Hystopia: A Novel (15 page)

And how do you know that? Haze said.

You’re a guy still living in a world devoid of Rake, Hank said. You’re a pimple-faced kid who hasn’t learned the lesson of Rake. If you don’t learn the lessons of Rake, you end up dead. Sometimes folks learn the rules by dying. Lesson number one: Never blink if you can help it. Lesson number two: Rake is always right. Never correct Rake or argue. Keep disagreement safely tucked away and don’t brood or even ponder the counterargument. Keep your face clean of emotion. Lesson number three: Join in with him in mayhem. Lesson number four: See the world from his eyes. Lesson number five: Submit to the idea that his history is your own when you’re around him. Lesson number six: No lesson can prepare you for one of Rake’s sudden, impulsive mood shifts. You can learn the other five lessons but it won’t do you any good, no matter how ready you think you are, when, out of the blue, for no viable reason, some past incident causes him to move in a direction that is not only unexpected but absurdly disconnected from his present reality, Hank said.

Because I’ve seen him stick guys in the eye a few times, he added. It gives him great satisfaction. He’ll give you a lobotomy before you know what hit you.

He wouldn’t do that to me.

You really believe that? Hank said, sipping his drink, trying to remain in the zone.

I don’t believe he would.

Then you’re a fool, Hank said. And anyway, if he doesn’t put a shiv through your eyeball, I’ll have to do it for him.

Do what for me? Rake said, coming back in, hitching up his pants.

Kick this little runt’s ass, Hank said.

How’s that eye, Haze? What do you have to say about that eye?

Whatever was meant to be seen out of that eye, Haze said, touching the gauze pad, has already been seen.

You said the right thing, son, Rake said. He looked at his cards and then put his hand down and said, Fold. Meg looked her cards over and folded, and Hank presented his hand. Nobody could ever raise Rake. If you had a great hand, you folded it and put it away. Rake had to win.

You want to hear some news from out there, Rake said. A gang of bikers took over a lock at the Soo, jammed it up. A Black Flag–sponsored firefight in the streets of Marquette went haywire. A splinter group joined the fray. All hell broke loose. Some hillbilly types joined in to spice up the mix. The standoff lasted a day—a siege, someone called it. The Marines were called. A Marine is never under siege. The Marines were driven all the way back to Copper City before reinforcements came in. Now it’s what’s being called a stalemate, a draw. No mention of siege anymore.

Rake talked deep into the night, driven by speed, with an intensity that excluded the others, with the exception of Hank, who added to the talk by describing what he knew of the last big Black Flag battle. (Speedboats playing the role of Swift Boats.) There was a new maniacal element in Rake’s voice (Hank thought) and the way he pounded the table and, on occasion to underscore a point, swatted Haze on the side of the head. Haze claimed he had been a member of Black Flag. Couldn’t get the war out of my system, he said. Couldn’t get all the way home. Came up here with the rest. Fuckers tried to enfold me but I escaped and hitched up here.

At the table he absorbed the blows until the pain meds eased and he let out a howl that made Rake laugh long enough to forget his point in the first place, slapping his knees and saying, Man, shit, man, that’s funny, funny as all hell.

*   *   *

Then it began again, Rake coming in at night, feeding her Canadian pills, forcing them into her throat until she swallowed them, saying, That’s a good girl, that’s just fine, drink them down, and handing her a glass of water—the glass cool and damp—Drink them down, drink them down, and he said something was amiss in her eyes, something off (his mouth close to her ear, his fingers gripping her thigh), and she told him she was tired and wanted to sleep. I’m tired, she said, I’m tired, and he handed her a glass of water and another pill, another night; one night that was different from another, with the smell of the trees and the breeze and the sound of waves or the deep silence of no waves. He didn’t touch her, aside from gripping her thigh, or her arm, and she felt fear in the fact that he was withholding something. Stay up all night, he said, exhaustion brings a clarity to a new day, and then he reached over and held the back of her neck with one hand and brought her to him and forced her mouth against his own. Night sounds and smells, not only the lake itself—she could feel it, sense it, the great, massive body—but jasmine sweetness, the smell of honeysuckle.

*   *   *

For days Haze lurked around the edges of action. He stood out in the old barn smoking while Hank sat in a lawn chair and studied his tree guides, his maps, his histories of Michigan forestry. Early dog days. An early summer heat wave. Now and then, finding themselves alone, Hank and Meg whispered to each other words of encouragement.

He’ll be going away again soon, Hank said. He’ll be back on the road. He can’t sit still for long. I’ll persuade him to leave you here. He’ll want to take Haze as a sidekick. Haze is the new Meg, you see, he said, and then he lifted his hand up as if to touch her and moved it away, looking out over the yard at MomMom, who, in a lawn chair, was making the sign of the cross and whispering prayers.

When Hank asked she said no, no, he hadn’t done that, no, not that she could remember, and it was true. He fed her the pills and went off with Haze and left her alone, and then Hank looked at her, his eyes soft but careful, and when he asked her again—in a whisper—she gave him the same answer and he looked at the sky and let out a deep sigh. What is he doing to you at night, he asked, and she said she couldn’t remember.

*   *   *

The fact that so far he hasn’t done it again to you must mean something. (He wanted to say it, to say the word
fuck
to her, but he couldn’t.) I’m not sure what, exactly, but if he’s keeping his hands off you there must be a reason, Hank said the next day, out alongside the old shed. The eaves were full of nests. Wasps dipped down and flew off while others came swooping back in. The furious industry of it. Bees don’t do that, Hank explained. Bees have style and grace and only sting—I don’t need to tell you this—if they have to sting, but wasps have a destiny that comes from their form; they’re segmented with that narrow little band and they feel, well, they feel a sensation that at any moment they might break apart; they’re locked into the brutal logic that has been passed on to them and don’t even know it, but bees are a little like trees. They have a greater sense of their fate in relation to the work they put into time itself. He paused and then took a deep breath of the smell, the dusty bake of the shingles and a moist scent of fern drifting in from the woods. He stood over Meg as she dug a hole for the dog, which was nothing but rib bones and maggots and a sag where the ground met the decaying body and the body the ground, the two sides of the coin, after weeks in the warm spring sun, woven into each other. Let the dog sit until I tell you to do something with it, Rake had said days ago. You don’t go burying that dog until it has to be buried, or else you might forget what I did to it.

Hank slapped her back once with his palm, swinging his arm back and making a show of force, because he knew that Rake was inside, watching.

We’ll figure something out to get him to do himself in somehow, Hank said. Then he ordered her to dig harder.

It has to be his idea. Stay in the role of Old Meg. Stay as deep as you can.

What makes you think I’m acting? Meg said. What makes you think there even was a New Meg?

Just keep digging. He can’t hear you but he can see you.

*   *   *

Quiet static days of summer. One day slipping into the next as Rake seemed to be recharging his anger batteries for another killing spree. I’m trying to catch a new technique, he explained. I’m tired of just popping people. I’m getting sick of the whole thing, he said one night. Another night he said he didn’t give a shit. He wasn’t tired of it, not at all.

Whatever there was to know about Haze stayed hidden. He leaned against the kitchen wall and prodded the floor with his toes. He lurked around, just a shadow figure, waiting to be tested. Hank kept him in his line of sight and tried to probe, to figure it out. One afternoon he cornered him near the shed, loomed over him.

Say something, Hank said. Tell me about your war.

Something, Haze said. Tell me about your war.

No, fucker, say something meaningful, make your presence known.

Something meaningful, Haze said. There, I said it.

You were in Nam. Did you fight with Rake?

You’d know if I did, right. No, man. I fought all around, man. I got gooks anywhere I could. All shapes and sizes. I saw the guy they like to call the Phantom Blooper. I tried to kill him but he slipped away. And I understood the villages, man, and all that ancestor shit. See, I understood it. They were building those tunnels a long time before we got there, man. They were ready for us. They saw us coming long before we knew we were going.

So you think you know who the Phantom Blooper is?

Everyone knows the Blooper, Haze said.

Not everyone.

Everyone who saw action knows. He went over to join the other side, the Cong, the winning fucking side, the side that’s looking back into history, to the ancestors, man, to the worship of those who came before you.

So you’re saying you saw him? Hank looked away over the yard. Rake had Meg tied up in a chair and was sitting across from her talking, smoking a cigarette, sipping a beer. The wind was high and the sound of waves came through the trees.

I’m saying I was him, Haze said, and he bent forward slightly with his chin up as if to offer his face to a fist, his eyes wide open, a dapple of sweat on his brow. It was a face waiting to be struck. It was a testing position—his arms dropped to his side, his tiny hands open, not clenched. High winds were coming in from the west and the sound of the surf came and went, came and went, milky white against his eardrums. You must not fight, Hank told himself. His internal voice was sullen and sad-sounding, coming through the continual buzz of his own treatment. What had just happened with Haze was a skirting around the issue at hand, the sense that if he had been asked the question about where he fought he wouldn’t have been able to answer. Had Haze sensed this? All the cocky, bullshit wordplay, the twisting around of his questions.

*   *   *

MomMom began throwing visionary fits with wholehearted vigor. One afternoon, she went to the yard, tossed herself into the weeds, convulsed, and spoke in tongues. Go do something, Rake said. Stop your old lady, man. I’m having a bad enough trip without having to watch her freak out and talk God this and God that. I’ll do what I can, Hank said. He went and said, Mom, Mom, MomMom, you’ve got to stop. He listened and located a vague syntax in her nonsense phrases, a logic in the way she went on about the torment of vanquished peoples, a fiery end, as she heaved her calico chest into the air. Eventually, he dragged her deep into the brush near the barn where the sound would be buffered by the rotting wood structure.

How’d you get her to stop, Rake said. He was at the kitchen table cutting up some product, chopping with quick, efficient strokes.

I talked to her in her own tongue as much as I could, Hank said. I just said back to her what she was saying to me and that calmed her down.

Rake prepared his product like a prep cook, moving from task to task.

I hope you don’t do that with me? He looked up with glazed eyes. In his right hand, shaking slightly, he held a box cutter.

Do what? Hank said.

Say back to me what I’m saying to you to calm me down.

THE BLUE PILLS

In the last few days of June they had started to arrive, more and more of them, coming down from the U.P. and up from the south, attracted by a rumor that was passing from vet to vet, from the VFW Hall in Hell, Michigan, to the streets of Detroit—a rumor that the original treatment had been twisted into something better than an acid trip, and that it included not only free grub and a place to hang out but also a chance to pay back command, to frag the guy who messed up your life forever. In a meeting, Singleton was briefed that the rumor’s originator was a man named Stan Newhope, who suffered from acute delusions and shell shock in addition to a run-of-the-mill schizophrenia that gave him visions of lumbering ships in the sky—not aircraft, but pirate ships. Newhope was throwing out a good rap, blowing it way out of proportion, saying: “Man, what I hear is they give you AK-47s, not some shitcan M16, but a Ruskie weapon that actually works, and you’re free to kill the officers who screwed you in the first place.” The weird specificity of the AK-47—the agent giving the brief had explained—was the vital element that had fueled the rumor. The key concept of the rumor was that you could do anything you wanted so long as you came out of a reenactment firefight a winner, on top, alive. By the time the rumor reached the hills of Kentucky, the briefer said, it had been put to music and was being sung like a ballad from the porches of backwoods shacks; by the time it got to Virginia, where only a few vets lived, after the great migration north, it had solidified into what seemed to be a solid slice of the truth. Now, thanks to the rumor, Flint had become a beacon of hope for those who hadn’t already come north, luring in the non-enfolded (the briefer said). Most didn’t qualify for the program. Some were too old, like Korean War vets, or too physically damaged. The Tripizoid simply wouldn’t work on subjects too far—in years, or in memory—away from the actual combat trauma. They were, as some of the vets liked to put it, those who had been back home so long they would never get home.

*   *   *

Singleton held the plastic baggie of bright blue pills and thought about the stunning sensations they might induce when ingested; no holding back, a bright sense of portent had led them to the window where they stood watching the ash heaps smoldering with a new intensity. A sliver of moon hung far out in the haze. The pills had come to Singleton via an intricate series of events—at least it seemed that way, passed from palm to palm secretly through old connections he hadn’t known existed, ending with the man who had approached him on the street with big, Howdy Doody ears, produced a snappy salute, and said, “Hey, Captain Singleton? Fucking A. That you? I’d know you anywhere. It’s me, man. It’s me, remember? Used to call me Chaplain because, well, basically I was the chaplain and all that. I had a feeling I’d bump into you soon.”