Hystopia: A Novel (16 page)

The stranger was dressed in full regalia, old army-issue jacket, helmet liner with ballpointed peace symbols. Vets lurked around. “I’m over here to get into the program, sir,” the man on the street said to Singleton. “I’m gonna go sign up for the treatment and kill me some of those fresh-faced West Point fucks. Not men like you, sir. You didn’t act like a ring wearer. No West Point bullshit from you. It’s Wilson I want to kill for making us walk the middle of the roads when we told him we’d be sitting ducks. How are you doing, Sing?”

“OK,” Singleton said.

“Man, Captain Sing, I’ve been wondering what happened to you. I had a feeling if I bumped into you anywhere it would be here, man, because I’ve seen half the men in these streets.”

Singleton took a step back and put his arm out as if to say, “Here I am.” “What do you do now?” he said.

“I’m not doing God’s work, if that’s what you’re thinking. Left that behind me, too. Got all that preaching out of my system in Hue. But I didn’t forget, sir. I didn’t forget the promise I made. I promised to get you some good shit when we got home, and I got it for you.”

*   *   *

“Then the guy took this from his pocket and went through the motions, bowing and presenting, one survivor to another,” Singleton said at the window. “The magic shit I told you I could score, he said to me. I told you I’d get it for you, I promised, and I’m good on my word, he said. Then he gave it to me and before I could thank him he walked away.”

Singleton handed her the bag and watched her hold it, fingering the pills. She took one out and sniffed it and dropped it back into the bag and then handed it gently back to him and shook her head.

“I don’t think I’m describing him correctly. He had this helmet liner on, and a flack jacket, and his eyes were spooky but also made up a little bit, with eyeliner or glitter or something.”

“So if this guy’s for real you might’ve been an officer, a West Pointer,” she said, pulling him away from the window. “That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.”

“If I was an officer, I was laid-back about it, or maybe it was a nickname. It might make sense that he was a chaplain and might’ve called everybody Captain, because that’s what we did. We took a big word and made it small, got control of it, maybe messing with the real captain by calling everybody the same.”

He closed his eyes. Perhaps he did remember a chaplain praying over the body of one of his buddies, ministering the last rites. Perhaps not. He went to the freezer and hid the bag in the back. Then he opened the freezer door again and made sure the bag was hidden completely, behind bags of frozen peas and corn coated in snowy fuzz. Wendy smoked a cigarette as he sat across from her and explained that they wouldn’t take them unless he could remember something—anything—about a man nicknamed Chaplain, something that confirmed he was for real, and they wouldn’t take them when they were already high—for sure—and he waited for her to say something and she did, speaking in a low, husky voice, asking him if he wanted her to say she thought maybe she could help him out with that, and he said yes, he wanted her to say that, and she said it, and then she took his hand and led him to the bedroom and made him sit on the end of the bed.

*   *   *

A sensation of going out and then returning was part of it, he’d think. She had sighed the word
easy
. Take it
easy
.

When he came, he’d later think, it was weirdly a sensation deep inside himself and a white flash that vaporized all time and hollowed his mind and brought everything to a halt at the tip of his cock, deep in an open zone (he thought the word
zone
) of nonflesh surrounded by flesh, an airy free zone. He moved down into that zone and let his soul leave via that route. Just before he came he had a sharp awareness of being in the room and of touching her and of the fact that the future had been nullified and that the riots had left behind not only ash but something else: a consistent foreboding sense that the future might or might not exist. He felt, pushing forward, feeling the tightness as his scrotum drew itself up, that along with history and the end of the future any number of other things might terminate the mutual feeling they were sharing, the secretive, all-knowing bond of their two beings. She drove her pelvis forward as if to reduce the possibility of such an end, and then, when he didn’t think he’d be able to go further, he lost it and gave way and grew light and flew up with his thoughts; then, it seemed, he came again, grunting, while she did, too, her cries short, musical, and he was out of it, back in the world, and could smell her scent, slightly metallic, along with the smoke in the air.

He fell to the side and admitted that he had unfolded. “We called him Chaplain, I think, because he was so pious, always praying and had this little family Bible that his father had carried in the Second World War and his father’s father in the First. I saw him going from one body to the next, making the sign of the cross, fingering rosary beads and saying a prayer. I’m sure we gave him shit about it all the time, but he fit with the unit, and I imagine he was probably a source of drugs, always connected in Saigon, a real hustler: God’s hustler. He talked Jesus. He talked his boyhood in Oklahoma. He talked a farm, with a real windmill and other Wizard of Oz shit.”

She remained silent. All that conveniently in an unfolded vision? her silence said. How convenient that you’d have this particular vision at this particular time, giving us permission to take the pills, it said.

“All that conveniently in your unfold.” There was a worried edge in her voice.

“He grew up on a farm and had all of those farm-boy ways of thinking that came from putting in hard work during the spring and then kicking back when summer came to watch the crops grow; so this guy was incredibly patient and didn’t mind waiting out the enemy…”

He explained the battle for the Citadel and she sat listening, not moving. The five-day stalemate, mortar rounds and tank shells pounding what remained of the structure—thinking it was clear and then, a few hours later, receiving sniper fire. The weather had been heavy and air support couldn’t strike, so they dug in and held position and during the long, tense hours and days Chaplain told his life story; he told tales of Cain and Abel–style wrestling matches in the barn loft that started out playfully but then took on epic qualities: getting his brother, Pete, in a half nelson. He told stories of growing corn only to burn it in the fall to collect the no-grow subsidies. He talked for hours of barn construction—the placement of the barn in relation to the sun to maximize the heat in winter and the coolness in summer; talked about the storms that came charging across the flatness, a thin line of dark far off producing tiny, toylike lightning bolts (no thunder); he talked about the long evenings watching the storms approach, slowly at first, or at least seemingly so, and then raging down on them.

“Truthfully, I don’t know if he told those exact stories, now that I think about it,” Singleton said. “Except for the battles with his brother. His brother was the one who got him to enlist. His brother went over to Nam, came back clean and bright. That must’ve been in ’67, or thereabouts. His brother had been a member of Tiger Force and probably committed as many atrocities as the next guy but still came back in fine shape. That was the only story he told, and the rest, like I’ve been saying, might’ve been landscape details. But then I guess he probably told us about his belief in God and how much he admired King David; he told us stories about King David all the time,” he said, trying to see her face in the dark, making out her lips, set tight. Her eyes were hidden. Night sounds came through the walls, deep, muffled television voices and the thumbed thump of a funky bass line. In the window across the room the curtains swirled and fell. She wasn’t buying it, he sensed, and when he asked, she told him she wasn’t. He was simply trying to fish around to find something true, to find a confirmation so they could pop the pills—which she wanted to pop, too, she admitted—and when he told her that he
had
seen the guy, Chaplain, in his vision, crossing the bodies, and that when the time came to take the pills they should feel free to do so, she nodded and touched his scar and then gave a soft, dismissive laugh. He told her it was fate that brought the pills, and as if in response, the bass line fell silent downstairs and there was, for a second, a lull in the noise level, an opening up of a deeper, speculative, judgmental silence, and then he heard himself explaining that fate was whatever you see when luck begins to make sense. It’s a retroactive thing, yeah, but it starts to speak and you listen to it and then it seems to have a shape, he said.

“So you’re not finding it strange that we’re together when you happen upon these blue pills? You’re just chalking it up to fate and leaving it at that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the chances of us being together like this and you having this flash that helps clarify for you that it’ll be safe to take the pills. And you know if we take the pills you’ll unfold more, for sure. That’s all I mean. I’m sick of feeling this way.”

“Sounds to me like you’re talking about a conspiracy. The Corps sets this all up, this guy from my unit appearing?” he said, and then they went back and forth for a few minutes, arguing the possibility that somehow the Corps had set all this up. It’s simply strange the way the world works, she argued. Things play out along lines of love, along desires, needs, touch. She kissed him and then said, still whispering, that conspiracy was a male thing. Men had a need to find structures in encounters that arrived out of desire. They longed for string-pulling at the highest level.

*   *   *

The next morning they got out of bed and readied themselves for the day, hungover, feeling sluggish, keeping away from each other as they moved around the apartment. Then they headed out to have breakfast, leaving the apartment separately, meeting up at the diner, taking a booth by the window and ordering coffee, sipping before they spoke.

“Everything feels out of balance now,” she said. Across the street a man in fatigues stood, glaring in their direction. “There are two sides. I still wonder how much of that story you told me about Hue was true? When I’m high I just take in what you say and let it flow but this morning I woke seriously wondering what I’m supposed to make of the fact that we’re together. I mean, when I’m lectured about having to go out and be Intuitive, and we break a major regulation and no one seems to care, if they know about it, and I think they do know, and then we make love and you unfold something that immediately confirms that the pills you got from some street guy are authentic and then we just wake up and pretend that nothing really happened.”

There were tears in her eyes when she turned back from the window.

“Wendy, you know I can’t really confirm that all the stuff I said last night was completely true,” he said. “And I’m not sure I know what you mean by two sides, except maybe to say that the other side might be your feelings, your gut feeling, your intuition.”

She looked up at him and smiled. “Jesus, that’s not what I’m talking about at all. Not even close. I’m trying to say I didn’t sign up for this shit. I signed up for some kind of structure, not to nurse a guy into unfolding, bit by bit. I think we kind of owe it to ourselves to figure out what our function might be as members of the organization.”

“How do you propose to do that?” he said.

“Well, if they’re aware that we’re together and haven’t stepped in, my guess would be we’re supposed to be talking openly to each other about our cases. My guess would be we’re actually here to exchange information on our cases.”

The waitress came over with the coffee. “You two want anything else? I’ve seen agents come in like you, paired up, and I’ve seen them go away and never come back, but I’ve never seen them come in and go out and come in again like you two.”

“What does that mean?” Wendy said.

“It means you’d better work this out, whatever it is.”

“Who sent you to talk to us?” Singleton said. “Did Klein send you here?”

“Don’t get conspiratorial on me,” the waitress said. “I get enough of that around here. I just saw the two of you, and I saw her crying, and I came over to give you a word. Take it or leave it. I’ve seen the likes of you come and go. I’ve seen you crying. I’ve seen folks come in with clean-cut uniforms, enfolded and cured, and then come back a few months later looking like rejects from the reject pile.”

She ripped the check off the pad and slapped it on the table.

“What was that?” Wendy said when she was gone.

“That was the voice of wisdom, or else the voice of a secret operative who is trying to nudge us into a certain modality.”

“Don’t you think it’s obvious?” Wendy said.

“In what way?”

“In the way of all of these things. If she’s not part of some grand conspiracy denying she’s in a conspiracy, at least she knows something we don’t know.”

“Everyone knows something we don’t know.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Look,” Singleton said. “Again, I’m sure that the flash I got of the Chaplain had to do with Hue. I got a taste of dust—and I don’t think I’m making it up—of city dust. I can only say that it’s an educated guess.”

Music came on the jukebox, and the noise of the diner seemed to lower to let it in. The man across the street was gone.

“I think we both know that we’re on the same case,” she said. “I think that’s been this unspoken thing between us for weeks now and that we’ve been gaming each other—and enjoying it—from about the second or third day, at least until that time you unfolded Rake’s image and saw the look on my face in the car, because I remember you gave me a wink, or maybe not a wink but you indicated that you saw me respond to Rake’s name.”

“You’re projecting, Wendy. I didn’t see you respond to me when I said his name, but I remember you didn’t seem to respond at all and that was weird, so yeah, yeah, yeah, OK, I think we can both agree that we’re making this big revelation. I mean talking here, speaking what has been unspoken and all of that, but to hear you say you’re on Rake’s case shines a light on the fact that we’re both now articulating the fact out loud, right here in the old fucking coffee joint.”