Authors: David Means
“I’ll pull into the driveway.”
“Make sure no one follows you in.”
It was a beautiful night outside. He kept his gun out as he walked up the road to the car. He stood for a second, listening to a distant bike roaring. Assessing, trying to pick up a scent, an awareness. He had—he admitted to himself—been hoping to put a bullet into the skull of the man named Rake, to get it all over in one quick action, to reach an end equal to what he imagined.
He could feel the wild rage of the lake just through the trees, the vast, heavy gravity of its cold depth. This was a land that held on against the forces of wind and raging snow, and the air had a hint of winter and iron. The brutal individuality of the men and women who lived here had been channeled by historical forces, by the anger in the wind, and yet he knew, he was sure standing there, taking another deep breath, lighting a cigarette, that there were also good people, and that it was just as likely, in the scheme of chance and luck, that a soft, warm, cleanly lit kitchen scene would be found in a house hidden from the road.
* * *
An hour later they were in the living room, still tense but exhausted. Two old sofas faced a coffee table and, in the corner, a wooden stereo console stood with records piled on each side. Sinatra’s youthful face stared out from one, his lips pursed in a smile flushed of irony. Don’t fuck with me, the smile said. I’m humorous but only to a certain degree. His hat was cocked to one side and he looked like a man—Singleton thought—who had been enfolded again and again until he lost sight of everything but his body and his voice. On the other side of the console the Rolling Stones sneered at the world, completely unfolded. They jeered and mocked and looked out with twisted lips and a frankness that was clear and brutal but honest.
“You folks go ahead and interrogate us now if that’s what you want to do,” Hank said. “If you want to start right in, feel free, but I’m not going to be ready to confess all the details until I’m sure you’re not just here looking to see if Rake is alive or dead, to confirm the information and pass it on to some gang members out there waiting to know the truth so they can strike as hard and fast as they want, and believe me, that’s what they want because Rake called in accounts all over the state, even up into Canada, and made as many enemies as he could.”
The subjects struck an assumptive pose of innocence that had a tinge of disguise. The feeling—he’d find a more technical term when the time came—was that Meg and Hank were enfolds partly unfolded, something like that. Search of premises revealed absence of target. Established a friendly cooperative vibe—again, another word?—and a casual rapport via the use of marijuana.
Singleton sat alongside Wendy on the couch, still holding his gun, resting it against his knee but keeping it aimed slightly away from Hank. His hand was tired and his head was starting to pound from the buzz.
“What can we say that will assure you that we’re agents?” Wendy said. “We’ve shown you our badges and the papers and explained that our mission is to come up here to find Rake.”
“I’d like to hear something that testifies to your nature,” Hank said.
Singleton explained that they were running ahead of the riots downstate, but that they hadn’t been sent up ahead of some kind of collapse.
“Anybody can buy a badge and papers on the black market. All we want now is to be left in peace. If I tell you—I mean, really confirm it somehow, although I’m not sure how we’d do that because we don’t have something to show you in the way of a body—that he’s dead, not lurking out there, or on a run, coming back any moment, are you gonna take that information back to the world and bring every member of Black Flag, every man Rake’s ever screwed over in one of his bad deals, not to mention all the men he betrayed in Vietnam. Are they going to swarm our encampment?”
“You can trust us,” Wendy said.
“How do I know?”
She leaned in and kissed Singleton and put her hand on his knee.
“That’s a good sign. How about we do this? You place the guns on the table and we kick back here and see what happens. You can keep your guns trained if that helps you, but consider the vibe. Truth is, I’m close to believing you are who you say you are, and I don’t want to string this out just for the sake of stringing it out, so let’s put some music on and see how it goes.”
“You’re a man of the woods,” Singleton said.
“No, I’m a man of the forest. There’s a big difference between the two, but I’ll spare you the lecture right now.”
“Thank God,” Meg said with a laugh of newfound happiness.
Deep in the night, they turned the music off and listened to the night sounds, the moan of mufflers down the road. Sometime, near dawn, they drifted asleep—Wendy and Singleton against each other on one couch, Meg and Hank against each other on the other, MomMom upstairs snoring loudly.
Singleton woke first. He’d been dreaming of a cozy, warm house full of love. He’d also been in a train looking out into the dark night at a house down in a hollow, one single light glowing, the roof frosted with moonlight. In the train and the house at the same time. The house, secluded, the train somehow secluded, too, in its transcontinental rush across the dark valley, moving tenderly to some unknown destination.
He’d never mention in his operation report that they had fallen asleep, but he might mention that seeing Hank and Meg curled up together on the couch asleep had given him the sense that they were telling the truth when they said Rake wasn’t a threat.
What he really wanted, he realized, was to write a fictionalized report that matched what he’d been hoping for: to be upon the dunes with Wendy, hiding, scoping out the target, aiming, waiting, drawing a deep breath, holding it, and then taking a kill shot to end the matter once and for all. He’d been hoping for a way into violence, for an apex of all narrative lines leading to Rake. He’d imagined that face exploding with the impact of a shell. He’d imagined a beautiful purge of inner tension.
In the days that followed, as they tried to gain each other’s trust, the man named Hank kept stopping to lift his nose to the air, like a dog. He claimed to be able to tell as much from the scent as from the radio reports. Smell was a spectrum to be broken apart and analyzed: lots of burning rubber and cut lumber from buildings in Detroit and Flint and Bay City (Bay City buildings had a spice to them, like oregano, because their lumber was old and seasoned), and then the tires stacked by gang members as barricades (a bitter scent, nothing to ever smell if you could help it), and then of course gasoline and oil and tar, and finally the more natural (and even lovely, in a sick way) smell of forest fires, which according to his nose were moving up the state and would probably hit the top of the mitten in a few weeks.
Wendy gave him pitying looks and told him to stop writing the fucking report. Something had shifted in her demeanor. In bed the second night, she refrained from touching him, rolling away, sleeping on her side. He ran his hand along her hip and she slapped it away.
What? Nothing. What’s wrong? Silence. When she fell asleep he put his hand back on her hip and left it there until he drifted off, only to wake deep in the night to the sound of motorcycles down the road, and then, when they were gone, the distant shush of the waves and the buzz in his ear. Wendy was breathing quietly, an almost inaudible shush.
Put something in the report about bonding between Wendy and Meg, some indication that they had found a mutual point of commonality, both of them having lost lovers in Vietnam. Something about the afternoon chat, over tea, at the kitchen table, sharing stories while he listened from the hallway, pressing his back against the cool plaster (no, he’d leave that out), catching words, the name Steve Williams (a.k.a. Zomboid), something about the beach, the clink of the cups against the saucers. In the process of interrogation she and Meg had formed a silent alliance.
Early one morning, jittery with exhaustion, Singleton drove into town to use a phone outside the tavern. When he left, Wendy was still asleep, far over on her side of the bed, hugging the edge, breathing softly.
“We got to the target,” Singleton said to Klein. “We believe, although we’re not sure, that he is dead. You were wrong, sir. Or perhaps you were right.”
“Son, I want you to envision me deep beneath a mountain, behind a ten-ton door, in a bunker,” Klein said. “Because that’s where I am right now. We had all incoming calls rerouted out here. I’m deep underground.” His voice indeed sounded attenuated by the lines slung from pole to pole across the Great Plains, following the railroad right-of-way. Lines humming in a perpetual wind, twanging against the glass insulator bulbs. “Couldn’t hold on in Flint. We not only had too many failed enfolds out there but we also put too much trust in the treatment without understanding that the things we didn’t understand were just as important as those we did. Now we’re undertaking a review of the entire program, top to bottom.”
“I’m formally resigning,” Singleton said. “I want to get that in before the connection is cut.”
“You can’t resign, because I’m having you processed for administrative adjudication, son. Believe me, it’s the best thing that ever happened to you. I filled it out yesterday. But the papers are going up this morning.”
“Yes, sir, sir,” Singleton said. The parking lot at the tavern had a single bike parked near the door. Black streamers hung from the handlebar grips, fluttering.
“And now that you’re not my charge, now that you’re AWOL and on the run, I can give you an order man to man, from me to you. Father to son, so to speak, although of course I’m only taking a paternal role in theory. I assume you’ve had some time to think about your own real father,” he said. Klein’s voice faded for a moment and again Singleton imagined drooping lines along the right-of-way. “… hereby order you to interrogate the girl Meg. Get what you can from her. Use any means necessary—”
The connection clicked off with seeming finality. Holding the phone, Singleton watched a man in a leather jacket with Black Flag tags stumble out the tavern door and across the parking lot, singing to himself in an Irish brogue, his voice loud in the morning quiet. Singleton reestablished a dial tone, put some coins into the slot, and read numbers from his palm. The ringing signal, he heard at his end, presumably took the form, on the other end, of a clapper striking a bell in the belly of a black phone. He was about to hang up when Wendy’s father answered. The voice of a thousand smoked cigars. A throat that needed to be cleared every few minutes.
“Headquarters,” it said.
“It’s me, Singleton. How goes it down there? You surviving?”
“We’re alive,” Wendy’s father said. Another man came out of the tavern drunk. He flopped down on the sidewalk and sat with his legs crossed and his head bowed into his open hands. “We’re in the fray but it’s looking good. We held off the first wave. Nothing like a man in a wheelchair with a gun to confuse matters, and it didn’t hurt that I covered him with the big gun. Mostly kids and a few disgruntled locals but no vets, thank God. The vets aren’t in this one, because they came—most of them—for treatment.”
“So the violence is dying down?”
“Not at all. All of our scouting reports—and by that I mean what I hear on the radio—indicate that a counterattack is gathering.”
“Well, be safe. Please pass word to Steve Williams that we’re thinking about him.”
“He still prefers to be called the Zomboid.”
“OK, pass word to the Zomboid.”
* * *
“I’m being processed for administrative adjudication, which is a fancy phrase for court-martial,” he told Wendy when he got back to the house. Everything was quiet. MomMom was upstairs still sleeping, and Hank and Meg had taken a hike to the beach to look around for signs of Black Flaggers. She was in the kitchen, at the table, smearing jam on a slice of toast, leaning into the task, not looking up, keeping her head down as he explained that her father was OK and things were quieting down.
“They’re not quieting,” she said, softly. “And there’s not going to be a court-martial, because we’re not going back there for a long time.”
“I’m not sure about that. If this entire thing was meant to be part of our treatment, especially if it was Klein’s idea, then maybe we can go back and beat the rap.”
“It’s pretty clear. It isn’t exactly open to interpretation. The safe house wasn’t safe. The target isn’t a target. Now here we are.”
“But he’s in a bunker. Who knows what he really meant. He was cryptic.”
“Cryptofascist might be what you mean.”
“He told me to interrogate Meg.”
“I’ve already done that. It’s pretty simple. Rake took her out of the Grid because she probably had some connection with someone in his past—I didn’t get that far. She lost her boyfriend over in Nam and had a breakdown and was selected for treatment.”
“I know you’ve done it, but I think I should, too, somehow.”
“She won’t say much to you,” she said.
“Well, maybe not. I’m going to interrogate Hank first anyway. We’re building trust, but we have to consider what he said about his acting abilities—that he enfolded himself and then played the role, his words, of someone who was still in there with the derangement. He might be acting now.”
“Nobody’s acting,” she said. “Can’t you see that, Sing? Can’t you see that you’re the only one who’s acting?”
“I’m not acting. I’m doing my job.”
“See what I mean,” she said, and she got up from the table and went out the back door. When he looked out the window, tight in the frames of light gray, she was alone by the shed looking out toward the woods.
Final action reports contain enemy body count, men cured of trauma, proper enfolds, number of failed enfolds, psychological profiles, guns and ammo seized. They were about horseshoe formations closing in on all sides, always ending with a sharp forward thrust. A good report had a subtext of preordained domination. A twisting of failure into success. He would have to make the initial standoff in the kitchen much tenser. He’d have to stress that he in no way intended the action as a form of self-treatment, or a way to gather information about his own trauma. According to the Credo—and leaving aside Klein’s transgressions—it was an agent’s duty to sustain an enfolded state and relate impersonally with the target (in other words, to become as inhuman as you could, subordinating your impulses to the structure of the Corps). That meant he would have to avoid all mention of his wartime relationship (indeed, if he had had one) with Rake. He’d have to pretend, if he ever went back to Flint, typing it up on the old manual, that his own needs had not played a role in the intuitive decisions he had made. He’d have to pretend that he had not unfolded himself at all
.