David Means: Hystopia

Go as deep into the strangeness of it and leave clear-cut indicators and be certain that what was left behind each time was a record. That was his modus operandi.

Anyone passing on the road, looking carefully, would’ve noticed a crime in progress. They would’ve seen the heels of the two dead men on the walkway, in front of the shabby hotel. They would’ve seen Rake doing a little dance, leaving bloody footprints all the way to the office. They might’ve seen — if they passed a moment later — Rake shooting the night clerk. The bright flash.

Singleton and Klein had gone over the map that morning, the long strings and the short strings: red ones marking a murder, blues a possible sighting. The target, Rake, was on a rampage, or had been on a rampage, and he had gone and taken a girl named Meg. One more Grid-breaker going in and taking a girl out of post-treatment, Klein had explained over and over for at least a week.

Now Klein leaned forward with his hands flat on the desk, arching his neck to look up at Singleton.

“You know what I did before I joined this outfit?”

“No, sir.”

Light coming in from the windows — the smoky morning air taking the sun and diffusing it — or the fluorescent fixture overhead talking to itself. The world buzzed in Singleton’s ear.

“I fought in the big one and then I became a historian. You can’t fight in that war — I mean really fight, be in the shit, so to speak, and not become some kind of historian. Let me tell you, history misses the point. Take the Somme, for example. The Big Fuck-up. I mean it was called that when it was happening. You had something like sixty thousand lads — and they were lads — die in the first day of battle. That battle cut the world in two. It introduced pure irony into the world, but do historians mention it? Hell no. Are we willing to call Nam the Little Fuck-up? Christ no. The president keeps her rolling and decides to make a repository for irony, and do you know where it is, Singleton? You’re sitting in it. And I feel duty bound to dissipate some of the excess irony. And do you know how I’m going to do it? I’m gonna terminate this Rake character first chance I get. Now, you might think that’s against the Credo, but the way I see it, he’s going around taking perfectly cured individuals and returning them to their traumatized states, and when we tried to enfold him, to treat him, he became one more in a line of failed enfolds, and the only way to make the wider problem — with the treatment, I mean — disappear, the only realistic way is to terminate him. If you’re gonna build a big repository for the remnants of Nam, if you’re gonna go around believing in the structure of your endeavor, you have to be willing to go out and solve the problem so it doesn’t exist anymore — proof of the problem, I mean. So that’s why I’m going to eliminate him.”

Klein moved back to the map on the wall, touched the pins, plucked the strings gently. “That’s just between the two of us, confidential,” he said. His voice softened and his jaw slackened for a second and then tightened up. He’d be lighting a pipe in a few minutes.

“I don’t really want to go against the regulations,” Klein said. “Or the mission, for that matter. But the way I see it, a situational reality must be faced. We’ve been tracking down these failed enfolds for two years now, and we have cops up north sending the law enforcement liaison down asking for help. They’re sure we know more than we say we know, of course. I’m here to train you, so I feel an obligation to speak the truth. But you should feel an obligation — no, scratch that. You’ve taken an oath to keep this case to yourself. Anything I say in here can be used against you, so to speak. It would’ve saved me a hell of a lot of time and pain if I’d been trained to see that we’re not a perfect organization. The vision we have as an organization, even our building might seem close to perfect, and certainly we’ve come a long way toward fulfilling our mission, but, again, truth to power, there are points at which the means of war, the problem itself, must be tapped to solve a difficult problem. A man like Rake escapes off into a fury of social nonstructure. He comes to us, his file sealed, as per regulations, and then when we try to enfold him, to give him the best treatment possible — although I’ll be the first to admit that he was one of the early test cases, and his reenactment was down in New Mexico — he doubles his trauma, and as I’m sure you know, from reading your manuals and your early training, a failed enfold simply takes the Causal Events Package and amplifies it. Tripizoid, in the case of a failed enfold, doesn’t allow for the proper state of redress. It’s just a drug, and like all drugs it’s still partly — no, scratch that — it’s still a mystery. You’d know about drugs, I assume. You could tell me plenty.”

Singleton looked over Klein’s shoulder and out the window and thought about the agent Wendy, who was probably, right now, listening and nodding and making gestures to indicate she was listening. He thought of her up in Relations, hands in her lap, her eyes fixed on her boss. Meanwhile, the building gave off bad vibes that came of its having been endowed by Kennedy in his third term, when secured by his martyrdom (or whatever the fuck you wanted to call it), as part of his Great Hope initiative. Originally built to serve as a transfer point for veterans coming back into the Vetdock programs, the offices consisted of shoddy government-issue wallboard in preconstructed frames, with flickering fluorescent lights and broad windows facing the front of the building. A sense of mission gone haywire inherent in the walls.

Klein’s bearing had changed little in the last few weeks. He leaned forward and seemed to aim his words at a target down-range. He spoke to his own sense of himself as it related to his own history. He spoke in broad strokes and then tightened — with a slight vibrato — to the details of the case.

“We think Rake has a history of finding recently treated patients and kidnapping them. We’ve already covered that.” Klein reached out to align the pipes on his rack again, fingering the bowls. “She was released into the Grid with a tacking band and he somehow knew she was coming out of treatment, knew she’d be freshly enfolded, and he showed up there — most likely hiked his way in — around day two after her arrival. He must’ve found his way to a list. The lists are going on the black market, and you know, well, we’ve been through all of this but it won’t hurt to repeat it. You might hear something that triggers an idea, Singleton.” (Klein lifted a pipe from the rack — an absurdly long meerschaum, broken in, tobacco colored — and twiddled it between his fingers. His mouth puckered and he sucked the stem and then put it back and took another pipe, holding it up, explaining that it was a Dublin, beautiful bird’s-eye briar. Then he fixed it, packing, poking, lighting, puffing.) “Her record — I mean the enfolded material — is officially sealed to us, of course. But what we do know is that she was fixed and released with tag.”

“Yes, sir, tagged.”

“No, not tagged. With tag.”

“Yes, sir. With tag.”

Klein stood up again and moved to the window. Overhead, the building thrummed. Files were held somewhere off facility, locked away, bending against clips, rubber banded and color coded. His own was out there somewhere, Singleton thought, stored in some secure location, loaded with the facts and figures and the basic stage directions of what had to be replicated — a mass shooting, a booby trap, he didn’t really know anymore — during the enfold, reenacted into memory with the help of the go-to drug, Tripizoid, and doubled back on itself hopefully forever. One peek in a file — it was said — and the memories would rush back and the fuzzball in the head would explode and you’d be back in the shit again. Treatment failed if the treated knew, or even suspected, that the treated material, the information, could be accessed again. Without a sense of privacy, reenactment failed. Klein went on about Rake’s noir tendencies and how it was clear in his actions, in the blood paintings, in the traces he left behind, that he had an inclination to instill his actions with drama, and that this was key — this might be the key.