David Means - Hystopia

Her father’s voice had been like Cash’s when they left the house, forlorn, suddenly distant, speaking as if through a wall.

“You really didn’t fall for that act at your dad’s house, did you?” he said. Cash had faded out again. Why bother finding another signal, the white noise said. It was neglected but necessary background noise. Leave me on, it seemed to say as the road swayed inland away from the lake.

“What act?”

“The act your father and I put on,” Singleton said.

“I fell for what I had to fall for,” she said, tapping the wheel. “And anyway, I knew when I was upstairs that when I came down you two would be in cahoots. I guess I knew it before we even got to the house. And you didn’t want him along on this anyway.”

Her old man had leaned into the car window as they were pulling away, telling them that he’d get through it, that he had some serious firepower and a lot of grunt experience. And an old Howitzer in the attic, he said, pointing to the muzzle in the little crescent-moon-shaped window, poking out ominously, a little dark disk.

Klein had said that a soldier could fake, or embody a state — was that how he put it? — in order to fool the enemy, or whatever. All of Klein’s long-winded briefings, all that chatter, seemed to blend with the sound of the car’s engine and the slight aftermath of the mystery pill, and he reached over and dug around in the ashtray and got another joint lit and decided to end further discussions on the topic.

“What do you think’s going on in your department?” he said. “Do you think they’re in some bunker somewhere trying to figure out a way to spin this fucked historical moment? Sending out bulletins to the cops upstate, making the case that Rake is dead?”

“I think they’re doing what they can to spin the unspinnable,” she said.

They were running north on the shore road, following the index finger part of the mitten alongside Lake Huron. The safest way was to stay close to water. Inland rage was more intense than shore rage, at least in theory. The road was old concrete, glinting with embedded stone and glued with swirls of tar. A voice was struggling through the static on the radio, a sermon materialized in medias res, an old-time preacher saying: God’s mercy is severely limited. He has his doubts, man, about this one. He’s lost in the clouds of his own thoughts. Surety is a thing of the past. King David pisses in the wind. God’s like the Phantom Blooper, the supposedly kindhearted American who went over to the gook side and began to fight against us, hiding with the Cong, fighting his own beloved.

“I doubt this preacher even knows what surety means,” Singleton said. “Surety isn’t what he thinks it is.”

Wendy remained silent, clutching the wheel, leaning forward slightly. To their left the remains of the Au Sable State Forest fire appeared, carbonized wood stinking of pitch.

“Are you sure you know where this safe house is?”

“We’ll make it to the safe house. Klein made damn sure I knew where it was. As if he’d expected this all along. If this is some sort of treatment, or if we’re supposed to be thinking this is treatment, he’d want us to be aware that we’re aware of our own awareness of the situation.”

“All I know is they trained me early on, when we were doing the basics, to think about the idea of north.”

“It sounded like bullshit then and it does now,” Singleton said.

The road ahead was empty, no sign of Black Flag gangs, no evacuees. The asphalt seams between the long concrete slabs made a rhythmic beat beneath the tires. If there was indeed a lure of north, and if he was feeling it, it had nothing to do with the Corps theory that vets were drawn north into the peninsular formation of the state by some residual attraction to potential enemy action. Nor was it a matter of the polar magnetic field. It had to do with desolation. A sense of the sky being closer to the ground.

“You’re thinking it isn’t pure bullshit,” Wendy said. “You’re thinking we’re both attracted to the idea of north.”

“It’s anyone’s guess how safe this safe house is going to be,” he said. Klein had mentioned it in a briefing on the plan of action in the event — he said — of further upheaval. He’d gone to the map and pointed it out. Something about the operative being a blacksmith.

A few miles later, past the state forest, she pulled the car over, left the engine running, and said she had to pee. He took his gun and stood beside the car, keeping an eye out, watching as she waded through the brush and then, a few minutes later — nothing to fear, just a field and a few trees down the road — she came back out, buttoning her jeans, straightening herself, smiling at him.

“There’s a little brook back there. Can you hear it?”

They stood for a moment. The car ticked. When the wind eased, he could hear it, a faint burble threading through the overgrowth. They waited again for the wind to die down again. Nothing moved.

“I wish we could stay here for a while,” she said.

“We can if you want, for a few minutes at least.”

“Are you afraid?” She pushed slightly with her hip against his hip.

“Well, yeah, a little bit,” he said. He touched the gun in his waistband. The safety was on, it was locked up tight.

“I’m not,” she said. “I’m fearful, but that’s different. Fearful for my father. Once you’ve been heroic like he has, you want to do it again.”

“Your father will be fine,” he said. He didn’t believe it. Fine for the old man meant upholding a vision of the self that had been created at a young age, in circumstances that were unusual — the Black Forest, snow, youthful cunning and gumption set against huge historical forces. He’d be fighting the wrong war.

Back behind the wheel she drove quietly and carefully and continued thinking, he guessed, about her father’s chances. At least the old man could remember his combat training. Some said — and this might just be one more of the countless rumors, of course — that the mechanics, the fighting techniques, the useful stuff could never be lost, because it was somehow entwined into your sense of destiny (something like that). It was all tiresome. Rumors appeared around a context of need; they were nothing but a formation of an idea around a precise desire.

“What are you thinking about,” she said later. Darkness had fallen quickly. He listened to the engine, felt it vibrating at his feet, on the floorboards.

“Nothing,” he said. She shook her head, letting her hair drift into and remain in her eyes. Then she took one hand from the wheel and swept the hair back into place.

An hour later as they were nearing the safe house, he rooted in the duffel for the Corps kit bag, which contained pills that could light you up when you needed a zip. He took one and she took one and within minutes their eyes were wide open, their night vision enhanced. When the house came into view, a two-story farmhouse with a wide porch, across a wide field, they could make out a strange lean-to structure behind it. A small chimney in the structure was releasing puffs of smoke that looked chalky in the rising moon. Nothing moved. Behind the structure were dark woods.

“It certainly doesn’t look safe,” Wendy said.

“That smoke in the back’s from the forge. Klein said the operative is some kind of blacksmith. We should sit for a few minutes and assess this in a professional manner. You know training. Never think a safe house is safe until you feel safe.”

“Never feel safe unless you know you’re safe, I think it was,” Wendy said.

They waited. The zip pills had given them a good, clean professional edge, an esprit de corps intensified by a sense that they were facing a convergence between what the Corps called Forces of Inherent Evil imported into the culture from abroad (meaning Vietnam) and what the Corps called Trained Moral Positioning. When he mentioned it, she told him to shut up.