David Means - Hystopia

“There isn’t a catchphrase for that,” Singleton said.

“But you at least get the gist,” Hank said. “Meaning if we didn’t put the body there you wouldn’t be here, and if you weren’t here, I wouldn’t have to come up with a precise explanation for our actions. It wouldn’t matter. The fact that I need to explain what we did has everything to do with the fact that it’s you who’s doing the asking, and you’d never be asking if I hadn’t put the body there, you see.”

Hank cupped his palm over a match and lit a joint. He inhaled and held and released a cloud and hit again.

“I think I’ll have a hit of that,” Singleton said, reaching for the joint. He’d have to say the body had been transported downstate to the fort for unknown reasons, if he did write a report. He looked out at Meg and Wendy, who were still arm in arm, down near the water, but turned slightly, looking back at him. The waves were slathering in with long, slow sweeps, arriving at what seemed to be an angle to the beach.

“You’re probably thinking it was a neat, clean operation. I imagine that’s what you’re thinking. But it wasn’t clean, man. Not at all. It wasn’t neat.”

“I wouldn’t think it was,” Singleton said.

“I took advantage of Meg, in that I discovered that besides being another one of Rake’s prisoners, she had another connection to his past, one I couldn’t remember because of the Tripizoid, but I sensed it. I guessed it was there. All that is lost to me. Everything before she arrived. But I’m guessing, because I can’t remember, that he went gonzo crazy when he saw her name on one of those black-market lists, just as I’m guessing I didn’t enlist with him for the Army, I mean we didn’t sign up together with the buddy program, because I do have vivid recollections of my boyhood up to the day I was in my bedroom packing up my stuff, heading off to boot camp, along with some residual memories of flying over to Nam, landing, the smell of the trees over there, and things like that. Then everything goes blank. If I’d been friends with Rake before Nam I wouldn’t remember all that shit. It would be enfolded. He was a nasty fucker as a kid, I’m sure. He went in with a chip on his shoulder and the war was his feeding ground.”

“So you immersed her. You gave her a controlled dunk in the lake?” Singleton said.

“I was careful and told her it was a onetime deal. I kept my own head above water.”

“And she came out and told you what she saw?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say that. She told me bits and pieces, but eventually she mentioned a name that seemed to trigger a little bit of a spark.” He tapped his head. “Enough to hint that her connection with Rake had to do with whatever I’d enfolded in myself and that her connection with Rake in the past was also a connection with me. It made me think, maybe the Trip doesn’t get it all enfolded. Maybe we all have something that’ll spark a memory.”

“So you used the name to somehow provoke a duel?”

“Rake had been out on a long run and I enfolded myself with the black-market Tripizoid when he was gone. Then he came back, months later, with Meg. Then he went out again and brought this kid named Haze back. I’m guessing I knew he’d gone into the Grid for Meg specifically, although I didn’t figure why until Meg unfolded and had that vision. After that, we had to keep in our roles of Old Meg and Old Hank. But that was wearing thin by late June, early July.”

Singleton stared out at the water. Riding atop the horizon, like a block of stone, another tanker headed on course to Duluth, or away, it was impossible to tell. Down the beach, Wendy and Meg were sidearming stones into the water, making them skip.

“I’ve come to the conclusion, thanks to the Trip, that killing goes against nature in the deepest way, that to kill another no matter what the reason, no matter how justified in war, leaves you coated with some kind of residue. You pay a price, no matter what. Animals don’t pay a price because the price has to do with the fact that you know what you did. Trees don’t even have the price.”

“So you had to find a way to get him into a situation that would result in his death, and to make it his idea, to make him the initiator.”

“It makes me sad thinking about it, but knowing a little bit of Rake’s story, I wanted him to have the satisfaction in his last moments of thinking that he had somehow resolved things that could not be resolved — because really, Singleton, you and I both know that there is nothing more tragic than a man like Rake, someone who doubled up a trauma so huge that he wants to eat the earth itself.”

“You wanted him to initiate it so it would be part of his own story, somehow connected with his own trauma.”

“Initiate’s exactly right,” Hank said. “Haze was dumb as a peg, but he had unusual smarts when it came to his place in the pecking order and knew he had to worry about me as much as he worried about Rake. He put on a front that he didn’t give a shit. Meg and I waited as long as we could, and then one night when we were all at the dinner table and things were relatively calm I decided to play the trump card. At least I hoped it was a trump card. Truth is, it was just a shot in the dark because I wasn’t sure if I’d made the right connection. I figured that Rake had gone down there and grabbed Meg for a reason. I figured she had some connection with his past, but, again, the rest of the story was lost to me. Bad timing, what have you. A bad twist. Meg didn’t tell me that much about her vision, but again she did mention the man’s name, the man in the vision, and like I said, it gave me a feeling that he had something to do with Rake, his initial combat trauma situation. I figured our only shot would be to put that name in Haze’s mouth.”

“What was the man’s name?” Singleton said. He had a feeling it would help with his report, snap everything into place. Far down the beach the women held stones, waiting for a breaker to ebb, finishing its journey across hundreds of miles of lake and leave behind a momentarily smooth surface, perfect for stone skipping. Hank was saying he didn’t have the slightest idea what the T stood for. Hank said the name that had sparked the duel and he said it again, saying, “Billy-T, Billy-T’s the name,” and then he kept talking as Singleton tried to process the name, one part of his mind listening while another felt a current dashing around the name itself; one part of his mind clear and engaged with reality (another stone tossed, the two women looking distant and conspiratorial) as the other began to process the name that had been spoken, while the other part was unfurled into an acute, brutal, lonely, isolated desolation in which his mind’s eye (no other way to put it, he’d tell Wendy, later) saw his father, dressed in his olive overalls with goggles, at work, car after car, and then sitting during his lunch break with his black bucket between his legs on the windowsill eating a sandwich his mother had made, and worrying over his son in Vietnam, his son becoming a man in the infernal heat of combat.

The next thing he knew, water was closing around him, the cold pounding his temples and his jaws and shoving the air out of his lungs. Even as he sank below the surface, feeling the vise of the cold, he was aware that he was a man who had been flung into direct contact with something huge from his past — and later he’d swear that he was thinking about the report, the name Billy-T expanding in his mind until he could hear it speaking, a slight lisp, and then arms came around him and lifted him up, ordering him not to resist, to stay calm and then for a few seconds he was deep again. He could feel the mighty body, not just the water but the entire lake. There have been rumors about men who, confirming a specific element of their Causal Events Package, went wild with a desire to be permanently unfolded. And then he felt arms around him, lifting him up, and he was above the surface and Hank was slapping him softly, speaking into his ear as he pulled him to shore, saying, “You’re gonna want to do that again. You’ll want to get back into that water but as long as I’m here it won’t happen.” He pulled him along the sand and wrapped him in the picnic blanket and made him sit down.