Hystopia: A Novel (6 page)

Klein’s bearing had changed little in the last few weeks. He leaned forward and seemed to aim his words at a target down-range. He spoke to his own sense of himself as it related to his own history. He spoke in broad strokes and then tightened—with a slight vibrato—to the details of the case.

“We think Rake has a history of finding recently treated patients and kidnapping them. We’ve already covered that.” Klein reached out to align the pipes on his rack again, fingering the bowls. “She was released into the Grid with a tacking band and he somehow knew she was coming out of treatment, knew she’d be freshly enfolded, and he showed up there—most likely hiked his way in—around day two after her arrival. He must’ve found his way to a list. The lists are going on the black market, and you know, well, we’ve been through all of this but it won’t hurt to repeat it. You might hear something that triggers an idea, Singleton.” (Klein lifted a pipe from the rack—an absurdly long meerschaum, broken in, tobacco colored—and twiddled it between his fingers. His mouth puckered and he sucked the stem and then put it back and took another pipe, holding it up, explaining that it was a Dublin, beautiful bird’s-eye briar. Then he fixed it, packing, poking, lighting, puffing.) “Her record—I mean the enfolded material—is officially sealed to us, of course. But what we do know is that she was fixed and released with tag.”

“Yes, sir, tagged.”

“No, not tagged.
With
tag.”

“Yes, sir. With tag.”

Klein stood up again and moved to the window. Overhead, the building thrummed. Files were held somewhere off facility, locked away, bending against clips, rubber banded and color coded. His own was out there somewhere, Singleton thought, stored in some secure location, loaded with the facts and figures and the basic stage directions of what had to be replicated—a mass shooting, a booby trap, he didn’t really know anymore—during the enfold, reenacted into memory with the help of the go-to drug, Tripizoid, and doubled back on itself hopefully forever. One peek in a file—it was said—and the memories would rush back and the fuzzball in the head would explode and you’d be back in the shit again. Treatment failed if the treated knew, or even suspected, that the treated material, the information, could be accessed again. Without a sense of privacy, reenactment failed. Klein went on about Rake’s noir tendencies and how it was clear in his actions, in the blood paintings, in the traces he left behind, that he had an inclination to instill his actions with drama, and that this was key—this might be
the
key.

“Brando,” Singleton said.

“Yes, Brando syndrome. I’ve thought of that. And Dean. Most of the dramatic types imagine themselves as inheritors of a great rebellious tradition and see no need to find a cause for their rebellions, so they lean toward Dean. Auden said, ‘It’s the insane will of the insane to suffer insanely.’ Something like that. It’s the same with actors. The line between what they’re presenting and their own inner life thins, if they’re weak of will, and the character they’re embodying becomes the body they’re presenting, something like that. When you consider the fact that Rake is a failed enfold
and
he has dramatic inclinations … I hope you’re listening to me, Singleton. We’re talking about grunt-level thinking, and to get to that you have to go to the random particulars, or the particulars that seem to map out the random. Like I said, it seems to me—and this is an example of trusting your gut—that it bears repeating that Rake came back from Vietnam and was enfolded in the early experimental station down in New Mexico, most likely at the Las Vegas facility, which I’m sure you know was considered substandard, although there wasn’t a standard at that time because it was the only facility. Not the gambling Nevada Vegas, but the New Mexico Vegas. Then he escaped to Amarillo and, as is typical for these men, made his way here to Michigan.”

“Yes, sir. Then we lost his trail,” Singleton told himself to say, and said. He had learned over the last two weeks to beat the dead horse, and keep beating it. Kick the can down the road. Fill up these training sessions with as much of his own verbiage as possible.

“Then he popped back in April, made his mark. Now every random killing up north, every psycho killing, every gang-related draw-and-quarter gets pinned on him whether he did it or not. We’ve got these dinky, small-town cops, these half-assed sheriff deputies flashing badges, talking to the liaison, who comes here with his pleas, his missives that imply that we must know where the guy is. Cops want to shoot him dead. Command wants to get him back in for another round of treatment.”

He plucked the string—a shooting in Petoskey on April 5 to a shooting near the Indiana border, an old man shot in the head on April 6.

“There was something in her file about a man named Billy Thompson, a.k.a. Billy-T, a vet who was killed in the war,” Singleton told himself to say, and said.

Klein went to his desk and opened a file. “Here it is: Billy Thompson, a.k.a. Billy-T, came back out of rotation for a stateside visit, fell in love with a girl—name redacted, but we can assume it’s Meg—took her away to California on a wild road trip, was AWOL for ten weeks and then got sent back with limited disciplinary charges on account of his sharpshooting abilities, or something. He was KIAed on his second rotation and his trail ended. Whereas her trail ends in this shit.” Klein pointed at the map, the pins, the strings.

“He came home in a bag,” Singleton said.

“A casket with a flag, as simple as that.”

“Then the girl cracked.”

“One can only assume. The file is sealed, of course.”

Klein closed the meeting with a handshake and a command to take the afternoon off. That was how it worked. You spent the morning in so-called briefings and then were given the afternoon to wander and think and absorb and, in the parlance of the Corps, go Internal.

*   *   *

The last of the industrial surge, cars partly formed, their frames and skeletal strutwork floating down the line, bucking slightly from the conveyor jerk, surrounded by the pop of pneumatic guns and bolt drivers as he punched the rivets quickly and then stood back, looking sadly down the line at the other men who seemed caught in a perplexity of automated movement, waiting for the next door to arrive. That’s what she looked like standing in the lobby—another incognito worker, another cog having a smoke after a hard shift on the line, gazing around as if looking for an opportune moment to escape, dressed in her regulation stretch pants and white blouse.

But her face brightened and she gave him a second glance and he knew they were going to join each other for lunch against regulations because that’s what they did—they went out onto the sidewalk after being briefed, zoned out on data, and then they let their instincts take over.

She glanced at him again and then went ahead through the revolving door while he stayed in the lobby and tried to look casual. A guard was staring at her as she stood with her face up to the sun, the noontime breeze ruffling her blouse. Singleton waited until two more agents had passed through the door before he went out into the glare.

“Hey,” she said. “We’d better stand here a second and pretend to have a friendly face-to-face, agent-to-agent greeting, and then I’ll go ahead and you follow.”

“How’s your case going?” he said. He liked her eyes. They were the blue of faded denim, and they didn’t look at all enfolded.

“Same old case,” she said.

The guard inside was still watching, for sure.

“Well, good to see you,” he said, and she shook his hand.

“Just give me a half-block lead,” she whispered, and then she turned on her heels and headed down the street. He lit a cigarette and checked his watch.

A half block ahead she turned and made a come-along gesture, and then turned and continued walking, all shift and sway with the breeze tousling her hair and her beautiful (fucking beautiful, he thought) hips and ass perfectly restricted in her regulation stretch pants. You either wore pencil skirts with a wide belt and a white blouse, or you wore the pants and a white blouse.

He liked the way she waited for him by the cash register, standing with her hip cocked and gesturing with her hands out, as if to say, Here you are, finally. It was a classic coffee joint, somehow saved from the ravages of the original riots; the kind of place that most Corps workers avoided not only because it was old-fashioned, nothing like the canteen with its plastic modern chairs, but also because it was full of vets or men who looked like vets, and if there was one place you could meet without being noticed by other members of the Corps it would be full of potential clients, of patients waiting to be treated, or already treated, leaning into the counter in their old fatigues and sweating nervously into their soup.

A waitress in a yellow skirt and a yellow blouse with white ruffles and a name tag led them to a booth by the window.

“Well, here we are, breaking regulations again,” he said.

“That seems to be true,” she said. “In theory we should exchange bullshit information, no mention of the cases beyond the fact that we’re both bored and tired, that kind of thing.” They raised menus and looked them over and went into an exchange that began with “By the way, where are you from?”

She was from Flint. He was from Benton Harbor, not far from Lake Michigan. She was a Lake Huron girl, whatever that meant, and he was a Lake Michigan guy. (They agreed that you were either one or the other.) Huron girls contended with topographical tedium and high pollution levels. Michigan guys—she insisted—stared wistfully out at what they imagined was Chicago’s coast. They both agreed that Lake Superior types were cold and stoic in a good way, clean and pure like the water.

There was a moment of tension after he mentioned, offhandedly, that he would really enjoy—that it might even help him with the Internal afternoon—getting his hands on some good drugs, nothing too serious or against regulations, just something to spark his thought systems, to ease up the tension of his repetitious briefings with a punitively old-school agent. She didn’t say anything, just raised her brows and touched her nose. She had a birthmark, hardly visible, a small red-purple mark, and the second button of her blouse had come undone (or perhaps she’d unbuttoned it) and he could make out the sprinkle of freckles leading down to the shadow of cleavage. He looked away out the window and then back. She took a sip of her drink and then suddenly threw her head down and let her hair spread over the table and then, just as quickly, tossed her head up, so that it fell back into place.

“Oh, God,” she said. “We’re already in trouble.”

“How so?” he said. But she widened her eyes as if with mischief. He could get lost in those eyes, he thought. He looked away out the window—a vet, or at least someone who looked like one, lurked on the other side of the street, running his hands though his hair, staring in their direction—and then back. Her eyes widened again, the same way, and a tingle moved up from his toes to his groin. The birthmark saved him, drawing his attention away, and then the coffee arrived.

“I’ve heard things about your agent in charge,” she said.

“What have you heard?”

“Nothing that isn’t probably common knowledge, or whatever. He’s a bozo, a nut job, an old-schooler with his head stuck in the past, a fake, a phony, blah blah blah. I’m sure if you asked anybody they’d say the same about mine. But I heard something else, some rumor, and it made me a little sorry for you. I mean I’m jumping here. I’m taking a leap. I don’t even know you. I’m not going to pry. I wouldn’t do that anyway. You know, regulations. I just heard the guy’s an asshole. That’s basically it. Might’ve been more stuff to it, but that’s the gist.”

“That’s the gist? That’s it?”

“There’s more gist, but then, again, you know, regulations.”

“I can’t say much without risk of compromising. You know what they say: It’s not what you know it’s what you know and don’t let others know you know, something like that. I have that wrong, don’t I? It’s more like: if you know something and know it, then why not know it without letting others know…”

“This is when I’m supposed to laugh,” she said. She scanned the restaurant.

“I can say this much and not compromise. He says he was a historian. I mean he’s been in battle and knows what he’s talking about at the field level. It’s a little unclear if he was actually some kind of historian, but he talks like one when he’s in a bombastic mode, and then he quotes poets, things like that. He hasn’t had the treatment, of course—you know, wrong war, too old.”

When the food arrived there was a sudden sense of seriousness. He watched her eat, holding her fork and knife in the European manner, cutting with swift strokes.

“We shouldn’t meet here,” he said. “It’s too close to the office.”

“I thought the number of vets eating here would make us pretty invisible.”

“You had wayward tendencies, didn’t you?”

“Not really. I mean I do now, clearly.” Again she gave him the look. This time she kept her eyes wide and smiled, reaching out to touch his arm, running a finger along his scar, leaving it there for a second.

A busboy came and cleared the dishes into a plastic bucket. Singleton examined a smear of grease on his placemat—a map of pre-riot Michigan with drawings of emblematic crops and products: blueberries in the thumb region; rolls of paper and stacks of lumber and, of course, automobiles. The smear was near a town called Big Rapids, on the southern edge of what some people were starting to call the Zone of Anarchy. (Look, son, Klein had said. I can’t stand the lingo. They’re just making the lingo up as they go along. In any case, you can’t have a bunch of low-level law enforcement officers operating like fascists—which to my mind isn’t always such a bad thing—and simply call it anarchy. It’s a misuse of a word that is prone to misuse. What we got here is a situation in which the general public is not sure who’s doing the protecting. Some are taking the law into their own hands while others are going mad trying to live up to this so-called Year of Hate thing, and then you have the drugs, of course, and the music.)