Hystopia: A Novel Read online

  Dr. Brent Walk

  Friendship under the pressure of war forms bonds like no other. It’s easy to say that, but it’s hard to really recognize unless you’ve been in the field of battle; strange bonds that would never form in the so-called real world: Jekyll-and-Hyde bonds, I call them. For instance, you’ll have some large black man from pre-riot Detroit paired up with a runty kid from Willard, Ohio; there’s a kind of alchemical connection between them, catalyzed by their shared fear of death. Death is the context in which these bonds form. There is a lot of signification; a lot of language play, a lot of jest. I’d venture to say it’s a form of love as deep as that between any married couple: in both cases, it’s precisely the differences between the two individuals that creates the deep and mysterious attraction.

  Lucy Allen

  The thing about our city is that it was just big enough and just small enough. Meg was mentally ill, they say. She was sick before she met Billy. Billy didn’t make her crazy. His death put her over the edge, they say, but I know a little better than that.

  Richard Allen

  [Static. Wooden-sounding fumbling with microphone. Street noise.]

  No comment. I’d appreciate if you’d stay away from me. My son is dead.

  Margaret Allen

  Eugene was a good boy. When he came back from the war he went up there and began writing, and we knew he was writing because we could hear the typewriter, day and night, and the bell at the end of each line. That bell tinkling. He’d come down and sit and have breakfast after writing all night. He went to visit Meg a few times at the hospital and came back and wrote more. I’d rather not say anything else.

  Lucy Allen

  I was the tagalong, you know, the kid sister who wanted to hang out and was sometimes allowed to go with them. I went to the beach with them a few times. Billy-T smoked a joint, I remember that, back in the dunes. Meg wouldn’t smoke when I was around. [Indecipherable.] Yeah, there’s a lot of denial. All that. After Eugene killed himself, the family balled itself up tighter than ever.

  Reverend Dudney Breeze

  Thomas Merton said hell is hatred. Murder comes out of hatred. Only through hatred can you murder, at least in theory, so one would, most certainly, say that war is hell, because war is murder. There’s a sermon in there, for certain.

  John Frank

  They called me Chaplain, man, because I’d pray over the dead, and I meant it when I did it. I’d do it again. I’d pray over every KIAed in the squad. I’d give them a quick version of the last rites, not the full viaticum, of course, but I’d bless them best I could.

  Billy Morton

  We were at China Beach on a five-day leave, and this guy named Franklin—I think it was—and I were in the water. He was a big believer, all full of God this, God that, and Christ this, Christ that, and he said, You want me to baptize you, and I said, What’s in it for me, and he said, It might tighten your luck, man. You’re a short-timer. You’ve got to do what you can, and I said, OK, and he did it, right there, pushed me under and said whatever you say. Did I feel different? Did my luck get better? I’ll never know.

  Stewart Dunbar

  History has always had a hard time allying itself to the novel. The young man’s creative effort, disturbed though it might be, is realistic to the extent that it captures the tension of history meeting the present moment. Is it not possible that someone looking back at the past, even the very recent past, and bending it this way and that (e.g., Kennedy in this third term, not his second) might actually rearrange the— No, I can’t express the thought without getting Einsteinian and saying that retelling the past, as the young man does in his novel, might actually change the past. But perhaps that is exactly what I mean.

  Randall Allen

  Screw Nam. Screw the novel he was writing. Screw white history. Above all, screw Michigan. And screw my cousin. He didn’t know the state at all. He lived in a bubble. He imagined the entire thing. He was freaked out about being drafted. That’s my theory. He just couldn’t handle it.

  Jamakie Lowwater

  There are too many moose on Isle Royal. It’s impractical to imagine that a group of vets would be able to reenact night battles up there without having moose wandering in and out of their fights; water buffalo stand-ins, perhaps. He didn’t put that in the novel but he told me about it as an idea, a concept.

  Gracie Howard

  They were a quiet and rather formal family, actually. Did we have an idea that the daughter was troubled? Yes, we did. Did we know that the son was troubled, too? No, I’d say we didn’t. Eugene was a quiet boy. When he died we were stunned, just stunned.

  Randall Allen

  My cousin was hot. Meg was one hot girl. That much is for sure. I used to go to the lake with her. The whole family would go and she’d be in this bikini and I’d be like, man, why does she have to be my cousin? Of course if she wasn’t my cousin I never would’ve been that close to her, because she was that hot. But she was crazy, too. But that kicked in later.

  Janice Allen

  Kissing cousins. I saw Randall trying to kiss Meg. She shoved him. We were having a fire on the beach and they were just out of the light, but I could see it clearly. She was going with Billy around then. At least she mentioned his name to me. Then when he came home they took off to California. They say he kidnapped her, but I think she was duplicitous—is that the word?—yeah, she was ready and willing, at least some part of her, to take off with him—not to say he didn’t force her to go, in his own way. When she was gone all we could do was speculate.

  Dr. Ralph Stein

  Early indications of schizophrenia? I’d say the temporal lobe seizure suffered by the patient [Meg Allen] was an early indication. Hospitalization for that condition, at her age [15] is rare but not unheard of.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  A Compact Primer on the Theory of Enfolding

  by Eugene Allen

  1

  The process of reenacting particulars of the causal/trauma events turns (enfolds) the drama/trauma inward. Confusion is undoubtedly an element of the curative process: a mysterious blurring of the line between what happened and what is reenacted. One folds into the other, and during the period of adjustment the patient typically experiences disjunction and bewilderment. He or she may vehemently reject the curative process, making statements to the effect of “This is pure bullshit. I remember everything. Nothing has been tucked away. I’m the same old screwup. You can’t just yank me in here, make me reenact a bunch of the shit I went through, in a lame-assed way, not even close to what it was really like, and expect me to forget about it.” But in most cases, the patient does forget about it, becoming fully immersed in the reenacted trauma’s nullification of the real trauma. (Editor’s note: The author John Horgan has coined a term—Ironic Science—to define a brand of science that “does not advance hypothesis that can be either confirmed or invalidated empirically.” The enfolding process may be Ironic Science at its worst, or it may be visionary science at its best.)

  2

  General theory: objective cure to a subjective illness. Enfolding rejects etiological description of the specific illness and instead simply objectifies it into itself.

  3

  Avoid diagnosis. Submit to the fashionableness of the cure. Pure theater above all.

  4

  Inherent in drama and reenactment is a blurring of the distinction between the originating causal events and the apex events—“the moment.” Creating an artificial apex calls the originating events into question.

  5

  Replication alone isn’t sufficient to enfold the illness into itself. Asklepios must be invoked by way of communal rants, articulated gesture exercises, and ecstatic submission to pure chance.

  6

  All cures are bogus.

  7

  Without the drug Tripizoid the enfolding process doesn’t work and the reenactment of the trauma isn’t properly confused with reality. Tripizoid somehow incites a doubling-back of memory, a
mnemonic riptide—the great drawback of water before the tsunami of pure memory arrives, except that it never arrives but is simply conjoined with the withdrawing currents. Conversely, in cases of unfolding, liquid memory returns to its original stasis, although, as has been noted, there may be slight “frustrations” in the form of alterations wrought by older, pre-traumatic memories, which may be discerned in the jumbling of proper nouns and subtle deviations in spoken syntax.

  8

  Theorists like to cite, by way of illustration, the example of two waves of identical amplitude but opposite phases, which cancel each other out when they coincide.

  9

  Enfolded memory can be unfolded in two ways:

  Immersion in cold water. (Extremely cold.)

  Fantastic, beautiful, orgasmic sex.

  Original research on the processing of enfolding was funded by Kennedy Grid Project initiation grants at the University of Michigan. It was presumed that a state shaped like a hand capable of holding itself was superior to other states as a venue for enfolding projects. Florida was rejected on account of its unfavorable climate and its lack of clearly defined seasons. Extremely high humidity, it was found, early on, fosters too keen an awareness of the skin/mind division.

  Although reenactment was initially tested in New Mexico and at a cavernous Chicago complex, these tests were both top secret. Michigan quickly became known as the Psych Project state. The process of enfolding was perfected in its lower peninsula with funding from Kennedy’s initiative.

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  Most historians of the curative technique commonly known as enfolding agree that its widely acknowledged bogusness was a necessary correlative of a bureaucratic structure created well in advance of the cure, just as the Eisenhower freeway project created a new cartography of driving needs. Most authorities now agree that the beauty of the enfolding cure lies precisely in the fact that its practitioners, inspired by the vastness of the project and by the excitement of Kennedy’s post-assassination survival, bravely admitted, early on, that the cure was a dreamy and even absurd concept, and that therein lay its wild effectiveness. The paradox was that the cure was actually often effective, so that the claim of its bogus nature was itself partly bogus.

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  Historians have speculated at great length about the concentration of veterans in the state of Michigan. Most have resorted to a geographical theory, in which its peninsular shape acted as a lure. (The same theory can be applied to other end points, Provincetown, Key West, etc.) Wayward souls find themselves longing for some terminus.

  A smaller group of historians has argued that the Black Flag motorcycle gang, originally twenty or so in number, helped spark the mass migration of vets to the state. Others simply argue that a large number of vets, particularly those who served the second big escalation after the first assassination attempt, originally came from the Rust Belt region and were simply returning home. Whatever the reason, a decision was made to establish a transitional Grid stretching from the southeastern shore of Lake Michigan, north to Benton Harbor, east to Kalamazoo, and then straight down highway 131 to the southern border. A year later, the Grid was extended to include Battle Creek and the area west of Route 69. The extension area remained rebellious, with some farmers and townspeople refusing to evacuate.

  As the designated Psych State, and with hospitals, reenactment chambers, and a release Grid area in place, Michigan received a vast share of federal Psych Corps funding. Before there was an established cure rate, or true understanding of the nature of enfolding, the great hospital boom was in full swing. Magnificent edifices of mental care sprang up in the countryside in every architectural style, from retro castles to immense geodesic dome structures. Grid signs sprouted in equal numbers. The Grid symbol appeared on handbags, paper dresses, and tattoo parlor walls. The idea appears to have been to systemize the unholdable.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The fires began in two places, the outskirts of Flint and the center of Detroit, before spreading house to house and across fields and uniting near Auburn Hills. All sparked by the raid on the Blind Pig in Detroit that night by the police, who were steeped in the dialectic of revolution and keyed into the idea that a revolt might start at any time. It was on the 266th anniversary of the day that Cadillac stepped ashore on what became known as de trois. The National Guard came in to shoot up at the “snipers” after the police were repelled. Soon the Detroit streets were ringing with the chants of “Motown, if you don’t come around, we are going to burn you down.” An aide to the mayor came up with the idea of burn squads. They would get ahead of the riots with Molotov cocktails and flamethrowers. Let it burn, the governor reportedly said. But the dynamics were simply too intricate to sort out accurately. The big map in police headquarters couldn’t handle the information that was being teletyped in—squad cars akimbo, nobody sure where anybody was, rumors spreading even faster than the fire. The governor had begged Kennedy for federal troops, telling him the whole state was at risk, and the federal troops were mustering along the Ohio border—the rumble of tanks could be heard in Toledo. The rumors had had a head start on the fires, anyway: a revolution was at hand. The Negro was going to avenge three hundred years of slavery. The uncured vets would join in; the vagabonds, the waywards. Already the structure of the Grid area was in negotiation; eminent-domain strictures were being argued in the Supreme Court that summer. Several thousand farmers and home owners were bracing for the order to move. Some had taken the offer and moved down to Indiana, where state law forbade the construction of Grid zones. If the wayward want to be wayward, let them do it in Michigan, Senator Clam of Indiana said. Senator Holly, of Michigan, led the fight for the creation of a Grid zone for Michigan, allowing for a safe place—not wilderness, but not urbane—in which certain patients, after treatment, might go to have a controlled transitional experience before being released into the general society.

  HYSTOPIA

  By Eugene Allen

  BIG AND GRAND RAPIDS

  April’s the cruelest month, they say, but I wouldn’t go that far. At least not yet. I’m going to do my best to make it the cruelest, she heard him say, and then she slipped into darkness and woke, hours later, to the murmur of the engine, the power thrumming under the hood, the hood ornament far out, pointing the way. He had gone in and taken her out of the post-treatment Grid, slipping in, using his words and drugs. His hand was on her leg. Fingers spread. Above everything his talk, his voice ragged and deep, and then as she came up and out of it, his voice and radio static were all she had.

  Something was close behind, a spiral of police sirens, the hospital’s clean simplicity, the sedation of the treatment, pre and post, that stayed with her when it was over, and she had to command herself to open her eyes and to look out the windows at the devouring slip of the road into itself …

  Groggy, she found her mouth and made it speak, and she was telling him, Find the Ann Arbor channel, the one from the university, Stooges all the time.

  Stooges all the time, he muttered.

  Then he began coughing and clearing his throat until he had something to spit, and he told her his throat was sore from screaming in Grand Rapids.

  It had been a confusing couple of hours before they’d split that scene. The houses had been old, once dignified and fine, now slipping into decrepitude, uncomfortable beneath the trees arching over the wide streets. The trees were tired of shading structures of grandeur, optimistically huge Victorians. Slate shingles gone, hauled away by the looters after the riots.

  Shaky had been asleep when they entered his bedroom, treading softly. Rake put the gun to his forehead and told him what he had to give them and how he was to do it and with what kind of movement, slowly, and how much shit he was in, deep, deep unbelievable shit, and Shaky did what they ordered him to do, but when he was doing it he stumbled or made a quick move. He was a tall dark man with knobby knees. One of the tallest motherfuckers you’re gonna see in the Middle West, Rake said.


  Rake shot him point-blank, producing a spongy, wet sound, and an outbound spew of bone and blood hit the wall, making another sound that she heard and reheard and heard again.

  That’s that, Rake said, kicking the body.

  Then they ransacked the house, pulling drawers, spilling underwear, unfurling panties, frilly things that she held for a moment and dropped to the floor.

  The feel of silk was still on her fingertips. She could still see the look in his eyes as he stared at the gun. The black barrel in the black pupil.

  You’re gonna come out of it, the look said. You’re gonna survive this. I’m dead but you’re going to live. I’m just one more in the wrong place at the wrong time. One more who wakes up into a nightmare. I’m not going to plead with you too hard, no girl, but I’m gonna give you this last little glance to carry with you when you go, the look said before the gun took it away.

  In the kitchen he removed a loaf of Wonder from the bread box, a glass bottle of milk with a paper cap, and some cheese, and then they headed off into the morning light.

  I’m afraid we didn’t leave a single print, he said. We’re on the lam. That’s part of the deal. We’ve got to mix it up. Sometimes I leave prints, other times I don’t. Got to give the Psych Corps something to think about, got to leave some tracks they can obsessively follow. He talked and talked as they drove the Grand Rapids streets, turning now and then to make sure she was listening or at least awake, poking her with his long fingers, gripping her thigh.

  * * *

  Do I talk too much? He said.

  Do I ramble on, the king of non sequitur? He said.

  Do you listen to me? He said.