Hystopia: A Novel (7 page)

The waitress returned, tapping the pad with her pencil. Her face was smothered in makeup. Bright blue glittery half-moons spread over her lids and down part of her cheek; her eyelids struggled against globs that clung to her lashes. She’d been through the riots and come out the other end with the same job in the same coffee shop.

“I don’t suppose you’d like more coffee. That is, if you want to continue your secret meeting.” She pointed over her shoulder. An agent, or someone dressed like one, was eating at the counter.

“We’d better split,” Singleton said.

“You folks let me know and I’ll find a way to keep him occupied,” the waitress said. “That is, if you give me a good tip. If you give me enough of a tip I’ll give you a tip. And my tip is to stay away from each other if you can. I don’t know much about what goes on over there, but it seems like it’s always the ones that come together that never return together, if you know what I mean.”

She returned to the counter, lifted a gate, and approached the man who seemed to be an agent. She was asking him if he wanted pie. The word
pie
seemed to float in the air as Singleton and Wendy left the diner and headed away from the Corps campus.

“You think they’re keeping an eye on us? I wouldn’t put it past Klein to track me when I go out in the afternoons, even though, as far as I can tell, it would violate regulations. You’re supposed to feel free. He gives me these so-called Internal leaves, but then he asks me to detail my movements. Usually it’s just stuff like: I walked down to the old canal. I smoked a joint and sat around my apartment, reading. I make stuff up because I can hardly remember.”

“Well, you know,” Wendy said. “You’re supposed to be trusted.”

This is where we stand for a moment in awkward hesitation, he thought. She was rubbing her arm, as if tense. The street looked unusually clean and bright, full of people going about their daily business. He reminded her again that he was, of course, on an Internal that afternoon. She told him she was, too, and then her voice dropped and she gave him her address. Then they parted in opposite directions. When he passed the coffee shop again, the agent was gone and the counter was empty.

*   *   *

From the window of her apartment he could see heaps of hot cinders, great piles of debris plowed up during the initial clean-up effort, before the stop order was declared and what remained was left to sit and smolder as a monument to the riots. Her building sat on the edge of the debris area. The smoke seemed blue-green, catching the late afternoon light. Everything has a tendency to become framed. You build a frame and put a window in and there you have it. You meet a fellow agent and have a couple of lunches and the frame appears. She says she’s going to change into something more comfortable and you turn away and another frame appears.

She had changed out of her work clothes into cut-off jeans and a halter top tied in a big knot above her belly button, which was small, like a flower bud, turned in. As she lifted her arms to make a ponytail in her hair he saw the powder-blue hem of her panties.

“You’ve got yourself a fine view,” he said. “Just looking at it makes me want to change my position on the stop order. Normally, I’m a put-the-fire-out-and-rebuild-right-away kind of guy. Normally, I’m of a mind that it should be all bulldozed and rebuilt. But right now, looking at this view, I think the governor had it right. It’s all going to burn again sometime soon, so why not leave it.”

“You can leave it but once the toxins leach out, eventually it’s going to green up, fauna’s gonna grow.”

“You’re an optimist,” he said.

“Nature wins eventually. At least that’s what they say.”

All afternoon they’d been moving toward this moment—it was the object of the conspiracy that had started in the street. First they’d analyzed the man at the counter in the coffee shop. The cut of his suit. The way he kept his head down. Then they’d talked about the waitress, who they agreed was an intuitive woman with that strange waitress radar that picked up on the way people moved. She’d seen that they were breaking regulation: two younger folks eating together, one with a scar on his face and that slightly enfolded tense look; the other a young woman who looked not enfolded but perhaps damaged. (You don’t look that damaged, Singleton had said. You’re young, that’s true. You’re highly attractive for an agent, that’s true, too. You can see right away that I’m a vet. How old do I look? Do I look about twenty-five? You look twenty-six, she’d said.)

Sitting at the little table in her kitchenette, he’d avoided asking deeper personal questions so that she would avoid asking deeper personal questions. There had been a sweet feeling—with a wedge of afternoon light stretching across the floor—of a mutual standoff. He knew she might be thinking about the dangers of being around an enfolded man. He knew that she was thinking about the risk.

“What’s going to grow on the heap, I was told in briefing, is jimsonweed,” she was saying at the window. “Which is smokable.”

“Speaking of smokable, do you have any pot? You said you had pot?”

“I’ve got a tin in the freezer.”

“Please, get it out,” he said.

On the bed it started as newness, the first touch of this, the first touch of that, the whorl of hair at the back of her neck, his thigh, her arm. Pushing away to look and then closing in, losing control and then regaining it, mapping and exploring, high with the first-touch sensations. (And the pot.) She ran her fingers along his scar, starting below his temple, following it to his armpit, across the bridge of undamaged skin that he loved to touch when he was alone, spreading out to his chest—his one nipple permanently shriveled—and around his side to his back. The scar, tissue where they’d grafted new skin, seemed suddenly charged with a slight electric current that zinged right up to his head and into the enfolded nut up there, as if to confirm what they’d said: After your treatment anything bodily that reminded you of the trauma would remain slightly energized. The high of the Tripizoid left only the nurses’ advice, the echo of their warning that sex, really good sex, might unfold you again completely, bringing back your old, traumatized self.

They rolled away from each other and let the charges deplete and the sweat dry, and then they rolled back toward each other. Then it was a matter of heaving and rocking, of attempting to be a neat unit, and he was trying but failing to get hard by releasing himself into mindless memory, as the electric charge began to leak around the fuzzball and he saw a flashbulb negative of a chopper in the air, an old Huey, and he was in it and out of it at the same time, which of course he would’ve been if he’d died like some of his buddies, but he hadn’t died (the flash seemed to say) and before he knew it he was on his back breathing hard, his heart pounding. The sound of street noise, of a siren far off, and the noise of the shitty building, the beat of music through plaster and lath.

“It’s OK,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“What were you thinking about?” she said, searching for dilation in his eyes. (She’d been through training. She knew the basics of medical psych, the sweep of the penlight to see if the pupils dilated properly.)

“I was thinking how alive I am because I’m lucky.”

*   *   *

He went to the kitchen, poured some gin into tumblers, added ice, and brought them back to the bed. They lit another joint and let it burn and sipped the drinks and leaned shoulder to shoulder. She asked how he ended up in the Corps and he gave her the barest sketch about Nam, about what he couldn’t remember, the texture of not knowing but wanting to know, and how after his treatment he had rented a little walk-up over a garage in Bay City where he hung out and read, trying to collect a sense of who he might’ve been and what he might’ve seen, finding it in magazines and books and news reports until he felt strong enough and, paradoxically, weak enough and fucked up enough to see himself as someone who might contribute something to the new cause of trying to help other vets like himself. He figured—he explained—that he had had some kind of tracking tendencies that went back to before Nam, and that as a kid he had loved books about animal footprints. That much he could remember. He didn’t care so much about animals, per se, but he had loved to track footprints. What about you? he asked. And she explained—her voice suddenly distant—that in the end it had come down to a hospital job, as a nurse, or a Corps job, and she liked the idea of finding a better structure for her desire to care, one that didn’t have so much to do with physical suffering. When he pushed her to explain more, to elaborate, she said she’d rather not, and when he asked why, she grew quiet. (It was the first time, he’d later think, that he had seen this state of tense quietude.)

“I made a promise to my mother before she died. I was just nine, so maybe I’m just imagining it, or maybe it’s something my dad told me, but I like to think that I really did make a promise to take care of my dad, even though he didn’t seem to need my care, not one bit, and maybe I extended that promise out, I don’t know. Maybe I just have a thing for vets.” And then she shrugged again and spread her hands out as if to say that’s it, and she waited until he felt compelled to say something—anything to fill up the quiet—and he explained that in Bay City, after he had been released from treatment, from the Grid, one afternoon, listening to Kennedy on the radio, he had fallen hook, line, and sinker. It seemed to come, this desire to join, out of a need to help those who couldn’t be helped, something like that, he explained. She hugged herself, looking dejected and lonely (he thought), and then, suddenly, she said, her voice deep and confessional: “I don’t want to get involved with you, but here I am.”

“Jesus,” he said. He let the smoke sit inside his head until he could hardly think at all.

“I’m afraid. I don’t really want to unfold you. What I said before, it’s not that simple.”

“If it becomes too good, I’ll let you know.”

“Ha ha,” she said, frowning.

Later, when she got up to make coffee he lay in bed listening to the sound of water running, the scoop digging into the coffee, the tin percolator on the stove ticking as water pushed up through the tube and into the small glass observation bubble. He imagined it brimming past the curved glass, getting one last look at daylight before the plunge into oblivion.

DOWN & UP

Along the Indiana border the road began to yearn north. She dozed against the window, feeling the engine—all eight cylinders firing in a grumbling vapor lock of piston rings and sealed systems. Rake nudged her shoulder. When she opened her eyes it was dark and the fields of dead, unharvested crops had given way to a farmhouse. He pointed to it, cocked his thumb back, made a spoof sound to indicate gunfire and then slowed the car down, and when they got to a mailbox, he began to talk softly about the Jones family, saying, We’ll have to pay a visit to the Joneses. You got a name like Jones, a common name, Smith or Jones, and you make a target of yourself. You got all the lights on like that, you’re opening yourself up to the potential of someone like me coming your way. You sit in the house and wait. You know I’m coming. You got that sensation under your skin. You build a notion that it’s impossible and so forth, you pray to your God to sustain your safety, but he’s not listening and you know it, he said, and then he went quiet and she knew what that meant. She was only half-awake. She wiggled her fingers to see if they’d move (they did) and then her toes and pushed back against the seat.

She felt him staring at her in the darkness.

You move and you have to move somewhere, he’d said. I’m going light on the substance. I’ll learn you, as they like to say down south. I’ll learn you a new way of thinking so long as you move with me. A new way of moving. I’m gonna hold the death card close to the vest and then slap it down on the table when the time comes. I’m kidnapping you for your own sake. To keep my word of honor made way back. Not that I want to keep it. You’re bound to me by things you don’t even know. If you knew them, you’d know. If you were to know, you’d understand. Now you see a house here, a house there. A house passing in the night. It means something, just by itself. You remove the inhabitants and it means something more. Smoke coming from a chimney. Down in a valley, covered in snow. Means one thing. Tucked against another house in a street burned out, means another.

On the left side of the house was a tree with pink blossoms in the window light.

The farmhouse, surrounded by spring mud, was absurdly neat, with two stories and dormers and black shutters.

The whole package, he said. They’ve got the whole package here.

He parked the car up the road. Together they walked down the drive, hunching slightly, until they were at the side of the house. He pointed at the tree and she knew what he wanted because he’d made her climb a tree at a rest stop somewhere, an old one with a stone barbecue pit and a pump with a broken handle, just to watch her do it. She’d gone up into the branches, clutching, shaking, until she was caught like a cat, unable to get down, and then he made her jump into his arms.

I’m the bad luck brought home. I’m taking the bad luck I had and foisting it on somebody else.

The tree reached as high as the second-story window, and she got into the middle of it, against the trunk, found a branch and pulled herself up. (Light as a bird. Your bones are hollow, he’d said at the rest stop. You’re high enough to fly high.) In the tree, amid the blossoms, she took a breath. Threading through the floral perfume was the smell of spring grass.

Look forward, move through it, a nurse said, the one with the deeper voice. He looked at her the way you’d want to be looked at, with a calm and steady nonjudgmental gaze. You’ll feel it in there and at some point you’ll take comfort in knowing it’s there, the ball of old memories.

Through the window was an oriental rug and a big easy chair with a man reading a paper and smoking a cigar. Smoke roiled over his head and caught light from a television set. He seemed to be hiding behind the paper from his kids, who were at his feet with their legs crossed, looking forward.