Hystopia: A Novel (37 page)

Carrie Anderson

Meg used to hang out at Look Park with the other stoners. It was just across the road from the school, so it was where you went when you skipped a class and then decided to skip the whole day. We were friends, I guess, but not close friends because she was one of those girls who hung around with guys more than anything.

Richard Allen

No comment. I’d rather not say anything in response to that question.

Buddy Anderson

It’s like you can’t really get your mind around it when it’s being thrown at you the way he threw it at me all the time, saying I’m going to kill myself if I get drafted. Then he gets drafted and goes. When he came back he worked hard day in, day out, and when he did come out for a drink he’d just sit with his head in his hands and ask questions: What’s the plot, man? he’d say to me. What’s the plot? Thing was, around the time he was drafted we thought the war was starting to wind down, or at least it seemed like it might end any day and we figured we’d be shipped to Fort Whatever, somewhere down south, to go through boot camp and all of that and then we’d come back here, like I did, and live out our lives. When his draft notice came he’d already written me a bunch of the suicide notes, and we thought, at least I thought, they were funny, so when he got back—and he was changed, man, of course he was changed like everyone else—and he started to write them again, while he was writing his book, it wasn’t so funny anymore. I didn’t save those notes. I saved the ones he wrote before he left.

Susan Habb

There was this time these kids beat Eugene. We were walking home and John Burns and some other guys jumped him. They broke his nose and dislocated his shoulder. After that he was different. I mean, this kind of thing happened all the time. It was a tough neighborhood, with a mix of kids from the mills and kids whose dads were laid off and all of that. I’m not saying I saw he was different but now that I think about it, I mean looking back, I think he was different. He began to stay to himself more after that. He had friends, like the guy named Buddy. But things were different.

Markus Decourt

Yeah, yeah, that guy named Rake is a lot like the guy, Johnny Burns. That was the guy who came around to see Meg after Billy Thompson was killed in Nam. This sleazy snake came knocking, so to speak. Real snake, this guy named Johnny. There weren’t really established gangs in our town, but there were loosely associated, you might call them, somewhat organized clumps of young men who liked to fuck things up, and he was one of them. He could exploit her weakness, and I always guessed that he was the one, if there was somebody, who helped her escape the nuthouse and took her up to where they found her body. What would they say in court? I guess they’d say that’s all hearsay. But hearsay means something, too, is what I say.

Markus Decourt

It seems important that he wrote his book before they found his sister’s body, because he had to guess where she was, and the truth is he guessed pretty close to what really happened, except she wasn’t up in Canada safe and sound with some lumberjack like Hank, searching out trees, trying to make a killing in the lumber business. Whatever happened to her up there, she came into contact with some bad elements, rest assured. Actually, those are the words his father used when he could finally speak again, after the funeral. He said, bad elements. She got in with some bad elements, and they took advantage of her. That’s what he said.

Carl O’Brian

Allen had one thing right. You’d write an operation report after the fact and backdate the thing and then it would somehow fit the strange, horrific logic of the battle, at least the initial point of contact with the enemy and the charge up the hill and the number of your KIAed and injured in relation to the number of VC KIAed and all of that, all written in a kind of cable-ese that reduced the complexity of battle; even reports that were not written in the field, by some desk jockey in Saigon and meant for secret transmission, were written in that jargon, that reductive nonsensical, staccato mode. I get the feeling that Billy knew, and I mean we used to sort of talk about this stuff, in our own way, that if he was KIAed over there in his second tour, he’d be reduced to just some bullshit lingo on an outgoing report that somehow rat-tat-tatted out on a teletype machine in some deep basement of the Pentagon.

Richard Allen

[Static, fumbling with microphone.] Like I said, I really can’t talk about it. My father-in-law died shortly after my daughter was killed and so the grief was double, and I lost my son. So it was three in about two years.

John Burns

I seriously doubt if Billy ever went up to that kid’s room and had a man-to-man with him. I know for a fact he wouldn’t call him “son.”

Chuck Stam

Billy had a lisp; something about his teeth and his tongue. So I can see that he might’ve called in the wrong coordinates. That mind-flash—or whatever you want to call it—that Meg, the character Meg, has when she’s in the water and he speaks is about the way he sounded. He was a big questioner. He asked a hell of a lot of questions and then came up with a lot of answers. He loved to talk. He would’ve attended his own funeral for sure.

VARIOUS SUICIDE NOTES

Dear Buddy. Here’s the basic problem as I see it. Now that I’m back, I’m bored with the mystery of life. Why did Meg end up dead in a ditch? Why am I still here? What does it mean that I wake up early in the morning to hear a mourning dove cooing and listen to it intensely, as I did one summer morning a few years back? I lay and listened, knowing that I’d remember that moment forever. I told myself—in bed, shrouded in the cool sheets—that I should and would remember. And the deeper, eternal mysteries that, just a few years ago, I seemed to care so deeply about. That silence between Mom and Dad when the conversation, usually about what to do about Meg, lulled and then they were looking at each other, for just a second, fondly. The question of where time goes when it’s finished evoking the present moment. What it means when history devours a beloved, like Meg, or JFK, or MLK or whoever. I just can’t seem to rise to the occasion of giving the slightest shit anymore. This isn’t the kind of suicide note I’m sure you expect from me. But right now, here, on the edge of doing myself in, it’s all I can come up with. I wrote my draft and now I want to terminate myself before I finish revisions, partly because the entire mess is obviously built around the thing I’m avoiding. As Grandpa said to me years ago, I’m a hider by nature. I’m a loner. I’m sure I’m abnormally reacting to the fact that my sister was killed, on one hand. On the other hand, my own manhood was at stake. Whatever. I’m lonely, sad, and I’ve been beaten. That afternoon, the one you know about already, when I was walking home and jumped by Larry, and John, and some other assholes. They got me. I mean, they told me that Meg was a slut, and then beat the shit out of me. I said a prayer for them, and it was my last prayer. So let it be recorded here that Eugene Allen, on his last day on earth, admitted that he said one last prayer and knew it was going to be his final attempt. I mean, let it be known that I said goodbye to my attempts at forgiveness for those guys, who for me at that time, on the street, walking home, were emblematic—I can admit this—of certain men who have an inclination toward violence, that I also said so long to the inclination to forgive the world in general. In other words, my friend, where is the grace in all this? I mean, the war goes on. I see the photographs. I pay attention. Billy is gone, of course, but the men like him still go off to fight as I write this. (Note: Buddy. I know you’re gonna see this as yet another in a long line of relatively lame suicide notes I’ve composed this summer. This one might be for real. I’ll put it in your mailbox later tonight and you’ll get it before the lights go off. So I’m sure you’re thinking: Ah, man, Eugene does it again, spells out his last thoughts.) Anyway, back to my main point, which is that the deeper mysteries that I used to be able to feel with such ease, and by feel I mean respect, sense, and take in but not answer—that’s it, man, Buddy, I can no longer take in the mysteries. And I could do that a year ago, even when Meg was AWOL, out there somewhere, and the cops were coming to the door. I could still feel that delight—yeah, that’s the word—in the strangeness of reality. But that went away and with it my urge to stay involved with the present moment, and I have to add here, Buddy, that I have an unwillingness to look back, so I can’t even live in the past, not really, which would include some pretty traumatic shit—and you know what I mean—when we didn’t understand that Meg was going crazy, or was crazy, and before she was, as they said, diagnosed and treated.

Dear Grandpa,

I’m writing this first off, ahead of the fact, to say I’m sorry for whatever pain I’ve caused you. Please forgive me and know that I went out believing most, if not all, of what you taught me about God and about my place in the world and the importance, as you said again and again, of looking at the big, big picture, the one that goes forward in time and backwards and shows, or as you always said, the vastness of eternity in relation, as you said, to our small speck of lives. There are some things I’ve got to get down in this letter to let you know that I do remember. First off, I remember your elegance and the way you dressed—won’t force it in here, but I’ll describe a few things: the way you wore your hat, with your name and address and a note in the band that said, Reward if found. Return to Harold B. Allen. (I’ll spare you what you know.) The suits you bought in Chicago, and the time you took me and let me watch while the tailor chalked and measured and lifted the bolts of fabric out for me to finger, treating me, the tailor, like a man instead of a kid; also the cufflinks you wore along with the sock garters and the shoes. Anyway, your elegance and the house and the time you let me stay there, those days, when things at my house were too chaotic. I’ll spare you the narrative here. This note isn’t to explain why I’d end my life early. I realize that my desperation, my despair, will be linked directly to my tour of duty in Nam, of course, and also Meg’s death and the pain of all of that and the way Mom drinks and so on and so forth, but the truth is I’m simply not equipped for manhood as it is defined in this—I’ll spare you the rest [indecipherable scribble] … I should type this up because the writer’s cramp is killing me, but it seems wrong to type out a note like this on the same machine on which I wrote fiction. I’m slightly obsessive about your hats, to return to that subject. It seems to me that the covering of the head with an elegant object somehow is emblematic of your time and place in the world, and the fact that I’ve grown my hair long, too long to fit under the kind of hat you wear—although in theory it might work—should stand out as a major indication of the difference between your generation and mine, although I do, as I stand here, with a can of gas in my hand (or a gun, or whatever), have to admit that I side with your comment, and agree wholeheartedly, that the concept of generations is a creation of, as you say, the culture gone haywire, and that between your world and mine there is really only a slight, tweaky difference. I go out now because I can’t find a way [indiscernible scribbles] …
foothold
might be the right word. My body feels unable to relate to the gravitational pull. I thought of this when Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon and I became obsessed with that footprint more than anything, the pattern on the sole, the boot prints, and then I began to wonder if maybe the world would be better if he had stepped onto the lunar surface in a pair of Florsheims (can’t think of a better brand), or better yet one of your handmade shoes, the ones with nails holding the sole. If he’d left a better print perhaps the whole Year of Hate thing, the riots and so forth … I won’t go there. Suffice it to say that a young man who can only come up with a lame little riff on the nature of moon footprints deserves, in some way, to stop existing. Or maybe I should say that a man who has to resort to a riff on footprints and then resorts to resorting to mention of that resorting as a lame excuse and then talks about his desire to end it all deserves to end it all? Anyway, I know you did your best with the draft board and pulled whatever strings you could and were in the uncomfortable position because of your former service.

Dear Buddy,

This is it, man. The real deal. Please disregard other notes and take this one seriously. I’ve been typing like a madman and failed to get the following, not verbatim, but in essence. Here’s a last list of things:

The time we went fishing up at the Two Hearted, which we agreed was really a shit stream, and you caught the hook in my fist when I was watching you cast from the footbridge, looking down and studying the riffles, trying to see where the fish might be lurking from a better vantage. You were wading with your back to me and made a fantastic cast, just beautiful, and then another even better cast, and I was watching the line and the hook—I think it was a muddler—stuck in my wrist and you thought it was a snag and before I could yell you began yanking; not that actual moment but the way we used it later, driving up to Duluth, smoking, talking, as the butt of a joke, twisting it and turning it, taking your point of view and then my point of view. That moment, in the car, rehashing the snag, is where the glory of my life stands. I mean it, man. That was the peak, and the fact that I lived through that moment—I should say moments, in the car—while back home all hell was probably breaking loose, with Meg going into the hospital, is enough for me. In other words, I’m sure now that I’ve had my moment of grace and glory. There’s that moment and the other moment. One night when I was about twelve and Meg was about fourteen we went out into the snow and hiked around, just walking, and the streets were buried and the snow was pouring down and we held hands and she told me that she didn’t care if Johnny Burns called her names, and I asked her what he called her, and she told me and it was the first time I heard the word. I listened and she shrugged it off and that was it, man, the moment I relish because I didn’t know the word and yet heard the word from her own lips and it didn’t pain me yet the way it would when, for example, Burns said it when he beat the shit out of me. The fact that I got all the pain in the thing I’m typing but couldn’t get that tiny, little sliver of grace irks me, but only insofar as any writer feels irked, and they all must, over the limitations of story. As I think we talked about a few days ago, it’s impossible, for the most part, at least for this writer, to get in there and find a way to show how those tiny, little fucking moments of ignorance provide pure grace. Time, I think I said, is the only thing [indecipherable scribble].