David Means - Hystopia

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.

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.