David Means - Hystopia

“A story with a pill,” Hank said. He closed his eyes and let the sun bathe his face. “I’ve heard plenty of stories with pills.”

“A grunt recognizes a grunt who’s been treated and can’t remember a damn thing about the war. There’s a strange moment between them. The guy who’s been treated racks his brain knowing that he should know the other guy. He digs and digs because he can see, in the way the other guy’s looking, a pure connection. All this in a few seconds.”

“The man doing the recognizing puts the onus onto the man being recognized,” Hank says. “I know that feeling, man. I know it all too fucking well.”

Singleton took a deep breath, took a sip from his canteen, and told Hank the story of the blue pills. The Flint streets, the desolation of afternoon, how it felt to leave the Corps building after a briefing session, to pass through the revolving door and bump into Frank. He described the helmet liner. The weird sensation of being recognized by somebody who, presumably, he had once known in battle.

“Folks come out of nowhere, like you and Wendy did the other night, to present themselves as part of your past with no way to prove it,” Hank said. “You have all of these folks drifting around with the pivotal point of their lives buried, not sure if they should be digging around, and from time to time someone comes along. It’s a fucking strange world, man.”

“He came up to me and called me Captain and then said he was going to fulfill a promise he had made to me in Nam, and he handed me a bag of pills and I had to confirm it, had to know for sure before I took them, and when it was confirmed, I mean when I saw that he really was there with my unit, Wendy and I took them.”

“You still have some of those left?” Hank said. He looked out across the grass at the trees, mostly jack pines, against the sky.

“I’ve got exactly four left,” Singleton said.

“One for each of us, is what I’d say,” Hank said.

“Now it’s your turn to tell a story.”

“You already know my story,” Hank said. “It’s a story you know too well. Except instead of getting tagged and put in treatment I partnered with Rake before they could find me. I was so fucked up, I’m guessing, upon getting home that I didn’t have a choice. I told you I treated myself. It’s all enfolded now,” he said, tapping his head. “So you know the deal. I’m making it up based on the backwash I picked up from things Rake told me. He didn’t like to talk about that shit, so basically I just have a vague sense that I came out and met up with him and took to the road and played it all out that way, one killing at a time. Was I a psychopath like Rake? No way, man, and I can attest to that, of course, because I’m not a failed enfold. There was part of me that could be saved, otherwise I wouldn’t have been saved. I like to think it was my love of MomMom that pulled me through it and created a will to self-treatment, but I’ll never know and don’t want to know and if I do start wanting to know — heading to the waterline — you do your best to pull me back, and I’ll do the same for you, man, if you want me to,” he said, and then he lay back down and settled into a silence.

“What happened to Rake?” Singleton said.

Hank laughed. “I knew that was coming. Deeper trust formed and you struck. You’ve been trained.”

“What happened to Rake?”

“Meg and I had to find a way to channel his desire to kill into the little bit of honor he had left — something like that. He had a little bit left, my gut told me. I had to trust my gut. We had to find a way to get him killed without either one of us doing the killing. I thought about getting him to commit suicide, something along those lines, and, again, I thought about killing him myself, risking going back to that old place, reversing the treatment. Believe me, there was nothing I wanted to do more than take him out. I was itching to do it. Meg wanted to do it, too. Then these rumors came in about duels up on Isle Royale and I made use of them in my own way.”

“How’d you do that?” Singleton said.

“I’d rather not get into the details right now. But believe me, Rake’s dead. He’s gone. Nothing to worry about. I get the sense you know that anyway.”

* * *

A perfect blue-skied end-of-August day with a faint hint of autumn. A front had come through early in the morning and pushed back the southerly smell of burning tires and trees and cleared out the sky. “One last daytime beach excursion,” Hank suggested. The night before, the Black Flaggers had approached closer than ever.

Now, on the shore, Hank was on his back with his hands crossed over his chest, his soft belly exposed. He was talking about the good groove that he and Singleton had going, the sense of shared mission that was developing. Wendy and Meg, arm in arm, were sauntering down the sand, staying close to the waterline where the gravel was smooth, stopping on occasion to look out at the water. (Later he’d look back and see that there had been intention in the secretive distance they had kept. Sitting across from Hank, he had felt something, an urge to run to them, to take Wendy by the hand and lead her into the berm — not really a dune — where he would declare his love for her in no uncertain terms. Later he’d understand that he had been locked into an operative task, focused, zeroed in on getting some kind of answer from Hank.)

“I need to know what you did with Rake’s body. I need details on how you handled the duel.”

Hank sat up and lit a cigarette.

“What difference does it make. If I could enfold that story, I’d take fucking Trip right now and do it. That’s all in the past. I just want to forget it.”

“No. I need it for my report,” Singleton said.

“You’re not going to write a report. I heard if you go back, you’ll be court-martialed.”

“Sent up for adjudication,” Singleton said. Wendy had turned and was looking back at him with her hands out as if to say: What are you doing, exactly? What are we doing?

“Same thing. You’re not going back there and you’re not going to write a report,” Hank said. He lit a cigarette, blew the smoke to the side. “It’s not that I don’t want to tell you. It’s that if I say it, if I put it in the air, if you hear it, you’re not going to want to go back, ever.”

“I’m going to write the report.”

“Well, Singleton, let me tell you, it was risky and we had to go deep into our roles. To make sure the Black Flaggers wouldn’t know he was dead, I took a big risk and drove down to the L.P. Left deep in the night and got down to the bridge at dawn, crossed over it, and then propped the body in front of Fort Michilimackinac. You probably know that the police took over the fort because it is supposedly avoided by failed enfolds, or something like that. Word goes around that failed enfolds like Rake can’t stand anything that harkens back to the wars before Nam. There’s nothing that screws with the mind like a fake old fort, with all of those logs carved into points, is what they say.”

“Why leave the body for the Corps to find?”

“In retrospect, which isn’t really fair, I’d say the idea was to get you to come up here so we’d able to leave on friendly terms with the Corps and avoid being tracked. I’ll say one thing. We had both reached a limit. If we went deep downstate with Rake’s body, we’d be dead meat before we got far. If we went ourselves, we’d never make it alive. Not if word got out — and believe me, it’s gonna get out — that Rake was dead. Rake alive was what kept us safe. There must be a catchphrase for someone in a situation that is simply not winnable, for a road that splits into two options that are just as bad. Two roads that lead back to the original option.”