David Means - Hystopia

“I’m disappointed and relieved at the same time. I thought this would make me feel better. I was hoping to get here, find Rake alive, and take him out.”

Another gust of wind gathered in the darkness and the shade sucked back tight against the screen with a snap and the house seemed to grow tense in the rafters. He slipped his fingers along the band of her underwear and lifted it gently.

“I saw the way Meg reached up and touched your face when you were talking on the beach,” Wendy said. “You wanted to touch her back, I mean really touch her, and you stopped yourself by keeping your hand on her cheek. You wanted to go deeper, but consciously you drew a line that you really needed, like my father. You just knew that enough had been spoken, revealed. Now you’re going to leave it alone,” she said.

“What makes you think so?” he said.

“Because I want you to.”

“So I didn’t seem pathetic?” he said.

“Yes,” she said tenderly, pushing against him.

“Yes, I didn’t?”

“Yes, you seemed pathetic,” she said. Another gust gathered, the sudden stillness, a drawing back not only of air but time, too, it seemed, and then after it had gone through, in the stillness, a complete silence. The old lady down the hall had fallen asleep.

It’s impossible for me to think that this entire thing is merely an elaborate form of treatment, he would write in his report. And yet the implausibility of the conspiracy is precisely what makes it plausible. To be AWOL but, in a deeper sense, not AWOL at all … Was the intention that I terminate Rake, or that, by confronting him, I effect the cure that the Corps had failed to effect with him? Or was this only about me? That I was supposed to go to Rake and, before killing him, get filled in on what really happened over there, to learn about my experience in Vietnam from the horse’s mouth? But the horse was dead.

Without a word Wendy reached over and turned on the light and got up and went to the bag on the floor and came to bed with four zip pills, popping two and swallowing them dry before he could stop her and then putting her hand out as if to say: Now you. He popped his and laughed because it was already coming over the edge of his grief, a bright, delusional sense of being able to see anything and everything, and when Wendy turned off the light the room was suffused with phosphorescence, greenish in hue, trickling through the window and around the floor and across the sheets, which roiled and shimmered. She touched his scars and ran her finger down his arm, leaving a trace of green light where the warmth remained on his skin, and he traced his name on the soft curve of her belly and then watched her as she got up, went to the window, pulled the shade up, and called him over to look as beyond the trees, in flashbulb bursts, the lightning flared out the yard, metallic silver — and then she turned to him, offering her mouth, kissing him with the taste of ash and mint, everything accentuated by the pills, sharp and acute, her tongue twisting with his own.

“Not yet,” she told him, pushing away. “We’ve got all night.”

The edge the pill created seemed acute and sharp but with a wave of sadness pushing behind. He imagined that Billy-T had felt the same way, just before he was killed, and that the Zomboid had had a similar feeling, a kind of refinement of his senses shoved forward by sadness into a precise, particular moment. As if she had read his thoughts, Wendy was quietly crying, her tears bleeding, glistening with sparkles down her cheeks, and when she rubbed them away there was a violet bloom of color that faded into green. He could only imagine that she was thinking about her own loss, or about the mutual shared loss she had with Meg. He wanted to ask her, but when he began to speak she put her fingers to his lips and shushed him and got up and began to get dressed, slipping into her pants and then pulling a shirt on and telling him — with a wave of her arms — to do the same, motioning to the door and then leading him down the hallway, past MomMom’s room, past Meg and Hank’s room, down the stairs, and through the kitchen to the back porch, where they sat watching the yard burst into brightness and then diminish into residual light, pale silver and green, as another gust arrived — the sound raking the air far off, reeding through the dry grass and through a million dying leaves with a low, toothy hiss — and she raised her voice to speak through it, and he listened as she told him that when the Zomboid came home — when Steve came home, she said, softly — he was angry and violent, first at his legs, at what was missing in his body, and then at her, at what was missing in her, because no matter what she did, it wasn’t enough, not even close.

“Nothing’s missing from you,” Singleton said. “Nothing at all.”

“Nothing that you can see,” she said, taking his hand.

* * *

When the rain started they went inside, back through the kitchen, up to the bed. The pills — he’d later think — provided them with the necessary acuity, funneling all sensation into the fingertips and eyes, into the sensations that under normal conditions would simply be erotic.

When she told him to fuck her — that’s how she said it, direct, no buildup, fuck me —he drew himself over her in the bed but she stopped him and turned him onto his back, holding her hands flat on his chest, fanning her fingers over his scars again, leaving a faint handprint when she moved them back. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them a few minutes later he saw that her head was tossed back like a floating swimmer, keeping her head above water for air, her lips parted, her hair sizzling with static. The nearness — a tenseness at the back of his cock, deeper still — caused him to ease up, because he wanted it to last a long, long, long time, but it didn’t because he was pushing up into the sweet vacuum, the airless zone somewhere deep inside, the same one he had felt months ago, and he felt himself slipping away not into another unfolded vision but into something much calmer. Then there was the same backdraft as another wind gust gathered far off, and for a few seconds — maybe it was minutes — while the clouds recharged, there was a pause in the lightning and thunder and the house was silent except for her moans, and his, and then she came and he came, a flutter and tightness, and when she was done she collapsed against him and he wrapped his arms around her back and they stayed still for a few minutes, rocking gently.

They talked deep into the night and at some point he heard himself declaring his love for her, and she listened and accepted it. It was that simple. He was not finished with his sense of mission, of being inside something that was larger, a conspiracy or whatever, but the fact that he had admitted it, that he had met someone with a shared memory, had released him, freed him.

“You’re full of shit,” Wendy said. “But that’s OK. I think you meant what you said.”

At another point in the night — the zip pills had worn thin and an acute but pleasant exhaustion had taken over, birds were waking each other up in the trees, and the grainy twilight was materializing the dresser, the bed frame, the walls — she went to her bag and got the veil and held it in her hands, flat against her palms, and stood in the center of the room for a few minutes and waited until he got on his knees and kissed her belly and said maybe he would, and she asked would what? And he said betroth himself to her someday, and she asked him where he got such a pretentious word, and he said he didn’t know, maybe from a book, it’s not a word he would normally use, and he went down the hall to the bathroom to pee and came back and found her in bed, sleeping soundly, and he got in next to her, and in beautiful exhaustion of the diminished pill, cradled in the sounds of dawn, he fell asleep.