Hystopia: A Novel (28 page)

“You need me in this operation. You need me, period.”

We went over the bridge, made note of some jumpers opening the hatch to a tower. We had a brief, terse exchange about the nature of the Corps, and the nature of our mission. We silently agreed to disagree. Then we relished the cool northern summer air and we felt ourselves committed, agent-to-agent
, he would write, if he did write.
Our confusion was acute. A debilitating sense of not understanding our own actions was internal. We understood that the Corps believed Rake was dead and that Klein either didn’t believe he was dead or was putting on an act that he didn’t believe he was dead.

“Your father, he was the pathetic one,” Singleton said.

“The word is
pitiful
. I felt pity for you. I used to feel pity for my father, but when he talked to you I heard a new tone. He seemed pitiful and pathetic until he talked to you. Next to you, he seemed heroic. You might think he told those stories again and again, but the truth is, Dad kept his mouth shut. He folded it up and went on with his life. I knew he’d been through trauma. I knew he was walking around holding it all in to protect me. But I respect him because he’s a fully functioning man.”

The whine in his ears was getting higher and louder and the road seemed to flex from side to side. He gripped the wheel tight while Wendy looked him over and told him he looked like he was getting sick, or having a flashback.

“I’m not having a flashback. At least not a pharmaceutically induced one. I’m still thinking about how I’ll put this in words, explain this part of the mission.”

“The president was finally killed. All hell broke loose. We took off.” She frowned. “Why this obsession with the operation report? Why do you feel this need to put everything into a system?”

“How did Ambrose get hold of that file? If they keep them under lock and key, how did he get a copy?”

“They wanted him to have a copy. When they handed it to him they knew he’d hand it to you.”

“I need to know. I need to know,” he said.

He pulled over to the side of the road, under tall pines clutching sandy soil, the isolated sunlight, dappled, coming down through the branches, and got out. Across the road, empty beach stretched to the west. There was an old grill and a pump with a working handle.

“I came up here as a teenager,” he said. “We camped on this beach, or somewhere near it.” He sat on a picnic bench carved with old names and dates. He put his face in his hands and suddenly began to sob.

“I feel genuinely sorry for myself. I feel this huge pity for myself.”

Wendy spread her arms and took a deep breath. “This is a real place and it’s beautiful, and it smells good, too. I say, fuck whatever they’re trying to do to us. We’re heading up to the target if he’s alive or dead, and we have to follow our guts on this.”

Looking out at Lake Michigan, across the road, he sensed again that he’d been here as a teenager, and that it had something to do with Rake, and the firebomb, and that scene in Hue. On a hot summer day he might have seen the Chicago mirage, the streets and towers visible high over the water, an optical trick of heat and light fantastic to behold if you were lucky enough to catch it. Whether or not it ever happened, the idea held a place in the hearts of Michiganders, who kept it alive from generation to generation. He felt the urge to cross the street and wade into the lake, which would be cold enough to unfold him completely if he stayed under long enough.

His eye was distracted by a gull riding out on a gust of air, holding wings steady and straight as it floated in a gentle swaying motion.

“Do you have an urge to go into that water?” Wendy said. He studied the freckles on her nose and her eyes. He remained silent.

“I’m sorry about what I said. My dad knew his story. You don’t. You know a little bit more now and you’re not as pathetic.”

“And I’m sorry about what I said. But I meant it. I can’t really say how I feel, I mean exactly how I feel, until I know exactly what the deal is.”

“Love means saying you’re sorry over and over and over again,” she said, and they laughed.

“I really don’t want to go in the water,” he said.

“You looked, sitting there, like a man who wanted to go for a swim.”

“Maybe a quick romantic dip? To wash the smoke out of my hair.”

“We should get in the car and keep driving. We don’t want to arrive at the target in the dark. Not if we can help it.”

*   *   *

The guns were out in the backseat, arranged neatly, along with two grenades. Miles and miles of forest were making Singleton’s head ache. In his report, he’d describe how the trees had been planted in a straight line that somehow suggested eternity, forcing the eye down long corridors of green, creating a strobe of light on the road when the sun was at the right angle. The only clear signal on the radio was from Canada, a CBN show playing Bach, the notes too pure and clear and precise.

“I’ll remember my military training when the time comes,” Singleton said. “I did the hand signals, on the porch back at the safe house. They came to me. I remembered details. A diagram of a clip and a spring came to me.”

“We don’t really have much of a plan, do we?”

“Training says approach target with assurance. Entrapment is the result of not having an exit plan, a detailed map of the stakeout area.”

In the report, he’d say the trees in their straight lines seemed to draw him onward toward Rake, either to terminate him or to confirm his status as dead. He’d tweak it as needed.

“Stop with the report,” Wendy said. She was eating a C-ration bar. He glanced and saw her tooth marks on it.

They drove until abruptly the trees thinned out and the road passed through a gate in a chain-link fence and the sky opened overhead, a galvanized, post-sunset gray. Right here, he thought. This is where the north begins. This is where at night the sky shimmers with cosmic activity. This is where the imaginations of most folks reach a limit and they draw a blank, like the isolated edge of my Causal Events Package. The beauty of the land disappeared as soon as the first house appeared, a one-story with peeling paint and a yard littered with stone monuments (some kind of private graveyard?), white concrete angels with stubby wings, three crosses, absurdly white, seemingly lit from within. On a wooden pole a black flag was snapping in the wind. Three choppers sat parked in the driveway, lined up side by side, like a chorus line, exactly at the same angle.

Wendy poked through the ashtray and found the half-burned joint. She lit it up.

“Late May the snow finally breaks and then in mid-October the snow begins. Not much of a season for riding a chopper.”

“Want a hit?” she said.

“Keep it low, don’t let it show. I’ve got to maintain an edge.”

A gas station. A liquor store. A tavern with a cop car—a star on the side panel, faded, gray—parked in front. Past a stoplight (blinking yellow), the lake revealed itself, a vast gray corrugation of waves, an inland sea.

“Give me a hit,” he said.

Headed east from the Harbor of Refuge as per instructions, he’d write, if he wrote. Took Deer Park Road. The lake was relatively calm
.

They drove through the wind-battered landscape. This part of the state looked completely untarnished, but it was deep into the so-called Zone of Anarchy. At any moment a gang of bikers might appear beyond the bug specks on the windshield.

When they got near Rake’s encampment, Singleton pulled over and parked the car in the grass. Wendy kept lookout while he checked the weapons. He handed her a gun and watched as she kissed the barrel for good luck and tucked it into her waistband. The night was getting cool. She put on her leather jacket with fringe. (
In the report, he’d say they were wearing the regimental uniform with badges, as per regulation. Pants clean pressed and shirts neatly tucked. He’d say they made it clear that they were agents from the Corps. He’d say they had assessed the road situation—dead quiet—and assured themselves that no one was coming. He’d say they were keenly aware of the idea of north, remembering, from the manual, that northern climes enhanced the intuitive clarity of agents while increasing the psychotic intensity of failed enfolds
.)

“Hug,” she said, pulling him close. He would omit from the report the desire he felt for her. There was a faint smell of smoke in the air.

“Time to reconnoiter,” he said.

“I fucking love that word.
Reconnoiter
.”

Approach the perimeter and establish the target in relation to the landscape and make necessary adjustments
, he might write in the report. They stopped and listened. A clear intuitive drive. That was the phrase he’d use. What does it mean, he thought, that all I can do is try to frame this in the technical terms of a report I might write. He shook his head. He was feeling lonely, isolated.

There was a single goat in the field to the left. It made a sound like a laugh. Then another.

The gun slung on his shoulder; the grenade hanging from his belt.

Farther down the road they came to a driveway with a mailbox, a sign that said
KEEP OUT
, and a skull impaled on a stick. The skull was clearly human, not dog or goat. It was missing the jaw and bleached clean and white.

Merle had said the hideout was at the end of the paved road. Two rutty tracks ran through thick weeds and plunged into a dark hole in the woods. To the right, what Singleton would call a windrow in his report.
Windrow
was the word he’d use.
The windrow formed a perimeter of deadfall with a clearing that was visible as a brighter glow of purplish light
. He put up his hand to signal halt. They listened to the faraway sea sound of the surf and the wind rising in the pines, dying away, rising again. Nonspecific vibrations at the coordinates’ location, as specified in prior vision. Dangerous vibrations, northern negative lure. This had to be the feeling you got being on point in Nam.

Singleton crouched down and Wendy crouched beside him. You can enfold the trauma but you can’t enfold the age and time. In the field you’ll be thinking about the war, starting from the moment you stepped onto a Pan Am airline flight and heard the stewardess sweet-talk you, serving coffee, knocking hips, flirting, to the final moment you were lifted up and out of the hellhole to return home, passing fresh grunts on the way in, their assholes clenched, their faces fresh and bright as they went to their destinies. Just can’t wash all that away, no matter what, Klein had said. Yes, sir. Yes, sir.

The smell of her patchouli and the glow of her hair beside him. He stood and she stood. They walked forward a few yards and stopped.

“What about the zip pills?” she whispered.

They were in the brush near the edge of a yard. Sheets on a line luffed softly, straining skyward, as if to gather whatever light remained. The house’s clapboards were shedding paint. There was a light in the back window, presumably the kitchen, and a thin thread of smoke from the chimney. The breeze lifted, and the sheets stretched out in unison, and then luffed down again.

“We won’t need them,” he said.

A few minutes later they heard a screen door slam, and an old woman came out onto the back porch huffing, grunting down the steps and shambling into the yard with a basket in her arms. She took down the sheets one by one, folding each one over her arm and then in half and then in quarter before laying it in the basket. Then she began to unfold each one, lifting the corners up to the line, pinning them back into place.

“Sure this is the right place?”

“I’m sure,” he said. “You know what they say. Every failed enfold has a hefty old lady tending to his needs, some mother figure who believes he’s a pure little angel. The hardened cases are often the most pathetically in need of maternal care.”

“OK, but she looks nondangerous in a deep way.”

“All the better for us.”

The old lady took the sheets down from the line again and stood with her arms at her side and her face to the sky. What happened then was hard to see from their position. She’d fallen to the ground and was partly obscured by the basket. Holy holy, she seemed to be saying.

The subject appeared to be speaking in tongues, he thought. Glory and holy, or holy and glory—the wind rose and covered the words—and then something about the wrath of God being torn away. She seemed to be running in a supine position. The screen door slapped again, and a similarly large man (a son, Singleton thought) with a beard strode across the yard and said, Mom, MomMom, it’s OK, go easy.

Wendy took a step forward, her gun out.

“Wait,” he said.

The man was helping the woman into his big arms.
Likeness of physique indicated a genetic relationship. No sound from the house. We held our position and assessed the situation. Male subject assisted female subject up the steps to the porch …

The screen door creaked open as they approached. A young woman emerged, wiping her hands on a towel, and let them into the house.

“That might be the one Rake kidnapped out of the Grid.”

“Total weirdness,” Wendy whispered. “They don’t look dangerous. I get a vibe of a loving relationship.”

“The closeness of these folks, from what I understand, is even more intense than the closeness of normal folks. They practice violence externally and live in small-group formations, or whatever the Corps calls them, an intense familial groove. A failed enfold often doubles not only his psychotic intensities but his sentimental attachments.”

We posited that the familial vibration derived from a projection of mother-son love as he had experienced it in the field of battle heightened by an abnormal dose of Tripizoid to an abnormal intensity
.

“I know that. But I don’t necessarily see it in front of me.”

“When we’re sure they’re inside we’ll get up to the porch and take a look.”

Northern darkness fell slowly, and they waited until the yard was dark and the window in the back glowed brighter, throwing bars of light onto the floor of the porch. Over the yard a bowl of stars appeared.