David Means - Hystopia

* * *

I’m watching you, he said, to Haze, cornering him in the yard that evening, trying to bore into the kid’s eyes, to put the fear in him and make sure he knew where he was situated in the structure of things, but the kid just returned his look and said, Well, I’m watching you watch me, and he got up and stood shirtless, his chest concave and hairless. He was jittery in a way that suggested he was going to try something soon. Inevitability was implicit in his distance, his hanging back on the margins of the yard, hidden in the brush, or in the shed doorway, back far enough to be hidden in shadow.

I see what you’re doing, Haze said. I know you and that girl are up to something.

Hank threw an uppercut — he felt good doing this and imagined (but wasn’t sure) that he had a memory of boxing somewhere, a club back in Detroit, the swat of leather against a bag, the echoey glove-on-glove slap of men sparring — that struck the kid in the jaw. Then he followed with a jab and watched him as he flopped to the ground and looked up with a smile smeary with pink.

That was a sucker punch, he said. That second one. The first one I saw coming.

You’re lucky I didn’t hit you in your good eye, and you’re lucky I don’t kill you right now, Hank said.

Who says I can see out of the eye? Haze said. Who says it’s my good eye?

I says, Hank said. And I’m telling you to be careful what you see.

If it sees, it’s gonna see what it wants to see.

That’s what I’m saying. Everything that eye needs to see has been seen, he said, and then for good measure he aimed a kick into the kid’s chest and left him squirming in the yard to consider his place in the pecking order and how easily it could shift — the same as the wind blowing up the sheets — with a sudden movement of flesh. Exhausted, he walked into the trees so the kid couldn’t see how he was sweating. Instilling fear wasn’t his way. Old Hank would’ve felt a surge of joy, he speculated. His ears were buzzing. Through the trees he could sense the lake, beyond, throwing itself urgently into the sky. Out there his old memories rested, waiting to be reclaimed.

* * *

They could feel it, a tightening sense of doom in the long afternoons. Rake sorted on the kitchen table, picking the pills up one by one, holding them to the light for inspection, placing them in bags, and then he sat in the yard drinking, expounding on his need for speed and the rumors he’d been picking up (or so he claimed) on his drives in the morning to connect (so he claimed) with Black Flag members. One of the rumors concerned a duel up on Isle Royale, a formal confrontation between two grunts who had fought in the same unit and had betrayed each other during a reenactment, the same way they had betrayed each other when they were deployed. They’d shot each other dead, and their seconds, the guys who helped coordinate the duel, got into it and offed each other, too, but the cops or some investigative agents from the Corps had found the setup, the handkerchief that one of the seconds used to start the duel and the rope that was the line between them, and there’d been witnesses, too, he explained, his eyes bright with excitement. Rumors of the double-enfold, double-dose of Tripizoid that Black Flag members used as they reenacted battles so intense they went insane and had to fight them over and over again. Rumors that Canada was trying to establish a new kind of Corps, something to counter Kennedy’s vision, a group that would reenact with a different, better drug, something that didn’t leave even a trace, a fuzzball. The rumors went in and out of mouths until they somehow reached Rake, who went out — random times, random modes, random ways — and came back to fill the air with talk, his voice gleeful as he described Oswald’s twin, who was making a final salute and taking aim, following the president as he toured the Midwest again. Don’t fuck it up this time, Rake shouted. We’re counting on you to do what the rumor fucking says you’re gonna do.

Whenever she arose out of the stupor of the drugs, it came to her that she had been in love with the guy in her vision when she was seventeen or eighteen. She remembered that sadness of knowing he would be gone and lost forever, one way or another.

From the vision she’d had underwater, she connected to another memory she had, a boy on the beach, in the dunes on Lake Michigan, his body young and lean in the sun, his eyes liquid blue and squinting, the sweet smile with which he’d closed in for a kiss, a breeze blowing over them and shifting the razor grass, the salty taste of his kisses, and she knew — in bed, alone, trying to extract meaning from the voice she’d heard — that he was, in the memory, heading soon to Vietnam. His number had been called, and this was one of the last days they’d spend together.

Billy-T, Hank said, when she mentioned his name. That rings a bell. I feel like I know that name for sure although I have to admit I don’t know it the way I should know it except I do somehow — and I’ll admit that maybe I’m just imagining that there’s a connection, Meg, maybe I’m just taking a hopeful spark that doesn’t exist and turning it into a lament that has something to do with something I’ve lost. It’s a name stuck in whatever I enfolded when I treated myself. That’s what I like to think.

Hank, she said softly. You’re long-winded. Did you know that?

I do know that, he said.

They were on the porch. He had her hands tied and they knew that Rake would appear at any moment. He went out and came back at random intervals, but there was still a rhythm to his movement, and his car had a bad muffler and, if the wind was right, was audible from a half mile away.

It bothers me that I think I know the name, he added. But if I know it, it’s likely that Rake knows it, too. There must be a connection. It tempts me to try to unfold a little bit of myself, to get in there and poke around.

He comes at night to my room and when he’s touching me I want to scream because I’m sure he wants to kill me. He talks to me and he talks to me and I can tell he’s wondering if something in me unfolded, and he wants to know what it is and he’s fishing around for it. We have to do something.

We’ll take action soon.

He led her down the trail toward the water. The afternoon air was sweet and soft. They stopped for a moment and listened for footsteps behind them. At the fork he took her to the right, a path that ran through forest to a clearing — he left her hands tied just in case. In the clearing a small brook bubbled up to the surface. He scanned around again and then hunched down to scoop some water, washing his face, and he loosened her ropes, let them hang, and told her to take a drink. She drank and splashed her face and when she came back up she was smiling. He nodded and retied her hands and they continued along the trail for about half a mile, cutting down to the soft, sandy soil, along the low-growing shrubs and razor grass and then along rockier ground until they got to a cut in the headland, a path in the embankment, a natural way to the shore. He stopped her and smelled the air, listening to the sigh of the surf, and then took her by the hand — gently, softly twisting his fingers against hers, holding her so their arms were touching — down to the beach, where he loosened the ropes and then pulled them away. The stones on the beach were dried white, coated with powder, except where breakers had come in, forming black tongues, and when they walked they kicked them over and blackflies swirled. There was a strong fishy odor drifting from the west — he took a deep breath — where alewives had died en masse, washed up in clots, a stench, when it drifted in, so persuasive it seemed to be saying something.

There might be something in the rumor about men having duels, she said, swiping the flies off her arm, shaking them out of her hair. He’s mentioned it a few times, so he’s thinking a lot about it.