Hystopia: A Novel Read online

  VARIOUS SUICIDE NOTES

  Dear Buddy. Here’s the basic problem as I see it. Now that I’m back, I’m bored with the mystery of life. Why did Meg end up dead in a ditch? Why am I still here? What does it mean that I wake up early in the morning to hear a mourning dove cooing and listen to it intensely, as I did one summer morning a few years back? I lay and listened, knowing that I’d remember that moment forever. I told myself—in bed, shrouded in the cool sheets—that I should and would remember. And the deeper, eternal mysteries that, just a few years ago, I seemed to care so deeply about. That silence between Mom and Dad when the conversation, usually about what to do about Meg, lulled and then they were looking at each other, for just a second, fondly. The question of where time goes when it’s finished evoking the present moment. What it means when history devours a beloved, like Meg, or JFK, or MLK or whoever. I just can’t seem to rise to the occasion of giving the slightest shit anymore. This isn’t the kind of suicide note I’m sure you expect from me. But right now, here, on the edge of doing myself in, it’s all I can come up with. I wrote my draft and now I want to terminate myself before I finish revisions, partly because the entire mess is obviously built around the thing I’m avoiding. As Grandpa said to me years ago, I’m a hider by nature. I’m a loner. I’m sure I’m abnormally reacting to the fact that my sister was killed, on one hand. On the other hand, my own manhood was at stake. Whatever. I’m lonely, sad, and I’ve been beaten. That afternoon, the one you know about already, when I was walking home and jumped by Larry, and John, and some other assholes. They got me. I mean, they told me that Meg was a slut, and then beat the shit out of me. I said a prayer for them, and it was my last prayer. So let it be recorded here that Eugene Allen, on his last day on earth, admitted that he said one last prayer and knew it was going to be his final attempt. I mean, let it be known that I said goodbye to my attempts at forgiveness for those guys, who for me at that time, on the street, walking home, were emblematic—I can admit this—of certain men who have an inclination toward violence, that I also said so long to the inclination to forgive the world in general. In other words, my friend, where is the grace in all this? I mean, the war goes on. I see the photographs. I pay attention. Billy is gone, of course, but the men like him still go off to fight as I write this. (Note: Buddy. I know you’re gonna see this as yet another in a long line of relatively lame suicide notes I’ve composed this summer. This one might be for real. I’ll put it in your mailbox later tonight and you’ll get it before the lights go off. So I’m sure you’re thinking: Ah, man, Eugene does it again, spells out his last thoughts.) Anyway, back to my main point, which is that the deeper mysteries that I used to be able to feel with such ease, and by feel I mean respect, sense, and take in but not answer—that’s it, man, Buddy, I can no longer take in the mysteries. And I could do that a year ago, even when Meg was AWOL, out there somewhere, and the cops were coming to the door. I could still feel that delight—yeah, that’s the word—in the strangeness of reality. But that went away and with it my urge to stay involved with the present moment, and I have to add here, Buddy, that I have an unwillingness to look back, so I can’t even live in the past, not really, which would include some pretty traumatic shit—and you know what I mean—when we didn’t understand that Meg was going crazy, or was crazy, and before she was, as they said, diagnosed and treated.

  Dear Grandpa,

  I’m writing this first off, ahead of the fact, to say I’m sorry for whatever pain I’ve caused you. Please forgive me and know that I went out believing most, if not all, of what you taught me about God and about my place in the world and the importance, as you said again and again, of looking at the big, big picture, the one that goes forward in time and backwards and shows, or as you always said, the vastness of eternity in relation, as you said, to our small speck of lives. There are some things I’ve got to get down in this letter to let you know that I do remember. First off, I remember your elegance and the way you dressed—won’t force it in here, but I’ll describe a few things: the way you wore your hat, with your name and address and a note in the band that said, Reward if found. Return to Harold B. Allen. (I’ll spare you what you know.) The suits you bought in Chicago, and the time you took me and let me watch while the tailor chalked and measured and lifted the bolts of fabric out for me to finger, treating me, the tailor, like a man instead of a kid; also the cufflinks you wore along with the sock garters and the shoes. Anyway, your elegance and the house and the time you let me stay there, those days, when things at my house were too chaotic. I’ll spare you the narrative here. This note isn’t to explain why I’d end my life early. I realize that my desperation, my despair, will be linked directly to my tour of duty in Nam, of course, and also Meg’s death and the pain of all of that and the way Mom drinks and so on and so forth, but the truth is I’m simply not equipped for manhood as it is defined in this—I’ll spare you the rest [indecipherable scribble] … I should type this up because the writer’s cramp is killing me, but it seems wrong to type out a note like this on the same machine on which I wrote fiction. I’m slightly obsessive about your hats, to return to that subject. It seems to me that the covering of the head with an elegant object somehow is emblematic of your time and place in the world, and the fact that I’ve grown my hair long, too long to fit under the kind of hat you wear—although in theory it might work—should stand out as a major indication of the difference between your generation and mine, although I do, as I stand here, with a can of gas in my hand (or a gun, or whatever), have to admit that I side with your comment, and agree wholeheartedly, that the concept of generations is a creation of, as you say, the culture gone haywire, and that between your world and mine there is really only a slight, tweaky difference. I go out now because I can’t find a way [indiscernible scribbles] … foothold might be the right word. My body feels unable to relate to the gravitational pull. I thought of this when Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon and I became obsessed with that footprint more than anything, the pattern on the sole, the boot prints, and then I began to wonder if maybe the world would be better if he had stepped onto the lunar surface in a pair of Florsheims (can’t think of a better brand), or better yet one of your handmade shoes, the ones with nails holding the sole. If he’d left a better print perhaps the whole Year of Hate thing, the riots and so forth … I won’t go there. Suffice it to say that a young man who can only come up with a lame little riff on the nature of moon footprints deserves, in some way, to stop existing. Or maybe I should say that a man who has to resort to a riff on footprints and then resorts to resorting to mention of that resorting as a lame excuse and then talks about his desire to end it all deserves to end it all? Anyway, I know you did your best with the draft board and pulled whatever strings you could and were in the uncomfortable position because of your former service.

  Dear Buddy,

  This is it, man. The real deal. Please disregard other notes and take this one seriously. I’ve been typing like a madman and failed to get the following, not verbatim, but in essence. Here’s a last list of things:

  The time we went fishing up at the Two Hearted, which we agreed was really a shit stream, and you caught the hook in my fist when I was watching you cast from the footbridge, looking down and studying the riffles, trying to see where the fish might be lurking from a better vantage. You were wading with your back to me and made a fantastic cast, just beautiful, and then another even better cast, and I was watching the line and the hook—I think it was a muddler—stuck in my wrist and you thought it was a snag and before I could yell you began yanking; not that actual moment but the way we used it later, driving up to Duluth, smoking, talking, as the butt of a joke, twisting it and turning it, taking your point of view and then my point of view. That moment, in the car, rehashing the snag, is where the glory of my life stands. I mean it, man. That was the peak, and the fact that I lived through that moment—I should say moments, in the car—while back home all hell was probably breaking loose, with Meg goi
ng into the hospital, is enough for me. In other words, I’m sure now that I’ve had my moment of grace and glory. There’s that moment and the other moment. One night when I was about twelve and Meg was about fourteen we went out into the snow and hiked around, just walking, and the streets were buried and the snow was pouring down and we held hands and she told me that she didn’t care if Johnny Burns called her names, and I asked her what he called her, and she told me and it was the first time I heard the word. I listened and she shrugged it off and that was it, man, the moment I relish because I didn’t know the word and yet heard the word from her own lips and it didn’t pain me yet the way it would when, for example, Burns said it when he beat the shit out of me. The fact that I got all the pain in the thing I’m typing but couldn’t get that tiny, little sliver of grace irks me, but only insofar as any writer feels irked, and they all must, over the limitations of story. As I think we talked about a few days ago, it’s impossible, for the most part, at least for this writer, to get in there and find a way to show how those tiny, little fucking moments of ignorance provide pure grace. Time, I think I said, is the only thing [indecipherable scribble].

  Love, your buddy

  Dear Buddy,

  Scratch that last note, if you got it. I’m sure you got it and I’m sure we’ll have a good heart-to-heart about it if this one doesn’t do the trick. I’m off to the blue yonder. So long. But before I go let me say. Things I’d Enfold If Tripizoid Really Existed:

  Basic image of my sister in brush before her body was found, as I imagine it. Alone with the hiss of wind through the pines. The sound of waves breaking down on the shore. Can’t stop seeing that image and would like very much to find a way to enfold it.

  Entire war from start to finish with the exception of a couple of R&R leaves, one in Saigon, another in Hong Kong.

  [Editor’s Note: The following handwritten fragment was found taped to the back of the manuscript.]

  Up in the weedy ditch, not far fromb the lake, on a singular fall afternoon—the few trees about a half mile away flaming bright, astonishingly colorful, and then beyond them the muted slate clouds against a tinge of autumnal blue. The cop in the patrol car just making his usual run down on Route 2, heading west, trying to catch one more speeder, to write the last ticket of the day, not so much trying to reach his quota as wanting to find some way to close it down. He was thinking of his daughter, Anna, and her play at school, and he caught sight of the body in the weeds, a bit of white, could’ve easily been some garbage. But his cop gut was at work. The third wayward girl he’d found that year. They always look windblown, silent, with speckles of mud and blood on their cheeks, and almost always the legs akimbo with a sad kind of entwinement that speaks of being parted and then moving back together with a kind of resistance, an elastic snapback. A naked torso. He had his own way of looking at a body; it was a resistance to the truth that even an officer of the law, seasoned in those parts, having seen several bodies of young women in woods, covered half buried in pine needles, or mourned with leaves. Most of the killers made only a halfhearted attempt at full burial. They were pressed for time, or simply didn’t care. Most of the killers up there worked in homicidal haste, not giving much of a shit if they left evidence or not, always seeming to assume—it seemed to him—that the onus of the crime would somehow be cast back into those twilight, silent, betrayed eyes that stared up out of the skull, sometimes bones, the flesh almost eaten away; the crime—drugs, usually, and then abduction and rape and eventually, using them up, murder—no matter what, at least in the mind of the killers—he thought—was a natural outcome of a sequence of events that began far, far back, starting with a casual pickup, or a seductive lure, or the usage of pills in various forms, and then followed a jagged logic of fear. He theorized a lot about this kind of stuff, as did all of his colleagues. Anyone who came upon the end result in the form of a body, at least any law officer, had to go back through the chain of events, in theory, and attempt to guess at some kind of motive—in a mind-flash—and in doing so felt stained and sullied and implicated somehow in the crime itself, as if by finding the body you were playing a key role in the death itself. Any cop will admit—in some secret part of themselves—that they’re just one step away from the criminal; that the good-cop part is closely associated with the fact that with ease any one of them could’ve gone the other way, into crime, as an avocation, and in making that deep admission also saying—again silently—that crime itself is a vocation, and around any good criminal, even a psychopath, stood a calm that seemed to hold the realities of life in acute focus. Psychopaths, the ones who seem to come about it naturally, worked with a fluidity, a deeper instinctual, even, some cops (this one included) might say, artistic flair, and when he saw the body, as he walked through the weeds, smelling the sweet taint of lake breeze, he knew right away that this one had been the work of someone in a certain zone. How could he tell that? What triggered this sense of all-knowing understanding in a man who had a young daughter; in a man who had just two days ago attended her first performance in a school play? What part of him understood the killer, or at least told himself—perhaps later, in retrospect—that he had had an understanding right away, intuitively, putting two and two together, knowing that this was some guy who had been in Nam, or at least been through some primal trauma—in the parlance of the times—and so could connect somehow with the man who had killed? (Nonsense, he’d tell himself years later, when he’d been through so much more and understood, from the keen view of wisdom, that what he had been sensing at that time was just a rookie’s vision. A rookie cop—or a young cop—made up for his deficiencies, and his fears, by creating an inner narrative that was, above all, coherent: he—or she—saw a causal sense of one thing leading to another; whereas the older, wiser cop, or the retired officer, understood that the terminal result—a dead body—was often of dispirited, random, windblown, senseless events.)

  PRAYER FOR POP

  Twisted on the gist of Christ

  against the beat of Raw Power

  twisted on the twist of nice

  you tore another (a)hole

  in the beat blood senseless

  Ann Arbor night, right

  before “Search and Destroy.”

  “Somebody’s got to save

  my soul, somebody’s got

  to save my soul…”

  [Eugene Allen, August 20, 1973]

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank those veterans who, one way or another, shared their stories as I was writing this book—in particular Chet Lubeck and Gerald McCarthy.

  And thanks to those who gave me support along the way: The Guggenheim Foundation, Jonathan Franzen, Jamie Quatro, Rebecca Nagel, Andrew Wylie, Mitzi Angel, Will Wolfslau, Donald Antrim, Rodger Stevens, Joanna Goodman, David Patterson, Frank and Holly Bergon, Eric Chinski, and Laird Gallagher.

  Finally, I’d like to thank my father, who died before I finished but who—I hope and pray—would’ve seen that this was written in the spirit of via negativa. His belief in the wider cosmology, in the before and the after, in the permanence of grace as the fundamental light in the darkness of existence, is the gift that keeps him alive in me.

  ALSO BY DAVID MEANS

  The Spot

  The Secret Goldfish

  Assorted Fire Events

  A Quick Kiss of Redemption

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  David Means was born and raised in Michigan. He is the author of four story collections, including The Spot; Assorted Fire Events, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction; and The Secret Goldfish, which was short-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize. His stories, which have recieved numerous honors, including two O. Henry Prizes and two Pushcart Prizes, have been translated into ten languages. He was a recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2013. You can sign up for email updates here.

  Thank you for
buying this

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux ebook.

  To receive special offers, bonus content,

  and info on new releases and other great reads,

  sign up for our newsletters.

  Or visit us online at

  us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

  For email updates on the author, click here.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Editor’s Note

  Hystopia

  Big and Grand Rapids

  Psych Corps Building, Flint

  Down & Up

  Psych Corps Building, Flint

  Strange House

  The Zomboid

  Tree Hunting

  Old Schoolers

  Out of the Woods

  The Blue Pills

  Maps

  Billy-T

  The Blue Pill Kicks

  The Plan

  Termination Report

  Cong

  Rumors Afloat

  Return

  Killdeer

  Surety Is a Thing of the Past

  Reunification

  Homecoming

  The Fury Unites

  The Duel

  Duluth

  Rumors

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Also by David Means

  A Note About the Author

  Copyright

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

  Copyright © 2016 by David Means

  All rights reserved

  First edition, 2016

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data