David Means - Hystopia

After a while, she said, fearfully, “Oh, God, God, I hope that wasn’t too much, too far.”

“Vision not complete but vision beautiful, man, beautiful. Rake and a man named Billy-T and fieldphone and flame. A battle. In Hue, for sure. He called in an air strike and it hit too close. A ball of fire and then a fizzle. A fizzle out.”

“I’d like to do it again.”

“But I can’t,” he said. He located an ability to reason inside his high, a rip current countering the tidal pull of the drug. (Later, when he went back and tried to imagine how it had felt on the blue pill, he found himself thinking of the easy, persistent flow of water, following the easiest path.) He had an awareness of the fuzzball of lost memory smoothed and spread from ear to ear. He was still hard. If they did it again it would be even better. He’d go double and unfold the unfolded until a chain reaction began. Already he could see the blue flashes in the pleasure of touching her neck — small sparkles out of his fingers. She was saying she was sorry, sorry. He heaved himself up out of bed, pushing through the high, and then she was behind him, kneading his shoulders. They were both in a zone of mutual pleasure beyond anything they had felt before, but it dissipated almost as quickly as it had arrived, with a kind of pop of the eardrums and a quick return to reality: the smelly room in a cheap boardinghouse and, outside, the firecracker snap of gunfire, the spiral of sirens, and the cellophane crackle of fire.

It’ll be even harder now that you have a better sense of your real self, now that you have some sense of your past. Harder to go back and act like Old Meg, because I’m seeing you right now and what I’m seeing isn’t just New Meg but a new New Meg, he was saying, poking the fire. They had hiked a few miles along a footpath through the pine needles and a grove of trees planted in a neat formation, with the light shafting through the rows. On the beach, when she had cried in her hands, he had resisted the urge to question. When she looked up, Hank knew, just seeing her face, her teary eyes, that she had had a vision, caught sight of something that had been enfolded in her, the source of her trauma, and he could see it in the way she was walking, the shift of her gait, her toes pointed differently — with more assurance, he thought, a nimbleness on the trail, a sense of how to walk in the woods. The waves had seemed indrawn when he glanced back one last time, a looming quality in relation to the ones that hit the shore, shoving the stones in with a roar.

When a tree is damaged it forms a knot. You’ll do the same, he told her. Not the old adage about a broken bone being stronger, but something different than that. Up the path, she led the way, as if they had a plan, but they’d didn’t. Behind them clouds were gathering in the west and the wind was rising and the undersides of leaves were showing. The canopy overhead was shuddering, making long beautiful sighs, lifting and falling. She led the way to their old campfire — dead, a blank eye of coals surrounded by stones — and the flattened spot where the tent had been and, without a word, she began to roll out the tarp.

We’ll stay here tonight and then we’ll head back, he said. Rake’s going to return soon.

He was shaking out the canvas, sweeping it clean with his palm, and he stopped and watched as she got a tent stake out of the canvas bag and held it the way you’d hold a knife.

Back on the beach, she said, I became aware of the sound of a wave. Did you hear it, too?

I’m sure I did, he said. Her statement was strange but not that unusual. Her senses would be improved with each unfolding, until, if she went too far, she went over some edge into an acuteness that was beyond normal. Then she’d be raging around like Rake, seeing portents and signs in the way a dog shook his leg when he pissed, of the angle of a doorjamb, or whatever … it didn’t really matter, he thought, looking at her.

Well, I mean I was aware of the sound it made, coming in low in a shush from one side and then sliding to the other.

They built the fire together, gathering wood and piling it neatly. He showed her the best way to get the kindling, small curls of bark, not too much to hurt the tree. It has a desire to burn because the tree has a desire to help, is the way I see it, he said.

You’re weird, she said. I mean you’re really, really weird.

You’re getting better, he said. That’s a good sign, hearing you say that.

So you’re not going to deny it?

What you have with me is a man who has given himself the treatment but who was probably weird before he had it. Which is to say, before I treated myself I was still able to smell trees and to lumber run with the best of them, but I was too busy with violence of one kind or another to properly attend to my obligation to nature herself. I hate to put it that way, but that’s the way I put it.

They boiled some water and cooked pasta and he found a can of sauce in his bag and pulled it out and they heated it. When they were finished eating, they waded through the brambles down to the stream and cleaned the pot and plates.

This used to be a famous fly-fishing river, he said. No one really fished in it, but a writer used it in a story and made it into something it wasn’t, so for a few years people would come and give it a try, but it was too brambly, too rough, and you couldn’t cast far enough without getting snagged unless you knew the exact right spot.

He resisted mentioning the balsam willow until later that night, when they were holding each other, drinking whiskey, watching the fire and listening to the flames. Then he told her — clearing his throat, taking a deep gulp of whiskey — that he had wanted to say it back on the beach, right after she came out of the water, that she was like a balsam willow, or maybe a sandbar willow, or better yet, a tree that you can’t even find here in Michigan, but the guys — the grunts, or whatever you want to call them — have in Nam a tree called sao den , or better, its nickname, “black star,” because that’s a tree that somehow resists termites, he said.

What are you saying? she said.

I’m just saying you’re going to be strong enough to resist, Rake. You know it now more than before. It’s going to be a very fine line — the act you’ll have to perform when we get back there.

You’re really weird, she said again.

Maybe I am. But I’m not the first. In India, some folks marry trees. They go through a ceremony and hitch for life. Anyway, you seeing me as weird only means you’re getting better.

If seeing that you’re weird means I’m better, then I’m much better, she said. Then she began to talk about the vision. Her voice was a whisper. She said she’d heard a young man speaking, and as soon as she heard him speaking she saw his face. He’d been in Nam.

He leaned back and waited for her to say more. She spoke now clearly, with assurance and in a voice that was, he thought, much more musical. The guy in her vision was someone she had been in love with — she left that vague — and he had gone to fight. Something had happened and Rake had been involved.

Rake was involved, he repeated.

Rake in my unfolded vision, yes.

So this guy must’ve been with Rake, over in Nam. Maybe Rake knows that so he goes into the Grid and gets you and brings you out. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do with you, but he knows you have a connection with something in his past, with some little residual shred of honor he still feels, or a sense of mission. If he knew exactly what it was he would’ve dunked you in ice, or worse, unless he’s done worse and I don’t know about it. Maybe there’s another factor involved, something else, a promise to somebody he made over there that he has to fulfill. He might not even know because when they tried to treat him they just doubled his trauma and made it so intense.