Hystopia: A Novel (4 page)

You’re oblivious to the facts, Meg, he said. His fingers moved along her thigh. She stayed silent and looked out at the streets passing, Grand Rapids in the early morning light, nothing but television aerials, the stars, dew on roofs, lights on in a few windows as folks got up to face a day of work. She tried not to listen, let him keep going, as they moved through the cloverleaf.

Let me explain. When I heard your name a lightbulb went off and the word
bingo
came to mind. Bingo, I said. I’ve got to get her out of there and take her on the road. She’s the one for me. She has a story that somehow ties to mine.

Anyway, he said, pulling the car to the curb and cutting the engine. I have a picture in my head of the man who caused your trauma from everything you’ve told me.

I haven’t told you anything.

You’ve told me plenty. In so many words.

So tell me what you know, she said.

I know he died in your typical big-time snafu, all sparkle and glimmer and flash.

You’re sure about that.

I’m certain of it.

Then how come I don’t think so. How come I can’t even speculate.

I’m not the one to ask, he said. Then he got out, opened the rear door, and began loading his weapons in the backseat, snapping them open and shut, filling the car with the smell of oil while she gazed out at the house and examined the beach towels someone had carefully hung over the railing, lining them up neatly: one with the Detroit Tigers emblem: the roaring tiger and the baseball bat. Another had a map of the state of Michigan adorned with symbols: cherries and automobiles and rolls of papers. Next to it was a towel with a peace symbol. She read them from right to left and then from left to right and thought: the Tigers were playing the night of the first Detroit riot, and then the state burned, and then the peace movement—then the peace movement fell apart. A fourth towel was missing, she thought. The statement wasn’t complete. There has to be a fourth towel in the house somewhere, still wet and smelling of lake water and suntan lotion, and on that towel there has to be some symbol of hell.

Rake’s face appeared in her window. Get out of the car, he said, and she did.

She could remember the nurse’s big, lovely brown hands and the way he had soothed and assured, but she couldn’t remember his name or his face. She could remember the med center and the start-off point, a room with long countertops and forms to fill out and secretaries with slightly bemused expressions, tired from processing in-patients who came in a great never-ending cycle, and then the rest—the Tripizoid injections, the hippy encampment with a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome and campfires—became a blur.

Let me quote myself, Rake was saying in the car. This was later, moving along a road through the darkness, the engine rumbling under her feet, in her legs.

You’re driving on some forsaken road like this one, and then some bloke, yeah, that’s the word, some bloke appears with his thumb out, and he wonders if you’re going to pick him up or not, and he has that desperation in his eyes because he’s hoping for some blind luck, some kind of happenstance out of the blue, and you slow down to get a look at him, and fucking bingo, he’s some long-lost comrade-in-arms, a guy you knew back in the fray. So you stop and wave him over to get a better look and see that, yeah, he’s a buddy you were sure was KIAed. You were sure of it but there he is, looking loopy, his eyes weary and lost, and he leans forward a little bit and says, Hey, can I get a lift? And you say, Where you heading? And he says, Anywhere. And you tell him to get in, wanting to probe a bit, thinking maybe he’s not the guy. And he gets in and sits beside you and you drive a few miles without saying much, just idle chitchat, and then you say, Hey, man, you ever see action in Nam? And he says, Yeah, as a matter of fact, I did, and you say, Hey, me too, and he gives you that kind of reaction you’ve heard a million times, flat and noncommittal, full of avoidance—because you get either that or the other thing, the full-on meeting-of-two-souls-in-the-desert vibe, as if to say, and this is usually in just a word or two, How could it be possible that two souls bump into each other? Two souls who were over there and are now over here? As if it were some fantastic impossibility, for Christ’s sake, when in truth it’s as likely as anything else in this state. And because he’s noncommittal you wait it out, saying, Fuck, man, and you wait, maybe putting the radio on, figuring the music might lure more out of him but not caring too much because to want his history isn’t healthy.

Outside the city there was nothing much along the roadside except dead fields with purple skunk cabbage, old billboards advertising truck stops, restaurants long shut down, houses in shambles. In the center of one field a man stood, staring mutely as they passed, resting his weight against an implement. The Indiana border exerted its own unique pull down and down into the great heart of the country, past demarcation signs; past the dullard state of Ohio. They’d get to the border and head west toward Chicago and feel her pull but not venture too far because that would go against what some vets liked to call the Covenant of the Mitten. You got to keep it in the Mitten, you’ve got to rage against one thing or you’ll never get it done, and it does no good to go wildly out into an entire continent, Rake explained. Fucking state’s enough to take care of. There’s enough drugs in the state to keep a man busy for a lifetime, not to mention Detroit, not to mention the Grid itself, not to mention the riot zones.

He located—in the haze of static—the Ann Arbor station playing the Stooges, Iggy’s voice writhing in little hoots, angry, tinny. It was easy to imagine his shiny torso twisting around and his ribs sticking out as he crucified himself on his own tune. He’s the one I turn to when I need a hit of salvation, Rake said. I go to Iggy and begin to worship. I’d kill him if I got close enough. And he’d thank me for it, he added. Then he went on talking while she listened with her head back and her eyes closed and just a sliver of white noise coming through the window crack and another bit of air coming up from a hole in the floorboard. The air smelled sweet through the smoke of his cigarettes and hints of mint weed, spring …

Oncoming in the distance was a big car, a Lincoln or Olds, with smoke pouring out around the hood.

Fear manifesting itself. The air tarnished with it. Her skin with hives. Everything reduced to her forearms, her skin with hives. Behind them far off a siren unspooling. The look Shaky had given—the moon whites of his eyes, the sadness touching sadness.

I believe that man’s drinking under the influence of driving, Rake was saying, pulling the car over to the shoulder. Through the windshield she watched as he stepped out of the car, entrapped in silence, the sun on his neck, the fields behind him empty, the road still and quiet as he pointed, aimed, following the car in the opposite lane, following, following until the smoke of the shot hovered and he squinted, gazed, shot again, catching the Olds in a tire, running across the median (all quickly) and ordering the driver out, a tall elderly man in a black suit coat and tie with his arms up high. The hat on his head was black, with a narrow brim. (For a second she thought: That’s my grandfather.) There was something about the break of his trouser around his shoes and the way his shirt was tucked in tight that spoke of a gentleman, a man who had made his mark in the world and was now succumbing to loss. She slid down and waited for one more shot, or two, the sharp hole the sound would inevitably produce, startling the starlings and sparrows that had settled again in the fields (and it did) into a gust of wing flap she’d catch out of the corner of her eye when she’d look up and out the window and see the man sprawled on the road, making electric jerks that lifted his heels up and down while a stub of blood shot from his chest.

He was breathing hard when he got back to the car.

The road blazed in the setting sunlight. A trooper car passed, going the other way, dome light flashing, and then he spoke, saying, I’m going over the border to Indiana for a few miles and then up again even though it’s not my style to go out of state even to make the odds better against being caught. You’re probably wondering why I shot that one back there, and I’m inclined to tell you, although I have doubts that you’ll understand what I’m going to say, he said, adjusting the radio dial, holding on to the wheel with his knees while lighting a cigarette, taking a deep draw and then another deeper one and glancing at her. I shot that guy because he reminded me of my uncle Lester, and my uncle Lester used to remind me of my father, and my father used to remind me of my uncle Lester, and Lester was a crazy son of a bitch who did things to kids that he should’ve done to adults because he had what my mother liked to call wandering hands, hands that were cut loose from his mind. My mother said Lester couldn’t help what he did but she still sent me over to his sign shop to learn the trade, in Detroit. He had a good little operation going as a vendor and he made shingles for dealerships and for the floors—warning signs and the like, things that said Careful Workers Make Better Cars, that kind of shit, and I got to his shop and began to learn to make stencils, cutting them out—I was handy with my own hands, you see—and I was a natural. That’s what the old geezer said. He said, You’re a natural at this, boy, holding my hand with his hand while he guided the brush, using that as pretext to handle and fondle my fingers, I see now, but I didn’t at the time because I was a kid and pure and clean and unseeing of those things, as most kids are, and that went on until a few weeks later he was trying to get his hands on other parts of me and finally, well, to cut this short and give you the whole story, I gave him a blast of paint in the face from a spray gun, and then I cut his throat and then I joined up, I enlisted, and the rest, as they say, is history, but that’s what made me kill that man out there, the fact that there was a likeness in the man to the man named Lester, although I have to say it wasn’t as good as killing uncle Lester himself, but I can’t do that again, can I, so all I can do is keep trying to find a way to get as close to doing it again as I can, he said madly, going on for at least twenty minutes, circling around on the story again to tweeze out more details; the little shacklike building that was the shop, the smell of paint and paper and turpentine.

He said. He said, and he said, and she closed her eyes and slid back down into the darkness, into the murmur of the engine and what felt like time itself at the center of her mind. (She could feel it. She could feel the wall the drugs made between the inner and outer, apparent in the stretch her mind made to locate the missing parts: the enfolded memories sat like a nut, like some seed of potential, tucked away to the side, hiding.) From time to time she came up and opened her eyes to watch the road, a single line drawing into the headlights as they fanned out to the edge of darkness on both sides, and then she went back down while he talked, his voice within a narrow range, the words pristine and sharp—
enfolded
,
Mexico
,
gunplay
,
gunmetal
,
blood
—but unattached, and then he was nudging her hard in the shoulder until she was up again to see a town passing in dim streetlight, the road dusky with ash, the boarded storefronts, and then she was back down again into the darkness while his words, again, floated—
hideout
,
cops
,
tracking systems
—until she awoke suddenly, startled by the sealed silence of the empty car, to see the stretch of bleak parking lot and the single-story hotel, fifteen units, with a brightly lit office in which Rake stood, his silhouette tall and angular, his head big and round, as he turned to look out through the window at her, lifting his arm and his hand and his finger in a sign, as if to say “one minute,” while the clerk handed him a clipboard. Then he came bounding out, with a slightly bowlegged walk, his hands jammed into his pockets, his face firm and grim, and he took her from the car, told her to stretch her legs, and led her into the room—wood paneled and smelling of lemon polish and bleach and stale cigarette smoke, with two grimy bedspreads, a television set against the wall, a Bible in red artificial leather on each nightstand. After she used the bathroom, he told her to sit in a chair.

When she came up and out again, Rake was counting and sorting tabs and baggies on the bedspread while she watched television, the picture unsteady, an old family drama with a clean-cut father and a runty, troubled kid with a crew cut who kept making wisecracks when they asked him to do something around the house. The mother had a beehive hairdo and wore an apron over her dress as she moved through the scenes with devotion to the tasks at hand. The show came in and out, bits of dialogue leading to laugh-track hilarity, the sound of waves hitting a shore. When she opened her eyes she saw, in a quivering black-and-white image, a father with his briefcase at his side, receiving a highball from the mother’s hand, holding it up like a chalice and saying something inaudible that sparked another, bigger laugh-track roar that sounded like a wave hitting a shore hard and then leaving with a long, slow, receding hiss, and then more waves to punch lines she didn’t hear because, on the bed, she was trying to remember and to reconstruct her own family tableau: father, mother, brother, the house, Colonial, the fat maple trees out front …

 … she woke to the sound of Rake snoring and got up and went to the bathroom to pee and sat on the seat and stared at her knees, which were ruddy and brushed and scabbed. Then she went back into the bedroom and went to the window and lifted a blind and stared out at the parking lot. Two cars. Their own and an old G.T.O. grainy, sandpapery in the moonlight, and the playground, the spaceship monkey bars, the swing with the rotting seat, cordoned off with chain link. She watched a police cruiser, old-style, with a single dome, deliberately slow, blink, turn in, and sit.

Rake, she whispered. He rolled over beneath the sheets and snored again and seemed to settle even deeper into sleep. The room stank. The pills glinted.