Hystopia: A Novel Page 6

  “I made a promise to my mother before she died. I was just nine, so maybe I’m just imagining it, or maybe it’s something my dad told me, but I like to think that I really did make a promise to take care of my dad, even though he didn’t seem to need my care, not one bit, and maybe I extended that promise out, I don’t know. Maybe I just have a thing for vets.” And then she shrugged again and spread her hands out as if to say that’s it, and she waited until he felt compelled to say something—anything to fill up the quiet—and he explained that in Bay City, after he had been released from treatment, from the Grid, one afternoon, listening to Kennedy on the radio, he had fallen hook, line, and sinker. It seemed to come, this desire to join, out of a need to help those who couldn’t be helped, something like that, he explained. She hugged herself, looking dejected and lonely (he thought), and then, suddenly, she said, her voice deep and confessional: “I don’t want to get involved with you, but here I am.”

  “Jesus,” he said. He let the smoke sit inside his head until he could hardly think at all.

  “I’m afraid. I don’t really want to unfold you. What I said before, it’s not that simple.”

  “If it becomes too good, I’ll let you know.”

  “Ha ha,” she said, frowning.

  Later, when she got up to make coffee he lay in bed listening to the sound of water running, the scoop digging into the coffee, the tin percolator on the stove ticking as water pushed up through the tube and into the small glass observation bubble. He imagined it brimming past the curved glass, getting one last look at daylight before the plunge into oblivion.

  DOWN & UP

  Along the Indiana border the road began to yearn north. She dozed against the window, feeling the engine—all eight cylinders firing in a grumbling vapor lock of piston rings and sealed systems. Rake nudged her shoulder. When she opened her eyes it was dark and the fields of dead, unharvested crops had given way to a farmhouse. He pointed to it, cocked his thumb back, made a spoof sound to indicate gunfire and then slowed the car down, and when they got to a mailbox, he began to talk softly about the Jones family, saying, We’ll have to pay a visit to the Joneses. You got a name like Jones, a common name, Smith or Jones, and you make a target of yourself. You got all the lights on like that, you’re opening yourself up to the potential of someone like me coming your way. You sit in the house and wait. You know I’m coming. You got that sensation under your skin. You build a notion that it’s impossible and so forth, you pray to your God to sustain your safety, but he’s not listening and you know it, he said, and then he went quiet and she knew what that meant. She was only half-awake. She wiggled her fingers to see if they’d move (they did) and then her toes and pushed back against the seat.

  She felt him staring at her in the darkness.

  You move and you have to move somewhere, he’d said. I’m going light on the substance. I’ll learn you, as they like to say down south. I’ll learn you a new way of thinking so long as you move with me. A new way of moving. I’m gonna hold the death card close to the vest and then slap it down on the table when the time comes. I’m kidnapping you for your own sake. To keep my word of honor made way back. Not that I want to keep it. You’re bound to me by things you don’t even know. If you knew them, you’d know. If you were to know, you’d understand. Now you see a house here, a house there. A house passing in the night. It means something, just by itself. You remove the inhabitants and it means something more. Smoke coming from a chimney. Down in a valley, covered in snow. Means one thing. Tucked against another house in a street burned out, means another.

  On the left side of the house was a tree with pink blossoms in the window light.

  The farmhouse, surrounded by spring mud, was absurdly neat, with two stories and dormers and black shutters.

  The whole package, he said. They’ve got the whole package here.

  He parked the car up the road. Together they walked down the drive, hunching slightly, until they were at the side of the house. He pointed at the tree and she knew what he wanted because he’d made her climb a tree at a rest stop somewhere, an old one with a stone barbecue pit and a pump with a broken handle, just to watch her do it. She’d gone up into the branches, clutching, shaking, until she was caught like a cat, unable to get down, and then he made her jump into his arms.

  I’m the bad luck brought home. I’m taking the bad luck I had and foisting it on somebody else.

  The tree reached as high as the second-story window, and she got into the middle of it, against the trunk, found a branch and pulled herself up. (Light as a bird. Your bones are hollow, he’d said at the rest stop. You’re high enough to fly high.) In the tree, amid the blossoms, she took a breath. Threading through the floral perfume was the smell of spring grass.

  Look forward, move through it, a nurse said, the one with the deeper voice. He looked at her the way you’d want to be looked at, with a calm and steady nonjudgmental gaze. You’ll feel it in there and at some point you’ll take comfort in knowing it’s there, the ball of old memories.

  Through the window was an oriental rug and a big easy chair with a man reading a paper and smoking a cigar. Smoke roiled over his head and caught light from a television set. He seemed to be hiding behind the paper from his kids, who were at his feet with their legs crossed, looking forward.

  She adjusted her grip and held still, feeling the serenity of the tree, the rustle of leaves in the breeze. From the window, which was open, came the smell of tobacco smoke along with the canned TV laughter and the giggle of the kids. The man lowered his paper and looked at them, tapped his cigar in an ashtray, and then he raised the paper, hiding again.

  Rake was whispering, his voice weirdly gentle. Stay up there and look and I’ll give you something to see.

  She looked out across the yard. The moon was rising and the light frosted the grass.

  When she looked back inside, the man still had his paper up. Rake was in the kitchen by now, she knew. He went into back hallways and kitchens first, and there must’ve been a sound from the kitchen, because the man lowered his paper and tilted his head, and the kids, who were crawl-walking backward toward his knees, giggling again, also turned. For a moment all three of them sat still.

  The cat, the man said. He lifted the paper again.

  The desire to say something, to shout out a warning, to terminate the scene. Fear, fear, fear was something material. Hold still and you’ll live. Move softly and you’ll survive. Take it easy and you’ll make it, the nurse had said. If you feel yourself falling look down into the fall. Something like that.

  The bloodbath that followed seemed distant. She was seeing it and not seeing it. (You saw it all, Rake would say. You might not’ve been looking but you saw it.) Rag dolls acted upon by some distant force. There was an explosion and the two children were dashed to the side, heads opening up while the man’s head snapped with the opening of his chest and the woman, who had been hidden from view, revealed herself in a scream. A moment later there was only the sound of the television set and he was looking up through the window glass, shrugging, and then he went from body to body and did what he had to do—that’s how he put it. I do what I do. You have to know that—making shapes in the carpet with his fingers, leaving messages.

  * * *

  He got his bag from the trunk and found what he was looking for and made her take it, pushing the canteen to her mouth and making her sip, probing her mouth with his fingers to make sure it was gone, and then there was Kennedy’s voice on the radio, Boston locutions from his repaired larynx, speaking of the nation’s great vision, outlining another one of his projects, reading out figures that suggested victory’s imminence in Vietnam. Rake was slapping the wheel with his palms and talking alongside the voice while she listened. Both worked into each other—she felt Kennedy’s more, she could catch each of his words and see the way he stood with the damaged shoulder stiffer than the good one and his jaw, repaired, listing as he talked of retreat from the DMZ and a fragmented force lef
t behind in the aftermath of retreat and something about a reckoning at hand (maybe Rake doing an imitation) and the conflagration of battle that would soon collapse into peace as the station bounced in off the higher reaches of the ionosphere and then faded into a preacher’s voice, quoting from the book of Isaiah: evil is the torment in the bloodied skies; shy are the defeated; the weak clutch to the stones—and then the Kennedy signal came back in strongly: We’re at the apex of the greatest experiment in our history, he said, and Rake said, Yeah, that’s what we’re doing. We’re heading into a big national experiment, and then he snapped the radio off and opened up the acceleration, faster and faster—as the acuteness of her attention increased, each word available to hear again and again, the road coming in under the headlights (she could feel it, she could feel the road). And then, hours later, a lonely gas station with long, narrow pumps and haloed lamps overhead.

  The car stretched out to the chrome ornament, crosshairs aiming into the night.

  Then they were passing through Big Rapids again, unnoticed, tearing down the main drag.

  What goes around comes around again, Rake said.

  He pushed another pill into her mouth and made her swallow and poked his fingers, probing.

  When you’re just about to fall into a dream, you get a sense of it being there.

  PSYCH CORPS BUILDING, FLINT

  Again behind his desk Klein went through the motions of preparing his pipe, first examining it and running his fingernail around inside, studying the curls of tar on his nail and flicking them onto his desk, and then scraping it out with the tool before filling it up and snapping the match. The tobacco had a sweet, rummy odor. It was packed in a tin that opened with a wonderful hiss when he turned the key.

  “You got these folks upstairs wanting to smooth things, talking mission this, mission that, and what they want is what we want, except…” He stopped to relight his pipe and leaned back in his chair and puffed. “Those bleeding hearts see the solution as simply a matter of enfolding these wayward types again, even though, clearly, you get a failed enfold like Rake and he’s not going to give you another chance. The fact that his trauma has been amplified makes a cure impossible. All you’d do by enfolding him again would be to get him back to his original trauma state,” Klein said.

  “Yes, sir, sir.” Singleton nodded and did his best to look like he was paying attention. Overhead the light fixture continued buzzing. Outside, the wind blew rain against the window, streaming drops along the glass. He leaned back slightly in the chair, kept his hands on his knees, took on the stiffness that Klein expected, hiding his boredom. Klein expected spot-shined boots and clean, pleated trousers and undivided attention all the time, no matter how boring or duplicitous the briefing might be. He took a breath and let the air seep out. The boredom was pure. He relaxed into it and thought of Wendy, the freckles on her breastbone and the tone of her voice, deep alto, resonate.

  “I know we went over it, the material about the girl named Meg, but it might help to go over it again. You might go out there with it into the Internal afternoon and think about it in another context. Who knows. Most of her file is sealed, of course. But let me reiterate what we do know, which is that Meg’s family was set to inherit part of the Upjack fortune, at least they were until the family lost everything. You familiar with Upjack?”

  “Drugs,” Singleton told himself to say, and said. “The development of what they called the friable pill, a pill that wouldn’t dissolve until it reached the gut. That led to a patent. The patent led to great wealth. Scalp lotion. Ointments. Vitamins. And the serious antidepressants and, finally, Tripizoid, which was originally a veterinary product for horse sedation, a cure for the hoof-kick, for stable-knock, something like that.”

  “Excellent,” Klein said. “It doesn’t seem to matter, unless it matters. If it matters, we’ll only know in retrospect. Her mother and father met on the train from New York to Michigan, somewhere along the water-level route. Most likely they sat near each other in the parlor car, along the Hudson, and conversed. Then, as I imagine it, they went to her sleeper car and had relations while the nighttime towns passed, little hamlets, houses down in dales, snow falling because it was winter, I’m guessing, and then they conceived a baby, and the baby was Meg. How do we know that they were on that train? Because one of the facts that was not redacted from her file was that she has a fear of trains. Is there a connection between Upjack and her trauma? Not likely. You get some strange connection, a link like the Tripizoid, but it has no meaning unless you try to make up the story to fit the facts, and we’re not in that business here. It’s in the Credo. All cures are bogus. Which I take to mean all stories are bogus. It’s impossible to find a causal connection between the end product, a cured patient, and the events that led to the originating trauma. In other words, the trauma seems to stand apart from the initial trauma when you look back in retrospect, after treatment. When you cure, you eliminate the cause. And when you eliminate the cause, you eliminate the sequence of events up to the trauma. The Corps has its own term for everything eliminated—which is?”

  “The Causal Events Package. When you enfold the trauma, you must make sure you enfold the entire Causal Events Package,” Singleton said. He put his hands on his knees and leaned forward. Klein’s pipe hung from his clenched teeth. Behind his aviator-style glasses his eyes looked dazed with tedium. They’d been saying basically the same thing to each other for weeks.

  “You’re not really paying attention,” Klein said. “You said to me that it was a Causal Events Package, and that wasn’t necessary. Even though I asked, I expected something more. Look, it’s late June and the cops are passing the buck, pinning every little shit-can murder on our target, which is only natural. You get some family scared shitless because they live—or think they live—in something called a Zone of Anarchy, and a Black Flag gang arrives one night revving engines, calling, waiting, until the man of the house comes out—because he has to come out eventually—and tries to sweet-talk his way out of what he knows is coming, or else he’s one of those guys with a lot of ammo but no luck who comes out shooting, and then one of the Black Flag men, fresh from one of those absurd battle reenactments up on Isle Royal, trying to relocate the glory and pissed off because reliving the glory has only made him want more glory, puts a bullet in the man’s head and kicks his skull in and leaves him to the local cops, a bunch of Barney Fifes who have no way to solve the case and don’t want to see it for what it really is—because why would they want to mess with the Black Flags?—so they wait until there are a few more killings. When they imagine a pattern, they pass word of a failed enfold to the liaison, and he comes up to my office with his briefcase and puts the pressure on me because that’s his job, and when I see his information I do a gut check and fail to find a pattern because there isn’t one. That’s how it works, again and again.”

  “Yes, sir,” Singleton said. There was something in the hang of Klein’s jaw, a new tension. He fiddled with his pipes and then looked up, his eyes steely blue, fixed.

  “Have you been fraternizing outside? That’s what I’ve been meaning to ask you.”

  “Sir, I’m not fraternizing with another agent,” Singleton said.

  “I didn’t think you were,” Klein said.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “I was sure you were fraternizing.”

  “Well, I’m not, sir.”

  “When I was in Korea, I saw a man like me, I mean who I am right here, now, an officer in charge, and thought it was absurd that my life was in his hands. You don’t remember what you used to feel about your command over in Nam but I can assure you that when you saw a man with a West Point ring on his finger, some fresh change of command come walking up the trail in the Mekong with his spit-polished boots and his fresh shave and his baby face, you felt something akin to what you’re feeling about me right now.”

  “Yes, sir. I thought you were in the big one, sir.”

  “I said the big one, and for me
the big one was Korea. It was just part of the Second, as a matter of fact. It was just an extension of the Second.”

  “I see, sir,” Singleton said.

  “When I start to feel the urge to recite poetry, I know we’re about done for the day. And I feel that urge. In that war you had a superabundance of highly educated men in the trenches carrying a working knowledge of Greek and Latin, reading Hardy and Dickens, filled with a desire to capture in words the way a sunrise or sunset looked from the bottom of the trench, or the way it felt to do a stand-to at dusk or twilight. All we’re getting from this war is the desire to write rock-and-roll lyrics.”

  As he continued talking, tamping and lighting a second pipe, the sky in the window behind him seemed to clear (a perfect day to head to the beach with Wendy). Singleton continued doing his best to look like a trainee who still held the purest belief in Kennedy’s original vision of a Corps that would solve the problem of mental illness in general and the vast horde of returning vets in particular; a vision that honored the president’s sister, who sat somewhere alone and quiet with her brain lobotomized; a vision fueled by a man who had been shot in the shoulder and jaw (if a third term was good enough for Roosevelt, it’s good enough for Kennedy, the ads said).

  Klein was rambling on about men who dragged Japanese heads on grappling hooks behind a ship, let the sharks clean flesh from bone, and brought them home as trophies. (There’s a photo in Life magazine, if you’d like to see it, he said.)