Hystopia: A Novel (13 page)

On the beach—cold stones, small tendrils of black sand—they sat on a tarp and ate cheese and a loaf of bread. Then they lolled and he pulled off his shirt and she pulled hers up, letting the wind blow across their skin, not too cold but cool, counteracted by the sunlight, which came through the thin, late spring clouds. The blackflies that would pester in June stayed hidden in the crux of rocks, and the waves, barely a foot high, came in and carved themselves into the shoreline and receded in long stretches of foam. Along the horizon, almost out of sight, as if a decorative afterthought, another supertanker gave the lake a deeper, more horrific beauty, because during the last few years, ships were sinking (he explained) at an alarming rate: the
Fitzgerald
, the
Hoover
, the
Drake
, the
Sam Johnson
.

Last winter the
Drake
sank, ten hours out of Duluth on a run to Mexico, loaded with copper ore, the bow low, icing up. The hatches weren’t bolted correctly is one theory.

Deadly cold but fucking beautiful, Hank said. He got up and stretched his arms and then sat back down. You had a dream last night, didn’t you?

What makes you say that?

You seem like a girl who had a dream.

You want to hear it, she said.

No, dreams are boring. As soon as they hit the air, they become meaningless. I’d rather hear a lie. I’d rather hear a falsehood than a dream. I’d rather listen to MomMom rant about God.

Then why’d you ask? she said.

Because I wanted to know.

So I’m telling you. Yeah, I had a dream. I was with a boy, and we were at a beach—South Haven, I think it was—one summer afternoon in the dunes, hidden from the crowd, surrounded by grass, a safe place, and the boy’s draft number was up, I remember that, and he said that he was going to war, and the rest, well, the rest you really don’t want to hear because the rest felt like a dream, not a vision, she said.
Much more lucid; the taste of his lips on hers, the razor grass making a dry, husky hiss as the wind blew outside the cove; the sensation of being touched gently—with love—and also the desperate falling away, the sensation of seeing him lean against his car, legs out slightly, cocky, posing for her with his arms back and his chest thrust forward; the last day together before he shipped out, somehow knowing that exactly.

Chances keep growing that my old man’ll land on a sinking ship eventually. That’s the truth, he said, abstractedly. That’s what I have to dream about. He works coal burners, and then he works a new oil burner, and then he goes back to a coal like that one way out there, he said, pointing at the ship trailing a thin curl of black smoke along the horizon.

She watched as he pried his shoes off, cuffed his jeans, straightened his jacket, an old army fatigue, and walked down to the shore to dip his toes in, making a loud, joyful hoot. He waded in and hopped around with his arms up. Then he began kicking long, beaded arches of water curling off his toes in her direction.

It was, she thought, one of the most joyous sights she’d ever seen. At least that she could remember seeing, and for a split second, with her head back, exposed to the sunlight, while he continued to kick the water (she could hear the splash), she felt for the first time in what seemed to be an eternity an ability to fully enjoy a particular moment, with only a little breath of fear on the back of her neck.

OLD SCHOOLERS

In mid-July, the Soviets adjusted their nuclear coordinates and Kennedy continued his wave-by tours, visiting South Bend again, and then Lincoln’s birthplace in Springfield, where he gave another long speech justifying the war effort. He had given up providing logical reasoning. The fight was about the fight. National honor was at stake. Photos of him on the front pages in early July showed his hand in the air, his face aged, with Jackie in the car beside him looking frightened but beautiful. War reports: The siege of Hue dragged on as the Marines struggled once again to take what was left of the Citadel. Jason Williamson—a.k.a. the stoned reporter—filed nightly radio reports in a drug-dreary voice that was oddly comforting. His modus operandi, which had won him a Pulitzer, was to be on the ground as stoned as possible and to catch a new perspective, to offer up reports steeped in the language of visions. He was on the so-called wire, or outside the wire, or near the wire, filing from a microphone attached to the lapel of his flak jacket, pausing to let the pop of gunfire punctuate his whispery narrative, which seemed at an odd remove from reality, peppered with phraseology that could only come from tripping, describing the way the tracer fire wrapped long ribbony bands over the Vietcong, a sweep of galloping ghosts.

Singleton listened with his feet up on the sill, looking at the view of the ash piles in the distance. Wendy was sleeping soundly on the bed. Dog days of Flint. Two weeks in a holding pattern of nonsense from Klein, who was using the word
modality
a lot, talking about a holding modality—and the fact that the Rake killings had stopped, or had stopped being reported. We have to sustain an understanding of the modality, Klein said, going over to the map again and again, touching the pins, returning to his desk to light another pipe.

“You’re going to confess that you’re fraternizing and I’m going to listen to you confess and then I’m going to tell you that in this case, because I think it fits the modality it’s not reportable, because in this case, and I’m trusting my own instincts, such as they are, my own gut, I sense that you might—and I have to go to the lingo again—be caught in some type of retrospective harmonious conversion. So you’re going to admit it to me now, son, and I’m going to listen and let you off the hook.”

“I’m sorry, sir, I won’t admit it,” Singleton said. In the past few weeks Klein had become somewhat disheveled, the knot in his tie was often improperly dimpled, and there was a small stain on his lapel. Today he was wearing his G-man outfit for the second day in a row; he’d been rotating between his old Korea dress uniform and his suit. (I’m both an ex-soldier and an agent, he explained, and I don’t see a problem with splitting the difference between the two, do you?)

“You will admit it, son. I’ve had some reports coming down that put you and another agent together at the beach. A man down in Relations made a report that put you at the canal with another agent. Now, normally, I’d see this as a deep betrayal of the organization because we have our rules, and our rules are there for a reason. For example, if two agents meet secretly there might be some residual sense of needing to unfold each other. Or the two agents start to copulate and in doing so begin to feel at ease, and in that ease, in bed I assume, they might share case information and in sharing it compromise the program dynamic. I don’t need to state the obvious fact that if you reach some kind of unlimited ecstatic state, as in a massive orgasm, you risk unfolding.”

“No, sir.”

Klein got up from his chair and walked around his desk and put his hands on Singleton’s shoulders. “Now go ahead and admit it.”

“I’m sorry, sir. I can’t do that.”

He and Wendy had then met in the lobby. Standing on the Kennedy Psych Corps seal, under the scrutiny of the guard who had a shit-eating grin and seemed to know what was coming, they’d embraced and struck the poise of the sailor and lover on V-J day in Times Square, holding the kiss, fulfilling the vision he’d had weeks ago. And when Wendy asked, What are we doing? he told her they were letting the Corps know that they didn’t give a shit.

*   *   *

Out in the street that afternoon Singleton stopped for cigarettes and glanced at the newspapers. Ships were sinking out in the Great Lakes; headlines read
SAGANAW SINKS, DEATH SHIP
, and
KEWANAA TRIANGLE
. On the front page of the
Detroit Free Press
a Chinook hovered in a freak midsummer storm, dangling a net into raging waters. The teardrop shape of the net in relation to the spray and the chopper—fucking Chinook—gave him pause. The exuberance of a few minutes ago, the sense of rebellion, dancing in the lobby and then strutting down the street, leading her away from the building, had disappeared. He went back to the newsstand and took another look at the photograph. There were rumors that intense feelings like the jubilation he’d felt in the lobby could make you susceptible to the reintroduction of memory fragments. Odd bits of hearsay, usually about how treatment might fail, gathered around the hard facts: cold water immersion and orgasmic sex were the only proven methods of unfolding, and even those were often haphazard and might, or might not, actually reintroduce the trauma.

He told her he needed to get to the beach again, to get near water, to get away, and then he watched as she walked ahead. She had a slight pronation to one side that threw her off balance, and it made his groin tingle. If there is a God, he thought, I’ll speak directly to him when the time comes, and if there isn’t a God I’ll have to invent one, and I’ll find a way to thank him for the way I feel when I watch her move.

Then he caught up with her and took her hand, and when she asked what he was thinking he told her he was thinking he’d have to invent God so he could explain to him how he was feeling right now, and then she said, No, you weren’t.

*   *   *

Lakeport was an old beach town of boarded storefronts and a single beach-ball-and-towel emporium with sorry-looking, half-inflated figures hanging from poles and lifesaving rings deflated and faded to pastel colors. They took the cooler and the towels and went to the shore to examine the water quality. A snake of sludge stretched the entire length of the beach. A few kids tiptoed into the water while their parents looked away. Near the water, a boy, working with secretive intensity, dug into the sludge with a blue plastic shovel, molding the sand into animal shapes, whistling to himself.

Singleton sat on the towel and took out a weathered copy of
A Farewell to Arms
, opened it, and began to read the neat, clear sentences. The war was around the two main characters and they spoke in a pidgin English, using pet names, in a dialogue that was snappy and efficient and false-sounding in a way that was true-sounding at the same time because it was spoken rapid-fire, without intrusions, and it was spoken in isolation, he thought. Hemingway’s war had produced a certain kind of character, a new way of thinking and speaking that came from what was left out, from the things war had demolished and pushed away forever.

Wendy was putting lotion on her palms and rubbing it into his shoulders and on his legs and face, touching the scar, running her finger along it again, retracing, asking him—at least he imagined she was asking—with her touch instead of her voice, but she knew he didn’t have the answers and would only resort to conjecture. In Vietnam, was all he could say, all he did say when she asked, and then there was a silence full of the wash of waves and the hiss of sand.

*   *   *

On the drive back to Flint, listening to a broadcast of the Stooges from the Grande Ballroom in Detroit, the sound of the crowd roaring as Iggy sang “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” they discussed the old man they had seen on the beach, walking along the water, dressed in a black suit and an elegant hat, shuffling along out of place and oddly removed from the scene, one of many such men, nicknamed Old Schoolers, who were rumored to be spies for the Corps. That’s how a rumor gets started, Singleton explained. It’s absurd to think that an old man who happens to be walking along the beach in a suit would be a spy of any kind, and yet the desire to fit him into a specific story is stronger than reason, and if you’re going to fit him into something that is absurd, or at least partly absurd, it might as well be a vision President Kennedy happened to have during his recovery from the assassination attempt, with his poor sister as a focal point of his deep meditation. If you’re going to find a story for that man, who maybe just happens to like to walk on the beach dressed to the nines, cold the way old people are always cold, then you’re going to have to find a tool to force fit him into a conspiracy, or at least some complex social system, and that tool is going to be the idea that he’s a spy. And then Wendy took the other side, saying it was highly possible that he really was a spy and just so happened to disguise himself as a rumor, making use of the dynamic you just described (she said), taking advantage of the weird mix of belief and disbelief in the program. Then they both fell into a quiet perplexity while the old mills passed again, on the other side of the car, with a different light—late-day, subdued, smothering the thickets of the pipework in shadow, because they were both thinking, they’d later admit, that the argument was somehow applicable to the concept of God, in that he would be walking in plain sight disguised as a rumor.

*   *   *

Back at her apartment Wendy came out of the shower rubbing her hair with a towel, smelling fresh and clean, her eyes free of makeup, watching him as he tapped his head and told her he’d been thinking that his CEP had to stretch back a long way, far back, because he couldn’t remember much about being a kid, not much at all. She scrutinized him, up and down with what he was beginning to think of as her nursing gaze, looking for indications of his condition, and then asked, in a sarcastic voice, if they hadn’t informed him that he’d lose everything up to a certain point—blah, blah, blah.

“In cases of close friends with shared history, the war trauma will be enfolded along with other residual memories that are attendant to the loss, so that a man who has lost a good buddy from a small town, for example, will also enfold the small details of his life—playing ball, fishing, hijinks, drag races down forlorn streets, going out on dates together, anything linked to the loss,” Singleton said. “Some say, technically, that all of the memories related to the trauma repress themselves in a kind of sequential reaction, each one falling in relation to the next, so that in the case of grand trauma, the loss not only of a battlefield buddy but also a beloved friend from prewar, the subject—me, for fuck’s sake—will lose, in theory, a great deal of memory from the past.” He reached and took her cigarette.