didn’t seem to matter. She reached over and opened the drawer to her night table and took out a photograph, an old photo of the Zomboid, and held it up for him to examine: same sloppy smile, same long blond hair, but an eager and youthful face. He was standing straight and tall with his arm around Wendy. Does it matter if I see this and know what happened later; I mean, am I seeing what was or what was in relation to what happened? (She didn’t say that, not exactly. In getting the photograph out, it seemed to be said. The photo was saying it.) The day had been weird, and maybe looking back, knowing that Kennedy would be shot is what made it weird, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t weird, she explained, and he agreed, and they kissed. A deal was being sealed, he thought. From now on, this moment would be held between them, forever, even if they didn’t stay together. There was a sense of intense deliberation, he thought. It was a pre-drug thing. It was what you felt when you were about to pop a mystery pill.

  She put the photo back in the drawer and rolled over on the bed and took one of the pills from him and held it to her lips. Walter was still speaking on the television, his voice firm and resolute, talking about the need for calm, for a sense of national unity. Smoke drifted in from
the window, and now and then there was, far off, the crackle of gunfire and sirens across the night. He held one of the pills to his own lips. The apartment seemed grimy and dank. He could feel the history of the place seeping through the cracked plaster, the old, worn-out millworkers who had come back to the rooms deranged from their suffering, broken-backed men who had worked to earn money to get out of this dump, for a future they might never see. It went unspoken between them, this sense of a shared past. They had both had fathers who worked the assembly lines.

  “Here’s to those who worked the lines,” he said. “To our fathers and their fathers. To our mothers, too,” he said, and then they counted to three and took the pills at the same time and sat in silence waiting for the kick. It was the pre-trip silence, the ticking of time measured in the potential of the high that would be coming, and he held her hand and twisted her fingers and stared forward into the darkening room while she did the same, and when, after five minutes, nothing happened, he said, Nothing, and she said, Nothing at all, not even a buzz, and they agreed that they had been duped, that Frank wasn’t Frank.

  The pills kicked as a field reporter outside some Illinois emergency room with his collar up around his trench coat, a drizzling rain collecting in droplets on his brow, claimed on the TV that Kennedy was dead. Side by side, like two teenage kids, they kissed each other and felt the immensity of the new situation, the taste of it, the long stretch of nerves to the surface of fingers and leg. He felt hard against the empty air. He could feel her tongue and her fingers, and at the same time he wasn’t there at all, feeling nothing except the charge of energy from the pill, and then she was whispering nonsense to him, right into the buzz. She got on top of him—he was lifting, pushing his palms to receive her weight, and then there was a zero-gravity sensation, her motion matching his motion on what seemed to be totally equal terms. (His cock searched the wetness for a space of nothingness where love seemed to reside—and his mind, oh Jesus Christ, his mind was in a glorious sustained suspension, no thought, nothing but a blank.) She slid away to one side and he rolled with her and got behind her with his hands holding on, as if holding the gunwales of a rocking boat, and then, as she tossed her head and hair, he began to come and to see the vision, and to smell a familiar smell, ashen and chalky, limestone and mortar; he was inside the vision and the vision was of a man, a soldier named Billy-T, with a radiophone to his mouth, calling in coordinates, his voice lisping as he shouted the numbers, and the man named Rake (again), his face intense, and then the flash of heat and fire and a far-off scream and the word Hue, and from Wendy a coo that sounded like water over stones.

  After a while, she said, fearfully, “Oh, God, God, I hope that wasn’t too much, too far.”

  “Vision not complete but vision beautiful, man, beautiful. Rake and a man named Billy-T and fieldphone and flame. A battle. In Hue, for sure. He called in an air strike and it hit too close. A ball of fire and then a fizzle. A fizzle out.”

  “I’d like to do it again.”

  “But I can’t,” he said. He located an ability to reason inside his high, a rip current countering the tidal pull of the drug. (Later, when he went back and tried to imagine how it had felt on the blue pill, he found himself thinking of the easy, persistent flow of water, following the easiest path.) He had an awareness of the fuzzball of lost memory smoothed and spread from ear to ear. He was still hard. If they did it again it would be even better. He’d go double and unfold the unfolded until a chain reaction began. Already he could see the blue flashes in the pleasure of touching her neck—small sparkles out of his fingers. She was saying she was sorry, sorry. He heaved himself up out of bed, pushing through the high, and then she was behind him, kneading his shoulders. They were both in a zone of mutual pleasure beyond anything they had felt before, but it dissipated almost as quickly as it had arrived, with a kind of pop of the eardrums and a quick return to reality: the smelly room in a cheap boardinghouse and, outside, the firecracker snap of gunfire, the spiral of sirens, and the cellophane crackle of fire.

  THE PLAN

  It’ll be even harder now that you have a better sense of your real self, now that you have some sense of your past. Harder to go back and act like Old Meg, because I’m seeing you right now and what I’m seeing isn’t just New Meg but a new New Meg, he was saying, poking the fire. They had hiked a few miles along a footpath through the pine needles and a grove of trees planted in a neat formation, with the light shafting through the rows. On the beach, when she had cried in her hands, he had resisted the urge to question. When she looked up, Hank knew, just seeing her face, her teary eyes, that she had had a vision, caught sight of something that had been enfolded in her, the source of her trauma, and he could see it in the way she was walking, the shift of her gait, her toes pointed differently—with more assurance, he thought, a nimbleness on the trail, a sense of how to walk in the woods. The waves had seemed indrawn when he glanced back one last time, a looming quality in relation to the ones that hit the shore, shoving the stones in with a roar.

  When a tree is damaged it forms a knot. You’ll do the same, he told her. Not the old adage about a broken bone being stronger, but something different than that. Up the path, she led the way, as if they had a plan, but they’d didn’t. Behind them clouds were gathering in the west and the wind was rising and the undersides of leaves were showing. The canopy overhead was shuddering, making long beautiful sighs, lifting and falling. She led the way to their old campfire—dead, a blank eye of coals surrounded by stones—and the flattened spot where the tent had been and, without a word, she began to roll out the tarp.

  We’ll stay here tonight and then we’ll head back, he said. Rake’s going to return soon.

  He was shaking out the canvas, sweeping it clean with his palm, and he stopped and watched as she got a tent stake out of the canvas bag and held it the way you’d hold a knife.

  Back on the beach, she said, I became aware of the sound of a wave. Did you hear it, too?

  I’m sure I did, he said. Her statement was strange but not that unusual. Her senses would be improved with each unfolding, until, if she went too far, she went over some edge into an acuteness that was beyond normal. Then she’d be raging around like Rake, seeing portents and signs in the way a dog shook his leg when he pissed, of the angle of a doorjamb, or whatever … it didn’t really matter, he thought, looking at her.

  Well, I mean I was aware of the sound it made, coming in low in a shush from one side and then sliding to the other.

  They built the fire together, gathering wood and piling it neatly. He showed her the best way to get the kindling, small curls of bark, not too much to hurt the tree. It has a desire to burn because the tree has a desire to help, is the way I see it, he said.

  You’re weird, she said. I mean you’re really, really weird.

  You’re getting better, he said. That’s a good sign, hearing you say that.

  So you’re not going to deny it?

  What you have with me is a man who has given himself the treatment but who was probably weird before he had it. Which is to say, before I treated myself I was still able to smell trees and to lumber run with the best of them, but I was too busy with violence of one kind or another to properly attend to my obligation to nature herself. I hate to put it that way, but that’s the way I put it.

  They boiled some water and cooked pasta and he found a can of sauce in his bag and pulled it out and they heated it. When they were finished eating, they waded through the brambles down to the stream and cleaned the pot and plates.

  This used to be a famous fly-fishing river, he said. No one really fished in it, but a writer used it in a story and made it into something it wasn’t, so for a few years people would come and give it a try, but it was too brambly, too rough, and you couldn’t cast far enough without getting snagged unless you knew the exact right spot.

  He resisted mentioning the balsam willow until later that night, when they were holding each other, drinking whiskey, watching t
he fire and listening to the flames. Then he told her—clearing his throat, taking a deep gulp of whiskey—that he had wanted to say it back on the beach, right after she came out of the water, that she was like a balsam willow, or maybe a sandbar willow, or better yet, a tree that you can’t even find here in Michigan, but the guys—the grunts, or whatever you want to call them—have in Nam a tree called sao den, or better, its nickname, “black star,” because that’s a tree that somehow resists termites, he said.

  What are you saying? she said.

  I’m just saying you’re going to be strong enough to resist, Rake. You know it now more than before. It’s going to be a very fine line—the act you’ll have to perform when we get back there.

  You’re really weird, she said again.

  Maybe I am. But I’m not the first. In India, some folks marry trees. They go through a ceremony and hitch for life. Anyway, you seeing me as weird only means you’re getting better.

  If seeing that you’re weird means I’m better, then I’m much better, she said. Then she began to talk about the vision. Her voice was a whisper. She said she’d heard a young man speaking, and as soon as she heard him speaking she saw his face. He’d been in Nam.

  He leaned back and waited for her to say more. She spoke now clearly, with assurance and in a voice that was, he thought, much more musical. The guy in her vision was someone she had been in love with—she left that vague—and he had gone to fight. Something had happened and Rake had been involved.