Hystopia: A Novel (18 page)

Why’d you do that, splash me awake like that? I was speaking to him directly.

In the mudroom he got two lengths of rope and then went upstairs. Meg was squeezing her hair in a towel.

I’ve got to tie your hands, he said. We’re going to march you in front of MomMom and make her practice her lines. I’m going to tie you and I’ll wheelbarrow you through the yard while you scream, and we’ll make sure MomMom sees that. We’ll make sure she remembers. Ideally she’ll forget minor details, which will make it sound even more horrific when Rake interrogates her.

When she was dressed, he sat her down on the bed and gently tied her wrists, keeping the rope loose, using a slipknot.

If you want to get out of these, just pull hard and you’ll be free. You can let yourself free anytime you want, even in the yard, even in front of Ma. If you don’t want to play the part don’t play it and I’ll figure something else out.

She went down the stairs ahead of him into the kitchen. Look, Ma, Hank said. I want you to take note of this. I’m leading her out tied up. Can you say that for me? he said. Why should I say that for you? she said. Because I want to make sure you remember. I want you to say to Rake: He had her tied up. Can you say that for me? He crossed his arms and waited.

You got her tied up, she said.

Good, Mom, that’s fine. Just remember that when Rake asks you, because he’ll come back and he’ll be suspicious. This is a test. For all I know, he’s out there in the trees right now waiting and watching.

*   *   *

I’m not saying I believe it anymore, he was saying. They were about a mile up the trail, moving along a barely discernible path, a faint trace in the pine needles, close enough to shore to see the water through the trees. Hank made slow, deliberate steps, stopping often to smell the air and scout with his hand up to his forehead. The trees thinned where the rocky berm began, showing shards of slate-colored lake. I’m not saying I even believe in the vision of the Corps, or the treatment, that it works in the long run, or any of that. What matters right now is that Haze and Rake are paired up, tight. They’re a new pair. They were loading the car with gas cans and old rags, so I guess the truth is they’re going on another burning and killing spree, not a distribution run. They had fuses and a few sticks of old dynamite from the shed.

Then he stopped and turned her around and untied her wrists and rubbed them lovingly.

I’m sorry I had to do that. I was just acting the part as much as I could but didn’t feel it, not at all. You know that, right? You knew that. And of course I know some of the New Meg is still there. What we want to do is get more of you back, to take you into the water and get you in the cold—not much, just a bit—and start to get some of your memories back.

He looked around the woods. I’ve got some Potawatomi blood in me, most certainly, and I would’ve heard him on this part of the trail if he were scouting parallel to us.

He kissed her and touched her face and looked into her eyes. She was still slightly stoned from whatever Rake had fed her. A lollygag motion in the eyes, disconnected from her thoughts. When she spoke, the words seemed to take a trip to the moon and back, the same kind of delay. He glanced one more time back into the woods, the sunlight streaming through the high branches—the disorder of an unplanted forest—and then once more out toward the lake, at the scrubby little jack pines that hung on for dear life in the steady wind, stunted and short, most of them young because older trees died a quick wintery death in the storms. Everything seemed quiet. They were as alone as they could get.

Another supertanker slid along the horizon on its way to Duluth. He led her down to the water and put his hands on her shoulders and held her for a moment.

Now, this is how it’s going to happen, he said. You’re going to go into the water and I’m going to go with you. You’ll go up to your ankles and feel how cold it is and then you’ll want to dash out, or else you’ll want to submerge yourself totally right away, one or the other depending on how much you want to unfold, and I’ll help you but you might not think I’m helping. I’m not going to force you but I’m going to make sure you don’t kill yourself. Holding her by the shoulder, feeling her shivers, he walked with her into the water. Before he could say anything more she wrenched free and ran leaping through the shallows and then, with a small cry, she slipped over the shelf—the drop-off was quick—and sank with her arms straight up and was gone. He dove and swam to find her, reaching out with broad strokes, resisting his impulse to shut his eyes against the cold. When he came back up, she was up, too, finding the edge of the shelf with her feet, gasping. Then she sank back down, and he had his arms around her and brought her in so he could touch the bottom with his feet. He cupped her head with his palm and held her down in the water, feeling her relax. He counted the seconds and then let her up again, spitting water from her lips, and when he asked if she wanted him to push her down again, to go the full count, she said, Yes, yes, and before he could think, before she could think, he pushed her back under and counted again, going as long as he dared, waiting for her to struggle against him, going all the way to the limit, as close as he could, watching the bubbles rise in the clean gloss of the wavelets, and when he finally let her back up he could see in her eyes right away that she had gone through a change; her eyes were sad, bright, frightened, but relieved.

Down under the water she heard a voice speak and the voice said:

*   *   *

I wonder who’s going to tell the story, Meg? Nothing else to say. You see, you had to be here and you weren’t. You know the one that goes: How many Vietnam vets does it take to screw in a lightbulb? How many? You fucking don’t know because you weren’t there, man! You weren’t fucking there! The texture of history; the rubbery material it’s made out of—say, latex. No. Something stronger than latex that can stretch out to a pure translucence until it’s nothing but a molecule thick, man, not even that. You had to be high to be there. Listen up, man, let me tell you, they can’t reproduce the shit I went through; Tripizoid or no Tripizoid, it isn’t going to work for me. No confusion (some guy said, raising his fingers up in the V sign). Don’t give me that Walter Cronkite that’s-the-way-it-is bullshit, man; I don’t care who’s directing the reenactment chamber, I’m gonna out-Hector Hector, man, and there ain’t nothing to be said. I won’t go on, I won’t go on with it. They’re going to have to drag me in to Vetdock. They’ll have to shove the Tripizoid down my throat. There is the buzz in the ear; the buzz in the ear’s as close as you’ll get. That’s what this friend tells me, likes to say that, as if it means something. Just can’t get it right, what a friend says to me. Piece it together, dude, put two and two next to each other and figure this … shit … out. Elephant grass. Man, journalists always mention the elephant grass. And rice paddies—and the Mekong Delta—always the rich beauty of the mountains and the Mekong Delta, man; always that to set up the contrast; and jungle rot, always that rot, man, along with slogging through this and slogging through that; always point man this and point man that and ambush this and ambush that: look close, you noticed the line; the line is late 1967, when the crewcuts grew out and the love beads grew down and the shirts were unbuttoned wide and the refusal of orders became routine and the air mattresses began to sag. Back home the line was pot and acid to speed and meth and coke. You had to be there. You weren’t there. You should’ve been there. Should’ve been you. Reporters put fear in your eyes. Put fear in your mouth. The grimace. Reporters tell the story: take the hill, lose the hill. Take a hill. Lose a hill. Story has to rotate on an axis, has to spin around the Polaris of fear; story has to make some kind of sense, dissasembled and reassembled: all ticker-tape bullshit and journalese code wired back. The steel cases for the film reels arriving in New York days late: old news is better than no news—so by the time it gets on the tube we’re long gone from that shit, man, and the dead have been hoisted up, the net sagging, the chopper struggling to get the heave-ho going, pressing the grass down in the wash, and the men left behind waddle back into the bush; then the chopper does that little dip to one side and swings herself skyward under a barrage of flack—always flack—while the door gunner sprays wildly, his haphazard aim still tuned to water buffalo, and then that profound silence when the dust-off—always the dust-off—has gone out of range, not even the murmur of it anymore, and there’s just the silence of foliage and rice, man, that nobody—no writer, no miked-up Morley Safer—has ever caught, bottled up, and taken back to the States: the world, always
the world
, as if we really called it that and maybe we did but not to you, motherfucker; always the helmet graffiti quote, the totems and good luck charms reductio ad absurdum with their meaning couched, that said: these suckers will be offed, retroactively lending those charms the meaning you want; the terrible gist you already got in your living room easy chairs watching Uncle Walter while the vertical barely holds and the image threatens to turn itself into what it is, just so many radio waves coming off a tower for your viewing pleasure; the stately eye of the network, or the peacock tail metamorphosing into color plumage—another line; black and white/color: the browns and greens of the marijuana going to bright blue pills and tabs with psychedelic decoration—the fine bubbling fix gnarly and many-hued; don’t go there, man, don’t even try to get the combat in: never seen it work, man; only good story is a dead story … all that free-formed fear becoming nullified at the brain tip, with dark pure dark, so you sit inside your head for that split second and say: shit, ain’t no heaven or nothing but just this terminal darkness while some guy says, far off, in a trickle of audible sound itching the last viable neurons—gonna be all right, Hank, gonna be just fine. Fuck Asklepios, fuck that nonsense: Where was he when we needed him? Just one more bleeder falling into the nonsense of his pain, the gung-ho posture dissipating while he holds his chin up, prone on the stretcher, with the plastic cigar tip in his mouth and says he’s going to get the gook that sent the bullet, going to get him—while the camera, immoral and unjust, moves down to the shredded legs. He holds himself off from the pure shot and stays steady in the endorphin high and keeps the pose as long as he can until the morphine drip shoves the endorphins aside so that the pain can come in and you see it in his face, which goes from square-jawed, à la George Patton, Jr., to a prune of pain just before the film is cut and the story terminated: he was the biggest and the bravest motherfucker until he stepped on our own claymore out there, along the line, and then—always along the line, always out there—the faint distant explosion, the small cloud, the camera drawing itself along the tree line, and then (cut in) the medic hustling himself to work, elevating. (There’s this place, someone tells me, called the Gleel; some nice little glen down in a grove of trees with the babbling brook and the moss and the microclimate of coolness; place of curative powers, the guy tells me, and then he goes on to explain, getting professorial—in that way of the ex-junkie—that it’s where Saint Dymphna exercises her singular healing powers, and I tell him, Fuck off, and then go to it in my mind and imagine myself there.) Never used the word
Bedlam
; never heard the word once. This is Morley Safer, reporting from outside Hue, in the hamlet that can only be called Bedlam, South Vietnam. No tell of the grunt Hogarth—that silly little fuck, skinny as a whip, from Ellison, South Dakota, riding point—yeah, point—that afternoon (always through the head); and after the day was done, after the men took Hill #21, the cost was a high one, five dead, ten wounded. This is Morley Safer, somewhere—Christ knows where, exactly—outside Hue, in Vietnam. Hovercrafts: giant bulldozers to clear the jungle, carving the symbol for the Engineer Battalions into the countryside; sensors that can sniff out the smell of piss ammonia and campfire smoke from a thousand feet up; all kinds of shit to compose the nightly newscast and usually cast into the bright shiny emotion of battle: bric-a-brac, man, was the main thing—a thousand hours of footage filled with that shit—preset images: men with their boots off trying to cool their feet—the skin moon-white and swollen; men lying back smoking kif; boys fingering their love beads—bearded, long-haired (because, man, we knew that the fact that we knew what was up back home was a big kick to the viewing audience and milked the irony and turned it into itself, man, all pose and acting; man, you gotta think: the whole enfolding gig came out of that, the double duplicity of it, actors on the big jungle stage mugging for the lens, even the Hanoi Hilton guys doing their Christmas card home, slump shouldered, singing their hearts out, amazingly in harmony, a barbershop quartet of vocal entwining; hanging bulbs on the tree—the whole thing, staged and restaged and then staged again until the final product had the humility of fine acting, souls embodying characters who, in turn, embodied the words: Say it, man, you bent-back double-elbowed motherfucker—that one guy bowing down too far—early footage, one of the first POW films, making a big show of it, all secret signals to the outside world, lips a bit too high around the edges in the smile department, frowns deeper than normal, fingers crabbing signals. Even the secret gestures were part of the show, man; and later when I got home and tried to really get home there was that, too, in the way I hung the streets of town in the jacket: don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it was a farce, I’m just saying we came back to the bit roles and took the parts that were available partly because our reentry was quick—into the great cargo transports and then, bingo, home sweet home (guys enacted the routine: fell before native soil and kissed the tarmac. Did I? I most certainly did. The grit and dust of Detroit Metro never tasted so good, as sweet as Tang). But the flight went from Saigon to Germany to home in the flick of the Zippo: all brilliant American sky beneath which the pompous Army band played their Sousa (which reminds me: look up the old footage of Air Cav. Band playing their brains out for CBS while the jets drop load after load on the Vietcong for the sake of villager morale). No long rearrangement of reality à la the
Odyssey
; not for us, man: we went in and out of the combat zones, lickety split and just as quick got stateside, back to the World; stumbling the streets in our derangement and grandeur; knocking on home-sweet-home doors and stepping into living rooms with the Namscape still etched on the backside of our eyeballs; Dad in his armchair with a drink and Mom beside him waiting for me to speak; and, Meg, let me say their questions came out of the pages of the ladies’ magazines where the articles went, “How to Talk with a Vietnam Veteran,” and suggested avoidance of the topic of death. Well, madam, I’d say, and I did say, I don’t know
what
to say. Certainly no mention of the war. Not a word. Not one single word the first five weeks I was in the house. Days fell into routine: sleep in as late as possible with the shades drawn until the hot day got too hot and I dragged myself up and went downstairs to face their eyes—not judgmental, I wouldn’t call them that: expectant, knowing. Fuck plot and fuck story and fuck the way one thing fits to another and fuck cause and effect, because there wasn’t none, and if there was we didn’t see much of it. Maybe history was moving forward back in the States. Hell, it most certainly was grinding. The Year of Love was turning itself over to the Year of Hate. There was a purgative thing happening. Ideals were falling neatly to the wayside, one at a time, and giving over to violence. Nam was seeping home. One man at a time it was coming back, talking the talk. We felt it there. Like I said, our crewcuts were giving way to long hair. The men went home and the music came back and we listened to it from tinny transistor speakers. On a fulcrum the whole thing shifted when Soldier #1 put his weight down, stepped off the transport to kiss the soil, the whole thing went down on one side and up on the other. Soldier #1 was Rake. When that boy got home the whole show went from rehearsal to opening night. Number 1 got to Michigan and began the beginning; started it all up. I’d be dead and gone by the time that moment came along, but I could feel it in the wind—that hot jungle wind, the stench of burning hootches (ain’t nothing like the smell of burning jungle roof, ain’t nothing like the thick smoke coming off a hootch that’s been Zippoed to flame). Just conjecture and speculation on how it would go down when the crazy fuck got to the world. Billy-T, he’d say to me: We’d be hunkered down against the bomb blasts called in to some coordinates, scared shitless, naturally, that we’d be a Close Air Support casualty ourselves (needless to say we hated and loved CAS; loved ’em for coming in to save our asses and hated them for coming in to save our asses). Hunched down waiting and Rake would be saying, Billy-T, man, when I get back I’m gonna take the state by fucking storm; I’m gonna haunt that place like a motherfucker. I’m gonna be their worse nightmare, etc., etc., etc. Ah, shut up, man, Singleton said, just to tighten the triangle, to make it right, and Rake said, Fuck you, man, and Singleton said, You’d like to, but I’m corn hole sore, and Rake said, in that seriously real, tight, nasty voice he could get, I’m not kidding, shut up, grunt boy, or I’ll frag your ass right here and now. (No, he wouldn’t’ve said it that way; he would’ve said, simply, Singleton, shut up, in
the voice
, and for the sake of peace between us Singleton would’ve shut up, and he did shut up; I remember that much, leaving behind just the tension, wordless, that was then, a few seconds later, demolished when the fighters came screaming in just over the trees and unleashed their bombs mercifully and the percussion was enough, just then, to wash it away while we plugged our ears and got as close to the dirt as we could and prayed (at least I did). Being dead doesn’t sanctify the living, or the memory of what the living went through. My word is only half good. The truth of what I’m saying might be nil, Meg, or it might be perfect. It’s not for me to pick apart and I’m not gonna do it. Forget heaven. Forget eternity. Some sorry-ass shit has been laid down under the guise of the eternal. Don’t even ask the question: don’t get into the pearly gate shit with me. Don’t try to get me going on the intimate particulars of what transpires down in the so-called living world when in truth I don’t have the slightest inkling; you go into the pinhole of death, sit there, and sit some more until your eyes adjust to the perpetual cave dark and, in doing so, allow yourself to imagine, now and then, that you’re starting to see some light, some glint of it at least, but then you come to realize that it’s just a variation on black and nothing more or less. All those neurons; all that memory, zapped. Maybe it hangs on as long as it can in some eternal place, maybe not: all that hangdog belief put in the afterlife becomes so much hokum, one way or another, anyway; to inhabit another, to walk the earth in the form of a dog or a cat, to reform yourself into some Hindu spirit dervish—roiling and forming before some bewildered farmer’s eyes as he looks up from his toil behind the mule and plow, reins in his hands—all that’s just one more way of trying to imagine yourself into my shoes, and it doesn’t work and it isn’t real. Truth is there’s nothing more than a zip closing the body bag—personal containment unit—and you’re gone, flag-draped (eventually) and shipped home like a hunk of cheese, refrigerated—naturally, by the high altitude—flushed by some Army mortician, powdered up, and, if you’re in shape for it, put on display for all to see. Do I remember the funeral? Hell, yes. What I remember is the way you clutched yourself, Meg, as if holding your own guts in—and I’ve seen that, believe me—and the way you quaked and sobbed, and the way the tears popped from your eyes and strung themselves down your cheeks. Did I stare at you? You were thin then, and sallow-skinned, but still beautiful, your hair fine and yellower than I remembered in Nam, during those furtive long jack-off sessions when I imagined myself in deep. Did I imagine the way your lips would move over the hymns that were sung, the voices lifting through the church (First Congregational) with a bit too much gusto, reverberating in the high arched reaches while the organ tried to outdo the voices but failed? Hell yeah, I did. I imagined your lips moving out of sync—like they would later, drugged up by Rake—into formations that were meant to look like utterances but really weren’t, because you weren’t looking down at the hymnal that your father held open in front of you. Did I scan the faces, seeing my mother and father and brother and the neighbors in anguish, and the minister (believe it or not, his name was Breeze, Dudney Breeze) in his vestments? You bet I did. Did I have that Huckleberry Finn groove going that came from attending your own funeral when in truth I was alive and well, albeit hunched down in a hole trying to survive a friendly ambush—for lack of a better phrase. Hell yeah. Did I imagine your face a couple of hundred times, pained, twisted in front of your loss, blooming like a flower with grief over the death of your boyfriend in Nam, taking in the fact that you would go on with the rest of your life without me? You bet. You see, death isn’t much more than an imagining of death in the face of the end itself as it came when you were trying to feel as alive as possible but were having trouble doing so because you were, at that moment, under heavy fire, or riding point through some bad-vibe part of the Mekong, tired but trying to stay alert, hot alert, but faltering because you were by nature a kid who liked to go off into reveries: by nature you’d deviate from all of your training and boot-camp conditioning at exactly the wrong moment. That was your way of rebelling against existence. That was how you got around the truth of your situation. You started to imagine the life you (if you survived) might have and then along the way you got to the possibility of your own death and then, naturally, casually, laughing about it, you got to your own funeral and then really zeroed in on the details. Asleep at the wheel, so to speak. Was I the only guy in the unit who slept on his feet and found himself dreaming, not some half-ass daydream thing but vivid and spatially detailed dreams? Hell no, I wasn’t. We all did the same thing, except maybe Rake, who had very little to go back to and couldn’t foresee his death the way he could foresee the death of others. Rake drew a blank in the dream department. He could only conjure nightmares, and we all know that nightmares don’t stand the test of time. So let me go back and reiterate what I’m saying here, right now: the dead can look back in time and look down at the world in that way live folks like to imagine, but they do so only as living souls dreaming their way forward to death and, in doing so, looking back. Otherwise it’s just black with some deceptive hints of light that aren’t really light but tricks of the dark and after that an eternal nothingness, etc. etc. etc. Was I having strange visions that summer in Vietnam? Was I spotting angels in the trees and hearing music coming out of the ether? Did I say to Rake and to Singleton: Man, did you see that figure up there in the trees, man? Did you see the angel in the trees? I most certainly did. Was I the only one? Hell no. Was I the only guy who, in the stress and fear and weariness, saw spectral formations of light or whatever that took the shape of human figures with white robes and wings attached to their backs? I’d say not. Were these delirious mind-fuck creations of a mind so wasted—not just from the shit we were in on recon, but from some of the shit I took in Saigon—hallucinatory creations of my own gratefully dead mind? I’d say not. Was I the only guy who saw a vision of Saint Jerome up in the trees outside Hue; a striking re-creation of the da Vinci painting, beating himself senseless to mortify his flesh? Most likely. Did I come up with this image because my old man had a book, and in that book was a replica of the Leonardo painting—not a bad one, either—and I drew upon it when I saw my own vision up there in the trees? Most certainly. Would it be possible to come up with the original vision without making use of something seen before? I’m sure it would, but I didn’t. When we went out on recon patrol, I had to rely on what I’d seen before, and in so doing took the shortest route to my visions because I wasn’t strong enough (who is, really?) to rise to the task of creating something from whole cloth. When it came to conjuring up an angel in the trees of Vietnam I had to lean on what I knew, and I drew inspiration from a Christmas card I had picked up one sunny afternoon at the Upjack house; an angel with wings, a pouty face, pointy breasts—somewhat alluring—through a thin, almost translucent robe; the wings sparkled with glitter that came off on my fingers. Was I illegally in the Upjack house? Did I break into the house in search of funds? I most certainly did. Did I—to use a word I love—burgle the house? I did indeed. Am I bein