Hystopia: A Novel (19 page)

g regressive in my approach to this part of my story? Yes. Is there any other way to get at it? No. You see, only through posing concise questions to myself—walking point; taking the flack, trying to sleep through a shelling—could I find the story, or at least part of it. My own, that is. Did I love this girl, Meg Allen, one summer? I suppose you might say I did. I mean, what is love but a retrospective bliss seen from afar—even the next day, or the next second. I loved her and she loved me. I went AWOL and we headed to California. Was she seventeen at the time, a girl whose mother drank herself into afternoon fits, if she drank, or shook with delirium if she didn’t? Did she have the finger marks of a slap on her cheek as she stood barefoot in my doorway? Was she immediately enamored by the figure I cut—striking, I like to think, with my long black hair, my ragged old leather vest with fringe? I’d say yes to all of the above. Did this girl—and the vision I had of her, a vision that shape-shifted as my second tour of duty went into its fifth month, after I’d seen friends killed—become something more, in my mind? She most certainly did. What did she become? She became nothing less than an angelic vision from my past that represented, I like to think, some potential future, frozen in time, unchanged and still seventeen (or eighteen) upon my return to the States—maybe nineteen. But let me stop here. The dead don’t speak. For Christ’s sake, the dead don’t riff on the living. The dead are silent and entangled in the past. The dead, with me as an exception, can’t say a word. Anything said by them is the pure fiction of the living and nothing more. For the sake of illumination, to draw some strings together, to fill in some blanks, because if I don’t do it, alive or dead, who will? Let’s just say I was dreaming this up on point, or riding shotgun, during the weary patrols, exhausted from the fear involved. Just say I made all this up in my own manner, foreshadowing, tightening the neck of the sack that would close in upon me eventually. In that light, let me regress, floating from one possibility to another, Ebenezer Scrooge–style. Early on, when we were on patrol, I imagined it: the state of Michigan itself, in the shape of a mitten, and the world back home as it would be upon my death; but like I said that’s about it, terminus; the only way into me is through the end point and then through whatever visions I might or might not have had before that point—all projection, all outward yearning, the hope and gist of the imagination, also known, in common parlance, as the dream. That’s what love is, as far as I can see, an outward forward projection of the self, and that’s what we had those few weeks that summer; just pure dreaminess. Her sweet little body—and let me tell you it was sweet and young, youthful, all downy skin, fine hairs and that never-been-touched tingle, charged and electric.

But let me reiterate. The dead can’t speak.

All this before the end. All this with the rot in my crotch. The imaginings that come with fear. The step-by-step movement through the jungle. What else could we do to fill the time? But the thing is, and here I might digress a little bit, we really didn’t dream when we were out there; one didn’t dream on point. Too much to look for. You were charged up, fired into an acute and exhaustive attentiveness to the things around you, ears perked up, eyes as wide as you could get them, just looking for a hint, a sign, a glint of flash in the treetops, a trip wire at the feet. You began to find a way intuitively; you trusted the sense that you had of seeing what was before you, which was why, when we were ordered to go down the road by the new guy, the one who came in on his West Point high horse, Singleton said no fucking way. We’re not going to obey that order, send us home, lock us up, whatever you want, man, but we’re not going down the road.

That’s how we found ourselves in the place I met my death.

All this is a cop-out. What I mean is I can’t speak from this vantage, not honestly, and not without sifting it all through the retrospection of someone who is, or might be, as I said, gone. That terminal point came and went. That’s what death is. You’re taken away and a point is made—a pinpoint of antimatter, if there is such a thing—until people forget you (I mean really forget) and your life as it was dissipates and evaporates, and then it becomes more of a fuzzy remnant of that terminal moment, and then eventually it’s gone, a mossy tombstone, if you’re lucky, that someone clears the weeds away to read the words of it, and then later not even that; just an overgrown field outside of Benton Harbor, Michigan, in my case—and then, of course, nothing. Yet theoretically that terminal point is still there. Anyway, the cop-out is that I bring myself up in the first place. After all, I’m gone. Trapped in that moment. That’s how I imagine it—not on point, or even in the middle—the safe spot; the safest spot on recon, in the middle where you’re not at the end or at the beginning but hunched down in a hole calling in coordinates for an air strike—I’ll be this terminal memory for a while, as hard and cold as anything in your mind, and then it’ll get subsumed by the rest of your life until it’s smeared out and bloblike, if even that, and then it’ll be nothing much to you, a sliver of pain you carried through your life from one place to the other. All I could do—weary, humping my weight in shit on my shoulders, my feet caved in, the itch of jungle beyond annoying—was imagine that point, make it up, and see what might transpire as I tried to imagine it. We paused and stopped to catch our breath in the middle of the jungle. How many clicks outside Hue? I couldn’t tell you. That battle was just a memory of streets. A real vintage Second World War street fight; we’d created what we could in the way of language around it, taking sips from the end of a rifle, good long hits of the best dope we could fine, passing the peace pipe, until it was nothing but a tangle: Frank praying over the bodies until his hips were tired from genuflecting; he’d lean over and say his prayer and then come up hollow-eyed and spiritless and say, Fuck God, fuck him into the ground. I’d like to see him come down and kiss my ass, I would. Where’s Jesus when you need him? he’d say. I’d take his cloak or shawl and yank it and say, Save us, and he’d give me his shit and I’d say, Don’t fuck with me, man, just save me, and he’d say, Do you believe, and I’d say, No, man, and he’d say, How much don’t you believe, and I’d say, Not at all, not much at all, not even much, not even at all, and he’d smite me with his jagged bolt of energy, man, and the fucker would fry us all with that bolt of energy he would shoot out, and then Frank would lean over and spew vomit and cry with shame and collect himself, going into the hermitage of his tent or foxhole tarp, and then he’d come out cleaned up, refreshed, ready to disbelieve again, because he was circular that way, and he’d start the routine over again and did so until that day when Deek Johanson got zipped—he was fresh meat, most certainly, but not that fresh, a month in, and he and Frank were buddies, and when he got to Deek he gave it all he got, did his cross and prayed, and then came up with his gun firing into the woods, drawing more fire, that fucker, until we were pinned down for a night because of his faith—before that we’d been slithery and quiet until Deek took a phantom shot, out of the blue, just some gook popping them randomly to keep us awake; took it by sheer chance in the head, a skull opened like a hardboiled egg in a cup (not the first one, I might add), so that what Frank was praying to was a skull spilling the cauliflower brain matter in the moonlight; did I mention it was moonlit that night, all glorious bright, so that movements could be easily detected? Everything in that hallowed colorless light, visible in texture and quality but not with colors; senseless in a way but completely sensible. The fire that Frank drew lasted for what seemed like an hour and sent us scrambling to reposition. Phantom gooks who could pass through trees. Amid all of it Frank crab-walked and then did a belly crawl back to us and, while we yelled at him to get fucking moving, he curled up, still in the fire zone, and buried his hands in his face and did that snort-gag-cry—the one a guy does when his buddy is killed, the one I’d do in the morning, at dawn light, when I lost Kingston, my buddy; the one they’d do for me—I could only imagine—when, in Hue, I was offed in the big fire bloom of misplaced napalm. (Don’t get me wrong; not that I could foresee that exactly. I’ll leave the foreseeing to Eugene Allen. I’ll let him conjure my life.) The napalm rounds came in halfheartedly, adrift on indeterminate axes, tumbling to the earth without the precision of a finned bomb; no careful target at hand; they just fell down from the sky tossed like coins, one after another, to spill fire into rectangular zones of death and destruction and so on. There was an arrangement to the fire they produced, but it came only after the fire raged, one bomb into another, to form a mass that could and would be driven into form by the wind, if there was some wind, Vietnam wind.

What else could you do in a firefight but imagine the possibilities at hand, just ahead?

Did I imagine my fate was just ahead of me? You bet I did. Did I stand there at dawn, a Nam dawn creeping across our weary faces and fleshing out the colors in the jungle, and imagine my death? You bet. Because what else could we do between firefights but try to foresee the possibilities at hand, all of them, including our own deaths? What else could we do? Along with imagining what it would be like to take you, Meg, into my arms and to nuzzle up against your warm sweet neck, to take your earlobe in my mouth.

*   *   *

Hank led her to the shore and went and got a towel from his ruck and dried her. Then he held her from behind as she leaned back into his arms. Then told her to rest and went for cigarettes. The beach seemed emptier than before, beneath the smoky white sky. It was a late spring, early summer beach with dark stones and black sand before a vast body of water, with a lone young woman hunching in a towel. Hank wanted to lift her out of her solitude, but he knew that he couldn’t. His duty was to continue to protect her from Rake. It was that simple. He lifted his head, blew out smoke, and sniffed the air. The wind was coming down from the Canadian Shield and he could catch the scent of the boreal forest, the long, lonely, isolated strands of untouched forest, the last remaining purity. He had things he wanted to say, things that might make her feel better. He’d tell her that she reminded him of a balsam willow. It wouldn’t mean much to her, but it would mean something to him. He felt limited in his ability to make metaphors beyond trees. He’d say a balsam willow. They make good smoke, they have uses if you know what they are. He’d tell her that maybe she was like a sandbar willow, because they were slightly forsaken, no board feet in the species, but they had good uses, made sweet smoke, great charcoal from the bark. Or maybe he’d go with the crack willow, because it was for baskets, for weaving, and even, if you worked the fibers the right way, pounded them down, for blankets.

When he got back to her she was crying into her open hands. She looked up and he could see in her gaze—the firmness of it—that she had unfolded something and that something had changed in her. She stood up and pulled him into an embrace. She felt firmer, stronger, and when she looked at him again her mouth was also set in a different way, not grim, not slack with sadness, but firm.

That felt good, she said. That felt really, really good. Someone spoke to me, and I know who he was and I think I understood most of what he was saying. Rake was part of it, and I’ll explain it if I can, once I figure it out. I was part of something in the past—obviously—and it’s up here, she said, touching her head. Her hair was tangled and beautiful, and the gooseflesh on her neck seemed to bring out the hidden paleness of her skin. A breeze was picking up now, and they just stood holding each other. Yes, a tree was calling to him from far up in Canada. He could taste the yellow pollen along with the dry residue of the shore. It wasn’t that he knew exactly what she was going to say or do. She’d come out of the water, walking over the hard stones, bracing herself against the cold. It would not be enough to say she had awoken from the dream or terror that she had been moving through. There was more to it than that. When they finally let go of each other she was smiling, the freckles on her face around her eyes and on her cheeks, and he was smiling, too. Released from the embrace, she looked radiant, lovely, as perfect as anything nature had ever cooked up.

THE BLUE PILL KICKS

It was gonna happen, man. It was gonna happen because he was out there, testing the odds, making public appearances, driving around in an open limo, with Jackie at his side, doing the hand-wave, the little movement, halfhearted, just a flick of the wrist, all slo-mo, the way the motorcade moved—with the cops on choppers out front, clearing the way, checking the crowd for a sign of disgruntled vets, or Black Flag members in their jackets and colors; the president with his bright white smile, his shoulder sagging on the side where he had been hit the first time, a hunk missing, the bone gone. In retrospect, looking back—if they ever had time—they’d remember the tension in the air that day, the sky over Flint blazing with heat. When he got to her apartment, after hearing the news from someone in the Corps headquarters lobby, she was in the doorway waiting.

“I got the news and left right away. You must’ve been stuck in a meeting. They’re saying the shot might’ve killed him this time,” she said, pulling him into the living room. Her face was flushed from crying, but her eyes were angry, not sad, and as they held each other she kept saying, “Men kill fucking men.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Yeah, it’s that simple now. Without something to enfold there’s no enfolding. Men go out and make sure they have something to treat.”

Outside, in the streets, there were shouts. The sound of breaking glass, far off. The phrase “national mourning” on the television, something about a dark day in a tone that seemed unbecoming in relation to the figure on the screen, the great Walter Cronkite, father of all authority, the most trusted man in America, as he took off his glasses, held them to the side, stared watery-eyed into the camera and, with his voice cracking, made the announcement that Kennedy had been shot again not far from Springfield, Lincoln’s birthplace.