David Means - Hystopia

Through chattering teeth he said the name Billy-T over and over again, his voice incantatory, as if he were trying to memorize the sound of it, and when Meg came up, breathing hard, she stood and listened and then got down next to him and asked, “What happened?”

“He made the connection I thought he might make. The deal has been sealed.”

“What deal is that?” Wendy said. She had her hands on her hips and was staring down at them. “I mean, what deal exactly are you talking about?”

“The deal that started as soon as I saw you walk in the door,” Hank said, and Singleton closed his eyes and felt the beach shift beneath him, a sense of complete dissociation and then, a second later, the feeling of being rooted in the sand. Klein had once said that it didn’t take much to put two and two together when you’re in the field, when you’re on the ground making minute-by-minute conclusions, trying to go with the information you’re seeing, smelling, instead of orders the staff sends down from Command. Draw your own conclusions. Shoot first and ask the dead questions. Was it really possible that the Corps had set the whole thing up as some kind of rehabilitative structure? It was a sad, simple, clear question.

“So you, Billy-T, and Rake were in a squad together in Nam,” Hank explained. “You were buddies with Billy-T. You lost him. You lost your dear buddy, your best friend. The three of you signed up together — at least that’s what it looks like. But I didn’t enlist with you guys. Like I said before, I have memories that go back to the day I was packing my stuff up before leaving for boot camp, and everything before that — growing up downstate, summer afternoons playing ball, friends and buddies and girlfriends but nobody named Meg, and no Rake, that’s for sure, so for me it’s clear that what I enfolded started in Vietnam and was finished in Nam. I was drafted clean and simple. I got my notice. But you and Meg share a common past with Rake.”

“Is that the way you see it?” Singleton said, turning to Meg. Her face was pale and pinched with pain.

“I knew it as soon as you told us your name,” she said. “He talked about you in the vision I had. You two were there together. You were good friends.”

“What else?”

“He was in the jungle, in a firefight, and there was someone named Frank who liked to pray over bodies. Then he was in Hue. Then he was dead. I was in love with him. He was my boyfriend and then he got drafted.”

This is the moment he’d heard about, that was rumored to exist, when you came into contact with somebody who had a direct connection to the trauma and shared the grief. Hank had taken Wendy down the beach to give them a little time alone. Space but not too much space was the way he put it, a chance to talk alone.

“He was angry,” she said. “And he was dead. He talked to me about going to his own funeral. Were you at the funeral?”

“He was in a casket and I was in combat,” Singleton said. “I remember when he was killed. In my vision we were fighting in Hue. Obviously, the second siege of Hue. He was calling in for air support and the strike came and it came in too close, and he was at the phone, first calling the coordinates in and then still holding it when the strike came, so it isn’t clear to me if he was calling in a second strike or if my vision compressed time, or if he just liked to hold that phone to his mouth, but then there was the fireball.”

“He had a slight lisp,” Meg said, her voice quivering. “I loved his lisp.”

“I don’t remember that,” Singleton said.

“Now you do,” Meg said.

She reached out and touched his face and he did the same and for a few seconds they held their hands there, as if passing thoughts and memories through their fingers.

“We were dating, me and Billy-T. He took me out to California, I think, and we went to the beach out there.”

“What did he look like?”

“He had curly hair — wavy, and it was sun blond, bleached, and he had this great smile,” she said.

“If I could remember him that’s the way I’d picture him,” Singleton said. “He had a big smile.”

“Yeah, a sweet smile,” she said, and then she went on to explain more, to lay it all out, to describe some of the things he already knew and some that were new to him. Down the beach Wendy and Hank had gone as far as they dared and had turned around, facing in their direction, arms down, looking straight ahead as if to wait for something to resolve.

There was an unnatural attraction between two linked by grief. Wendy’s awareness of that attraction was apparent in the swing of her arms as she ran down the beach. There was a connective name between us, Billy-T, and when the name was spoken, Agent Singleton (I) had a reflexive response. There were rumors that if two enfolds met and exchanged information a natural unfolding would take place, whereupon the two patients would share enough mutual memory material to counteract the Tripizoid in a natural manner, inducing a natural memory outside of the traumatic material.

* * *

“Maybe grief has to work itself out like this or something. If it’s not felt, if it doesn’t happen, it finds a way,” Hank said later that night as they sat at the kitchen table. They had returned from the beach, cooked dinner — chicken, potatoes, green beans — together, working alongside MomMom. She seemed aware of the shift, the change, and when she spoke her voice was lower, calmer.

“I don’t mean to throw even more disrespect on the Corps, but there’s simply no way they knew you coming up here would result in some kind of reunification. If they did know, they’re a hell of a lot more organized than I thought. It’s better if you don’t even consider that as a possibility. Put it aside, man, put it aside,” Hank said.

“No, I can’t. The best way for me to think about it is to believe that Klein knew,” Singleton said. “For my own sense of sanity I’m gonna say that he arranged things, maybe not specific things but the general pattern. He made a point of disregarding the instructions from Command as a way of making damn sure I knew that I had to make decisions in the field, based on the field. The last order he gave me was to interrogate Meg.”

“And he said it was a form of treatment,” Wendy said. “Don’t forget that.”

“He made me say it.”

“And you said it. Now put it aside,” she said, and she pushed her chair back, took Meg by the hand, and they went off into the living room, where they sat talking, their voices coming down the hall and into the kitchen while Hank and Singleton sat in silence, listening.

* * *

That night, in their room, they heard the old lady crying out in her delirium, her words coming down the hall. From the window there was the usual sound of surf breaking and, later, the roar of a gang of bikers coming closer and then receding with the pop of a backfire. Then the wind began to pick up, a long, low hissing through the bramble and trees as each gust approached, blowing the shade up into the room as it struck the house broadside, shaking away into a deep quiet (the buzz was completely gone from his ears) again until the next one arrived. That was how his grief felt. It came welling up out of the connection he had with the young woman, Meg, and then it receded into the logic of his assessment of the situation, his desire, for whatever reason, to somehow remain inside something that resembled an operation, a plan of action, a sense of being on a mission. His desire to find a technical way to describe the afternoon seemed to fade and he tried to focus his mind on Meg, her freckled face, her wide eyes, wondering if he had known her at least through a photograph that Billy had passed around to the guys in their unit, because he had carried a photo, for sure, if he was a normal grunt. Then he thought of the structure of the bridge, the long, beautiful arch of it across those brutal currents, and the two parts of the state, and he thought of Wendy’s father holding out down in Flint as he let his mind zoom into space to look down at the hand shape that was supposedly part of what drew vets in from all over the country, attracted not only to the shape itself but to the peninsular aspect, the fact that there were so many places in which to find an end point, and he thought about the streets of Flint, and the young man in his wheelchair, smoking a cigarette, his gun aimed at the sky, and he quickly let his mind zoom back down to the house he was in — beneath a roof, comfortable in bed with Wendy, who was letting him rest his hand on her belly, sliding it along the band of her underwear, not responding but not pushing him away. When he asked her if she was awake she said she was wide awake.