Hystopia: A Novel Read online

  The smell of the lake drifted in through the trees, wet stone and dead flies, with the hint of cold. She clutched the coat he had loaned her, leather with fringe, and followed him out of the woods and along a swell of grass and sand. At the top of the rise, the lake appeared, grand and glossy flat. He explained how just about every day he took a look—even when the waves came all the way up to the trees. He had to see it and tempt himself with the intensity of upheaval, its hugeness and brutal cold. His heart told him in no uncertain terms to keep sniffing for trees and listening to the lake as much as he could. So when I go out to look for trees I make a habit of stopping like this, he said. Smeary green copper deposits jutted into the water. A ship sat on the horizon, a supertanker from Duluth on a run to the locks at Sault Ste. Marie (he explained) and then from there out to the St. Lawrence and into the embrace of the wide ocean. His old man had worked his way up from deckhand, captained several ships and made countless runs without sinking. Maybe it’s enough to give you hope, he said. I like to think so.

  On the beach he had her sit on a rock. He stood for a minute, blocking the sunlight, and then went down to the shore and, with his hands jammed in his pockets, watched the water. He came back and hunched down, plucked his beard, and looked at her with steady eyes.

  I’m gonna do my best to help you. Rake’s out on a run. The lake is still cold, bitter cold. But the air is starting to warm up. That’s something, at least. It’s not all you could ask for. But it’s something.

  That night, in bed, she went over memories. Everything beyond a certain point was a fuzzy abstract feeling in her head. The Causal Events Package, as the nurse had called it, started at an early memory point. She could remember being in her mother’s arms, the coolness of a glass of water held up to her little-girl lips, but after that things vanished into a perplexing blankness until she got to the Grid and Rake’s appearance—even that was fuzzy—and then her days on the road with him.

  THE ZOMBOID

  Wendy’s father lived in a Sears house, an original kit that had been delivered on a boxcar complete, ready to be constructed, amid row after row of factory homes. On the way over they had passed houses with melted siding, a yard with the cyclopean eye of an old dryer. Dirty and forlorn, a kid stood in the yard chewing something. As they passed, he stuck one arm out, as if thrusting a sword, his leg bent at a right angle, still chewing as he posed (lead paint, Singleton thought). Then they arrived at her father’s house, exuding a working man’s pride, with a picket fence freshly painted and the only living oak tree on the block. In the yard next door a man in a wheelchair lifted his beer in a gesture of greeting. His legs seemed to have been amputated at the thighs. He had a folded bandana around his long blond hair. He had a face that was ravaged but still beautiful.

  “Please don’t pay him any mind,” she said. “It pains me to call him the Zomboid, but that’s what he calls himself and wants us to call him. That’s part of what pains me.”

  “Another veteran sitting out his days in his chair,” Singleton said. He returned the salute and then, against his better judgment, went over to say hello.

  Freckled and pale, with his arms firmly on the chair’s handles, the man called Zomboid struck the pose of a port gunner and said, “Hey, partner. Rank and fucking serial number.”

  “Can’t remember,” Singleton said. There was a worn path—two ruts—around the perimeter of his yard.

  “Got anything in the way of a cigarette?”

  Singleton held out his pack. Around from the side of the house, a dog barked, choked-sounding, as if pulling against a chain. Down the street, another dog responded, full-throated, and then, barely audible, another one, far away and completely free.

  “Arms are shot, too, cowboy.”

  Singleton took a cigarette from the pack and placed it between the man’s lips.

  “You wanna know what I’m seeing?” The guy’s voice was tight and flat, and seemed to come from somewhere else, ventriloquisticly. “I’m seeing nuclear conflagration after the next, the real Kennedy assassination, which is gonna happen soon, for sure. The ghost of Oswald is at hand, my man, and he’s gonna get it right this time. No fucking maladjusted scope. No blurry vision or submerged subconscious patriotic bullshit making him quiver; no heartbeat interference on the shot because he had too much coffee or whatever. Next guy’s gonna hold his breath and do the backward sniper count thing.”

  “OK, buddy, I got you on that,” Singleton said.

  “’Bout that light?”

  Singleton pulled the Zippo out and scratched a flame.

  “Yeah, Oswald’s just the fucking tip, man, of the largest iceberg this country’s gonna hit, man, and I’m not talking the riots and so forth, or any of that shit, man,” the guy in the wheelchair said. “I’m talking about a debasement of the largest kind.”

  (Now’s the moment, Singleton thought; there’s going to be a glint of something like recognition and then he’ll pop into the questioning mode: What’s your unit and where were you stationed and how long were you in and all of that.)

  “Hold that fucking thing up here.” For all of his limitations—his lack of legs and fully functioning arms—the guy had tremendous agility in his torso. (But how, Singleton thought, did he wheel around without the use of his arms? And didn’t he lift a salute to me?)

  “Light me another one so when this one goes out I’ll have something to sustain me.”

  He put another cigarette to the guy’s lips and brought out the lighter again.

  “I know that lighter, man. I know it. We might’ve seen some action together somewhere. I know you think I’m one more crazy fucker, rambling about my visions and so forth. Give me your story. Give me the whole fucking narrative.”

  Singleton resorted to making the enfolded gesture: he made a fist and held it against his temple and took a couple of steps back and did it again.

  “Ah, man. I thought so. I saw it right off. Saw it in the way you were standing there like you never saw a guy in a wheelchair before. Said to myself, there’s a guy who saw some bad shit. There’s a man who had the good fortune of having it all tucked inside while I sit here with my body too damaged to qualify for the treatment. When I tried to sign up they told me that if your physical damage is bad enough the mental can’t be worked on. You get a chair and a yard and a dog on a chain. That’s all you get.”

  “What’d you see over there?” Singleton said. All I can do, he thought, is kick the can down the road. When you have contact, avoid having to be precise about your own story.

  “I saw the five-by-six view from a gunner port and everything else in between. Gooks running through the grass with that squat waddle,” he said. He’d seen water buffalo stampeding under the blade wash. He’d seen the men in hats running under the ribbons of tracer fire. He’d seen the beautiful spin of dust-off smoke pouring up from the canopy. He’d rehabbed in South Haven, the fucking VA unable to secure for him a decent set of wheels. Then—with seething insects, the cicada in the weeds and up in the trees starting to talk directly to each other—he began making a clucking sound with his tongue and Singleton felt the sadness that came from hearing those who were way, way, way beyond help, the ones who turned to vocal tones instead of words.

  “You got a day and I’ll tell you the details,” he said, finally.

  “I’d like that,” Singleton said.

  “Now you’d better go to your old lady.”

  “You know her?”

  “Like a sister.”

  * * *

  Wendy’s father greeted him with a meaty handshake, saying, “Come on in. Don’t listen to anything that guy has to say. Wendy’s told me all about you.”

  Singleton paused at the screen door. The man—his long hair flaxen in the sunlight—was popping wheelies in his yard, his arms jerking, the metal foot-grills dipping up and down.

  “I should’ve warned you about him.”

  “I saw him coming a hundred years ago.”

  The house had a small
parlor with two easy chairs, a plush green couch, and a large television console on which two batters were up to bat, the image of one slightly on the side of the other. Singleton resisted his desire to go and fiddle with the rabbit ears and followed Wendy down the hall and into a clean, well-lit kitchen where her father was preparing coffee. The old guy held the pot with his arthritically clawed hands, all pain, nothing but pain up the arm to the tattoos, smeared with age.

  From the start a grunt-to-grunt tension was there, both men sensing, and maybe Wendy, too, the weight of the approaching topic.

  “I’m going to go get us a nip,” the old man said when the coffee was gone. He got a bottle of bourbon and poured three shot glasses as tight to the rim as possible, said salud, and drank his down before they could touch glasses. If he had been a different kind of man he would’ve toasted his regiment, or the Black Forest, but instead he’d kept it clean and simple. The old man wasn’t ready yet to go into that and instead circled the conversation back to the Psych Corps and to the system and to the hospitals, saying, “So you’re each on a different case and you can’t talk about it, is that it? You’re sworn not to talk about it, as I understand it. But you’re allowed to speak in generalities. Most of the men I fought with came home and took the weight onto their own shoulders.”

  “Yeah, we’re allowed to speak about generalities. And in theory we’re not even supposed to be together,” Singleton said.

  In the half-light of late day, Wendy’s face seemed to glow. She arched her brows, grimaced, and then smiled. Her face said: You’re an old man and can’t be expected to grasp the vision behind this huge national project.

  “OK, OK, maybe I’m just out of the loop on this enfolding treatment, but there’s something fishy about it, and something even fishier about the fact that the administration admits it’s bogus and it is written into the creed or whatever it is that you went around the house practicing for weeks when you were studying for your exam.” Here the old man turned his attention fully to Singleton and, sounding much older, said, “You should’ve seen her studying day and night in her room.” Suddenly Wendy was repositioned by the kitchen table of her youth. She seemed like a teenager in her father’s eyes, and even in Singleton’s. He felt the urge to lead her out of the kitchen and fuck her on her single bed. He could imagine her room upstairs, the small bed with a comforter and a pink dust ruffle, and the posters of the Stones trying to look like the Beatles, and her desk with her pencil can and her old school books.

  The old man opened up the subject of war by nodding to the shelves and saying, I got the idea for this setup from looking at a sub galley. A buddy served on a sub and got me on board and showed me around and the one thing that I was impressed with was the fact that the galley had the finest bone-white china, and the best silverware. You had to spend half a year breathing shit air in a tin can and sleeping ass to ass, but at least you got good food and fine dinnerware as part of the deal. My buddy joined the Navy and I joined the Army. He went under and I went over the top.

  Singleton knew the old man would use the mention of his friend in the Navy to begin his confession. And he did. The Bulge. The Black Forest silence during those woozy first few weeks when the war seemed to be winding itself down, one city after another liberated. Cold snowy days filled with the camaraderie of newly formed units: boys fresh off the boat, struggling to understand that they were on the front edge of the great push toward the bunkered-down Hitler (rumored to be dead). A few weeks in the Black Forest, and the gung-ho vibe was replaced by fear. The old man paused, trying to find a way to describe the way it had felt. He muttered to himself. He wanted to find a way to say it. He mentioned the snow, of course, and the fresh-faced innocence of his buddies. He talked about the wind through the pines, foxholes, plans for movement when the word came down. Just a bunch of ignorant doughboys, he said. We got there, dug in, and waited. The old man’s words had an offhandedness from countless retellings. Nothing he said sounded doubtful. The story was a block of stone with the following contents: they waited in the Black Forest. Scouts were sent ahead on recon missions. Scouts spotted the German reinforcements. Scouts sent information behind the lines. Brass gave a fuck. Men waited in trepidation. Germans attacked. At this point—again predictably—the story took a personal twist. Singleton already knew from what Wendy had said that the old man had been captured by the Germans. He was a lieutenant and had command of his unit and was captured. He was one of the men who’d let the Germans, dressed as Americans, through the line.

  Singleton listened while Wendy, having heard the stories a hundred times (no wonder she’d joined the Corps!), tried to locate something new. There was nothing but lies, Singleton thought, when a man began talking about combat. The truth of what had really happened was beyond words. In the truly mad, like wheelchair guy out there in the yard, the haze of lies was thick and serene. Amputees had a hard time with their stories. The listener knew the story would end with a blast of some sort, a flying sensation through the air, a gaping disbelief as the man groped around to locate his missing legs. The listener was always ahead of the game when it came to a wheelchair guy. (And maybe that was why enfolding didn’t work on them. Maybe the story they had was trapped in the missing arms, lost like some shadow memory of feeling that kept coming back again and again, mirroring the leg, or arm, or hand.)

  What bothered Singleton, as Wendy’s father spoke on about his internment, the forced march to Dresden, the escape during the bombings in a firestorm unleashed by his own troops, was the old man’s voice. It seemed to say: I’m going to go deep into the memory and give you my war and my experience and then I’m going to come to a full stop, maybe dab away the tears, and you’re going to say, Man, sir, that’s heavy, and then in turn, as part of the deal, you’re going to have to tell me your story. You’re going to ante up with some words, and the words must convey a sense, at least, that you’re down there in the memory of some hidden truth you’ll never divulge: but you’ll give me a chance to find it, because we went over and saw something that no one else has seen except for other grunts.

  In the old man’s voice was the older-vet-talks-to-younger-vet tone, and it occurred to Singleton that there was a generation gap that he might put to use. Maybe, when it was his turn to speak, he could signal to Wendy to say they had to go.

  Now the old man was speaking in tight phrases. He was running away. He made a run for it. The guards were lost in the chase. He somehow got out of Berlin. Then he was in the countryside. He hid out. He burgled a few homes. He slept in haylofts. He met friendly peasant types. A month he spent on the lam until he came upon an American unit …

  Singleton had his foot on Wendy’s leg and was moving it up along her shin. He couldn’t see much of her face. She had her elbows on the table and was running her spoon around the rim of her empty cup.

  The story would end, Singleton guessed, just as suddenly as it began. It would come to a dead stop. The poetry would flutter away and the old man would sit silently, shaking his head at the enormity of his memory. (There was always a head-shake at the end of a war story.) Then he’d say, Jesus Christ, didn’t mean to go on like that. At which point protocol would require that Singleton ask some question that would direct the story back to the Black Forest.

  How many were in your unit?

  Did you go on a recon?

  What’s your theory on the weak link in the chain of command? Or something else that felt detailed, a baton into the hand of a sprinter, so that the old guy would go back around and get closer to the truth of the matter, the big fuckup. No matter what, every grunt had the sensation of having made a grievous error. Maybe it came from being too gung-ho in the moment. Perhaps the error was a misreading of the landscape due to low light. A quick reaction, putting a round through the forehead of your buddy, who had been coming through the dark night to share a cigarette. Maybe it was a fear so deep that it sent you raging into a village to decapitate an old man who had simply been harvesting rice …

&n
bsp; What had brought this example to mind from the myriad of possible examples? Jesus Christ, had he gone in there himself? Had he done such a thing? Was that the evil bullshit enfolded in him? The fuzzball in his head, free-floating. Theory had it they wouldn’t enfold the fantastically evil shit. The evil shit had to be presented to the law, or left external (no treatment!). Reenacting truly evil shit (they said) would only leave you with more shit, so it was unlikely that in some secret facility they were making men reenact atrocities in rigged villages with actors leaning over rice bags, or babies stabbed like Christmas hams on the end of bayonets in the Korean War style; no, no, one had to trust that at some level the web of institutional presumption wouldn’t go that far.

  Wendy was nudging him gently in the shin, and her father was now finishing up, saying, Christ, did I go on like that? He was rubbing tears from his eyes. The kitchen was nearly dark, a window of lavender light over the sink. Time wasn’t exactly still. But it was stiller than usual and both men felt the weight of the story pushing against the one that Singleton might tell, if he could. The old man’s story sat like the giant boulder of copper that had been found in the Kewana Peninsula and was shipped at great cost down to the St. Lawrence Seaway. It sank to the bottom of the lake. That’s what seemed to be sitting between them, a large mass of some metal alloyed in the heat of history, now gone.

  But the universal laws of shared war stories were abrogated when Wendy got up and turned on the lights and the mood shifted and she and her father could see that Singleton was under too much of a burden to speak. Her father understood. For every man in the VFW who told his story fully—albeit according to the rules, waiting for the baton to be passed in the form of a question—there was another man who sat mute.

  Singleton gazed into his shot glass and said, “You know, my shit was a different kind of shit, and well, gee, sir, I wouldn’t even know exactly where to begin if I could recall it. I suppose I might start with Tet—and that’s just a guess—and take it from there, but all I can tell you is I was in for a tour of duty.” And then he choked up and let his throat clear, a few tears blurring his eyes. He was conjuring up images he had from news clips and the photos from Life magazine.