David Means - Hystopia

“Let’s go,” Wendy said.

“Listen to the lady,” the man named Merle said.

Singleton put the gun back in his waistband and spread his arms as if to say, OK, fuck it. It’s all yours.

“Nothing personal,” the man said. He had the door open and motioned them into the night air. They ran to the car through air sweet with pine and dew-wet grass. If Singleton wrote the report he’d say they left the house at gunpoint, the man unhinged by the dictates of his own mission. He could then discourse on the immorality of certain operations, the way things were actually done in the field in contrast to the vision that Kennedy had set forth.

* * *

A few miles down the road he stopped and Wendy stumbled out of the car, staying to the edge of the headlight beam, bowing down and vomiting into the gravel. When she got back in the car she said it wasn’t so much the bodies, or the stench, or the old man, or even the fact that they were in deep shit — officially AWOL, as the old man had indicated — that made her sick but something else, something she couldn’t pin down exactly, although it might’ve been the zip pills wearing thin. (Should we have another? Pop one more? It’s a great high.)

“No,” he said.

“No, what? No, we’re not AWOL.”

“No to more zip pills. No more drugs. We’re going to find a spot to park and hunker down for the night, get some rest, hit the road tomorrow fresh.”

Leaves were shimmering on both sides of the road, fresh and living leaves, frosted with moonlight.

He followed the road as it cut toward the shore.

“If I have to write a report, and I mean honestly do it, maybe under closely monitored treatment with further Tripizoid because who knows what the Corps can do to an AWOL agent, I want to be able to say we ran away from the safe house before we could look around, forgot the passphrase, something like that, and then we parked to rest, following procedure.” He stopped himself. What she didn’t know couldn’t be used against him in an interrogation.

“What? What were you going to say?” she said.

“Nothing. It’s beautiful here. This might be the place.”

They’d entered a small state park and were following a dirt road through a grove of quaking aspens.

“Whatever happens when we find Rake, the Corps is going to write up a report, either in response to our dead bodies or because we nailed the target, and if they interview me I’m going to claim that I had a vision right here, in this location, and that the vision told me where Rake was. I’m going to skip the safe house altogether. I’ll say you fucked me into unfolding Rake’s location, something like that.”

“Or you could tell them the truth,” she said. When he kissed her he tasted the forge on her lips, a faint tang of carbon. He thought of the windows on the other side of the room back at the safe house, the hanging bodies, and the dark portal in the window glass where he had cleared the dust.

Later that night, after Wendy was asleep, he opened the door quietly and got out and walked to the top of a dune and looked toward the car. It was hidden by trees shaking in a long sway of sequins as the leaves caught the moonlight.

Search and destroy was what they called it in my day, Klein had said. Now we call it a sweeping operation, or a reconnaissance in force.

Elastic with tar, a wave stretched itself from one end of the beach to the other, roping back as a cleaner wave overtook it, topped it, and spilled down into the sand. From far off came the tenuous whine of an engine downshifting. A gang of bikers riding along the road. The sound grew faint and slipped beneath the shush of waves. No shootout with bikers to end the night. Singleton felt relieved.

Would he use the old phrase in a report — or would he use “sweeping operation,” or “reconnaissance in force”? He’d say they had stopped at the beach for a rest and he had got out of the car alone — he’d make a point of saying that Wendy was sleeping soundly — and that he had stood at the top of a dune, whatever it was, and that he had watched the gunky waves coming across the water. He’d say he’d resisted the urge to walk to the water, to test it for coldness. But he’d admit that he’d had that urge.

He’d say that he began thinking about Huron, about the big spills that had presumably gunked it up when he was off in the war. It was enfolded, he’d explain, and it led me to thinking about the unfolded flashes I’d had (maybe he’d admit that he’d seen the photo on both folders, Klein’s and Ambrose’s). He’d say he was looking at the lake and had a vision — a big flash from the fuzzball — of the man with the phone to his lips, calling in coordinates, and that in the vision the numbers became clear to him, a longitude and a latitude, something like that.

With his fingers on his temples he gave it a try. One of the older rumors had it that if you pressed hard on the temples and really dug in, you could perhaps catch a snag, a bit of memory, in the fuzzball, something like that. He imagined the face of Rake and Chaplain Frank, and the other man, the one who looked up from the radio as he was calling in the numbers and the fireball struck. Another wave was coming in, and with his eyes closed he followed the sound from one end of the beach to the other. He pressed harder with his fingers and then, when his head began to hurt, opened his eyes and walked back to the car to Wendy and was filled with what could only be called love, a sense of destiny that was somehow related to the fact that she could sleep soundly with her legs tucked up awkwardly, and to the fact that they were both on a mission together. His love felt deep, but he knew that only time could reveal how deep. Only when the story is over and the report is written can the truth be known fully, he thought; or perhaps only when the depth of my love for her is fully known can the story end. If I’m debriefed after all of this, I’ll have to say the grove of aspens felt like a little island of beauty in a world of hell. I’ll have to say I felt a sea of calm. I’ll also make sure to include the fact that the offbeat rhythm of the waves had seemed to me like a good jazz beat, and that I’d become aware that the distortion of what is natural is somehow more beautiful than nature itself. He turned things around in his mind until his breathing matched Wendy’s own steady breathing. He was half-awake in the alert way of an uptight dog just trying to survive. He stayed that way until he dozed off at dawn and woke to the trees burning with sunlight. A bird was singing with a high, throaty warble. The waves had died. Wendy was just awake beside him, lifting her hair out of her eyes, blinking, looking angry and relieved at the same time.

“I didn’t know how exhausted and frightened I was until the last of the zip pill wore off and then I couldn’t stay awake, and when I did wake up, you still weren’t here, and I asked myself what Training would say, and I said to myself, stay with the car, one agent should stay with the car, and then I felt totally foolish but too tired to move so I fell back asleep, but I was saying a prayer when I fell asleep. That’s how worried I was. I thought I’d find you out in the water,” she said.

“It’s not cold enough to do anything to me anyway. Superior is still cold, but in Huron shallows and the tar absorb heat and warm it up.”

“But you were thinking about it.”

“Yes, sure, I had the thought.”

On the other hand, if they were following the right course of action, and if the riots died down and order was restored, he could simply go back and tell Klein the truth: He and Wendy had silently (it seemed) agreed that they had to follow the lead they got from the man in the so-called safe house. In the report he’d write that they were following the intuition so valued by the Corps, although he’d also have to mention that he felt betrayed: his belief in the Corps, whatever was left of it, had been shattered by those hanging bodies. Klein would light his pipe, and expound about the Corps insignia. The scales are there for a reason, son. We don’t have lady justice on the insignia because balance matters more than lady justice, if you know what I mean. When Singleton noted in the report that the man at the safe house had tortured informants, Klein would shrug (probably) and explain that even the Geneva Conventions were retroactive nonsense. They had been written after the First World War. After the fact, son. After the deeds were done. Then they were rewritten yet again when the need came, after the fact, you see. And then again, for God’s sake.