She returned to the counter, lifted a gate, and approached the man who seemed to be an agent. She was asking him if he wanted pie. The word pie seemed to float in the air as Singleton and Wendy left the diner and headed away from the Corps campus.
“You think they’re keeping an eye on us? I wouldn’t put it past Klein to track me when I go out in the afternoons, even though, as far as I can tell, it would violate regulations. You’re supposed to feel free. He gives me these so-called Internal leaves, but then he asks me to detail my movements. Usually it’s just stuff like: I walked down to the old canal. I smoked a joint and sat around my apartment, reading. I make stuff up because I can hardly remember.”
“Well, you know,” Wendy said. “You’re supposed to be trusted.”
This is where we stand for a moment in awkward hesitation, he thought. She was rubbing her arm, as if tense. The street looked unusually clean and bright, full of people going about their daily business. He reminded her again that he was, of course, on an Internal that afternoon. She told him she was, too, and then her voice dropped and she gave him her address. Then they parted in opposite directions. When he passed the coffee shop again, the agent was gone and the counter was empty.
* * *
From the window of her apartment he could see heaps of hot cinders, great piles of debris plowed up during the initial clean-up effort, before the stop order was declared and what remained was left to sit and smolder as a monument to the riots. Her building sat on the edge of the debris area. The smoke seemed blue-green, catching the late afternoon light. Everything has a tendency to become framed. You build a frame and put a window in and there you have it. You meet a fellow agent and have a couple of lunches and the frame appears. She says she’s going to change into something more comfortable and you turn away and another frame appears.
She had changed out of her work clothes into cut-off jeans and a halter top tied in a big knot above her belly button, which was small, like a flower bud, turned in. As she lifted her arms to make a ponytail in her hair he saw the powder-blue hem of her panties.
“You’ve got yourself a fine view,” he said. “Just looking at it makes me want to change my position on the stop order. Normally, I’m a put-the-fire-out-and-rebuild-right-away kind of guy. Normally, I’m of a mind that it should be all bulldozed and rebuilt. But right now, looking at this view, I think the governor had it right. It’s all going to burn again sometime soon, so why not leave it.”
“You can leave it but once the toxins leach out, eventually it’s going to green up, fauna’s gonna grow.”
“You’re an optimist,” he said.
“Nature wins eventually. At least that’s what they say.”
All afternoon they’d been moving toward this moment — it was the object of the conspiracy that had started in the street. First they’d analyzed the man at the counter in the coffee shop. The cut of his suit. The way he kept his head down. Then they’d talked about the waitress, who they agreed was an intuitive woman with that strange waitress radar that picked up on the way people moved. She’d seen that they were breaking regulation: two younger folks eating together, one with a scar on his face and that slightly enfolded tense look; the other a young woman who looked not enfolded but perhaps damaged. (You don’t look that damaged, Singleton had said. You’re young, that’s true. You’re highly attractive for an agent, that’s true, too. You can see right away that I’m a vet. How old do I look? Do I look about twenty-five? You look twenty-six, she’d said.)
Sitting at the little table in her kitchenette, he’d avoided asking deeper personal questions so that she would avoid asking deeper personal questions. There had been a sweet feeling — with a wedge of afternoon light stretching across the floor — of a mutual standoff. He knew she might be thinking about the dangers of being around an enfolded man. He knew that she was thinking about the risk.
“What’s going to grow on the heap, I was told in briefing, is jimsonweed,” she was saying at the window. “Which is smokable.”
“Speaking of smokable, do you have any pot? You said you had pot?”
“I’ve got a tin in the freezer.”
“Please, get it out,” he said.
On the bed it started as newness, the first touch of this, the first touch of that, the whorl of hair at the back of her neck, his thigh, her arm. Pushing away to look and then closing in, losing control and then regaining it, mapping and exploring, high with the first-touch sensations. (And the pot.) She ran her fingers along his scar, starting below his temple, following it to his armpit, across the bridge of undamaged skin that he loved to touch when he was alone, spreading out to his chest — his one nipple permanently shriveled — and around his side to his back. The scar, tissue where they’d grafted new skin, seemed suddenly charged with a slight electric current that zinged right up to his head and into the enfolded nut up there, as if to confirm what they’d said: After your treatment anything bodily that reminded you of the trauma would remain slightly energized. The high of the Tripizoid left only the nurses’ advice, the echo of their warning that sex, really good sex, might unfold you again completely, bringing back your old, traumatized self.
They rolled away from each other and let the charges deplete and the sweat dry, and then they rolled back toward each other. Then it was a matter of heaving and rocking, of attempting to be a neat unit, and he was trying but failing to get hard by releasing himself into mindless memory, as the electric charge began to leak around the fuzzball and he saw a flashbulb negative of a chopper in the air, an old Huey, and he was in it and out of it at the same time, which of course he would’ve been if he’d died like some of his buddies, but he hadn’t died (the flash seemed to say) and before he knew it he was on his back breathing hard, his heart pounding. The sound of street noise, of a siren far off, and the noise of the shitty building, the beat of music through plaster and lath.
“It’s OK,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What were you thinking about?” she said, searching for dilation in his eyes. (She’d been through training. She knew the basics of medical psych, the sweep of the penlight to see if the pupils dilated properly.)
“I was thinking how alive I am because I’m lucky.”
* * *
He went to the kitchen, poured some gin into tumblers, added ice, and brought them back to the bed. They lit another joint and let it burn and sipped the drinks and leaned shoulder to shoulder. She asked how he ended up in the Corps and he gave her the barest sketch about Nam, about what he couldn’t remember, the texture of not knowing but wanting to know, and how after his treatment he had rented a little walk-up over a garage in Bay City where he hung out and read, trying to collect a sense of who he might’ve been and what he might’ve seen, finding it in magazines and books and news reports until he felt strong enough and, paradoxically, weak enough and fucked up enough to see himself as someone who might contribute something to the new cause of trying to help other vets like himself. He figured — he explained — that he had had some kind of tracking tendencies that went back to before Nam, and that as a kid he had loved books about animal footprints. That much he could remember. He didn’t care so much about animals, per se, but he had loved to track footprints. What about you? he asked. And she explained — her voice suddenly distant — that in the end it had come down to a hospital job, as a nurse, or a Corps job, and she liked the idea of finding a better structure for her desire to care, one that didn’t have so much to do with physical suffering. When he pushed her to explain more, to elaborate, she said she’d rather not, and when he asked why, she grew quiet. (It was the first time, he’d later think, that he had seen this state of tense quietude.)