Hystopia: A Novel (21 page)
Authors: David Means
I still don’t understand. Why don’t you leave, or do something? she said.
Like I said, I can’t kill him because to kill him I’d risk becoming who I was before. Not that I don’t want to. I mean I have the impulse, believe me, but if I do it it’ll be a betrayal of my new self. I’m biding my time, I’ll admit, partly because MomMom won’t leave the house because the house is her house. It’s the house my father will return to—if he ever returns.
She kissed him again and had a flash—lightning—and saw Billy-T, his face in the sun, the bright shadow-lit beach sun, just a few inches from her own. They were on the beach on Lake Michigan, up in a cove, with the razor grass all around.
In the morning I’ll have a better plan, he said, his voice far-off, sleepy. The storm had passed and the thunder was to the east, bouncing off the copper deposits and the cold stone coves of the lake, and then it was gone and she was drifting against him, and together, amid his beloved pines, they slept.
Outside, the streets were tense; small pockets of violence had already broken out in response to the news about Kennedy. Police were posted on corners and powder-blue sawhorse barricades were in place—a shit-storm was coming, it all said—but the Corps, determined to maintain decorum, had called a meeting. So far, official word of the president’s death hadn’t come down. His body had been whisked away to another hospital: the only images afloat were of an ambulance backed into a loading bay, a gurney being removed, men in suits guarding the way. Singleton sat with Klein at the wide conference table on the second floor listening to an agent named Hogarth, an expert on rumor formation, reading from an index card, giving a brief about a rumor that had started in Kentucky.
Hogarth had the demeanor of an FBI agent, a quality of knowing more than he needed to know about things that he’d be better off not knowing. Also at the table was a trainee named Ambrose, who, according to Wendy, had published a book or two before his number came up. He wore Ben Franklin–type glasses and looked too delicate for fighting. Probably a 3A who’d worked as a dental assistant or stared at fuzzy U-2 photos.
The new rumors, Hogarth said, had started in Kentucky and then moved up the Ohio River basin before somehow making a big skip all the way to northern Michigan. He snapped his phrases as if to combat the stultifying buzz of the fluorescent lights. Klein, dressed in full uniform, fiddled with his pencil and nodded. Vets were tripping and dropping double doses and unfolding beyond the fold point—to put it in layman’s terms, Hogarth said. Some of them hadn’t been in combat; some of them were playing out delusional fantasies of traumas they hadn’t experienced.
He packed up his file and left the room.
“Philpot, you’re up,” Klein said. The room tightened in anticipation of another long-winded report, and as if in response a pop of gunfire came in through the window glass. Philpot, with his sweet-sounding Harvard voice, was known as a blowhard with a wide-spanning jargon vocabulary. But there was an uptick of attention as he shuffled his papers. Across the table, the agent named Ambrose yawned, patted his mouth dramatically, caught Singleton’s eyes, and winked.
Philpot said that there had been no further sightings—killings—by the failed enfold Rake (last name: unknown) since the report, dubiously pinned to him, of a mass murder near Alpena. The problem was that the public seemed to need to blame the Corps for these failed status problems, and that many of the untreated renegades out there were leaving clues clearly meant to indicate that the crime had been committed by someone who had been through the treatment.
Philpot went on to explain that not only was the public pinning random acts of violence on failed enfolds, but failed enfolds were figuring out that they could get their own acts of violence—and he admitted that this was pure speculation—pinned on fake failed enfolds, and thereby cast doubt in the minds of the Corps. In other words, it was starting to become impossible, unless you were acutely attuned to the nuances, to identify acts committed by honest failed enfolds.
“Nice work,” Klein said, cutting him off. “Before we go, I’d like to brief you on Rake. These are internal rumors, of course, but some people say a body has been found and that the body was identified as Rake, and that his name, his real name, was Ron Martin, at least according to his dog tag. I want to bring this rumor to your attention because that’s all it is. If there’s a file on it somewhere, I don’t know about it, and if there’s a file I don’t know about, it can’t be a real file but rather one of those generated in order to make sure someone out there maintains enfolded status; in other words, I know we don’t talk about this openly—at least they don’t in Relations, and I’m sure they don’t in other departments—but from time to time we have to fictionalize a background report in order to make sure the patient is never at risk of exposure.
“I want you all to know,” he continued, his voice booming, his medals swinging. “I believe the rumors to be unfounded. We’re going to continue on course and go after failed enfolds as mandated. Until I see Rake’s body for myself, I’m going to operate as if he’s still alive. And if I say he’s alive, he’s alive.”
* * *
Out in the hall, after the meeting, Ambrose approached Singleton. “Come with me. I’ve got some information for you.”
They went into the bathroom. The sinks were dripping and the toilet valves gargled. The bathroom had inlaid tiles and fixtures that seemed absurdly out of keeping with the rest of the building.
Ambrose put a briefcase on the edge of the sink and began unbelting it.
“I’ve got the information you asked for,” he said.
“I didn’t ask for information.”
“You don’t know you asked for this, but you did, if you know what I mean. I’m a trainee like you, so I know you’d ask me for this if you knew I had it. I mean, if you knew what I know, you’d want to know.”
Ambrose bent down to peer under the doors of the stalls. “You go in that one,” he whispered. “And I’ll go in that one, and I’ll pass it under to you and you look at it and then give it back,” he whispered.
“Are you kidding?” Singleton said.
“No funny business,” Ambrose said. “I’ll save the funny business for another day.”
Ambrose’s voice rose slightly into a sweet register and Singleton had another flash: a young man, dressed in a billowing white shirt and high-waisted pants, lounging on a bench in Central Park, posed for a photo on the back of a book, a book he had read just after treatment, on the back porch of his apartment.
“Are you the guy who wrote the book?”
“Yeah, I’m that guy. I’m the one who wrote the book Kennedy had on his bedside table around the time he was shot the first time. Now let’s get back to business. Go in that stall and I’ll go in the other and when the coast is clear you’ll see why I made you come in here.”
“Jesus, just give it to me.”
“Get in the stall,” he said.
In the stall there was the kind of shit smell you could taste, the kind that stayed with you forever—beyond microbial, some residual cosmic aftermath emanating from deep space.
A dainty hand curled up under the partition. It clutched and opened and then disappeared again.
“You OK over there?” Singleton said.
“Shush, we have to make sure the coast is clear.”
“If you say that again it’s not going to be clear. We’ve been in here for about five minutes.”
The file was taupe-colored, with the
TOP SECRET
stamp. It was coded
TERMINATED
. It had the blue label of an operation report.
“Open it, look, and give it right back while I do my business,” Ambrose whispered.
“Christ,” Singleton said.
He opened the file and read the report quickly. The target, Rake (a.k.a. name unknown. Speculation as to Ron Martin), had been located (see photo) dead in Mackinaw City.
“Where’d you get this?” Singleton whispered.
“When you work in Terminations, you tend to have access to termination files, my friend. That’s Rake.”
Clipped to the upper-right-hand corner of the top document—the case outline—was a small photo, taken in a photo booth somewhere. The face was thin and reminded Singleton of Vincent Price, a Vandyke beard and beady eyes and a ten-thousand-mile gaze. It was a face to go with the stench. This was a guy who maintained the same expression day after day, until his very skin conformed to it. Deeper in the file was a larger photo with a termination stamp, smeared slightly, and a note scrawled on the back: target Rake (Ron Martin), see note on dog tag located; body discovered in Mackinaw City, Michigan.
“Hand it back,” Ambrose said. “Got to get back to the post-briefing. Just wanted you to see this,” he said.
“Hold on,” Singleton said. He stared at the photograph and began to skim the report—body positioned against a tree … Suicidal ideation … Near Ft. Michilimackinac … Terminated case …
Someone came into the bathroom—a throat clearing, the heel-toe click of dress shoes. The hand flashed under the wall of the stall and Singleton gently put the report in it. He heard Ambrose close the briefcase and flush the toilet. He heard Ambrose leave his stall.
“Hello, sir,” Ambrose said.
“You didn’t have anything to add at the meeting?” Klein said. “I didn’t expect someone from Terminations to contribute, but you might want to think—and this is advice, son, man to man, about making a pretense of giving a shit. When I mentioned that Rake wasn’t terminated, you could’ve at least given your two cents, argued your case, or given me a nod. That’s my advice, man to man.”
“Sir, yes, sir.”
* * *
In the lobby she was waiting, silent and alone, by the revolving door. The lobby was full of energy, more movement than usual. He fought the urge to grab her hand, but he risked a nod and a look that said: Follow me, you’re not going to believe what I have to say. When the moment was right, he’d give her the news. As far as the Corps was concerned, they were tracking a dead man. The face in the file, at least the one clipped to the file, and the face in his unfolding flashbacks were the same, a perfect match with a memory from a dream.
Outside, in the blunt, brutal light of day, her face looked pale and frightened. She wanted to get to her father as fast as possible, to get him and get out of town. They made their way past a police barricade—the cops nodding them through checkpoints.
“It’s time to get out of here, Sing. Time to get to my father and head north.”
“We’ll be AWOL, we’ll be in deep shit.”
“This is deep shit,” she said. She had his hand and was pulling him down the street. There was smoke to the east where fire trucks dodged sniper fire and the police and the National Guard were taking control-march formation. The lower part of the state had been fueling up with riot potential for months: one spark, everyone had been whispering, one single spark was all it would take. Even Klein had mentioned it weeks ago—he thought, getting behind the wheel—saying something about Franz Ferdinand, an alignment of forces set to explode. Maybe we don’t have a man like Franz Ferdinand, but we’ve got Kennedy. He was standing at the window, staring out. It’s going to explode when the president explodes, he added. But our job here is not to pay attention to the external political or social factors but to keep our eye on the certain targets.
Vietcong put heads on sticks, cutting them not neat and guillotine-style but in a way that leaves the necks shaggy, Rake was saying. He was at the kitchen table and MomMom was cooking and there was a claustrophobia that seemed to come from the smell of the frying food and his intensity, his fists balled, his eyes shifting from Meg to Hank and then to Haze and then to Meg and Hank again as they tried not to listen, to remain calm. They sat across from him at the table, hands folded in their laps, listening as he explained how he and Haze had taken out an entire picnic, done the head-on-stick thing. He asked them to imagine four or five kids playing in the grass away from the picnic blanket, away from the parents. Then he asked them to imagine the folks with a thermos bottle, a wicker basket—people who should know better than to let their kids run with butterfly nets, people who have suspended their fear for the sake of hope.
He was probing, it seemed to Hank, testing for a reaction, but some of his jitteriness seemed directed at Haze, whose hair seemed longer now, hanging down into his eyes, parted like curtains to reveal shriveled eyes that had trouble focusing, drifting slightly. Whatever had happened on this run had taken some toll on the young kid, sapped whatever little strength he had before, and there was a new scar up in his scalp, a patch of missing hair as white as chalk. Rake was saying that it would be easy to imagine the Corps seeing the heads on sticks and knowing it was him for sure, and then he pounded his fists on the table—the silverware jumped, MomMom jumped, Haze blinked, Meg stayed perfectly still, staring straight ahead. MomMom came over with a pan and served him cabbage. He took a bite and spat it out and was at the stove before Hank could get up. She fell to the floor and began to kick her feet. Lord, Lord, she said. Rake kicked her and she began to speak in a crazed tongue, her words half-formed, and she began quoting fragments of the Bible at random, senselessly drawing from the book, saying, Go forth and blow the trumpets into the fortified cities! A lion has come from his thicket to waste your land!
Get her up and out of here. Put her in the yard, do whatever you do to shut her up. If she’s going to speak in tongues, let her do it tied up out there, Rake said. He picked a pot from the stove and held it over MomMom’s head and said, Get up, old lady. Get up or you’ll get some of this slop you call food in the face.
I’ll take care of her, Hank said. He spoke calmly, with deliberation. There was a sudden tense silence in the kitchen—the drip of the faucet, the sound of birds far off in the trees. MomMom grew still, hardly breathing, her big gray eyes staring straight up.
You do that, Rake said. You be a good son and tend to your loving mother. But before you do that you look me in the eye and say you’re not on her side. You show me that in your eyes so I can see, he said, and they looked at each other and to keep his focus Hank thought of a man chopping into a thousand-year-old sequoia. Then he envisioned two men and a long saw working back and forth while the tree cried and sprayed phonemes that would catch the breeze and ride across the Great Plains, touching the goldenrod and the quack grass until it reached Wisconsin, where the other trees, tasting it, gave out their own anguished cry and released a blast of pollen that, on the same breeze, rode to the shore of the Atlantic Ocean. He put into his eyes his hatred of the men who cut that particular tree. It allowed him to forget his mother.