Hystopia: A Novel (31 page)

*   *   *

To establish—as he’d write in his report, or claim at the adjudication—esprit de corps with Hank he agreed to go out on a recon mission to assess the level of gang activity. The two of them hiked through the brambles and then crawled across a field and into woods, weaving between trees until they could see a house behind which two men were sitting in lawn chairs, smoking and looking out in their direction. They crouched and watched for a few minutes before retreating into the woods. Hank said the two men had been sitting like that for most of the summer. He sniffed the air and led Singleton farther south to a second house, which consisted of multiple mobile homes connected by breezeways to the main house. Choppers were neatly parked in a line out front. A man with a rifle slung over his shoulder sat in a chair under an awning. Hank scoped him and made an ID. “That’s a guy named Duke, he works a big-shot connection down in Pawpaw. He’s been standing guard for about three weeks. There’s a few new choppers, so I’d say they’re arriving from downstate now. Rake had some kind of agreement with those folks, a truce. I’d say they’re waiting for someone to come riding up with a sweet rumor. They’ve sensed a lack of activity.”

They hiked back into the woods and came out in a clearing about a mile inland from the lake. Hank swished through the grass and then, like a dog, turned around and around to clear a spot, motioning for Singleton to sit down, offering up a hand in a gesture that seemed sweetly out of place.

“You’ve got to trust me, Singleton. The way you and Wendy have been acting the last three days shows outward trust. You’ve been acting like you trust us, hanging out, joining me on this mission, and that’s a first step. But there’s still internal doubt and all of that.”

He lit two cigarettes and passed one to Singleton. Then he lay back with his arms crossed behind his head.

“What’d they train you on interrogation? I’ll bet they told you to begin with easy banter, establish trust, and then, when a moment like this comes along, hit hard.”

“That’s about it,” Singleton said. The air was filled with late summer chaff and insects. A breeze sifted through the grass and then died away. Singleton thought about how it must’ve felt to wade through grass with his rifle overhead into a horizon that was brutally open and visible.

“This might be the time,” Hank said, “to tell me something, not too intimate, about your journey that might help me trust you a little more.”

“I can tell you one thing,” Singleton said. “You ever hear of blue pills?”

“
The
blue pills?”

“Or green. Sometime they’re gray or green or whatever. We’re talking about putting a stress on the ‘the.’”

“A story with a pill,” Hank said. He closed his eyes and let the sun bathe his face. “I’ve heard plenty of stories with pills.”

“A grunt recognizes a grunt who’s been treated and can’t remember a damn thing about the war. There’s a strange moment between them. The guy who’s been treated racks his brain knowing that he should know the other guy. He digs and digs because he can see, in the way the other guy’s looking, a pure connection. All this in a few seconds.”

“The man doing the recognizing puts the onus onto the man being recognized,” Hank says. “I know that feeling, man. I know it all too fucking well.”

Singleton took a deep breath, took a sip from his canteen, and told Hank the story of the blue pills. The Flint streets, the desolation of afternoon, how it felt to leave the Corps building after a briefing session, to pass through the revolving door and bump into Frank. He described the helmet liner. The weird sensation of being recognized by somebody who, presumably, he had once known in battle.

“Folks come out of nowhere, like you and Wendy did the other night, to present themselves as part of your past with no way to prove it,” Hank said. “You have all of these folks drifting around with the pivotal point of their lives buried, not sure if they should be digging around, and from time to time someone comes along. It’s a fucking strange world, man.”

“He came up to me and called me Captain and then said he was going to fulfill a promise he had made to me in Nam, and he handed me a bag of pills and I had to confirm it, had to know for sure before I took them, and when it was confirmed, I mean when I saw that he really was there with my unit, Wendy and I took them.”

“You still have some of those left?” Hank said. He looked out across the grass at the trees, mostly jack pines, against the sky.

“I’ve got exactly four left,” Singleton said.

“One for each of us, is what I’d say,” Hank said.

“Now it’s your turn to tell a story.”

“You already know my story,” Hank said. “It’s a story you know too well. Except instead of getting tagged and put in treatment I partnered with Rake before they could find me. I was so fucked up, I’m guessing, upon getting home that I didn’t have a choice. I told you I treated myself. It’s all enfolded now,” he said, tapping his head. “So you know the deal. I’m making it up based on the backwash I picked up from things Rake told me. He didn’t like to talk about that shit, so basically I just have a vague sense that I came out and met up with him and took to the road and played it all out that way, one killing at a time. Was I a psychopath like Rake? No way, man, and I can attest to that, of course, because I’m not a failed enfold. There was part of me that could be saved, otherwise I wouldn’t have been saved. I like to think it was my love of MomMom that pulled me through it and created a will to self-treatment, but I’ll never know and don’t want to know and if I do start wanting to know—heading to the waterline—you do your best to pull me back, and I’ll do the same for you, man, if you want me to,” he said, and then he lay back down and settled into a silence.

“What happened to Rake?” Singleton said.

Hank laughed. “I knew that was coming. Deeper trust formed and you struck. You’ve been trained.”

“What happened to Rake?”

“Meg and I had to find a way to channel his desire to kill into the little bit of honor he had left—something like that. He had a little bit left, my gut told me. I had to trust my gut. We had to find a way to get him killed without either one of us doing the killing. I thought about getting him to commit suicide, something along those lines, and, again, I thought about killing him myself, risking going back to that old place, reversing the treatment. Believe me, there was nothing I wanted to do more than take him out. I was itching to do it. Meg wanted to do it, too. Then these rumors came in about duels up on Isle Royale and I made use of them in my own way.”

“How’d you do that?” Singleton said.

“I’d rather not get into the details right now. But believe me, Rake’s dead. He’s gone. Nothing to worry about. I get the sense you know that anyway.”

*   *   *

A perfect blue-skied end-of-August day with a faint hint of autumn. A front had come through early in the morning and pushed back the southerly smell of burning tires and trees and cleared out the sky. “One last daytime beach excursion,” Hank suggested. The night before, the Black Flaggers had approached closer than ever.

Now, on the shore, Hank was on his back with his hands crossed over his chest, his soft belly exposed. He was talking about the good groove that he and Singleton had going, the sense of shared mission that was developing. Wendy and Meg, arm in arm, were sauntering down the sand, staying close to the waterline where the gravel was smooth, stopping on occasion to look out at the water. (Later he’d look back and see that there had been intention in the secretive distance they had kept. Sitting across from Hank, he had felt something, an urge to run to them, to take Wendy by the hand and lead her into the berm—not really a dune—where he would declare his love for her in no uncertain terms. Later he’d understand that he had been locked into an operative task, focused, zeroed in on getting some kind of answer from Hank.)

“I need to know what you did with Rake’s body. I need details on how you handled the duel.”

Hank sat up and lit a cigarette.

“What difference does it make. If I could enfold
that
story, I’d take fucking Trip right now and do it. That’s all in the past. I just want to forget it.”

“No. I need it for my report,” Singleton said.

“You’re not going to write a report. I heard if you go back, you’ll be court-martialed.”

“Sent up for adjudication,” Singleton said. Wendy had turned and was looking back at him with her hands out as if to say: What are you doing, exactly? What are we doing?

“Same thing. You’re not going back there and you’re not going to write a report,” Hank said. He lit a cigarette, blew the smoke to the side. “It’s not that I don’t want to tell you. It’s that if I say it, if I put it in the air, if you hear it, you’re not going to want to go back, ever.”

“I’m going to write the report.”

“Well, Singleton, let me tell you, it was risky and we had to go deep into our roles. To make sure the Black Flaggers wouldn’t know he was dead, I took a big risk and drove down to the L.P. Left deep in the night and got down to the bridge at dawn, crossed over it, and then propped the body in front of Fort Michilimackinac. You probably know that the police took over the fort because it is supposedly avoided by failed enfolds, or something like that. Word goes around that failed enfolds like Rake can’t stand anything that harkens back to the wars before Nam. There’s nothing that screws with the mind like a fake old fort, with all of those logs carved into points, is what they say.”

“Why leave the body for the Corps to find?”

“In retrospect, which isn’t really fair, I’d say the idea was to get you to come up here so we’d able to leave on friendly terms with the Corps and avoid being tracked. I’ll say one thing. We had both reached a limit. If we went deep downstate with Rake’s body, we’d be dead meat before we got far. If we went ourselves, we’d never make it alive. Not if word got out—and believe me, it’s gonna get out—that Rake was dead. Rake alive was what kept us safe. There must be a catchphrase for someone in a situation that is simply not winnable, for a road that splits into two options that are just as bad. Two roads that lead back to the original option.”

“There isn’t a catchphrase for that,” Singleton said.

“But you at least get the gist,” Hank said. “Meaning if we didn’t put the body there you wouldn’t be here, and if you weren’t here, I wouldn’t have to come up with a precise explanation for our actions. It wouldn’t matter. The fact that I need to explain what we did has everything to do with the fact that it’s you who’s doing the asking, and you’d never be asking if I hadn’t put the body there, you see.”

Hank cupped his palm over a match and lit a joint. He inhaled and held and released a cloud and hit again.

“I think I’ll have a hit of that,” Singleton said, reaching for the joint. He’d have to say the body had been transported downstate to the fort for unknown reasons, if he did write a report. He looked out at Meg and Wendy, who were still arm in arm, down near the water, but turned slightly, looking back at him. The waves were slathering in with long, slow sweeps, arriving at what seemed to be an angle to the beach.

“You’re probably thinking it was a neat, clean operation. I imagine that’s what you’re thinking. But it wasn’t clean, man. Not at all. It wasn’t neat.”

“I wouldn’t think it was,” Singleton said.

“I took advantage of Meg, in that I discovered that besides being another one of Rake’s prisoners, she had another connection to his past, one I couldn’t remember because of the Tripizoid, but I sensed it. I guessed it was there. All that is lost to me. Everything before she arrived. But I’m guessing, because I can’t remember, that he went gonzo crazy when he saw her name on one of those black-market lists, just as I’m guessing I didn’t enlist with him for the Army, I mean we didn’t sign up together with the buddy program, because I do have vivid recollections of my boyhood up to the day I was in my bedroom packing up my stuff, heading off to boot camp, along with some residual memories of flying over to Nam, landing, the smell of the trees over there, and things like that. Then everything goes blank. If I’d been friends with Rake before Nam I wouldn’t remember all that shit. It would be enfolded. He was a nasty fucker as a kid, I’m sure. He went in with a chip on his shoulder and the war was his feeding ground.”

“So you immersed her. You gave her a controlled dunk in the lake?” Singleton said.

“I was careful and told her it was a onetime deal. I kept my own head above water.”

“And she came out and told you what she saw?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say that. She told me bits and pieces, but eventually she mentioned a name that seemed to trigger a little bit of a spark.” He tapped his head. “Enough to hint that her connection with Rake had to do with whatever I’d enfolded in myself and that her connection with Rake in the past was also a connection with me. It made me think, maybe the Trip doesn’t get it all enfolded. Maybe we
all
have something that’ll spark a memory.”

“So you used the name to somehow provoke a duel?”

“Rake had been out on a long run and I enfolded myself with the black-market Tripizoid when he was gone. Then he came back, months later, with Meg. Then he went out again and brought this kid named Haze back. I’m guessing I knew he’d gone into the Grid for Meg specifically, although I didn’t figure why until Meg unfolded and had that vision. After that, we had to keep in our roles of Old Meg and Old Hank. But that was wearing thin by late June, early July.”

Singleton stared out at the water. Riding atop the horizon, like a block of stone, another tanker headed on course to Duluth, or away, it was impossible to tell. Down the beach, Wendy and Meg were sidearming stones into the water, making them skip.

“I’ve come to the conclusion, thanks to the Trip, that killing goes against nature in the deepest way, that to kill another no matter what the reason, no matter how justified in war, leaves you coated with some kind of residue. You pay a price, no matter what. Animals don’t pay a price because the price has to do with the fact that you know what you did. Trees don’t even have the price.”