Hystopia: A Novel Page 26

  The next thing he knew, water was closing around him, the cold pounding his temples and his jaws and shoving the air out of his lungs. Even as he sank below the surface, feeling the vise of the cold, he was aware that he was a man who had been flung into direct contact with something huge from his past—and later he’d swear that he was thinking about the report, the name Billy-T expanding in his mind until he could hear it speaking, a slight lisp, and then arms came around him and lifted him up, ordering him not to resist, to stay calm and then for a few seconds he was deep again. He could feel the mighty body, not just the water but the entire lake. There have been rumors about men who, confirming a specific element of their Causal Events Package, went wild with a desire to be permanently unfolded. And then he felt arms around him, lifting him up, and he was above the surface and Hank was slapping him softly, speaking into his ear as he pulled him to shore, saying, “You’re gonna want to do that again. You’ll want to get back into that water but as long as I’m here it won’t happen.” He pulled him along the sand and wrapped him in the picnic blanket and made him sit down.

  Through chattering teeth he said the name Billy-T over and over again, his voice incantatory, as if he were trying to memorize the sound of it, and when Meg came up, breathing hard, she stood and listened and then got down next to him and asked, “What happened?”

  “He made the connection I thought he might make. The deal has been sealed.”

  “What deal is that?” Wendy said. She had her hands on her hips and was staring down at them. “I mean, what deal exactly are you talking about?”

  “The deal that started as soon as I saw you walk in the door,” Hank said, and Singleton closed his eyes and felt the beach shift beneath him, a sense of complete dissociation and then, a second later, the feeling of being rooted in the sand. Klein had once said that it didn’t take much to put two and two together when you’re in the field, when you’re on the ground making minute-by-minute conclusions, trying to go with the information you’re seeing, smelling, instead of orders the staff sends down from Command. Draw your own conclusions. Shoot first and ask the dead questions. Was it really possible that the Corps had set the whole thing up as some kind of rehabilitative structure? It was a sad, simple, clear question.

  “So you, Billy-T, and Rake were in a squad together in Nam,” Hank explained. “You were buddies with Billy-T. You lost him. You lost your dear buddy, your best friend. The three of you signed up together—at least that’s what it looks like. But I didn’t enlist with you guys. Like I said before, I have memories that go back to the day I was packing my stuff up before leaving for boot camp, and everything before that—growing up downstate, summer afternoons playing ball, friends and buddies and girlfriends but nobody named Meg, and no Rake, that’s for sure, so for me it’s clear that what I enfolded started in Vietnam and was finished in Nam. I was drafted clean and simple. I got my notice. But you and Meg share a common past with Rake.”

  “Is that the way you see it?” Singleton said, turning to Meg. Her face was pale and pinched with pain.

  “I knew it as soon as you told us your name,” she said. “He talked about you in the vision I had. You two were there together. You were good friends.”

  “What else?”

  “He was in the jungle, in a firefight, and there was someone named Frank who liked to pray over bodies. Then he was in Hue. Then he was dead. I was in love with him. He was my boyfriend and then he got drafted.”

  This is the moment he’d heard about, that was rumored to exist, when you came into contact with somebody who had a direct connection to the trauma and shared the grief. Hank had taken Wendy down the beach to give them a little time alone. Space but not too much space was the way he put it, a chance to talk alone.

  “He was angry,” she said. “And he was dead. He talked to me about going to his own funeral. Were you at the funeral?”

  “He was in a casket and I was in combat,” Singleton said. “I remember when he was killed. In my vision we were fighting in Hue. Obviously, the second siege of Hue. He was calling in for air support and the strike came and it came in too close, and he was at the phone, first calling the coordinates in and then still holding it when the strike came, so it isn’t clear to me if he was calling in a second strike or if my vision compressed time, or if he just liked to hold that phone to his mouth, but then there was the fireball.”

  “He had a slight lisp,” Meg said, her voice quivering. “I loved his lisp.”

  “I don’t remember that,” Singleton said.

  “Now you do,” Meg said.

  She reached out and touched his face and he did the same and for a few seconds they held their hands there, as if passing thoughts and memories through their fingers.

  “We were dating, me and Billy-T. He took me out to California, I think, and we went to the beach out there.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “He had curly hair—wavy, and it was sun blond, bleached, and he had this great smile,” she said.

  “If I could remember him that’s the way I’d picture him,” Singleton said. “He had a big smile.”

  “Yeah, a sweet smile,” she said, and then she went on to explain more, to lay it all out, to describe some of the things he already knew and some that were new to him. Down the beach Wendy and Hank had gone as far as they dared and had turned around, facing in their direction, arms down, looking straight ahead as if to wait for something to resolve.

  There was an unnatural attraction between two linked by grief. Wendy’s awareness of that attraction was apparent in the swing of her arms as she ran down the beach. There was a connective name between us, Billy-T, and when the name was spoken, Agent Singleton (I) had a reflexive response. There were rumors that if two enfolds met and exchanged information a natural unfolding would take place, whereupon the two patients would share enough mutual memory material to counteract the Tripizoid in a natural manner, inducing a natural memory outside of the traumatic material.

  * * *

  “Maybe grief has to work itself out like this or something. If it’s not felt, if it doesn’t happen, it finds a way,” Hank said later that night as they sat at the kitchen table. They had returned from the beach, cooked dinner—chicken, potatoes, green beans—together, working alongside MomMom. She seemed aware of the shift, the change, and when she spoke her voice was lower, calmer.

  “I don’t mean to throw even more disrespect on the Corps, but there’s simply no way they knew you coming up here would result in some kind of reunification. If they did know, they’re a hell of a lot more organized than I thought. It’s better if you don’t even consider that as a possibility. Put it aside, man, put it aside,” Hank said.

  “No, I can’t. The best way for me to think about it is to believe that Klein knew,” Singleton said. “For my own sense of sanity I’m gonna say that he arranged things, maybe not specific things but the general pattern. He made a point of disregarding the instructions from Command as a way of making damn sure I knew that I had to make decisions in the field, based on the field. The last order he gave me was to interrogate Meg.”

  “And he said it was a form of treatment,” Wendy said. “Don’t forget that.”

  “He made me say it.”

  “And you said it. Now put it aside,” she said, and she pushed her chair back, took Meg by the hand, and they went off into the living room, where they sat talking, their voices coming down the hall and into the kitchen while Hank and Singleton sat in silence, listening.

  * * *

  That night, in their room, they heard the old lady crying out in her delirium, her words coming down the hall. From the window there was the usual sound of surf breaking and, later, the roar of a gang of bikers coming closer and then receding with the pop of a backfire. Then the wind began to pick up, a long, low hissing through the bramble and trees as each gust approached, blowing the shade up into the room as it struck the house broadside, shaking away into a deep quiet (the buzz was completely go
ne from his ears) again until the next one arrived. That was how his grief felt. It came welling up out of the connection he had with the young woman, Meg, and then it receded into the logic of his assessment of the situation, his desire, for whatever reason, to somehow remain inside something that resembled an operation, a plan of action, a sense of being on a mission. His desire to find a technical way to describe the afternoon seemed to fade and he tried to focus his mind on Meg, her freckled face, her wide eyes, wondering if he had known her at least through a photograph that Billy had passed around to the guys in their unit, because he had carried a photo, for sure, if he was a normal grunt. Then he thought of the structure of the bridge, the long, beautiful arch of it across those brutal currents, and the two parts of the state, and he thought of Wendy’s father holding out down in Flint as he let his mind zoom into space to look down at the hand shape that was supposedly part of what drew vets in from all over the country, attracted not only to the shape itself but to the peninsular aspect, the fact that there were so many places in which to find an end point, and he thought about the streets of Flint, and the young man in his wheelchair, smoking a cigarette, his gun aimed at the sky, and he quickly let his mind zoom back down to the house he was in—beneath a roof, comfortable in bed with Wendy, who was letting him rest his hand on her belly, sliding it along the band of her underwear, not responding but not pushing him away. When he asked her if she was awake she said she was wide awake.

  “I’m disappointed and relieved at the same time. I thought this would make me feel better. I was hoping to get here, find Rake alive, and take him out.”

  Another gust of wind gathered in the darkness and the shade sucked back tight against the screen with a snap and the house seemed to grow tense in the rafters. He slipped his fingers along the band of her underwear and lifted it gently.

  “I saw the way Meg reached up and touched your face when you were talking on the beach,” Wendy said. “You wanted to touch her back, I mean really touch her, and you stopped yourself by keeping your hand on her cheek. You wanted to go deeper, but consciously you drew a line that you really needed, like my father. You just knew that enough had been spoken, revealed. Now you’re going to leave it alone,” she said.

  “What makes you think so?” he said.

  “Because I want you to.”

  “So I didn’t seem pathetic?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said tenderly, pushing against him.

  “Yes, I didn’t?”

  “Yes, you seemed pathetic,” she said. Another gust gathered, the sudden stillness, a drawing back not only of air but time, too, it seemed, and then after it had gone through, in the stillness, a complete silence. The old lady down the hall had fallen asleep.

  It’s impossible for me to think that this entire thing is merely an elaborate form of treatment, he would write in his report. And yet the implausibility of the conspiracy is precisely what makes it plausible. To be AWOL but, in a deeper sense, not AWOL at all … Was the intention that I terminate Rake, or that, by confronting him, I effect the cure that the Corps had failed to effect with him? Or was this only about me? That I was supposed to go to Rake and, before killing him, get filled in on what really happened over there, to learn about my experience in Vietnam from the horse’s mouth? But the horse was dead.

  Without a word Wendy reached over and turned on the light and got up and went to the bag on the floor and came to bed with four zip pills, popping two and swallowing them dry before he could stop her and then putting her hand out as if to say: Now you. He popped his and laughed because it was already coming over the edge of his grief, a bright, delusional sense of being able to see anything and everything, and when Wendy turned off the light the room was suffused with phosphorescence, greenish in hue, trickling through the window and around the floor and across the sheets, which roiled and shimmered. She touched his scars and ran her finger down his arm, leaving a trace of green light where the warmth remained on his skin, and he traced his name on the soft curve of her belly and then watched her as she got up, went to the window, pulled the shade up, and called him over to look as beyond the trees, in flashbulb bursts, the lightning flared out the yard, metallic silver—and then she turned to him, offering her mouth, kissing him with the taste of ash and mint, everything accentuated by the pills, sharp and acute, her tongue twisting with his own.

  “Not yet,” she told him, pushing away. “We’ve got all night.”

  The edge the pill created seemed acute and sharp but with a wave of sadness pushing behind. He imagined that Billy-T had felt the same way, just before he was killed, and that the Zomboid had had a similar feeling, a kind of refinement of his senses shoved forward by sadness into a precise, particular moment. As if she had read his thoughts, Wendy was quietly crying, her tears bleeding, glistening with sparkles down her cheeks, and when she rubbed them away there was a violet bloom of color that faded into green. He could only imagine that she was thinking about her own loss, or about the mutual shared loss she had with Meg. He wanted to ask her, but when he began to speak she put her fingers to his lips and shushed him and got up and began to get dressed, slipping into her pants and then pulling a shirt on and telling him—with a wave of her arms—to do the same, motioning to the door and then leading him down the hallway, past MomMom’s room, past Meg and Hank’s room, down the stairs, and through the kitchen to the back porch, where they sat watching the yard burst into brightness and then diminish into residual light, pale silver and green, as another gust arrived—the sound raking the air far off, reeding through the dry grass and through a million dying leaves with a low, toothy hiss—and she raised her voice to speak through it, and he listened as she told him that when the Zomboid came home—when Steve came home, she said, softly—he was angry and violent, first at his legs, at what was missing in his body, and then at her, at what was missing in her, because no matter what she did, it wasn’t enough, not even close.

  “Nothing’s missing from you,” Singleton said. “Nothing at all.”

  “Nothing that you can see,” she said, taking his hand.

  * * *

  When the rain started they went inside, back through the kitchen, up to the bed. The pills—he’d later think—provided them with the necessary acuity, funneling all sensation into the fingertips and eyes, into the sensations that under normal conditions would simply be erotic.

  When she told him to fuck her—that’s how she said it, direct, no buildup, fuck me—he drew himself over her in the bed but she stopped him and turned him onto his back, holding her hands flat on his chest, fanning her fingers over his scars again, leaving a faint handprint when she moved them back. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them a few minutes later he saw that her head was tossed back like a floating swimmer, keeping her head above water for air, her lips parted, her hair sizzling with static. The nearness—a tenseness at the back of his cock, deeper still—caused him to ease up, because he wanted it to last a long, long, long time, but it didn’t because he was pushing up into the sweet vacuum, the airless zone somewhere deep inside, the same one he had felt months ago, and he felt himself slipping away not into another unfolded vision but into something much calmer. Then there was the same backdraft as another wind gust gathered far off, and for a few seconds—maybe it was minutes—while the clouds recharged, there was a pause in the lightning and thunder and the house was silent except for her moans, and his, and then she came and he came, a flutter and tightness, and when she was done she collapsed against him and he wrapped his arms around her back and they stayed still for a few minutes, rocking gently.

  They talked deep into the night and at some point he heard himself declaring his love for her, and she listened and accepted it. It was that simple. He was not finished with his sense of mission, of being inside something that was larger, a conspiracy or whatever, but the fact that he had admitted it, that he had met someone with a shared memory, had released him, freed him.

  “You’re full of shit,” Wendy said. �
��But that’s OK. I think you meant what you said.”

  At another point in the night—the zip pills had worn thin and an acute but pleasant exhaustion had taken over, birds were waking each other up in the trees, and the grainy twilight was materializing the dresser, the bed frame, the walls—she went to her bag and got the veil and held it in her hands, flat against her palms, and stood in the center of the room for a few minutes and waited until he got on his knees and kissed her belly and said maybe he would, and she asked would what? And he said betroth himself to her someday, and she asked him where he got such a pretentious word, and he said he didn’t know, maybe from a book, it’s not a word he would normally use, and he went down the hall to the bathroom to pee and came back and found her in bed, sleeping soundly, and he got in next to her, and in beautiful exhaustion of the diminished pill, cradled in the sounds of dawn, he fell asleep.

  THE DUEL

  Rake had begun sharpening all the blades in the house one day in early August, starting with the ax, using a file and whetstone, buffing it to a shine before starting on his knife collection—switchblades, his deer-gutting knives, his swords, taking them to the kitchen window to check them in the sunlight, dabbing water and running a cloth along the edge. All action a manifestation of some end point, Hank thought, watching. He went out to find Meg, who was in the yard, chained to a post near the shed.

  “It’s time, tonight,” he whispered. “He’s totally charged. He’s on edge enough to believe it when I get Haze to say what he has to say. Rake’ll hear what he wants to hear and not what’s being said. He’s so high, so angry that he’ll twist anything that he hears into a provocation, and we’ll provide that provocation in the form of a name, and then if I’m right, if we’re lucky, we’ve found the right connection, and all we have to do—I should say all I’ll have to do, because what you have to do is just follow my lead—is to channel that anger into the direction of a duel, which, given how many times I’ve already planted the idea, he should go for—if we’re lucky.”