Hystopia: A Novel (9 page)

If I told you what I’m thinking it would make your head explode, you old coot. Fingering your medals as if they meant something when they don’t even mean a thing to you
, Singleton thought.

“Go out into the world and let your mind go where it has to go,” Klein said.

“Yes, sir.”

“And you might want to trim those sideburns. They’re not regulation. Clean faces, clean hearts, is what they say. Mental health is our business. Or, rather, mental freedom is our business. Pax Americana, son,” he said, guiding him to the door.

“Sir?”

“Pax Americana begins at home, son.”

*   *   *

“I’m a million miles from headquarters,” she murmured, lying back in the moss and opening herself, it seemed, to his scrutiny, allowing him to observe that she was beautiful in a tense way. Her legs had a slight knock-kneed bend in just the right place. They were smoking a joint down by the old canal, on a spot across from the towpath. She’d taken off her work clothes in the car, ordering him (in a new voice, brusque) not to look while she slid her skirt off and wiggled into a pair of jean shorts. Now, on the grass, she seemed to be offering him a good, long look. He explained that he was sure—he touched his head—that the madman in his mind had some relation to the madman’s target, something like that, and that he had a running theory that all agents, at least enfolded, treated ones, must be thinking the same thing, because they’re burdened with the facts that they can’t remember and have to reach out to stories and make them their own.

He paused and looked out across the canal. The trees on the other side were deep green, quivering slightly in the breeze, and beyond them the sky was milky with heat. Weedy brambles rose sharply from the dark water—thick as tar—and the line between the two colors looked bluish brown. “We reach out to stories and can’t help but make them our own. I’m thinking that’s what they like about us. We can be used that way. They tap our desire to connect, and of course the desire comes from the fact that if we hit a connection, if we link to someone who’s in our Causal Events Package, we can start tweezing out the truth.”

As she stood, reaching back to band her hair, pulling her elbows up, tilting her head, she again seemed astonishingly beautiful to him in an edgy, new way. The attraction seemed mutual and strong and for a few seconds as he looked into her eyes—blue washed away by sunlight, speculative, searching his face for something—he felt a deep sense of danger. She turned from him suddenly, said something about needing to move, and led him down the towpath, striding quickly, past backyards cluttered with riot wreckage. The burn had reached the far side of the canal, an open vista of ash and char reclaimed, along the edge of the water, by green brush. Eventually, to their left, a neighborhood of spared bungalows appeared, ragged but structurally sound, with yards full of Queen Anne’s lace and, from one house, a faint pulse of music.

Wendy stopped and looked at the house and began to explain that she loved the Stones and hated the Beatles because the Beatles were what you get when you’re enfolded, treated with Trip, a song with just a formation built around old, unknown memories; whereas (she said “whereas”) the Stones are what you get when you allow it all to play out, when you come back fucked up. He resisted the urge to disagree, to say that the lads were slightly boring but seemed to be channeling trauma in their own way, working through the misery of their Liverpool boyhoods, the ration-ticket bleakness of a postwar landscape not that different from this one. It was too early for a petty squabble about rock bands, or anything that might hint at future arguments to come.

She was listening to the music, dancing slightly, swinging her hips, lean, not skinny, but slim. There was something wiry in the way she moved, and it thrilled him. She began to dance go-go style, smiling at him in a coy way at first, and then twisting her arms over her head and closing her eyes. He looked around and lit a cigarette. Then he motioned to a split-rail fence and told her to sit down on it. “Sit on the fence,” he said. “I want to see you sit on that fence.”

She gave him a look and called him a control freak and then smiled and went over and sat down. The yard behind her, with the Queen Anne’s lace and weeds and the house in the backdrop, seemed elemental and part of a package: Wendy sitting on a fence. That’s how it seemed to work. They’d said, You’ll find yourself weirding out about the way you see things, and you’ll be aware not only of your enfolded material, the sensation of it in your head but also the blind spot you have, the blank area.

He admitted that he was feeling turned on, seeing her sit there.

“As a Psych Corps member I have an obligation to remind you of the Credo,” she said. She got up and took his hand and led him back to the towpath.

“Fuck the Credo.”

He walked to the edge of the canal and looked down into the water. All of the creosote and tar had washed into it, along with whatever the mills had added, and it moved sluggishly along the weeds. It was easy, looking at it, to imagine that in a million years the fossils of small mammals and fuckups like himself would be chiseled from the ossified mass of gunk.

He placed his palms together and extended his elbows, a diving gesture.

“Once you’re in that you never get out,” she said. There was an edge around her words, a fear he hadn’t heard before.

“You don’t think I’d do it?”

“I hope you wouldn’t do it,” she said.

“I’d do it, but life is looking up and I’m trying to live the Psych Corps Credo.”

“I love a man who recites the Credo in his sleep,” she said, kissing him.

“You sounded, for just a second, like a hippie.”

“I’ve never been enfolded, so I can’t sound like pre-enfoldment,” she said.

“You can take the hippie out of the man, via enfolding, but you can’t take the wayward out, or the deeper tendencies.”

“Don’t quote me that shit. Not now.”

*   *   *

Later they drove to the beach and laid out their towels and smoked, looking out at Lake Huron, pollution levels down slightly but still a queer gloss over the surface, a fresh glaze of rainwater over the tension and a few sad birds in the resin, unable to pull free, yanking their wings. On the transistor radio (Nothing like transistor on sand, Singleton thought) a reporter was explaining that Kennedy was on one of his so-called wave-by swings, this time in South Bend, weighing his popularity and the love of the public against the evil elements out there, doing his
PT 109
thing, except in a limo instead of a boat.

“You can ask me more about Klein if you want,” Singleton said. “You can say something like, What’s Klein doing? Something along those lines.”

“You could stop directing me to ask you certain questions,” she said. She leaned back and put her face to the sun. “What’s Klein doing, something along those lines?” she said, hunching over to form a windbreak, rolling another joint with her long fingers, pressing the papers expertly.

“He puffs his chest out,” Singleton said. “Fingers his medals and pretends he’s in charge. It’s starting to make me sick, to tell you the truth. All I’m hearing now is repeated information, modulation this, formations that.”

She shrugged, sighed, looked away down the beach. “I think he’s doing the right thing, going about his life as if it wasn’t threatened, upholding democracy and the like,” she said.

“Who, Klein?”

“I’m talking about Kennedy,” she said.

“I’m not going to get into a Kennedy drive-and-wave debate with you, baby, not when I’m this stoned. But you and I both know he’s got a death wish that has a lot to do with his back condition. All that pain is an inducement to push the envelope. Take it from someone who knows. I like to imagine I was bivouacked out of Nam, looking down at the canopy, saying, ‘I’m flying, man, I’m flying and this is cool, groovy, groovy.’ That kind of thing.”

He took another deep toke and then a short one and held it, holding, holding.

He passed the joint and watched as she nimbly took a hit, letting the smoke trickle.

“I lost my train of thought,” she said.

“I never had a train. Who wants a train when you can have this shit?”

They lay in the sand for a while and he looked at her through the glare, over the top of his arm, and tried to imagine the kind of letters they would’ve written back and forth, from the war on his side to the States on her side. Her letters would’ve been chatty, full of nursing stories, patients who were demanding in one way or another, doctors with their know-it-all attitudes, full of authority, the long, lonely night shifts at the desk, sorting files, the small minutiae of everyday life; his would be filled with urgency, written in a crabby longhand, giving faint details and avoiding the truth as much as possible.

*   *   *

When a storm began brewing to the west, a dark line over the parking lot, they ran to the car and drove a few miles down to the next beach, concrete car bumpers and spaces delineated by faded yellow lines, reminders of a better era when crowds had picnicked and barbecued and made use of the grills and the quaint stone hut and the fact that the state of Michigan had the funds to keep the water pump working. A sense of common destiny that had been lost in the last few years. They parked in a far corner and watched long curtains of rain steaming when they hit the hot asphalt. The sky darkened while lightning stabbed at the lake, sending up spumes of fire. Even before they started kissing it seemed like a sure thing that they’d have visionary sex, that a memory would surface—two souls sealed in a car by the lake—and then they were kissing, and she was sliding down, unbuckling his belt, he felt her lips on his belly and there was a flash, a quick image along with the lightning
Klein with a pipe between his teeth, closing his lips and making the fish-suck and then opening them again
he lifted his hips and shifted his weight against the seat, her fingers worked the waistband, two seconds of quivering, empty air until her mouth—a faint brush of breath—was close enough to feel. He slid into the open space of it, her tongue rolling softly.
So this is
, her tongue seemed to say,
this is how it’s going to be.
She kept at it while another flash of lightning pulsed against his closed eyelids, leaving a purple blot, thunder shook the car and the blot disappeared,
Wendy on the fence, with the Queen Anne’s lace moving gently in the air, the smell of her herbal shampoo and the faint patchouli of her skin
, he felt her mouth and he filled it, filled and filled and slipped out as she lifted herself above him, taking his palms and putting them flat on her hips, a sensation of guidance
the tip nothing but the tip the tip just the tip of his cock
a last flicker of fire and then he came,
Rake’s face in black and white, a photograph on a file folder, mug-shot grimness and eyes furious, the paradox of being remote and captured at the same time
.

When they were finished, the desire to be dressed and warm seemed to be all that was left.

He turned on the heater and the windshield wipers, the lake outside a fury of dark chop.

“I unfolded for a second again, I think.”

She was silent.

“You’re supposed to ask what I saw,” he said, but she didn’t ask. He buckled his belt while she fiddled with the radio dial, trying to find a signal strong enough to cut through the static, and he thought of Rake’s photograph in the vision, the look on his face, a look he recognized, he thought (though he couldn’t be sure), one Marine to another just before a snafu. Or maybe, he thought, kissing Wendy and reaching into the glove box to get a fresh joint—an apocalypse between each swipe of the wiper blades, fire waves rolling in toward shore, on the horizon bolts of lightning and small geysers rising, falling, devoured by immolation—maybe it was an orgasmic look. Blank and blissful. Tight, angry, happy. Filled to the brim but still wanting.

“It’s beyond weird out there,” Wendy was saying. “We’re living where water burns.”

“Where souls are enfolded,” he said.

“And then unfold,” she said, taking a deep hit.

“Unions are busted. Deals are made.”

“Deaths are avenged.”

“The good ones.”

“The ones that need to be,” she said, taking another hit.

STRANGE HOUSE

Meg woke in a strange room, splintery, beaverboard walls, an old side table with a jug of water, a straight-backed chair with an embroidered cushion, a lamp with a tattered shade. She lay in bed and tried to orient herself, trying to remember. The shooting on the highway. The shooting in Elk Rapids. The farmhouse on the edge of nowhere, another shooting, the noise of the car engine and the endless unwinding of the road all slightly blurry in a way that told her time wasn’t at a standstill, exactly. The press of a tree branch against her arches as she stood in a tree looking down at a window. The weirdly soft pop pop of gunfire through window glass. The snort-sniff of Rake clearing gunk from his throat before launching into another soliloquy about the nature of his own violent tendencies.

A man with a big moon face came into the bedroom, pulled the shade, and asked again and again if she was awake until she said she was awake. He had a beard and wore a leather vest over a bare chest, hair thick and curly. He went back to the window and made a comment about the big Gitchi Gumi and then came back to her and sat on the bed and asked if she was hungry.

She clutched the sheet against her chin and looked up at him. He looked kindly, somehow, but mean, too. She waited until he spoke again. He said she had nothing to fear and that he wasn’t there to hurt her or anything like that. He said he’d leave her to get dressed and suggested that she go to the window to take a look, that she’d be able to see a bit of the water through the trees at this time of the morning, with the light, and then he went out and closed the door gently and she got dressed and, smelling bacon and eggs, went down a narrow, steep stairway and found the kitchen.

An old lady in a calico apron was tending the stove, and the burly man was at the table eating. He asked her to join him, said it gently, and she did.