Hystopia: A Novel (38 page)
Authors: David Means
Love, your buddy
Dear Buddy,
Scratch that last note, if you got it. I’m sure you got it and I’m sure we’ll have a good heart-to-heart about it if this one doesn’t do the trick. I’m off to the blue yonder. So long. But before I go let me say. Things I’d Enfold If Tripizoid Really Existed:
Basic image of my sister in brush before her body was found, as I imagine it. Alone with the hiss of wind through the pines. The sound of waves breaking down on the shore. Can’t stop seeing that image and would like very much to find a way to enfold it.
Entire war from start to finish with the exception of a couple of R&R leaves, one in Saigon, another in Hong Kong.
[Editor’s Note: The following handwritten fragment was found taped to the back of the manuscript.]
Up in the weedy ditch, not far fromb the lake, on a singular fall afternoon—the few trees about a half mile away flaming bright, astonishingly colorful, and then beyond them the muted slate clouds against a tinge of autumnal blue. The cop in the patrol car just making his usual run down on Route 2, heading west, trying to catch one more speeder, to write the last ticket of the day, not so much trying to reach his quota as wanting to find some way to close it down. He was thinking of his daughter, Anna, and her play at school, and he caught sight of the body in the weeds, a bit of white, could’ve easily been some garbage. But his cop gut was at work. The third wayward girl he’d found that year. They always look windblown, silent, with speckles of mud and blood on their cheeks, and almost always the legs akimbo with a sad kind of entwinement that speaks of being parted and then moving back together with a kind of resistance, an elastic snapback. A naked torso. He had his own way of looking at a body; it was a resistance to the truth that even an officer of the law, seasoned in those parts, having seen several bodies of young women in woods, covered half buried in pine needles, or mourned with leaves. Most of the killers made only a halfhearted attempt at full burial. They were pressed for time, or simply didn’t care. Most of the killers up there worked in homicidal haste, not giving much of a shit if they left evidence or not, always seeming to assume—it seemed to him—that the onus of the crime would somehow be cast back into those twilight, silent, betrayed eyes that stared up out of the skull, sometimes bones, the flesh almost eaten away; the crime—drugs, usually, and then abduction and rape and eventually, using them up, murder—no matter what, at least in the mind of the killers—he thought—was a natural outcome of a sequence of events that began far, far back, starting with a casual pickup, or a seductive lure, or the usage of pills in various forms, and then followed a jagged logic of fear. He theorized a lot about this kind of stuff, as did all of his colleagues. Anyone who came upon the end result in the form of a body, at least any law officer, had to go back through the chain of events, in theory, and attempt to guess at some kind of motive—in a mind-flash—and in doing so felt stained and sullied and implicated somehow in the crime itself, as if by finding the body you were playing a key role in the death itself. Any cop will admit—in some secret part of themselves—that they’re just one step away from the criminal; that the good-cop part is closely associated with the fact that with ease any one of them could’ve gone the other way, into crime, as an avocation, and in making that deep admission also saying—again silently—that crime itself is a vocation, and around any good criminal, even a psychopath, stood a calm that seemed to hold the realities of life in acute focus. Psychopaths, the ones who seem to come about it naturally, worked with a fluidity, a deeper instinctual, even, some cops (this one included) might say, artistic flair, and when he saw the body, as he walked through the weeds, smelling the sweet taint of lake breeze, he knew right away that this one had been the work of someone in a certain zone. How could he tell that? What triggered this sense of all-knowing understanding in a man who had a young daughter; in a man who had just two days ago attended her first performance in a school play? What part of him understood the killer, or at least told himself—perhaps later, in retrospect—that he had had an understanding right away, intuitively, putting two and two together, knowing that this was some guy who had been in Nam, or at least been through some primal trauma—in the parlance of the times—and so could connect somehow with the man who had killed? (Nonsense, he’d tell himself years later, when he’d been through so much more and understood, from the keen view of wisdom, that what he had been sensing at that time was just a rookie’s vision. A rookie cop—or a young cop—made up for his deficiencies, and his fears, by creating an inner narrative that was, above all, coherent: he—or she—saw a causal sense of one thing leading to another; whereas the older, wiser cop, or the retired officer, understood that the terminal result—a dead body—was often of dispirited, random, windblown, senseless events.)
PRAYER FOR POP
Twisted on the gist of Christ
against the beat of
Raw Power
twisted on the twist of nice
you tore another (a)hole
in the beat blood senseless
Ann Arbor night, right
before “Search and Destroy.”
“Somebody’s got to save
my soul, somebody’s got
to save my soul…”
[Eugene Allen, August 20, 1973]
I would like to thank those veterans who, one way or another, shared their stories as I was writing this book—in particular Chet Lubeck and Gerald McCarthy.
And thanks to those who gave me support along the way: The Guggenheim Foundation, Jonathan Franzen, Jamie Quatro, Rebecca Nagel, Andrew Wylie, Mitzi Angel, Will Wolfslau, Donald Antrim, Rodger Stevens, Joanna Goodman, David Patterson, Frank and Holly Bergon, Eric Chinski, and Laird Gallagher.
Finally, I’d like to thank my father, who died before I finished but who—I hope and pray—would’ve seen that this was written in the spirit of
via negativa
. His belief in the wider cosmology, in the before and the after, in the permanence of grace as the fundamental light in the darkness of existence, is the gift that keeps him alive in me.
ALSO BY
DAVID MEANS
The Secret Goldfish
A Quick Kiss of Redemption
David Means
was born and raised in Michigan. He is the author of four story collections, including
The Spot
;
Assorted Fire Events
, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction; and
The Secret Goldfish
, which was short-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize. His stories, which have recieved numerous honors, including two O. Henry Prizes and two Pushcart Prizes, have been translated into ten languages. He was a recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2013. You can sign up for email updates
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Contents
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2016 by David Means
All rights reserved
First edition, 2016
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Means, David, 1961–
Title: Hystopia: a novel / David Means.
Description: First edition. | New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015035421 | ISBN 9780865479135 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780374714871 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Nineteen seventies—Fiction. | United States—History—20th century—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | GSAFD: Alternative histories (Fiction)
Classification: LCC PS3563.E195 H97 2016 | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at
http://lccn.loc.gov/2015035421
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