David Means - Hystopia

If I told you what I’m thinking it would make your head explode, you old coot. Fingering your medals as if they meant something when they don’t even mean a thing to you , Singleton thought.

“Go out into the world and let your mind go where it has to go,” Klein said.

“Yes, sir.”

“And you might want to trim those sideburns. They’re not regulation. Clean faces, clean hearts, is what they say. Mental health is our business. Or, rather, mental freedom is our business. Pax Americana, son,” he said, guiding him to the door.

“Sir?”

“Pax Americana begins at home, son.”

* * *

“I’m a million miles from headquarters,” she murmured, lying back in the moss and opening herself, it seemed, to his scrutiny, allowing him to observe that she was beautiful in a tense way. Her legs had a slight knock-kneed bend in just the right place. They were smoking a joint down by the old canal, on a spot across from the towpath. She’d taken off her work clothes in the car, ordering him (in a new voice, brusque) not to look while she slid her skirt off and wiggled into a pair of jean shorts. Now, on the grass, she seemed to be offering him a good, long look. He explained that he was sure — he touched his head — that the madman in his mind had some relation to the madman’s target, something like that, and that he had a running theory that all agents, at least enfolded, treated ones, must be thinking the same thing, because they’re burdened with the facts that they can’t remember and have to reach out to stories and make them their own.

He paused and looked out across the canal. The trees on the other side were deep green, quivering slightly in the breeze, and beyond them the sky was milky with heat. Weedy brambles rose sharply from the dark water — thick as tar — and the line between the two colors looked bluish brown. “We reach out to stories and can’t help but make them our own. I’m thinking that’s what they like about us. We can be used that way. They tap our desire to connect, and of course the desire comes from the fact that if we hit a connection, if we link to someone who’s in our Causal Events Package, we can start tweezing out the truth.”

As she stood, reaching back to band her hair, pulling her elbows up, tilting her head, she again seemed astonishingly beautiful to him in an edgy, new way. The attraction seemed mutual and strong and for a few seconds as he looked into her eyes — blue washed away by sunlight, speculative, searching his face for something — he felt a deep sense of danger. She turned from him suddenly, said something about needing to move, and led him down the towpath, striding quickly, past backyards cluttered with riot wreckage. The burn had reached the far side of the canal, an open vista of ash and char reclaimed, along the edge of the water, by green brush. Eventually, to their left, a neighborhood of spared bungalows appeared, ragged but structurally sound, with yards full of Queen Anne’s lace and, from one house, a faint pulse of music.

Wendy stopped and looked at the house and began to explain that she loved the Stones and hated the Beatles because the Beatles were what you get when you’re enfolded, treated with Trip, a song with just a formation built around old, unknown memories; whereas (she said “whereas”) the Stones are what you get when you allow it all to play out, when you come back fucked up. He resisted the urge to disagree, to say that the lads were slightly boring but seemed to be channeling trauma in their own way, working through the misery of their Liverpool boyhoods, the ration-ticket bleakness of a postwar landscape not that different from this one. It was too early for a petty squabble about rock bands, or anything that might hint at future arguments to come.

She was listening to the music, dancing slightly, swinging her hips, lean, not skinny, but slim. There was something wiry in the way she moved, and it thrilled him. She began to dance go-go style, smiling at him in a coy way at first, and then twisting her arms over her head and closing her eyes. He looked around and lit a cigarette. Then he motioned to a split-rail fence and told her to sit down on it. “Sit on the fence,” he said. “I want to see you sit on that fence.”

She gave him a look and called him a control freak and then smiled and went over and sat down. The yard behind her, with the Queen Anne’s lace and weeds and the house in the backdrop, seemed elemental and part of a package: Wendy sitting on a fence. That’s how it seemed to work. They’d said, You’ll find yourself weirding out about the way you see things, and you’ll be aware not only of your enfolded material, the sensation of it in your head but also the blind spot you have, the blank area.

He admitted that he was feeling turned on, seeing her sit there.

“As a Psych Corps member I have an obligation to remind you of the Credo,” she said. She got up and took his hand and led him back to the towpath.

“Fuck the Credo.”

He walked to the edge of the canal and looked down into the water. All of the creosote and tar had washed into it, along with whatever the mills had added, and it moved sluggishly along the weeds. It was easy, looking at it, to imagine that in a million years the fossils of small mammals and fuckups like himself would be chiseled from the ossified mass of gunk.

He placed his palms together and extended his elbows, a diving gesture.

“Once you’re in that you never get out,” she said. There was an edge around her words, a fear he hadn’t heard before.

“You don’t think I’d do it?”

“I hope you wouldn’t do it,” she said.

“I’d do it, but life is looking up and I’m trying to live the Psych Corps Credo.”

“I love a man who recites the Credo in his sleep,” she said, kissing him.

“You sounded, for just a second, like a hippie.”

“I’ve never been enfolded, so I can’t sound like pre-enfoldment,” she said.

“You can take the hippie out of the man, via enfolding, but you can’t take the wayward out, or the deeper tendencies.”

“Don’t quote me that shit. Not now.”

* * *

Later they drove to the beach and laid out their towels and smoked, looking out at Lake Huron, pollution levels down slightly but still a queer gloss over the surface, a fresh glaze of rainwater over the tension and a few sad birds in the resin, unable to pull free, yanking their wings. On the transistor radio (Nothing like transistor on sand, Singleton thought) a reporter was explaining that Kennedy was on one of his so-called wave-by swings, this time in South Bend, weighing his popularity and the love of the public against the evil elements out there, doing his PT 109 thing, except in a limo instead of a boat.

“You can ask me more about Klein if you want,” Singleton said. “You can say something like, What’s Klein doing? Something along those lines.”

“You could stop directing me to ask you certain questions,” she said. She leaned back and put her face to the sun. “What’s Klein doing, something along those lines?” she said, hunching over to form a windbreak, rolling another joint with her long fingers, pressing the papers expertly.

“He puffs his chest out,” Singleton said. “Fingers his medals and pretends he’s in charge. It’s starting to make me sick, to tell you the truth. All I’m hearing now is repeated information, modulation this, formations that.”

She shrugged, sighed, looked away down the beach. “I think he’s doing the right thing, going about his life as if it wasn’t threatened, upholding democracy and the like,” she said.

“Who, Klein?”

“I’m talking about Kennedy,” she said.

“I’m not going to get into a Kennedy drive-and-wave debate with you, baby, not when I’m this stoned. But you and I both know he’s got a death wish that has a lot to do with his back condition. All that pain is an inducement to push the envelope. Take it from someone who knows. I like to imagine I was bivouacked out of Nam, looking down at the canopy, saying, ‘I’m flying, man, I’m flying and this is cool, groovy, groovy.’ That kind of thing.”