Hystopia: A Novel (25 page)

They made a show of it. The bird was glancing nervously in their direction, freezing still and then hopping, poking and probing in the rocks for food and glancing back intensely, fearful and yet free. As they moved closer, it hopped out into the flat, hard sand, dragging one of its wings.

It’s injured, Meg whispered.

It’s an act. They do it to lure predators away from the nest.

He took another step toward the bird and it skittered up the sand, keening loudly, dragging its wing.

Let me try to explain. Living things, all of them, are tied together. A bird is roped in tension, it’s beautiful to watch. It’s part of what makes a bird beautiful, he said. She’ll fake it until it’s a reality if she has to, luring a predator away, at the risk of her own demise. Once it gets near enough she’ll keep playing and playing until it’s close in and then she’ll try to scare it. That’s about ninety percent of what you need in the natural world; the one with a bigger bark, a display of power, wins.

And you have a big bark. Old Hank has a big bark, she said. She pulled away from him, hard this time, seriously. He yanked her back and got in close and looked down at her face tenderly.

I’ve got what I hope I need in the way of an idea, he said.

You and the bird.

Killdeer have a fine ability to mimic. I’ll say that much. I just said that much. He pulled on her ropes and marched her away from the bird.

Take me back into the water, she said, pulling away. He pulled her back and they continued walking, sticking close to the water. When they looked back the bird had settled down and was returning to her nest. Hank stood still, the wind ruffling his hair, and gazed at the trees to where Rake was hiding, or not hiding, watching them with intense scrutiny.

SURETY IS A THING OF THE PAST

For miles, as they continued north, the needle was still making a shish pop, shish pop, as it rode the eternal runout groove at the end of
Fun House
on the signal out of Flint, strong off the night sky until, finally, it merged with white static and became faint background sizzle while the state unfurled—the same stubbled fields and denuded trees and finless windmills and equipment left to rust—and then, finally, Johnny Cash pushed through, his voice weary and low to the ground as he sang a lament that seemed to match the landscape, speaking from within the prison walls to a train whistle out there. Wendy was driving now, keeping both hands on the wheel, paying close attention, the kind of driver who concentrated on the road and made the conversion slightly one-sided.

Her father’s voice had been like Cash’s when they left the house, forlorn, suddenly distant, speaking as if through a wall.

“You really didn’t fall for that act at your dad’s house, did you?” he said. Cash had faded out again. Why bother finding another signal, the white noise said. It was neglected but necessary background noise. Leave me on, it seemed to say as the road swayed inland away from the lake.

“What act?”

“The act your father and I put on,” Singleton said.

“I fell for what I had to fall for,” she said, tapping the wheel. “And anyway, I knew when I was upstairs that when I came down you two would be in cahoots. I guess I knew it before we even got to the house. And you didn’t want him along on this anyway.”

Her old man had leaned into the car window as they were pulling away, telling them that he’d get through it, that he had some serious firepower and a lot of grunt experience. And an old Howitzer in the attic, he said, pointing to the muzzle in the little crescent-moon-shaped window, poking out ominously, a little dark disk.

Klein had said that a soldier could fake, or embody a state—was that how he put it?—in order to fool the enemy, or whatever. All of Klein’s long-winded briefings, all that chatter, seemed to blend with the sound of the car’s engine and the slight aftermath of the mystery pill, and he reached over and dug around in the ashtray and got another joint lit and decided to end further discussions on the topic.

“What do you think’s going on in your department?” he said. “Do you think they’re in some bunker somewhere trying to figure out a way to spin this fucked historical moment? Sending out bulletins to the cops upstate, making the case that Rake is dead?”

“I think they’re doing what they can to spin the unspinnable,” she said.

They were running north on the shore road, following the index finger part of the mitten alongside Lake Huron. The safest way was to stay close to water. Inland rage was more intense than shore rage, at least in theory. The road was old concrete, glinting with embedded stone and glued with swirls of tar. A voice was struggling through the static on the radio, a sermon materialized in medias res, an old-time preacher saying: God’s mercy is severely limited. He has his doubts, man, about this one. He’s lost in the clouds of his own thoughts. Surety is a thing of the past. King David pisses in the wind. God’s like the Phantom Blooper, the supposedly kindhearted American who went over to the gook side and began to fight against us, hiding with the Cong, fighting his own beloved.

“I doubt this preacher even knows what surety means,” Singleton said. “Surety isn’t what he thinks it is.”

Wendy remained silent, clutching the wheel, leaning forward slightly. To their left the remains of the Au Sable State Forest fire appeared, carbonized wood stinking of pitch.

“Are you sure you know where this safe house is?”

“We’ll make it to the safe house. Klein made damn sure I knew where it was. As if he’d expected this all along. If this is some sort of treatment, or if we’re supposed to be thinking this is treatment, he’d want us to be aware that we’re aware of our own awareness of the situation.”

“All I know is they trained me early on, when we were doing the basics, to think about the idea of north.”

“It sounded like bullshit then and it does now,” Singleton said.

The road ahead was empty, no sign of Black Flag gangs, no evacuees. The asphalt seams between the long concrete slabs made a rhythmic beat beneath the tires. If there was indeed a lure of north, and if he was feeling it, it had nothing to do with the Corps theory that vets were drawn north into the peninsular formation of the state by some residual attraction to potential enemy action. Nor was it a matter of the polar magnetic field. It had to do with desolation. A sense of the sky being closer to the ground.

“You’re thinking it
isn’t
pure bullshit,” Wendy said. “You’re thinking we’re both attracted to the idea of north.”

“It’s anyone’s guess how safe this safe house is going to be,” he said. Klein had mentioned it in a briefing on the plan of action in the event—he said—of further upheaval. He’d gone to the map and pointed it out. Something about the operative being a blacksmith.

A few miles later, past the state forest, she pulled the car over, left the engine running, and said she had to pee. He took his gun and stood beside the car, keeping an eye out, watching as she waded through the brush and then, a few minutes later—nothing to fear, just a field and a few trees down the road—she came back out, buttoning her jeans, straightening herself, smiling at him.

“There’s a little brook back there. Can you hear it?”

They stood for a moment. The car ticked. When the wind eased, he could hear it, a faint burble threading through the overgrowth. They waited again for the wind to die down again. Nothing moved.

“I wish we could stay here for a while,” she said.

“We can if you want, for a few minutes at least.”

“Are you afraid?” She pushed slightly with her hip against his hip.

“Well, yeah, a little bit,” he said. He touched the gun in his waistband. The safety was on, it was locked up tight.

“I’m not,” she said. “I’m fearful, but that’s different. Fearful for my father. Once you’ve been heroic like he has, you want to do it again.”

“Your father will be fine,” he said. He didn’t believe it. Fine for the old man meant upholding a vision of the self that had been created at a young age, in circumstances that were unusual—the Black Forest, snow, youthful cunning and gumption set against huge historical forces. He’d be fighting the wrong war.

Back behind the wheel she drove quietly and carefully and continued thinking, he guessed, about her father’s chances. At least the old man
could
remember his combat training. Some said—and this might just be one more of the countless rumors, of course—that the mechanics, the fighting techniques, the useful stuff could never be lost, because it was somehow entwined into your sense of destiny (something like that). It was all tiresome. Rumors appeared around a context of need; they were nothing but a formation of an idea around a precise desire.

“What are you thinking about,” she said later. Darkness had fallen quickly. He listened to the engine, felt it vibrating at his feet, on the floorboards.

“Nothing,” he said. She shook her head, letting her hair drift into and remain in her eyes. Then she took one hand from the wheel and swept the hair back into place.

An hour later as they were nearing the safe house, he rooted in the duffel for the Corps kit bag, which contained pills that could light you up when you needed a zip. He took one and she took one and within minutes their eyes were wide open, their night vision enhanced. When the house came into view, a two-story farmhouse with a wide porch, across a wide field, they could make out a strange lean-to structure behind it. A small chimney in the structure was releasing puffs of smoke that looked chalky in the rising moon. Nothing moved. Behind the structure were dark woods.

“It certainly doesn’t look safe,” Wendy said.

“That smoke in the back’s from the forge. Klein said the operative is some kind of blacksmith. We should sit for a few minutes and assess this in a professional manner. You know training. Never think a safe house is safe until you feel safe.”

“Never feel safe unless you know you’re safe, I think it was,” Wendy said.

They waited. The zip pills had given them a good, clean professional edge, an esprit de corps intensified by a sense that they were facing a convergence between what the Corps called Forces of Inherent Evil imported into the culture from abroad (meaning Vietnam) and what the Corps called Trained Moral Positioning. When he mentioned it, she told him to shut up.

*   *   *

In his operations report he’d write about how they got around to the back of the house undetected, on tiptoe, past a mound of cycle parts rusted together—smelling of rust and oil—and then past a pump with a broken handle (every farm in the state had a pump with a broken handle). Discrete puffs of smoke rose from the forge structure, white, signaling to the sky. Singleton put his finger to his lips. Let the scene gather some meaning, he thought. Hearing the absurd pounding of his own heart, he wondered if his ability to sense danger ahead had been enfolded, or simply lost in the war. Wendy watched as he lifted his gun, held it like a divining rod, let it quiver slightly, and then, as if following its advice, moved forward with a sudden assuredness along the side of the house toward the front porch. (Why the front? he might be asked later.
We went to the front because the front was maximally distant from the forge, and the forge was emitting bad vibes, not just smoke—I mean, it was weird smoke, sir. So we went around to the front and I told Agent Wendy Z to wait. I used the recommended hand signals. I did the toe-to-heel walk, as instructed.
)

On the porch he touched the top of his head once with his palm, and then swung one arm in a windmill motion, the old Nam signal to provide cover. He stood and listened. Just the tick of wood contracting in the cool night. Another rotting porch in a state of rotting porches. He moved slowly to the window and then swept a portal in the dust and ash. Wendy came up behind him as he peered inside, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. In the pale light from under a door he could see an old pump organ against one wall. Hanging from the ceiling were six vague shapes, slightly conic, widening as they approach the floor, swaying slightly. He looked out the corner of his eye. The six shapes were bodies hung by their feet, bound tight, with arms extended out to the floor beneath them, some of them moving slightly.

(He knew what he’d have to say when he was being debriefed. He’d say it took him a while to make sense of what he was seeing, those forms hanging down, although for God’s sake the truth was he knew right away what he was seeing.)

“He’s hanging them by their feet.”

Beneath the shapes were oily pools of blood. (No, sir, he’d say. We weren’t sure what we were seeing exactly. They were slightly conic in shape and seemed to be swaying—but the light coming from the back room, a bit of light from under a door, was hardly enough to make them visible.)

A voice came from the yard. It was deep, husky, with a French-Canadian accent. “Them is the ones on the edge of oblivion, not quite there yet but on the way.”

Singleton and Wendy stopped breathing.

“Give me the passphrase and I’ll consider your salvation. Otherwise you’ll hang up there with those folks.”

“The dominion of the Corps is over memory ceded to terror,” Singleton said.

“Non-fucking-sense,” the voice said. “That was last month’s passphrase. Every man north of Grand Rapids knows that one. Give it one more try and get it right or you’re dead. This old buddy of mine is itching to go off. The clip longs to ease the burden of the spring, so to speak.”

Singleton visualized the rectangular spring pressing the follower. (Don’t remove the follower from the spring when cleaning, he remembered. Jiggle spring follower to install. If the spring comes loose, turn in the pieces. Don’t fix in the field.)

“Come out with it, folks,” the voice said. “Last chance to give the correct passphrase.”

“The stillness within is still within,” Wendy said.

“Correct,” the voice said. “Now turn around so I can get a look at you.”

He was at the foot of the stairs holding his flashlight to his chin. His face was caked with ash. He waved them down with the gun.

“We’d better go around back. You never know who might be watching us out there.” He gestured at the woods with the gun. “You two trainees look so out of place I’m surprised you’re not dead right now.” He staggered in his buckskin chaps, swinging a gimpy leg, motioning for them to follow him around to the back of the house. He opened the forge door and led them into a dark room with a low ceiling. The forge wasn’t much, just a small brick structure with a pile of charcoal and a bellows beneath a steel hood. Hanging from the ceiling—Singleton imagined he’d write in his report, if he lived—were all manner of motorcycle parts, chopper bars, along with what looked to be dried animal hides or jerky.