Hystopia: A Novel (32 page)

“So you had to find a way to get him into a situation that would result in his death, and to make it his idea, to make him the initiator.”

“It makes me sad thinking about it, but knowing a little bit of Rake’s story, I wanted him to have the satisfaction in his last moments of thinking that he had somehow resolved things that could not be resolved—because really, Singleton, you and I both know that there is nothing more tragic than a man like Rake, someone who doubled up a trauma so huge that he wants to eat the earth itself.”

“You wanted him to initiate it so it would be part of his own story, somehow connected with his own trauma.”

“Initiate’s exactly right,” Hank said. “Haze was dumb as a peg, but he had unusual smarts when it came to his place in the pecking order and knew he had to worry about me as much as he worried about Rake. He put on a front that he didn’t give a shit. Meg and I waited as long as we could, and then one night when we were all at the dinner table and things were relatively calm I decided to play the trump card. At least I hoped it was a trump card. Truth is, it was just a shot in the dark because I wasn’t sure if I’d made the right connection. I figured that Rake had gone down there and grabbed Meg for a reason. I figured she had some connection with his past, but, again, the rest of the story was lost to me. Bad timing, what have you. A bad twist. Meg didn’t tell me that much about her vision, but again she did mention the man’s name, the man in the vision, and like I said, it gave me a feeling that he had something to do with Rake, his initial combat trauma situation. I figured our only shot would be to put that name in Haze’s mouth.”

“What was the man’s name?” Singleton said. He had a feeling it would help with his report, snap everything into place. Far down the beach the women held stones, waiting for a breaker to ebb, finishing its journey across hundreds of miles of lake and leave behind a momentarily smooth surface, perfect for stone skipping. Hank was saying he didn’t have the slightest idea what the T stood for. Hank said the name that had sparked the duel and he said it again, saying, “Billy-T, Billy-T’s the name,” and then he kept talking as Singleton tried to process the name, one part of his mind listening while another felt a current dashing around the name itself; one part of his mind clear and engaged with reality (another stone tossed, the two women looking distant and conspiratorial) as the other began to process the name that had been spoken, while the other part was unfurled into an acute, brutal, lonely, isolated desolation in which his mind’s eye (no other way to put it, he’d tell Wendy, later) saw his father, dressed in his olive overalls with goggles, at work, car after car, and then sitting during his lunch break with his black bucket between his legs on the windowsill eating a sandwich his mother had made, and worrying over his son in Vietnam, his son becoming a man in the infernal heat of combat.

The next thing he knew, water was closing around him, the cold pounding his temples and his jaws and shoving the air out of his lungs. Even as he sank below the surface, feeling the vise of the cold, he was aware that he was a man who had been flung into direct contact with something huge from his past—and later he’d swear that he was thinking about the report, the name Billy-T expanding in his mind until he could hear it speaking, a slight lisp, and then arms came around him and lifted him up, ordering him not to resist, to stay calm and then for a few seconds he was deep again. He could feel the mighty body, not just the water but the entire lake.
There have been rumors about men who, confirming a specific element of their Causal Events Package, went wild with a desire to be permanently unfolded.
And then he felt arms around him, lifting him up, and he was above the surface and Hank was slapping him softly, speaking into his ear as he pulled him to shore, saying, “You’re gonna want to do that again. You’ll want to get back into that water but as long as I’m here it won’t happen.” He pulled him along the sand and wrapped him in the picnic blanket and made him sit down.

Through chattering teeth he said the name Billy-T over and over again, his voice incantatory, as if he were trying to memorize the sound of it, and when Meg came up, breathing hard, she stood and listened and then got down next to him and asked, “What happened?”

“He made the connection I thought he might make. The deal has been sealed.”

“What deal is that?” Wendy said. She had her hands on her hips and was staring down at them. “I mean, what deal exactly are you talking about?”

“The deal that started as soon as I saw you walk in the door,” Hank said, and Singleton closed his eyes and felt the beach shift beneath him, a sense of complete dissociation and then, a second later, the feeling of being rooted in the sand. Klein had once said that it didn’t take much to put two and two together when you’re in the field, when you’re on the ground making minute-by-minute conclusions, trying to go with the information you’re seeing, smelling, instead of orders the staff sends down from Command. Draw your own conclusions. Shoot first and ask the dead questions. Was it really possible that the Corps had set the whole thing up as some kind of rehabilitative structure? It was a sad, simple, clear question.

“So you, Billy-T, and Rake were in a squad together in Nam,” Hank explained. “You were buddies with Billy-T. You lost him. You lost your dear buddy, your best friend. The three of you signed up together—at least that’s what it looks like. But I didn’t enlist with you guys. Like I said before, I have memories that go back to the day I was packing my stuff up before leaving for boot camp, and everything before that—growing up downstate, summer afternoons playing ball, friends and buddies and girlfriends but nobody named Meg, and no Rake, that’s for sure, so for me it’s clear that what I enfolded started in Vietnam and was finished in Nam. I was drafted clean and simple. I got my notice. But you and Meg share a common past with Rake.”

“Is that the way you see it?” Singleton said, turning to Meg. Her face was pale and pinched with pain.

“I knew it as soon as you told us your name,” she said. “He talked about you in the vision I had. You two were there together. You were good friends.”

“What else?”

“He was in the jungle, in a firefight, and there was someone named Frank who liked to pray over bodies. Then he was in Hue. Then he was dead. I was in love with him. He was my boyfriend and then he got drafted.”

This is the moment he’d heard about, that was rumored to exist, when you came into contact with somebody who had a direct connection to the trauma and shared the grief. Hank had taken Wendy down the beach to give them a little time alone. Space but not too much space was the way he put it, a chance to talk alone.

“He was angry,” she said. “And he was dead. He talked to me about going to his own funeral. Were you at the funeral?”

“He was in a casket and I was in combat,” Singleton said. “I remember when he was killed. In my vision we were fighting in Hue. Obviously, the second siege of Hue. He was calling in for air support and the strike came and it came in too close, and he was at the phone, first calling the coordinates in and then still holding it when the strike came, so it isn’t clear to me if he was calling in a second strike or if my vision compressed time, or if he just liked to hold that phone to his mouth, but then there was the fireball.”

“He had a slight lisp,” Meg said, her voice quivering. “I loved his lisp.”

“I don’t remember that,” Singleton said.

“Now you do,” Meg said.

She reached out and touched his face and he did the same and for a few seconds they held their hands there, as if passing thoughts and memories through their fingers.

“We were dating, me and Billy-T. He took me out to California, I think, and we went to the beach out there.”

“What did he look like?”

“He had curly hair—wavy, and it was sun blond, bleached, and he had this great smile,” she said.

“If I could remember him that’s the way I’d picture him,” Singleton said. “He had a big smile.”

“Yeah, a sweet smile,” she said, and then she went on to explain more, to lay it all out, to describe some of the things he already knew and some that were new to him. Down the beach Wendy and Hank had gone as far as they dared and had turned around, facing in their direction, arms down, looking straight ahead as if to wait for something to resolve.

There was an unnatural attraction between two linked by grief. Wendy’s awareness of that attraction was apparent in the swing of her arms as she ran down the beach. There was a connective name between us, Billy-T, and when the name was spoken, Agent Singleton (I) had a reflexive response. There were rumors that if two enfolds met and exchanged information a natural unfolding would take place, whereupon the two patients would share enough mutual memory material to counteract the Tripizoid in a natural manner, inducing a natural memory outside of the traumatic material.

*   *   *

“Maybe grief has to work itself out like this or something. If it’s not felt, if it doesn’t happen, it finds a way,” Hank said later that night as they sat at the kitchen table. They had returned from the beach, cooked dinner—chicken, potatoes, green beans—together, working alongside MomMom. She seemed aware of the shift, the change, and when she spoke her voice was lower, calmer.

“I don’t mean to throw even more disrespect on the Corps, but there’s simply no way they knew you coming up here would result in some kind of reunification. If they did know, they’re a hell of a lot more organized than I thought. It’s better if you don’t even consider that as a possibility. Put it aside, man, put it aside,” Hank said.

“No, I can’t. The best way for me to think about it is to believe that Klein knew,” Singleton said. “For my own sense of sanity I’m gonna say that he arranged things, maybe not specific things but the general pattern. He made a point of disregarding the instructions from Command as a way of making damn sure I knew that I had to make decisions in the field, based on the field. The last order he gave me was to interrogate Meg.”

“And he said it was a form of treatment,” Wendy said. “Don’t forget that.”

“He made me say it.”

“And you said it. Now put it aside,” she said, and she pushed her chair back, took Meg by the hand, and they went off into the living room, where they sat talking, their voices coming down the hall and into the kitchen while Hank and Singleton sat in silence, listening.

*   *   *

That night, in their room, they heard the old lady crying out in her delirium, her words coming down the hall. From the window there was the usual sound of surf breaking and, later, the roar of a gang of bikers coming closer and then receding with the pop of a backfire. Then the wind began to pick up, a long, low hissing through the bramble and trees as each gust approached, blowing the shade up into the room as it struck the house broadside, shaking away into a deep quiet (the buzz was completely gone from his ears) again until the next one arrived. That was how his grief felt. It came welling up out of the connection he had with the young woman, Meg, and then it receded into the logic of his assessment of the situation, his desire, for whatever reason, to somehow remain inside something that resembled an operation, a plan of action, a sense of being on a mission. His desire to find a technical way to describe the afternoon seemed to fade and he tried to focus his mind on Meg, her freckled face, her wide eyes, wondering if he had known her at least through a photograph that Billy had passed around to the guys in their unit, because he had carried a photo, for sure, if he was a normal grunt. Then he thought of the structure of the bridge, the long, beautiful arch of it across those brutal currents, and the two parts of the state, and he thought of Wendy’s father holding out down in Flint as he let his mind zoom into space to look down at the hand shape that was supposedly part of what drew vets in from all over the country, attracted not only to the shape itself but to the peninsular aspect, the fact that there were so many places in which to find an end point, and he thought about the streets of Flint, and the young man in his wheelchair, smoking a cigarette, his gun aimed at the sky, and he quickly let his mind zoom back down to the house he was in—beneath a roof, comfortable in bed with Wendy, who was letting him rest his hand on her belly, sliding it along the band of her underwear, not responding but not pushing him away. When he asked her if she was awake she said she was wide awake.

“I’m disappointed and relieved at the same time. I thought this would make me feel better. I was hoping to get here, find Rake alive, and take him out.”

Another gust of wind gathered in the darkness and the shade sucked back tight against the screen with a snap and the house seemed to grow tense in the rafters. He slipped his fingers along the band of her underwear and lifted it gently.

“I saw the way Meg reached up and touched your face when you were talking on the beach,” Wendy said. “You wanted to touch her back, I mean really touch her, and you stopped yourself by keeping your hand on her cheek. You wanted to go deeper, but consciously you drew a line that you really needed, like my father. You just knew that enough had been spoken, revealed. Now you’re going to leave it alone,” she said.

“What makes you think so?” he said.

“Because I want you to.”

“So I didn’t seem pathetic?” he said.

“Yes,” she said tenderly, pushing against him.

“Yes, I didn’t?”

“Yes, you seemed pathetic,” she said. Another gust gathered, the sudden stillness, a drawing back not only of air but time, too, it seemed, and then after it had gone through, in the stillness, a complete silence. The old lady down the hall had fallen asleep.

It’s impossible for me to think that this entire thing is merely an elaborate form of treatment, he would write in his report. And yet the implausibility of the conspiracy is precisely what makes it plausible. To be AWOL but, in a deeper sense, not AWOL at all … Was the intention that I terminate Rake, or that, by confronting him, I effect the cure that the Corps had failed to effect with him? Or was this only about me? That I was supposed to go to Rake and, before killing him, get filled in on what really happened over there, to learn about my experience in Vietnam from the horse’s mouth? But the horse was dead.