Hystopia: A Novel (20 page)

“We can’t say we didn’t see it coming,” Singleton said. He went to the window and looked out. Below, a few people milled. Someone carried a bouquet of flowers, bright white, and someone else was placing another bouquet onto the edge of the ash heap. “We can’t say we’re horrifically sad.”

“Well, I’m horrifically sad. And I want to do something about it,” she said.

“He threw men into the fire and then felt guilty and had to face fear himself,” Singleton said. He went into the kitchen, got a beer, checked the freezer for the pills and decided not to take them out—not yet, not until they’d been through some kind of tense deliberation, because the pills, whatever they were, seemed destined to be a point of contention. Back in the living room, she was in front of the television set, listening attentively.

“OK, I am sad,” he said. It seemed like the right thing to say. If he didn’t say it, he was one more soul dead to history. The buzz in his ears sang from one side of his head to the other. He went to the window and looked down and the street was now empty. The flowers, even brighter now, in the fading twilight, were piled on the edge of the heap. A few people leaned from their windows, looking out. When he turned she was gone, and he heard the freezer door open and shut, and when she came out she had the bag in her hands and was holding it out like an offering, or something tainted.

Twenty minutes later they lay in bed. He fingered the pills. They had talked it out, the sense that Kennedy had simply pushed it too far, the weird day, the way the streets had felt before the news came in, the tension in the air that they knew came only out of retrospect. It didn’t seem to matter. She reached over and opened the drawer to her night table and took out a photograph, an old photo of the Zomboid, and held it up for him to examine: same sloppy smile, same long blond hair, but an eager and youthful face. He was standing straight and tall with his arm around Wendy. Does it matter if I see this and know what happened later; I mean, am I seeing what was or what was in relation to what happened? (She didn’t say that, not exactly. In getting the photograph out, it seemed to be said. The photo was saying it.) The day had been weird, and maybe looking back, knowing that Kennedy would be shot is what made it weird, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t weird, she explained, and he agreed, and they kissed. A deal was being sealed, he thought. From now on, this moment would be held between them, forever, even if they didn’t stay together. There was a sense of intense deliberation, he thought. It was a pre-drug thing. It was what you felt when you were about to pop a mystery pill.

She put the photo back in the drawer and rolled over on the bed and took one of the pills from him and held it to her lips. Walter was still speaking on the television, his voice firm and resolute, talking about the need for calm, for a sense of national unity. Smoke drifted in from the window, and now and then there was, far off, the crackle of gunfire and sirens across the night. He held one of the pills to his own lips. The apartment seemed grimy and dank. He could feel the history of the place seeping through the cracked plaster, the old, worn-out millworkers who had come back to the rooms deranged from their suffering, broken-backed men who had worked to earn money to get out of this dump, for a future they might never see. It went unspoken between them, this sense of a shared past. They had both had fathers who worked the assembly lines.

“Here’s to those who worked the lines,” he said. “To our fathers and their fathers. To our mothers, too,” he said, and then they counted to three and took the pills at the same time and sat in silence waiting for the kick. It was the pre-trip silence, the ticking of time measured in the potential of the high that would be coming, and he held her hand and twisted her fingers and stared forward into the darkening room while she did the same, and when, after five minutes, nothing happened, he said, Nothing, and she said, Nothing at all, not even a buzz, and they agreed that they had been duped, that Frank wasn’t Frank.

The pills kicked as a field reporter outside some Illinois emergency room with his collar up around his trench coat, a drizzling rain collecting in droplets on his brow, claimed on the TV that Kennedy was dead. Side by side, like two teenage kids, they kissed each other and felt the immensity of the new situation, the taste of it, the long stretch of nerves to the surface of fingers and leg. He felt hard against the empty air. He could feel her tongue and her fingers, and at the same time he wasn’t there at all, feeling nothing except the charge of energy from the pill, and then she was whispering nonsense to him, right into the buzz. She got on top of him—he was lifting, pushing his palms to receive her weight, and then there was a zero-gravity sensation, her motion matching his motion on what seemed to be totally equal terms. (His cock searched the wetness for a space of nothingness where love seemed to reside—and his mind, oh Jesus Christ, his mind was in a glorious sustained suspension, no thought, nothing but a blank.) She slid away to one side and he rolled with her and got behind her with his hands holding on, as if holding the gunwales of a rocking boat, and then, as she tossed her head and hair, he began to come and to see the vision, and to smell a familiar smell, ashen and chalky, limestone and mortar; he was inside the vision and the vision was of a man, a soldier named Billy-T, with a radiophone to his mouth, calling in coordinates, his voice lisping as he shouted the numbers, and the man named Rake (again), his face intense, and then the flash of heat and fire and a far-off scream and the word
Hue
, and from Wendy a coo that sounded like water over stones.

After a while, she said, fearfully, “Oh, God, God, I hope that wasn’t too much, too far.”

“Vision not complete but vision beautiful, man, beautiful. Rake and a man named Billy-T and fieldphone and flame. A battle. In Hue, for sure. He called in an air strike and it hit too close. A ball of fire and then a fizzle. A fizzle out.”

“I’d like to do it again.”

“But I can’t,” he said. He located an ability to reason inside his high, a rip current countering the tidal pull of the drug. (Later, when he went back and tried to imagine how it had felt on the blue pill, he found himself thinking of the easy, persistent flow of water, following the easiest path.) He had an awareness of the fuzzball of lost memory smoothed and spread from ear to ear. He was still hard. If they did it again it would be even better. He’d go double and unfold the unfolded until a chain reaction began. Already he could see the blue flashes in the pleasure of touching her neck—small sparkles out of his fingers. She was saying she was sorry, sorry. He heaved himself up out of bed, pushing through the high, and then she was behind him, kneading his shoulders. They were both in a zone of mutual pleasure beyond anything they had felt before, but it dissipated almost as quickly as it had arrived, with a kind of pop of the eardrums and a quick return to reality: the smelly room in a cheap boardinghouse and, outside, the firecracker snap of gunfire, the spiral of sirens, and the cellophane crackle of fire.

THE PLAN

It’ll be even harder now that you have a better sense of your real self, now that you have some sense of your past. Harder to go back and act like Old Meg, because I’m seeing you right now and what I’m seeing isn’t just New Meg but a new New Meg, he was saying, poking the fire. They had hiked a few miles along a footpath through the pine needles and a grove of trees planted in a neat formation, with the light shafting through the rows. On the beach, when she had cried in her hands, he had resisted the urge to question. When she looked up, Hank knew, just seeing her face, her teary eyes, that she had had a vision, caught sight of something that had been enfolded in her, the source of her trauma, and he could see it in the way she was walking, the shift of her gait, her toes pointed differently—with more assurance, he thought, a nimbleness on the trail, a sense of how to walk in the woods. The waves had seemed indrawn when he glanced back one last time, a looming quality in relation to the ones that hit the shore, shoving the stones in with a roar.

When a tree is damaged it forms a knot. You’ll do the same, he told her. Not the old adage about a broken bone being stronger, but something different than that. Up the path, she led the way, as if they had a plan, but they’d didn’t. Behind them clouds were gathering in the west and the wind was rising and the undersides of leaves were showing. The canopy overhead was shuddering, making long beautiful sighs, lifting and falling. She led the way to their old campfire—dead, a blank eye of coals surrounded by stones—and the flattened spot where the tent had been and, without a word, she began to roll out the tarp.

We’ll stay here tonight and then we’ll head back, he said. Rake’s going to return soon.

He was shaking out the canvas, sweeping it clean with his palm, and he stopped and watched as she got a tent stake out of the canvas bag and held it the way you’d hold a knife.

Back on the beach, she said, I became aware of the sound of a wave. Did you hear it, too?

I’m sure I did, he said. Her statement was strange but not that unusual. Her senses would be improved with each unfolding, until, if she went too far, she went over some edge into an acuteness that was beyond normal. Then she’d be raging around like Rake, seeing portents and signs in the way a dog shook his leg when he pissed, of the angle of a doorjamb, or whatever … it didn’t really matter, he thought, looking at her.

Well, I mean I was aware of the sound it made, coming in low in a shush from one side and then sliding to the other.

They built the fire together, gathering wood and piling it neatly. He showed her the best way to get the kindling, small curls of bark, not too much to hurt the tree. It has a desire to burn because the tree has a desire to help, is the way I see it, he said.

You’re weird, she said. I mean you’re really, really weird.

You’re getting better, he said. That’s a good sign, hearing you say that.

So you’re not going to deny it?

What you have with me is a man who has given himself the treatment but who was probably weird before he had it. Which is to say, before I treated myself I was still able to smell trees and to lumber run with the best of them, but I was too busy with violence of one kind or another to properly attend to my obligation to nature herself. I hate to put it that way, but that’s the way I put it.

They boiled some water and cooked pasta and he found a can of sauce in his bag and pulled it out and they heated it. When they were finished eating, they waded through the brambles down to the stream and cleaned the pot and plates.

This used to be a famous fly-fishing river, he said. No one really fished in it, but a writer used it in a story and made it into something it wasn’t, so for a few years people would come and give it a try, but it was too brambly, too rough, and you couldn’t cast far enough without getting snagged unless you knew the exact right spot.

He resisted mentioning the balsam willow until later that night, when they were holding each other, drinking whiskey, watching the fire and listening to the flames. Then he told her—clearing his throat, taking a deep gulp of whiskey—that he had wanted to say it back on the beach, right after she came out of the water, that she was like a balsam willow, or maybe a sandbar willow, or better yet, a tree that you can’t even find here in Michigan, but the guys—the grunts, or whatever you want to call them—have in Nam a tree called
sao den
, or better, its nickname, “black star,” because that’s a tree that somehow resists termites, he said.

What are you saying? she said.

I’m just saying you’re going to be strong enough to resist, Rake. You know it now more than before. It’s going to be a very fine line—the act you’ll have to perform when we get back there.

You’re really weird, she said again.

Maybe I am. But I’m not the first. In India, some folks marry trees. They go through a ceremony and hitch for life. Anyway, you seeing me as weird only means you’re getting better.

If seeing that you’re weird means I’m better, then I’m much better, she said. Then she began to talk about the vision. Her voice was a whisper. She said she’d heard a young man speaking, and as soon as she heard him speaking she saw his face. He’d been in Nam.

He leaned back and waited for her to say more. She spoke now clearly, with assurance and in a voice that was, he thought, much more musical. The guy in her vision was someone she had been in love with—she left that vague—and he had gone to fight. Something had happened and Rake had been involved.

Rake was involved, he repeated.

Rake in my unfolded vision, yes.

So this guy must’ve been with Rake, over in Nam. Maybe Rake knows that so he goes into the Grid and gets you and brings you out. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do with you, but he knows you have a connection with something in his past, with some little residual shred of honor he still feels, or a sense of mission. If he knew exactly what it was he would’ve dunked you in ice, or worse, unless he’s done worse and I don’t know about it. Maybe there’s another factor involved, something else, a promise to somebody he made over there that he has to fulfill. He might not even know because when they tried to treat him they just doubled his trauma and made it so intense.

Rake knows something, she said. The wind was lifting again and, far off, thunder. She was beginning to weep.

The rumor, he thought, was that if you unfold a little bit, the right amount, you could take what you saw and work back from it and very carefully—without all of the trauma coming at once in a rush that would make you sick again—tweeze it out, gently, the way you’d peel an onion, or remove a splinter. If you want to live a life that is stable and decent and good, you maybe go in and let a little bit come and then do it only that once and that’s it.

Don’t say any more, he said gently. He had his arm around her shoulder and felt her easing against him. He would have to resist all he could not to touch her any more than this, he thought.

Later, as they lay in the tent listening to the rain, he explained that they needed storms to cull the dead growth but also to sway them so they’d dig deeper with roots. He explained that nothing was meaningless when it came to trees because they were too smart to play games; they had a resolve that came from a blunt, brutal, natural being. That’s what I am, Meg. You’ll see that more and more as you see more and more, he said, and she put her finger to his lips and whispered shut up and kissed him gently.