Hystopia

by David Means

Genres: Alternative History sci-fi; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

At the end of the 1960s, after surviving multiple assassination attempts, President John F. Kennedy has created a vast federal agency, the Psych Corps, dedicated to maintaining the nation's mental hygiene by any means necessary. Soldiers returning from Vietnam have their battlefield traumas "enfolded," - wiped from their memories through drugs and therapy. Any veterans too damaged to be enfolded roam at will, evading the Psych Corps and re-enacting atrocities on civilians. Hystopia highlights the crazy reality of trauma, both national and personal.

Release date: April 19, 2016

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Print pages: 352

Sample

BIG AND GRAND RAPIDS



April’s the cruelest month, they say, but I wouldn’t go that far. At least not yet. I’m going to do my best to make it the cruelest, she heard him say, and then she slipped into darkness and woke, hours later, to the murmur of the engine, the power thrumming under the hood, the hood ornament far out, pointing the way. He had gone in and taken her out of the post-treatment Grid, slipping in, using his words and drugs. His hand was on her leg. Fingers spread. Above everything his talk, his voice ragged and deep, and then as she came up and out of it, his voice and radio static were all she had.

Something was close behind, a spiral of police sirens, the hospital’s clean simplicity, the sedation of the treatment, pre and post, that stayed with her when it was over, and she had to command herself to open her eyes and to look out the windows at the devouring slip of the road into itself …

Groggy, she found her mouth and made it speak, and she was telling him, Find the Ann Arbor channel, the one from the university, Stooges all the time.

Stooges all the time, he muttered.

Then he began coughing and clearing his throat until he had something to spit, and he told her his throat was sore from screaming in Grand Rapids.

It had been a confusing couple of hours before they’d split that scene. The houses had been old, once dignified and fine, now slipping into decrepitude, uncomfortable beneath the trees arching over the wide streets. The trees were tired of shading structures of grandeur, optimistically huge Victorians. Slate shingles gone, hauled away by the looters after the riots.

Shaky had been asleep when they entered his bedroom, treading softly. Rake put the gun to his forehead and told him what he had to give them and how he was to do it and with what kind of movement, slowly, and how much shit he was in, deep, deep unbelievable shit, and Shaky did what they ordered him to do, but when he was doing it he stumbled or made a quick move. He was a tall dark man with knobby knees. One of the tallest motherfuckers you’re gonna see in the Middle West, Rake said.

Rake shot him point-blank, producing a spongy, wet sound, and an outbound spew of bone and blood hit the wall, making another sound that she heard and reheard and heard again.

That’s that, Rake said, kicking the body.

Then they ransacked the house, pulling drawers, spilling underwear, unfurling panties, frilly things that she held for a moment and dropped to the floor.

The feel of silk was still on her fingertips. She could still see the look in his eyes as he stared at the gun. The black barrel in the black pupil.

You’re gonna come out of it, the look said. You’re gonna survive this. I’m dead but you’re going to live. I’m just one more in the wrong place at the wrong time. One more who wakes up into a nightmare. I’m not going to plead with you too hard, no girl, but I’m gonna give you this last little glance to carry with you when you go, the look said before the gun took it away.

In the kitchen he removed a loaf of Wonder from the bread box, a glass bottle of milk with a paper cap, and some cheese, and then they headed off into the morning light.

I’m afraid we didn’t leave a single print, he said. We’re on the lam. That’s part of the deal. We’ve got to mix it up. Sometimes I leave prints, other times I don’t. Got to give the Psych Corps something to think about, got to leave some tracks they can obsessively follow. He talked and talked as they drove the Grand Rapids streets, turning now and then to make sure she was listening or at least awake, poking her with his long fingers, gripping her thigh.

* * *

Do I talk too much? He said.

Do I ramble on, the king of non sequitur? He said.

Do you listen to me? He said.

Do you listen to me going on and on? You most certainly do. He said. Said. Said. He said. He said. He said.

If you’re good for anything you’re good as a listener, set to let me ramble while you nod into it. That first time back there, when I finally got to you, I tried that classic dosage, a big 400-microgram dose, the king of all tabs. You get a girl tripping on that and you’re free to do what you want depending on the structures you’ve set up for yourself and I’ll admit that I have set some up for myself. I’ve got my codes and credos just like the rest of them. That’s all we had over in Indochina. All we had to live with were the rules and regulations.

Them. It’s us against them and they know it, and the thing about them is that the only thing they really know, if you get my drift, is that they failed me. They failed me big-time by not taking care of me when I returned from the war. They took me down to Texas and put me into one of their reenactments and pumped me full of Tripizoid, and then all they did was double it down, increase what they were trying to decrease. If they knew how bad I was feeling, they’d never sleep at night. They’d lock the doors and nail the windows. They’d put me in their prayers and ask for protection specifically against me. They’d walk faster and glance back more often. If they had even the slightest idea that I was wandering their streets they’d unlock their gun cabinets and get their rifles cleaned and make sure the ammo was dry. Some of them have a vague premonition, an ill-formed vision comprised of Vetdock escapees, Black Flag wannabes, trigger-happy acid freaks, and Year of Hate troublemakers. Guys with bad scars, he said. Then he ran his fingers across the scar that ran from his scalp—the part where the hair wouldn’t grow—down his neck to where it disappeared under his collar. He touched it, pulled his shirt open, and stared down as if seeing for the first time the way the scar tissue radiated across his chest in weird formations that had once been his nipples, and into his belly button, where the splash had pooled. (That fiery goop spread over me while I watched—and yeah, I did watch it because I was hit such a blast of dopamine that I flew out of myself and stood there on the battlefield resisting the temptation to pound my chest like Tarzan.)

In Grand Rapids, before going into the house, he had pulled over to the curb, letting the car murmur and hum, the long hood shuddering, waxed, a glistening tongue touching the trees in reflection.

You want to know what my credo is? he said. And without waiting for her to answer he continued:

My credo’s: never kill for a good reason. If you’re going to be a failed enfold, then do it wholeheartedly and with all the gusto you can muster. When you kill, do it quickly so that you pluck the proper method from the situation itself. But never ever, ever be efficient. I mean don’t go for the easy kill. At the same time don’t stretch it out too much. If there’s a scream I want it to be the brutal, loud, quick kind that it goes in one ear and out the other. You can blame that on Nam or you can blame it on the way my mind works. The one thing I hated over there was hearing a fellow grunt crying, stuck out in the fire zone while we gave the Marine credo a workout (never leave the dead buddy behind and all that). He looked at her and examined her eyes and then reached up to touch her face. For a second there was a softening in his features. He had a lean, sharp chin and a gaunt jawbone that led up to an unusual fat brow. Then he gave her a swat on the top of the head and said, Shit, man. We’ve got to go in, take care of this Shaky character, and leave a calling card for the police, who will give it to the authorities, and then eventually it’ll go up the chain to some poor Psych Corps agent. Their job is to find some semblance of order in all this madness, and mine, as I see it, is to give them something to think about …

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.

He was breathing hard when he got back to the car.

The road blazed in the setting sunlight. A trooper car passed, going the other way, dome light flashing, and then he spoke, saying, I’m going over the border to Indiana for a few miles and then up again even though it’s not my style to go out of state even to make the odds better against being caught. You’re probably wondering why I shot that one back there, and I’m inclined to tell you, although I have doubts that you’ll understand what I’m going to say, he said, adjusting the radio dial, holding on to the wheel with his knees while lighting a cigarette, taking a deep draw and then another deeper one and glancing at her. I shot that guy because he reminded me of my uncle Lester, and my uncle Lester used to remind me of my father, and my father used to remind me of my uncle Lester, and Lester was a crazy son of a bitch who did things to kids that he should’ve done to adults because he had what my mother liked to call wandering hands, hands that were cut loose from his mind. My mother said Lester couldn’t help what he did but she still sent me over to his sign shop to learn the trade, in Detroit. He had a good little operation going as a vendor and he made shingles for dealerships and for the floors—warning signs and the like, things that said Careful Workers Make Better Cars, that kind of shit, and I got to his shop and began to learn to make stencils, cutting them out—I was handy with my own hands, you see—and I was a natural. That’s what the old geezer said. He said, You’re a natural at this, boy, holding my hand with his hand while he guided the brush, using that as pretext to handle and fondle my fingers, I see now, but I didn’t at the time because I was a kid and pure and clean and unseeing of those things, as most kids are, and that went on until a few weeks later he was trying to get his hands on other parts of me and finally, well, to cut this short and give you the whole story, I gave him a blast of paint in the face from a spray gun, and then I cut his throat and then I joined up, I enlisted, and the rest, as they say, is history, but that’s what made me kill that man out there, the fact that there was a likeness in the man to the man named Lester, although I have to say it wasn’t as good as killing uncle Lester himself, but I can’t do that again, can I, so all I can do is keep trying to find a way to get as close to doing it again as I can, he said madly, going on for at least twenty minutes, circling around on the story again to tweeze out more details; the little shacklike building that was the shop, the smell of paint and paper and turpentine.

He said. He said, and he said, and she closed her eyes and slid back down into the darkness, into the murmur of the engine and what felt like time itself at the center of her mind. (She could feel it. She could feel the wall the drugs made between the inner and outer, apparent in the stretch her mind made to locate the missing parts: the enfolded memories sat like a nut, like some seed of potential, tucked away to the side, hiding.) From time to time she came up and opened her eyes to watch the road, a single line drawing into the headlights as they fanned out to the edge of darkness on both sides, and then she went back down while he talked, his voice within a narrow range, the words pristine and sharp—enfolded, Mexico, gunplay, gunmetal, blood—but unattached, and then he was nudging her hard in the shoulder until she was up again to see a town passing in dim streetlight, the road dusky with ash, the boarded storefronts, and then she was back down again into the darkness while his words, again, floated—hideout, cops, tracking systems—until she awoke suddenly, startled by the sealed silence of the empty car, to see the stretch of bleak parking lot and the single-story hotel, fifteen units, with a brightly lit office in which Rake stood, his silhouette tall and angular, his head big and round, as he turned to look out through the window at her, lifting his arm and his hand and his finger in a sign, as if to say “one minute,” while the clerk handed him a clipboard. Then he came bounding out, with a slightly bowlegged walk, his hands jammed into his pockets, his face firm and grim, and he took her from the car, told her to stretch her legs, and led her into the room—wood paneled and smelling of lemon polish and bleach and stale cigarette smoke, with two grimy bedspreads, a television set against the wall, a Bible in red artificial leather on each nightstand. After she used the bathroom, he told her to sit in a chair.

When she came up and out again, Rake was counting and sorting tabs and baggies on the bedspread while she watched television, the picture unsteady, an old family drama with a clean-cut father and a runty, troubled kid with a crew cut who kept making wisecracks when they asked him to do something around the house. The mother had a beehive hairdo and wore an apron over her dress as she moved through the scenes with devotion to the tasks at hand. The show came in and out, bits of dialogue leading to laugh-track hilarity, the sound of waves hitting a shore. When she opened her eyes she saw, in a quivering black-and-white image, a father with his briefcase at his side, receiving a highball from the mother’s hand, holding it up like a chalice and saying something inaudible that sparked another, bigger laugh-track roar that sounded like a wave hitting a shore hard and then leaving with a long, slow, receding hiss, and then more waves to punch lines she didn’t hear because, on the bed, she was trying to remember and to reconstruct her own family tableau: father, mother, brother, the house, Colonial, the fat maple trees out front …

… she woke to the sound of Rake snoring and got up and went to the bathroom to pee and sat on the seat and stared at her knees, which were ruddy and brushed and scabbed. Then she went back into the bedroom and went to the window and lifted a blind and stared out at the parking lot. Two cars. Their own and an old G.T.O. grainy, sandpapery in the moonlight, and the playground, the spaceship monkey bars, the swing with the rotting seat, cordoned off with chain link. She watched a police cruiser, old-style, with a single dome, deliberately slow, blink, turn in, and sit.

Rake, she whispered. He rolled over beneath the sheets and snored again and seemed to settle even deeper into sleep. The room stank. The pills glinted.

There was a thump of doors and when she peeked again the cops were outside, adjusting their belts. One removed his hat. He slid his hand a couple of times up and over his scalp in a habitual motion and then slapped the brim of his hat against his thigh, as if to shake the dust from it, cowboy-style.

Rake, she said again. She went and gave him a nudge and stood back as he snorted and rolled over and settled back into sleep. So she nudged him again and he finally turned over and said, What the fuck do you want?

Cops, she said.

He sprang up, pulling on his boxers, and went to the window, lifting the slat with his thumb.

What were you doing up?

I was just up.

You were just up?

I was just up.

You use the phone?

No.

Out front, the cops seemed to be in surveillance mode, thumbs in their belts, turning one way and another. A car passed on the road and they turned to watch it.

Cops don’t just appear out of the blue like this. They’re onto something. They sniffed us out, he whispered. This is perfect, exactly. This is hoped-for shit. It can’t get any better than this.

Pulling his shirt on, tucking it neatly, he went to his rucksack and found his gun, held it up, spun the cylinder, opened it for a check, snapped it shut, and said, Take a peek and tell me if they’re coming to the door.

She looked out and saw them moving around Rake’s car, leaning in to the windows, and then standing behind it and reading the plates. One of them held a pad and jotted something down and then went to the cruiser and sat inside, lifting the microphone to his mouth.

He’s calling something in, she said.

Rake pushed her away from the window, lifted the slat, and looked out. Put that stuff in the bag. Pack everything up. We’re in one of those situations. We’re gonna have the pleasure of blasting them both, he said. They’re gonna face something they knew they’d have to face. They just didn’t know they’d have to face it tonight. It’s that simple, he said.

Words tight and sweet. The relief of putting them together. He would start speaking and she’d gather each phrase, take in the scroll of meaning. They moved together with conspiratorial unity. She felt that much. That much was sure. She was with him, at least for now. In her ears a siren still spun, but softer, subdued. This is how it is, a voice said, far off. This is how it’s gonna be. Another voice said: Give in to this and you give in forever. Don’t give in. Another part speaking in the clear logic of survival mode. Lockstep into the formation, the grid of the moment. She had been enfolded in a routine stage set. That part is gone, they said. That part of you’s gonna be there, you’ll feel it, and you’ll want to pick at it like a scab, but don’t pick. You pick, you open it back up and the blood’ll flow. In the dark she felt this. Lockstep to survive. Do what they say to do and you’ll be all right, it’s that simple, really. They were in folding chairs in a group facing each other, going through the routine motions, the Corps Credo on the wall, the windows open slightly and the breeze coming in. Move around it, work around it, and you’ll be fine, a voice said.

Keep an eye on them, he said, reaching under the bed. The double-barrel shotgun was blunt and stupid-looking in the dim light, sawed off, like something carved from a log. He cracked it, loaded two shells, thumbed them tight, and then jerked it shut. All snap and tightness. Old monster, he called it.

The charges hovered: kidnapping a minor out of the Grid and statutory rape to begin with; murder; narcotics, dealing and using, robbery, burglary—he could speak at length about these old-school cops, small-timers like his old man, shifty fuckers who moved with a deliberation you didn’t see in city cops, shrouded in a nonchalance that was highly deceptive. All that tedium of speed-trap stakeouts, parked deep in the brambles, clocking with their eyes, trying to find some semblance of drama in a few streets and a lot of land. His old man had come home from work with a dull gaze in his eyes, laying his firearm on the table.

This’ll kill both of them if we’re lucky. If we’re not, I’m going to have to be quick with this one here, he said, tapping his belt.

I’ve got to use the bathroom, she said.

He turned and gave her a long gaze. She could feel it. His eyes looking. His eyes boring into her.

Make it quick, he said. You’re gonna answer the door when they knock. They won’t be able to get their eyes off you because they’re not used to seeing flesh like yours, and that’s going to be their death warrant.

The tiles were moldy, the grout gray around the toilet, which was little more than a grim hole gurgling softly to itself. She pulled the shower curtains back, trying not to rattle the hooks, and gazed at the window. It was small, but not too small. She climbed into the tub and pushed it up and looked out behind the hotel. A field opened up into rubble and trash with a shaggy old fence that dipped invitingly in the middle. About twenty yards past the field was a weathered clapboard house with shaded windows. Everything was starting to emerge in the first dawn light.

Into the logic of it. Words clearly spoken. Structure around everything, the lines graphed and solid. Eyes still slightly blurry. As if rising up out of deep water into the fresh light suddenly, but it’s still dark in the hotel room. You can run, but then, that wouldn’t be in the nature of the program, so to speak, someone said. In any case, running goes against the nature of your rehabilitation. You run and you run toward that which was enfolded, so to speak. Or you run around it. You feel it and want to know it and also know that to know it would be to know way too much, so to speak, someone said.

Hurry it up in there, he said.

I just have to wipe.

Wipe fast. They’re down by the office right now.

There’s nothing in my dreams, just some ugly memories, a voice said from behind her. The restrictions of a drugged state, someone had said. Tripizoid with enfolding is salvation. You can’t say that for most of them. You can say it, but it wouldn’t be true.

Get out there, he said.

She went and stood where he told her, in her nightie, shivering, her nipples rough against the lace.

Just stand like that and tell them something sweet and nice. Give them the works. I’ll let you improvise this time. You’ll be the first thing they see. They’ll be dazed and dazzled small-time pokes. They’ll reach up to rub their unshaven chins and that’s when I’ll step out and give them a blast of pure reality.

He braced the shotgun against his leg while from outside came the distinct clumpy sound of cops who weren’t trying to hide their own presence; cops with an upfront style that reflected the tedium of their lives. At the door they stopped, knocked, and said, Open up, police. One or two beats, and then she sang out, One minute, and then waited another few beats and then said, Hold on, and then another beat and she went and unchained the lock and gazed out at faces leaning in to catch sight of her—she felt it, the light and their gaze forcefully upon her hips and the flat of her belly. One cop had baby fat on his cheeks and small