David Means - Hystopia

The connection clicked off with seeming finality. Holding the phone, Singleton watched a man in a leather jacket with Black Flag tags stumble out the tavern door and across the parking lot, singing to himself in an Irish brogue, his voice loud in the morning quiet. Singleton reestablished a dial tone, put some coins into the slot, and read numbers from his palm. The ringing signal, he heard at his end, presumably took the form, on the other end, of a clapper striking a bell in the belly of a black phone. He was about to hang up when Wendy’s father answered. The voice of a thousand smoked cigars. A throat that needed to be cleared every few minutes.

“Headquarters,” it said.

“It’s me, Singleton. How goes it down there? You surviving?”

“We’re alive,” Wendy’s father said. Another man came out of the tavern drunk. He flopped down on the sidewalk and sat with his legs crossed and his head bowed into his open hands. “We’re in the fray but it’s looking good. We held off the first wave. Nothing like a man in a wheelchair with a gun to confuse matters, and it didn’t hurt that I covered him with the big gun. Mostly kids and a few disgruntled locals but no vets, thank God. The vets aren’t in this one, because they came — most of them — for treatment.”

“So the violence is dying down?”

“Not at all. All of our scouting reports — and by that I mean what I hear on the radio — indicate that a counterattack is gathering.”

“Well, be safe. Please pass word to Steve Williams that we’re thinking about him.”

“He still prefers to be called the Zomboid.”

“OK, pass word to the Zomboid.”

* * *

“I’m being processed for administrative adjudication, which is a fancy phrase for court-martial,” he told Wendy when he got back to the house. Everything was quiet. MomMom was upstairs still sleeping, and Hank and Meg had taken a hike to the beach to look around for signs of Black Flaggers. She was in the kitchen, at the table, smearing jam on a slice of toast, leaning into the task, not looking up, keeping her head down as he explained that her father was OK and things were quieting down.

“They’re not quieting,” she said, softly. “And there’s not going to be a court-martial, because we’re not going back there for a long time.”

“I’m not sure about that. If this entire thing was meant to be part of our treatment, especially if it was Klein’s idea, then maybe we can go back and beat the rap.”

“It’s pretty clear. It isn’t exactly open to interpretation. The safe house wasn’t safe. The target isn’t a target. Now here we are.”

“But he’s in a bunker. Who knows what he really meant. He was cryptic.”

“Cryptofascist might be what you mean.”

“He told me to interrogate Meg.”

“I’ve already done that. It’s pretty simple. Rake took her out of the Grid because she probably had some connection with someone in his past — I didn’t get that far. She lost her boyfriend over in Nam and had a breakdown and was selected for treatment.”

“I know you’ve done it, but I think I should, too, somehow.”

“She won’t say much to you,” she said.

“Well, maybe not. I’m going to interrogate Hank first anyway. We’re building trust, but we have to consider what he said about his acting abilities — that he enfolded himself and then played the role, his words, of someone who was still in there with the derangement. He might be acting now.”

“Nobody’s acting,” she said. “Can’t you see that, Sing? Can’t you see that you’re the only one who’s acting?”

“I’m not acting. I’m doing my job.”

“See what I mean,” she said, and she got up from the table and went out the back door. When he looked out the window, tight in the frames of light gray, she was alone by the shed looking out toward the woods.

Final action reports contain enemy body count, men cured of trauma, proper enfolds, number of failed enfolds, psychological profiles, guns and ammo seized. They were about horseshoe formations closing in on all sides, always ending with a sharp forward thrust. A good report had a subtext of preordained domination. A twisting of failure into success. He would have to make the initial standoff in the kitchen much tenser. He’d have to stress that he in no way intended the action as a form of self-treatment, or a way to gather information about his own trauma. According to the Credo — and leaving aside Klein’s transgressions — it was an agent’s duty to sustain an enfolded state and relate impersonally with the target (in other words, to become as inhuman as you could, subordinating your impulses to the structure of the Corps). That meant he would have to avoid all mention of his wartime relationship (indeed, if he had had one) with Rake. He’d have to pretend, if he ever went back to Flint, typing it up on the old manual, that his own needs had not played a role in the intuitive decisions he had made. He’d have to pretend that he had not unfolded himself at all .

* * *

To establish — as he’d write in his report, or claim at the adjudication — esprit de corps with Hank he agreed to go out on a recon mission to assess the level of gang activity. The two of them hiked through the brambles and then crawled across a field and into woods, weaving between trees until they could see a house behind which two men were sitting in lawn chairs, smoking and looking out in their direction. They crouched and watched for a few minutes before retreating into the woods. Hank said the two men had been sitting like that for most of the summer. He sniffed the air and led Singleton farther south to a second house, which consisted of multiple mobile homes connected by breezeways to the main house. Choppers were neatly parked in a line out front. A man with a rifle slung over his shoulder sat in a chair under an awning. Hank scoped him and made an ID. “That’s a guy named Duke, he works a big-shot connection down in Pawpaw. He’s been standing guard for about three weeks. There’s a few new choppers, so I’d say they’re arriving from downstate now. Rake had some kind of agreement with those folks, a truce. I’d say they’re waiting for someone to come riding up with a sweet rumor. They’ve sensed a lack of activity.”

They hiked back into the woods and came out in a clearing about a mile inland from the lake. Hank swished through the grass and then, like a dog, turned around and around to clear a spot, motioning for Singleton to sit down, offering up a hand in a gesture that seemed sweetly out of place.

“You’ve got to trust me, Singleton. The way you and Wendy have been acting the last three days shows outward trust. You’ve been acting like you trust us, hanging out, joining me on this mission, and that’s a first step. But there’s still internal doubt and all of that.”

He lit two cigarettes and passed one to Singleton. Then he lay back with his arms crossed behind his head.

“What’d they train you on interrogation? I’ll bet they told you to begin with easy banter, establish trust, and then, when a moment like this comes along, hit hard.”

“That’s about it,” Singleton said. The air was filled with late summer chaff and insects. A breeze sifted through the grass and then died away. Singleton thought about how it must’ve felt to wade through grass with his rifle overhead into a horizon that was brutally open and visible.

“This might be the time,” Hank said, “to tell me something, not too intimate, about your journey that might help me trust you a little more.”

“I can tell you one thing,” Singleton said. “You ever hear of blue pills?”

“ The blue pills?”

“Or green. Sometime they’re gray or green or whatever. We’re talking about putting a stress on the ‘the.’”