Authors: David Means
“Or you could tell them the truth,” she said. When he kissed her he tasted the forge on her lips, a faint tang of carbon. He thought of the windows on the other side of the room back at the safe house, the hanging bodies, and the dark portal in the window glass where he had cleared the dust.
Later that night, after Wendy was asleep, he opened the door quietly and got out and walked to the top of a dune and looked toward the car. It was hidden by trees shaking in a long sway of sequins as the leaves caught the moonlight.
Search and destroy was what they called it in my day, Klein had said. Now we call it a sweeping operation, or a reconnaissance in force.
Elastic with tar, a wave stretched itself from one end of the beach to the other, roping back as a cleaner wave overtook it, topped it, and spilled down into the sand. From far off came the tenuous whine of an engine downshifting. A gang of bikers riding along the road. The sound grew faint and slipped beneath the shush of waves. No shootout with bikers to end the night. Singleton felt relieved.
Would he use the old phrase in a report—or would he use “sweeping operation,” or “reconnaissance in force”? He’d say they had stopped at the beach for a rest and he had got out of the car alone—he’d make a point of saying that Wendy was sleeping soundly—and that he had stood at the top of a dune, whatever it was, and that he had watched the gunky waves coming across the water. He’d say he’d resisted the urge to walk to the water, to test it for coldness. But he’d admit that he’d had that urge.
He’d say that he began thinking about Huron, about the big spills that had presumably gunked it up when he was off in the war. It was enfolded, he’d explain, and it led me to thinking about the unfolded flashes I’d had (maybe he’d admit that he’d seen the photo on both folders, Klein’s and Ambrose’s). He’d say he was looking at the lake and had a vision—a big flash from the fuzzball—of the man with the phone to his lips, calling in coordinates, and that in the vision the numbers became clear to him, a longitude and a latitude, something like that.
With his fingers on his temples he gave it a try. One of the older rumors had it that if you pressed hard on the temples and really dug in, you could perhaps catch a snag, a bit of memory, in the fuzzball, something like that. He imagined the face of Rake and Chaplain Frank, and the other man, the one who looked up from the radio as he was calling in the numbers and the fireball struck. Another wave was coming in, and with his eyes closed he followed the sound from one end of the beach to the other. He pressed harder with his fingers and then, when his head began to hurt, opened his eyes and walked back to the car to Wendy and was filled with what could only be called love, a sense of destiny that was somehow related to the fact that she could sleep soundly with her legs tucked up awkwardly, and to the fact that they were both on a mission together. His love felt deep, but he knew that only time could reveal how deep. Only when the story is over and the report is written can the truth be known fully, he thought; or perhaps only when the depth of my love for her is fully known can the story end. If I’m debriefed after all of this, I’ll have to say the grove of aspens felt like a little island of beauty in a world of hell. I’ll have to say I felt a sea of calm. I’ll also make sure to include the fact that the offbeat rhythm of the waves had seemed to me like a good jazz beat, and that I’d become aware that the distortion of what is natural is somehow more beautiful than nature itself. He turned things around in his mind until his breathing matched Wendy’s own steady breathing. He was half-awake in the alert way of an uptight dog just trying to survive. He stayed that way until he dozed off at dawn and woke to the trees burning with sunlight. A bird was singing with a high, throaty warble. The waves had died. Wendy was just awake beside him, lifting her hair out of her eyes, blinking, looking angry and relieved at the same time.
“I didn’t know how exhausted and frightened I was until the last of the zip pill wore off and then I couldn’t stay awake, and when I did wake up, you still weren’t here, and I asked myself what Training would say, and I said to myself, stay with the car, one agent should stay with the car, and then I felt totally foolish but too tired to move so I fell back asleep, but I was saying a prayer when I fell asleep. That’s how worried I was. I thought I’d find you out in the water,” she said.
“It’s not cold enough to do anything to me anyway. Superior is still cold, but in Huron shallows and the tar absorb heat and warm it up.”
“But you were thinking about it.”
“Yes, sure, I had the thought.”
On the other hand, if they were following the right course of action, and if the riots died down and order was restored, he could simply go back and tell Klein the truth: He and Wendy had silently (it seemed) agreed that they had to follow the lead they got from the man in the so-called safe house. In the report he’d write that they were following the intuition so valued by the Corps, although he’d also have to mention that he felt betrayed: his belief in the Corps, whatever was left of it, had been shattered by those hanging bodies. Klein would light his pipe, and expound about the Corps insignia. The scales are there for a reason, son. We don’t have lady justice on the insignia because balance matters more than lady justice, if you know what I mean. When Singleton noted in the report that the man at the safe house had tortured informants, Klein would shrug (probably) and explain that even the Geneva Conventions were retroactive nonsense. They had been written after the First World War. After the fact, son. After the deeds were done. Then they were rewritten yet again when the need came, after the fact, you see. And then again, for God’s sake.
Ahead the Mackinac Bridge stretched over the straits in the late morning sun. The roadbed, partly metal, partly poured concrete, had been damaged and patched.
“Maybe if I write up an operation report I’ll have to mention those hanging bodies.”
“If you write up an honest report you’ll also have to say that I fucked you into orgasmic unfolding,” she said. “And I’d appreciate it if you put in there that I acted as a nurse, that I relied on those skills, and you should also put that I feel horrifically conflicted about that fact.”
“If this is part of our treatment, then don’t you think the point was nullified at the safe house? I don’t want to believe the Corps would condone that kind of action. Klein would, but not the Corps, not Command.” Singleton guided the car over the rumble strips on the approach. It had been built optimistically and quickly in the teeth of winds roaring between the Upper Peninsula and the Lower, over the conflicting waters of the two Great Lakes, and now it looked thin and reedy. But once they were on the bridge, a tightrope of concrete and steel, they could appreciate its gracefulness and the majestic link it provided between two worlds, one new and connected with the rest of the world, the other separated and primordial.
Wendy had yet another joint going to celebrate the crossing. He slowed down and they took in the view.
“You love the Zomboid and can’t say it and it’s my duty to get you to say it,” Singleton said, suddenly.
“I have said it but not the way you want to hear it.”
“What do I want to hear?” Singleton said, taking a toke. Cars were streaming in the southbound lanes. His side of the bridge, with the exception of one car far ahead, was empty.
“You want to hear that I was fantastically in love, in love the way you can be when he’s your first and he was beautiful—just perfect—and then came back and his legs were missing and he couldn’t really remember who I was, beyond saying to me that I was his girl and that he had carried my picture into battle. You want me to speak of the kind of love that you feel after the object of desire is destroyed and all that’s left is a pulse through deep space. That kind of love,” she said.
“You might be right,” he said. He was feeling disoriented. Had he told her about the exchange of information in the bathroom? Had they talked about that?
The car ahead had stopped, blocking the lane, and two men seemed to be at work prying open a hatch of some kind at the base of one of the towers.
“Those must be jumpers,” he said.
“Jumpers?”
“You get your folks who stop on the bridge and leave the car running and leap. Those are East Coast mainly. Then you got West Coast jumpers, the ones who go out to the Golden Gate, climb atop the railing, and swan dive into the bosom of the bay, which is supposed to have something to do with the womblike nature of the formation, or something like that, and up here, well, it’s more brutal. The state maintains the elevator and all you have to do is know where to go—in that hatch—and you go up to the top and jump.”
They were passing the middle section and began the decline, the two parts of Michigan behind and ahead while far below the straits ran cold and choppy with currents revealed in long, white strings of foam.
His operation plan, attached to his report would be written after the fact, postdated to cover tracks and make it seem preordained. That’s how it was done, Klein had explained. Orders in a plan have a snap and zing, a knowingness, a resonance ahead of the curve. Gumption is what you need to be a commander, Klein had explained. The gumption to go back and revise history. The key to planning an operation is to take the facts and then speculate. When you start an operation, all doubts must be put aside. There was a general in the First World War who understood that. He had to assume that he was one step ahead of the krauts and to make his point, he renamed German trenches ahead of their capture, gave them English names, before the attack. He assumed the win and took it from there, which is what made him a supreme commander even when he lost a battle. And that’s what I intend to become, Klein had said, turning away. Win or lose, I’ll win.
A clump of cars passed coming the other way, a caravan of station wagons and campers loaded with frightened-looking men in madras shirts and housewives with their hair in scarves. Wendy gave them a wave and they waved back sadly.
“What are you thinking?” Wendy said again.
“You keep asking that.”
“I want to know what you’re thinking and I can’t think of another way to put it,” she said.
“I know you want to know, and you know I want to know, so we both know we want to know what we’re thinking all of the fucking time.”
“It helps me to say it out loud. It’s an old nurse thing, if you really want to know. You ask how they’re feeling again and again until they finally tell you, or at least give a hint.”
“Only when the operation is over, Klein said. Only when it’s over can you write a solid operation plan. You write it after the mission and it comes out perfect. That’s what I’m thinking.”
“Sounds like your department. Mine wouldn’t do it that way. We’d tweak it to shed the best light on the Corps, but we would never revise an operation plan after the mission and postdate it,” Wendy said. “We’d stamp it top secret and redact everything in it and stash it away for the future.”
Only when the story is over and the report is written—or not written—can the truth of my love for you be fully known, Singleton thought.
Then he said it aloud as they approached the end of the bridge, easing down into the Upper Peninsula.
“Are you trying to say you love me?” Wendy said.
“I won’t be able to say it until this operation’s over. I mean, of course I do love you, but the kind of love I’m thinking about is something I won’t know until I write up a report and sort through everything that’s happened this summer so that I’ve honestly done it justice.”
“Bullshit, I think you said you love me.”
“I think what I’m saying is that before I can really say it, I mean in the way I want to say it, so you hear it the way I want you to hear it, I’ve got to make sure I know for sure if this entire thing was a fucking setup, something they anticipated, playing matchmaker in a major way, or if it was just a matter of pure chance, the two of us, in the lobby, that first lunch, that second lunch, the whole thing.”
“Rake faked his death so that Status would think he was dead but he’s really alive and Relations would think he’s alive but he’s really dead. Is that the way it’s working?” she said, flicking the lighter and pinching what was left of the joint, holding it to the flame with shaking hands. “Who cares if they knew we were together early on? They understood that we were two trainees who might work well together and find Rake, but the rest…”
“Was set up to fuck with me,” he said. “To fuck with us.”
“One minute you seem to believe in the goals of the Corps. The next minute—usually when you’re high—you say the Corps is just a big structure to hold irony so Kennedy could go on with the war.”
“I didn’t say that. Klein said that early in the summer. When he still sounded reasonable to me, when he was talking World War this, World War that. I didn’t say it. He said it and I told you what he said, and now you quote it back to me.”
“That day you came over to my father’s house.”
“What about it?”
“You seemed pathetic to me.”
His throat got tight. When they were only half in love, Singleton thought, the fights had been petty and fun, a prelude to make-up sex. Now they were heading into a storm. It really did seem to matter who was right and who was wrong.
“How so?”
“Well, my father seemed like a
man
. I hate the way that sounds, but it’s true.”
“Do I seem pathetic?”
“Yes,” she said. “Not as pathetic as you seemed that day at my house. Or even at the safe house. You seemed particularly pathetic.”
“How so?”
“I knew what you were thinking. You sided with the operative. You took his information and you ran,” she said.
“And you ran with me,” he said.
They were off the cloverleaf at the end of the bridge, turning west per instructions, following the coast of Lake Michigan.
“I didn’t have a choice. I don’t have one right now.”
“You had a choice. You have one right now. I can stop the car and let you out,” he said. His voice was tight and angry. The fuzzball in his head was singing.