Hystopia: A Novel Read online

Page 5


  He plucked the string—a shooting in Petoskey on April 5 to a shooting near the Indiana border, an old man shot in the head on April 6.

  “There was something in her file about a man named Billy Thompson, a.k.a. Billy-T, a vet who was killed in the war,” Singleton told himself to say, and said.

  Klein went to his desk and opened a file. “Here it is: Billy Thompson, a.k.a. Billy-T, came back out of rotation for a stateside visit, fell in love with a girl—name redacted, but we can assume it’s Meg—took her away to California on a wild road trip, was AWOL for ten weeks and then got sent back with limited disciplinary charges on account of his sharpshooting abilities, or something. He was KIAed on his second rotation and his trail ended. Whereas her trail ends in this shit.” Klein pointed at the map, the pins, the strings.

  “He came home in a bag,” Singleton said.

  “A casket with a flag, as simple as that.”

  “Then the girl cracked.”

  “One can only assume. The file is sealed, of course.”

  Klein closed the meeting with a handshake and a command to take the afternoon off. That was how it worked. You spent the morning in so-called briefings and then were given the afternoon to wander and think and absorb and, in the parlance of the Corps, go Internal.

  * * *

  The last of the industrial surge, cars partly formed, their frames and skeletal strutwork floating down the line, bucking slightly from the conveyor jerk, surrounded by the pop of pneumatic guns and bolt drivers as he punched the rivets quickly and then stood back, looking sadly down the line at the other men who seemed caught in a perplexity of automated movement, waiting for the next door to arrive. That’s what she looked like standing in the lobby—another incognito worker, another cog having a smoke after a hard shift on the line, gazing around as if looking for an opportune moment to escape, dressed in her regulation stretch pants and white blouse.

  But her face brightened and she gave him a second glance and he knew they were going to join each other for lunch against regulations because that’s what they did—they went out onto the sidewalk after being briefed, zoned out on data, and then they let their instincts take over.

  She glanced at him again and then went ahead through the revolving door while he stayed in the lobby and tried to look casual. A guard was staring at her as she stood with her face up to the sun, the noontime breeze ruffling her blouse. Singleton waited until two more agents had passed through the door before he went out into the glare.

  “Hey,” she said. “We’d better stand here a second and pretend to have a friendly face-to-face, agent-to-agent greeting, and then I’ll go ahead and you follow.”

  “How’s your case going?” he said. He liked her eyes. They were the blue of faded denim, and they didn’t look at all enfolded.

  “Same old case,” she said.

  The guard inside was still watching, for sure.

  “Well, good to see you,” he said, and she shook his hand.

  “Just give me a half-block lead,” she whispered, and then she turned on her heels and headed down the street. He lit a cigarette and checked his watch.

  A half block ahead she turned and made a come-along gesture, and then turned and continued walking, all shift and sway with the breeze tousling her hair and her beautiful (fucking beautiful, he thought) hips and ass perfectly restricted in her regulation stretch pants. You either wore pencil skirts with a wide belt and a white blouse, or you wore the pants and a white blouse.

  He liked the way she waited for him by the cash register, standing with her hip cocked and gesturing with her hands out, as if to say, Here you are, finally. It was a classic coffee joint, somehow saved from the ravages of the original riots; the kind of place that most Corps workers avoided not only because it was old-fashioned, nothing like the canteen with its plastic modern chairs, but also because it was full of vets or men who looked like vets, and if there was one place you could meet without being noticed by other members of the Corps it would be full of potential clients, of patients waiting to be treated, or already treated, leaning into the counter in their old fatigues and sweating nervously into their soup.

  A waitress in a yellow skirt and a yellow blouse with white ruffles and a name tag led them to a booth by the window.

  “Well, here we are, breaking regulations again,” he said.

  “That seems to be true,” she said. “In theory we should exchange bullshit information, no mention of the cases beyond the fact that we’re both bored and tired, that kind of thing.” They raised menus and looked them over and went into an exchange that began with “By the way, where are you from?”

  She was from Flint. He was from Benton Harbor, not far from Lake Michigan. She was a Lake Huron girl, whatever that meant, and he was a Lake Michigan guy. (They agreed that you were either one or the other.) Huron girls contended with topographical tedium and high pollution levels. Michigan guys—she insisted—stared wistfully out at what they imagined was Chicago’s coast. They both agreed that Lake Superior types were cold and stoic in a good way, clean and pure like the water.

  There was a moment of tension after he mentioned, offhandedly, that he would really enjoy—that it might even help him with the Internal afternoon—getting his hands on some good drugs, nothing too serious or against regulations, just something to spark his thought systems, to ease up the tension of his repetitious briefings with a punitively old-school agent. She didn’t say anything, just raised her brows and touched her nose. She had a birthmark, hardly visible, a small red-purple mark, and the second button of her blouse had come undone (or perhaps she’d unbuttoned it) and he could make out the sprinkle of freckles leading down to the shadow of cleavage. He looked away out the window and then back. She took a sip of her drink and then suddenly threw her head down and let her hair spread over the table and then, just as quickly, tossed her head up, so that it fell back into place.

  “Oh, God,” she said. “We’re already in trouble.”

  “How so?” he said. But she widened her eyes as if with mischief. He could get lost in those eyes, he thought. He looked away out the window—a vet, or at least someone who looked like one, lurked on the other side of the street, running his hands though his hair, staring in their direction—and then back. Her eyes widened again, the same way, and a tingle moved up from his toes to his groin. The birthmark saved him, drawing his attention away, and then the coffee arrived.

  “I’ve heard things about your agent in charge,” she said.

  “What have you heard?”

  “Nothing that isn’t probably common knowledge, or whatever. He’s a bozo, a nut job, an old-schooler with his head stuck in the past, a fake, a phony, blah blah blah. I’m sure if you asked anybody they’d say the same about mine. But I heard something else, some rumor, and it made me a little sorry for you. I mean I’m jumping here. I’m taking a leap. I don’t even know you. I’m not going to pry. I wouldn’t do that anyway. You know, regulations. I just heard the guy’s an asshole. That’s basically it. Might’ve been more stuff to it, but that’s the gist.”

  “That’s the gist? That’s it?”

  “There’s more gist, but then, again, you know, regulations.”

  “I can’t say much without risk of compromising. You know what they say: It’s not what you know it’s what you know and don’t let others know you know, something like that. I have that wrong, don’t I? It’s more like: if you know something and know it, then why not know it without letting others know…”

  “This is when I’m supposed to laugh,” she said. She scanned the restaurant.

  “I can say this much and not compromise. He says he was a historian. I mean he’s been in battle and knows what he’s talking about at the field level. It’s a little unclear if he was actually some kind of historian, but he talks like one when he’s in a bombastic mode, and then he quotes poets, things like that. He hasn’t had the treatment, of course—you know, wrong war, too old.”

  When the food arrived
there was a sudden sense of seriousness. He watched her eat, holding her fork and knife in the European manner, cutting with swift strokes.

  “We shouldn’t meet here,” he said. “It’s too close to the office.”

  “I thought the number of vets eating here would make us pretty invisible.”

  “You had wayward tendencies, didn’t you?”

  “Not really. I mean I do now, clearly.” Again she gave him the look. This time she kept her eyes wide and smiled, reaching out to touch his arm, running a finger along his scar, leaving it there for a second.

  A busboy came and cleared the dishes into a plastic bucket. Singleton examined a smear of grease on his placemat—a map of pre-riot Michigan with drawings of emblematic crops and products: blueberries in the thumb region; rolls of paper and stacks of lumber and, of course, automobiles. The smear was near a town called Big Rapids, on the southern edge of what some people were starting to call the Zone of Anarchy. (Look, son, Klein had said. I can’t stand the lingo. They’re just making the lingo up as they go along. In any case, you can’t have a bunch of low-level law enforcement officers operating like fascists—which to my mind isn’t always such a bad thing—and simply call it anarchy. It’s a misuse of a word that is prone to misuse. What we got here is a situation in which the general public is not sure who’s doing the protecting. Some are taking the law into their own hands while others are going mad trying to live up to this so-called Year of Hate thing, and then you have the drugs, of course, and the music.)

  The waitress returned, tapping the pad with her pencil. Her face was smothered in makeup. Bright blue glittery half-moons spread over her lids and down part of her cheek; her eyelids struggled against globs that clung to her lashes. She’d been through the riots and come out the other end with the same job in the same coffee shop.

  “I don’t suppose you’d like more coffee. That is, if you want to continue your secret meeting.” She pointed over her shoulder. An agent, or someone dressed like one, was eating at the counter.

  “We’d better split,” Singleton said.

  “You folks let me know and I’ll find a way to keep him occupied,” the waitress said. “That is, if you give me a good tip. If you give me enough of a tip I’ll give you a tip. And my tip is to stay away from each other if you can. I don’t know much about what goes on over there, but it seems like it’s always the ones that come together that never return together, if you know what I mean.”

  She returned to the counter, lifted a gate, and approached the man who seemed to be an agent. She was asking him if he wanted pie. The word pie seemed to float in the air as Singleton and Wendy left the diner and headed away from the Corps campus.

  “You think they’re keeping an eye on us? I wouldn’t put it past Klein to track me when I go out in the afternoons, even though, as far as I can tell, it would violate regulations. You’re supposed to feel free. He gives me these so-called Internal leaves, but then he asks me to detail my movements. Usually it’s just stuff like: I walked down to the old canal. I smoked a joint and sat around my apartment, reading. I make stuff up because I can hardly remember.”

  “Well, you know,” Wendy said. “You’re supposed to be trusted.”

  This is where we stand for a moment in awkward hesitation, he thought. She was rubbing her arm, as if tense. The street looked unusually clean and bright, full of people going about their daily business. He reminded her again that he was, of course, on an Internal that afternoon. She told him she was, too, and then her voice dropped and she gave him her address. Then they parted in opposite directions. When he passed the coffee shop again, the agent was gone and the counter was empty.

  * * *

  From the window of her apartment he could see heaps of hot cinders, great piles of debris plowed up during the initial clean-up effort, before the stop order was declared and what remained was left to sit and smolder as a monument to the riots. Her building sat on the edge of the debris area. The smoke seemed blue-green, catching the late afternoon light. Everything has a tendency to become framed. You build a frame and put a window in and there you have it. You meet a fellow agent and have a couple of lunches and the frame appears. She says she’s going to change into something more comfortable and you turn away and another frame appears.

  She had changed out of her work clothes into cut-off jeans and a halter top tied in a big knot above her belly button, which was small, like a flower bud, turned in. As she lifted her arms to make a ponytail in her hair he saw the powder-blue hem of her panties.

  “You’ve got yourself a fine view,” he said. “Just looking at it makes me want to change my position on the stop order. Normally, I’m a put-the-fire-out-and-rebuild-right-away kind of guy. Normally, I’m of a mind that it should be all bulldozed and rebuilt. But right now, looking at this view, I think the governor had it right. It’s all going to burn again sometime soon, so why not leave it.”

  “You can leave it but once the toxins leach out, eventually it’s going to green up, fauna’s gonna grow.”

  “You’re an optimist,” he said.

  “Nature wins eventually. At least that’s what they say.”

  All afternoon they’d been moving toward this moment—it was the object of the conspiracy that had started in the street. First they’d analyzed the man at the counter in the coffee shop. The cut of his suit. The way he kept his head down. Then they’d talked about the waitress, who they agreed was an intuitive woman with that strange waitress radar that picked up on the way people moved. She’d seen that they were breaking regulation: two younger folks eating together, one with a scar on his face and that slightly enfolded tense look; the other a young woman who looked not enfolded but perhaps damaged. (You don’t look that damaged, Singleton had said. You’re young, that’s true. You’re highly attractive for an agent, that’s true, too. You can see right away that I’m a vet. How old do I look? Do I look about twenty-five? You look twenty-six, she’d said.)

  Sitting at the little table in her kitchenette, he’d avoided asking deeper personal questions so that she would avoid asking deeper personal questions. There had been a sweet feeling—with a wedge of afternoon light stretching across the floor—of a mutual standoff. He knew she might be thinking about the dangers of being around an enfolded man. He knew that she was thinking about the risk.

  “What’s going to grow on the heap, I was told in briefing, is jimsonweed,” she was saying at the window. “Which is smokable.”

  “Speaking of smokable, do you have any pot? You said you had pot?”

  “I’ve got a tin in the freezer.”

  “Please, get it out,” he said.

  On the bed it started as newness, the first touch of this, the first touch of that, the whorl of hair at the back of her neck, his thigh, her arm. Pushing away to look and then closing in, losing control and then regaining it, mapping and exploring, high with the first-touch sensations. (And the pot.) She ran her fingers along his scar, starting below his temple, following it to his armpit, across the bridge of undamaged skin that he loved to touch when he was alone, spreading out to his chest—his one nipple permanently shriveled—and around his side to his back. The scar, tissue where they’d grafted new skin, seemed suddenly charged with a slight electric current that zinged right up to his head and into the enfolded nut up there, as if to confirm what they’d said: After your treatment anything bodily that reminded you of the trauma would remain slightly energized. The high of the Tripizoid left only the nurses’ advice, the echo of their warning that sex, really good sex, might unfold you again completely, bringing back your old, traumatized self.

  They rolled away from each other and let the charges deplete and the sweat dry, and then they rolled back toward each other. Then it was a matter of heaving and rocking, of attempting to be a neat unit, and he was trying but failing to get hard by releasing himself into mindless memory, as the electric charge began to leak around the fuzzball and he saw a flashbulb negative of a chopper in the air, an old Huey,
and he was in it and out of it at the same time, which of course he would’ve been if he’d died like some of his buddies, but he hadn’t died (the flash seemed to say) and before he knew it he was on his back breathing hard, his heart pounding. The sound of street noise, of a siren far off, and the noise of the shitty building, the beat of music through plaster and lath.

  “It’s OK,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What were you thinking about?” she said, searching for dilation in his eyes. (She’d been through training. She knew the basics of medical psych, the sweep of the penlight to see if the pupils dilated properly.)

  “I was thinking how alive I am because I’m lucky.”

  * * *

  He went to the kitchen, poured some gin into tumblers, added ice, and brought them back to the bed. They lit another joint and let it burn and sipped the drinks and leaned shoulder to shoulder. She asked how he ended up in the Corps and he gave her the barest sketch about Nam, about what he couldn’t remember, the texture of not knowing but wanting to know, and how after his treatment he had rented a little walk-up over a garage in Bay City where he hung out and read, trying to collect a sense of who he might’ve been and what he might’ve seen, finding it in magazines and books and news reports until he felt strong enough and, paradoxically, weak enough and fucked up enough to see himself as someone who might contribute something to the new cause of trying to help other vets like himself. He figured—he explained—that he had had some kind of tracking tendencies that went back to before Nam, and that as a kid he had loved books about animal footprints. That much he could remember. He didn’t care so much about animals, per se, but he had loved to track footprints. What about you? he asked. And she explained—her voice suddenly distant—that in the end it had come down to a hospital job, as a nurse, or a Corps job, and she liked the idea of finding a better structure for her desire to care, one that didn’t have so much to do with physical suffering. When he pushed her to explain more, to elaborate, she said she’d rather not, and when he asked why, she grew quiet. (It was the first time, he’d later think, that he had seen this state of tense quietude.)