David Means - Hystopia

Certain historical facts have been twisted to fit Eugene Allen’s fictive universe. The fires his text describes did consume most of Detroit and parts of Flint, and raged through the state to the north, but they did not, of course, burn the entire state from top to bottom. Details of the seventh assassination attempt made on John F. Kennedy, now known as the Genuine Assassination, have been changed slightly in Allen’s narrative, which has it taking place on a mid-August afternoon in Galva, Illinois. As we know, Kennedy was killed a month later, on September 17, as he drove through the town of Springfield, Illinois, on one of his intimate wave-by tours, “throwing [his] fate to the whims of the nation,” as he said so often in his later speeches.

That Kennedy deliberately endangered himself in public outings as a way to defy previous attempts made on his life is historical fact, and historians will be debating for years the effectiveness this gesture had in reducing, or increasing, the number of attempts on his life (six), and whether it helped to extend his physical life along with his political life. The great ash heaps — still smoldering as Allen worked on the novel — certainly could be seen from an apartment at 22 Main, in Flint, in which Myron Singleton and Wendy Zapf had their first furtive lovemaking session. But the ash heap didn’t stop — as Allen claims — at Bay City (which burned for three years) but extended all the way up into the thumb region before petering out. Another backdrop of Allen’s narrative, the second great lumber boom, was simply a creation of his vivid imagination. Most of northern Michigan had remained reforested, with the exception of a few areas afflicted with white pine blister rust (even here, in most cases, the rust didn’t kill the trees but damaged branches and reduced lumber value). The great second lumber boom (1975) didn’t begin until shortly after the novel was finished. Certainly there were men like Hank (last name unknown), who stole into the state forests to poach lumber, acting as cruisers, locating the larger trees, and then going in at night (covertly) to cut. It is likely that Allen was inspired by his neighbor Ralph Sutton, a former lumberman who took him under his wing and taught him the intricacies of lumber poaching, even going so far as to take the boy on a few excursions, cutting trees from local parks.

EDITOR’S NOTE

On August 15, 1974, Allen was given a standard postmortem psychological examination, drawing upon the text of his manuscript and interviews with surviving family members, friends, and casual acquaintances. John Maudsley led the investigative team at the Michigan State Mental Facility. An excerpt from his extensive report, already considered a classic of the genre, is worth quoting:

Eugene Allen had a tendency to self-isolate and was prone to bouts of Stiller’s disease, a common condition in the Middle West of the United States. Although the diagnosis is relatively new, still under study, symptoms include a desire to stand in attic windows for long stretches; a desire to wander back lots, abandoned fairgrounds, deserted alleys, and linger in sustained reveries; a propensity for crawling beneath porch structures and into crawl spaces in order to peer up through cracks and other apertures to witness the world from a distance and within secure confines, the reduced field of vision paradoxically effecting a wider view by way of a tightening sensation around the eyeballs and eyelids. Clinical interviewees support that these moments of reverie, sometimes lasting as long as an entire afternoon, often include delusional historical memories. Stiller’s disease in older teens can lead to wayward tendencies, antisocial ideation, and profound spiritual visions leading to a desire for artificially induced visions. Evidence in the case of Allen includes the following: he spent a great deal of time in his grandfather’s vast attic space, most often in the northwestern corner, facing Stewart Avenue (one photograph shows him seated in a Hitchcock chair, knees pressed together, his chin slightly raised, and his eyes subdued). An interview with Harold B. Allen, age ninety, is here quoted in full:

He was a good kid, somewhat quiet, and of course he had to suffer through a great deal of turmoil related to his sister Meg. He was a splendid boy until he reached the age of sixteen and grew somewhat morose. One afternoon I heard footsteps in the attic. Our gardener and handyman, Rodney, was downstairs trimming the hedge. I went into the yard to talk to him, and when I looked up I saw Eugene in the attic window, which wasn’t unusual because he liked to go up there with one of his books — he was reading Dickens that summer. I didn’t think of him again until a few hours later when I returned home and looked again and he was still there. So I went up to the attic and said, What are you doing? And he remained silent. It was baking hot up there. You could hear Rodney downstairs, clipping the lawn, and down the street some kids playing, and so I said something to the effect of You should be out enjoying this beautiful summer day. And Eugene looked up at me and said, in an extremely formal voice, I’d rather not. There was something in his tone that shook me. Something weighty and cold in the way he said it, and I said, Well, you’d better come downstairs anyway and sit in the kitchen while your grandmother cooks supper, or watch the news with me, and he said, I’d rather not, and I said something like, Well, I’m going to have to give you a grandfatherly order and insist you come down, and he stayed quiet for a minute and then said, in the same formal voice, Well, Grandfather, we’re all subjugated to someone, somehow, and I suppose in this instant I’m subjugated to you, and then he stood up, his knees cracking, and wiped the sweat from his eyes, and we walked down to my bedroom and I gave him a fresh shirt, told him to clean up, and then went down to the kitchen, where Ethel and I had a laugh over the vagaries of teenage behavior. In any case, the boy didn’t come down, and I went back to the attic and found him in the chair, already sweating through my shirt, and I said, Come down, son, right now, and I suspect — I wasn’t certain — that his propensity for odd behavior was directly connected with his sister. Don’t get me wrong. I had my suspicions, but I told myself that the boy was enjoying some quiet time alone. The view from the window was splendid, looking out on the street — and I might add that it was and still is a beautiful street, a bit worn around the edges now, and zoned as a historical area (it was protected during the riots, one of the ringed blocks, and it survived the looting and so forth). There’s a large oak out front that survived the blight — at any rate, I didn’t see his behavior as out of the ordinary, at least not the first time. He was always a boy who would wander off on his own. I’d find him between our garage and the neighbor’s, or in the little plot of grass back behind the breezeway, sitting alone. I didn’t see anything unusual in it at the time and I’m still not sure I do.