David Means: Hystopia

You’re oblivious to the facts, Meg, he said. His fingers moved along her thigh. She stayed silent and looked out at the streets passing, Grand Rapids in the early morning light, nothing but television aerials, the stars, dew on roofs, lights on in a few windows as folks got up to face a day of work. She tried not to listen, let him keep going, as they moved through the cloverleaf.

Let me explain. When I heard your name a lightbulb went off and the word bingo came to mind. Bingo, I said. I’ve got to get her out of there and take her on the road. She’s the one for me. She has a story that somehow ties to mine.

Anyway, he said, pulling the car to the curb and cutting the engine. I have a picture in my head of the man who caused your trauma from everything you’ve told me.

I haven’t told you anything.

You’ve told me plenty. In so many words.

So tell me what you know, she said.

I know he died in your typical big-time snafu, all sparkle and glimmer and flash.

You’re sure about that.

I’m certain of it.

Then how come I don’t think so. How come I can’t even speculate.

I’m not the one to ask, he said. Then he got out, opened the rear door, and began loading his weapons in the backseat, snapping them open and shut, filling the car with the smell of oil while she gazed out at the house and examined the beach towels someone had carefully hung over the railing, lining them up neatly: one with the Detroit Tigers emblem: the roaring tiger and the baseball bat. Another had a map of the state of Michigan adorned with symbols: cherries and automobiles and rolls of papers. Next to it was a towel with a peace symbol. She read them from right to left and then from left to right and thought: the Tigers were playing the night of the first Detroit riot, and then the state burned, and then the peace movement — then the peace movement fell apart. A fourth towel was missing, she thought. The statement wasn’t complete. There has to be a fourth towel in the house somewhere, still wet and smelling of lake water and suntan lotion, and on that towel there has to be some symbol of hell.

Rake’s face appeared in her window. Get out of the car, he said, and she did.

She could remember the nurse’s big, lovely brown hands and the way he had soothed and assured, but she couldn’t remember his name or his face. She could remember the med center and the start-off point, a room with long countertops and forms to fill out and secretaries with slightly bemused expressions, tired from processing in-patients who came in a great never-ending cycle, and then the rest — the Tripizoid injections, the hippy encampment with a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome and campfires — became a blur.

Let me quote myself, Rake was saying in the car. This was later, moving along a road through the darkness, the engine rumbling under her feet, in her legs.

You’re driving on some forsaken road like this one, and then some bloke, yeah, that’s the word, some bloke appears with his thumb out, and he wonders if you’re going to pick him up or not, and he has that desperation in his eyes because he’s hoping for some blind luck, some kind of happenstance out of the blue, and you slow down to get a look at him, and fucking bingo, he’s some long-lost comrade-in-arms, a guy you knew back in the fray. So you stop and wave him over to get a better look and see that, yeah, he’s a buddy you were sure was KIAed. You were sure of it but there he is, looking loopy, his eyes weary and lost, and he leans forward a little bit and says, Hey, can I get a lift? And you say, Where you heading? And he says, Anywhere. And you tell him to get in, wanting to probe a bit, thinking maybe he’s not the guy. And he gets in and sits beside you and you drive a few miles without saying much, just idle chitchat, and then you say, Hey, man, you ever see action in Nam? And he says, Yeah, as a matter of fact, I did, and you say, Hey, me too, and he gives you that kind of reaction you’ve heard a million times, flat and noncommittal, full of avoidance — because you get either that or the other thing, the full-on meeting-of-two-souls-in-the-desert vibe, as if to say, and this is usually in just a word or two, How could it be possible that two souls bump into each other? Two souls who were over there and are now over here? As if it were some fantastic impossibility, for Christ’s sake, when in truth it’s as likely as anything else in this state. And because he’s noncommittal you wait it out, saying, Fuck, man, and you wait, maybe putting the radio on, figuring the music might lure more out of him but not caring too much because to want his history isn’t healthy.

Outside the city there was nothing much along the roadside except dead fields with purple skunk cabbage, old billboards advertising truck stops, restaurants long shut down, houses in shambles. In the center of one field a man stood, staring mutely as they passed, resting his weight against an implement. The Indiana border exerted its own unique pull down and down into the great heart of the country, past demarcation signs; past the dullard state of Ohio. They’d get to the border and head west toward Chicago and feel her pull but not venture too far because that would go against what some vets liked to call the Covenant of the Mitten. You got to keep it in the Mitten, you’ve got to rage against one thing or you’ll never get it done, and it does no good to go wildly out into an entire continent, Rake explained. Fucking state’s enough to take care of. There’s enough drugs in the state to keep a man busy for a lifetime, not to mention Detroit, not to mention the Grid itself, not to mention the riot zones.

He located — in the haze of static — the Ann Arbor station playing the Stooges, Iggy’s voice writhing in little hoots, angry, tinny. It was easy to imagine his shiny torso twisting around and his ribs sticking out as he crucified himself on his own tune. He’s the one I turn to when I need a hit of salvation, Rake said. I go to Iggy and begin to worship. I’d kill him if I got close enough. And he’d thank me for it, he added. Then he went on talking while she listened with her head back and her eyes closed and just a sliver of white noise coming through the window crack and another bit of air coming up from a hole in the floorboard. The air smelled sweet through the smoke of his cigarettes and hints of mint weed, spring …

Oncoming in the distance was a big car, a Lincoln or Olds, with smoke pouring out around the hood.

Fear manifesting itself. The air tarnished with it. Her skin with hives. Everything reduced to her forearms, her skin with hives. Behind them far off a siren unspooling. The look Shaky had given — the moon whites of his eyes, the sadness touching sadness.

I believe that man’s drinking under the influence of driving, Rake was saying, pulling the car over to the shoulder. Through the windshield she watched as he stepped out of the car, entrapped in silence, the sun on his neck, the fields behind him empty, the road still and quiet as he pointed, aimed, following the car in the opposite lane, following, following until the smoke of the shot hovered and he squinted, gazed, shot again, catching the Olds in a tire, running across the median (all quickly) and ordering the driver out, a tall elderly man in a black suit coat and tie with his arms up high. The hat on his head was black, with a narrow brim. (For a second she thought: That’s my grandfather.) There was something about the break of his trouser around his shoes and the way his shirt was tucked in tight that spoke of a gentleman, a man who had made his mark in the world and was now succumbing to loss. She slid down and waited for one more shot, or two, the sharp hole the sound would inevitably produce, startling the starlings and sparrows that had settled again in the fields (and it did) into a gust of wing flap she’d catch out of the corner of her eye when she’d look up and out the window and see the man sprawled on the road, making electric jerks that lifted his heels up and down while a stub of blood shot from his chest.