David Means - Hystopia

When he got back to her she was crying into her open hands. She looked up and he could see in her gaze — the firmness of it — that she had unfolded something and that something had changed in her. She stood up and pulled him into an embrace. She felt firmer, stronger, and when she looked at him again her mouth was also set in a different way, not grim, not slack with sadness, but firm.

That felt good, she said. That felt really, really good. Someone spoke to me, and I know who he was and I think I understood most of what he was saying. Rake was part of it, and I’ll explain it if I can, once I figure it out. I was part of something in the past — obviously — and it’s up here, she said, touching her head. Her hair was tangled and beautiful, and the gooseflesh on her neck seemed to bring out the hidden paleness of her skin. A breeze was picking up now, and they just stood holding each other. Yes, a tree was calling to him from far up in Canada. He could taste the yellow pollen along with the dry residue of the shore. It wasn’t that he knew exactly what she was going to say or do. She’d come out of the water, walking over the hard stones, bracing herself against the cold. It would not be enough to say she had awoken from the dream or terror that she had been moving through. There was more to it than that. When they finally let go of each other she was smiling, the freckles on her face around her eyes and on her cheeks, and he was smiling, too. Released from the embrace, she looked radiant, lovely, as perfect as anything nature had ever cooked up.

It was gonna happen, man. It was gonna happen because he was out there, testing the odds, making public appearances, driving around in an open limo, with Jackie at his side, doing the hand-wave, the little movement, halfhearted, just a flick of the wrist, all slo-mo, the way the motorcade moved — with the cops on choppers out front, clearing the way, checking the crowd for a sign of disgruntled vets, or Black Flag members in their jackets and colors; the president with his bright white smile, his shoulder sagging on the side where he had been hit the first time, a hunk missing, the bone gone. In retrospect, looking back — if they ever had time — they’d remember the tension in the air that day, the sky over Flint blazing with heat. When he got to her apartment, after hearing the news from someone in the Corps headquarters lobby, she was in the doorway waiting.

“I got the news and left right away. You must’ve been stuck in a meeting. They’re saying the shot might’ve killed him this time,” she said, pulling him into the living room. Her face was flushed from crying, but her eyes were angry, not sad, and as they held each other she kept saying, “Men kill fucking men.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Yeah, it’s that simple now. Without something to enfold there’s no enfolding. Men go out and make sure they have something to treat.”

Outside, in the streets, there were shouts. The sound of breaking glass, far off. The phrase “national mourning” on the television, something about a dark day in a tone that seemed unbecoming in relation to the figure on the screen, the great Walter Cronkite, father of all authority, the most trusted man in America, as he took off his glasses, held them to the side, stared watery-eyed into the camera and, with his voice cracking, made the announcement that Kennedy had been shot again not far from Springfield, Lincoln’s birthplace.

“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.