David Means: Hystopia

“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.)

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.)