* * *
He got his bag from the trunk and found what he was looking for and made her take it, pushing the canteen to her mouth and making her sip, probing her mouth with his fingers to make sure it was gone, and then there was Kennedy’s voice on the radio, Boston locutions from his repaired larynx, speaking of the nation’s great vision, outlining another one of his projects, reading out figures that suggested victory’s imminence in Vietnam. Rake was slapping the wheel with his palms and talking alongside the voice while she listened. Both worked into each other — she felt Kennedy’s more, she could catch each of his words and see the way he stood with the damaged shoulder stiffer than the good one and his jaw, repaired, listing as he talked of retreat from the DMZ and a fragmented force left behind in the aftermath of retreat and something about a reckoning at hand (maybe Rake doing an imitation) and the conflagration of battle that would soon collapse into peace as the station bounced in off the higher reaches of the ionosphere and then faded into a preacher’s voice, quoting from the book of Isaiah: evil is the torment in the bloodied skies; shy are the defeated; the weak clutch to the stones — and then the Kennedy signal came back in strongly: We’re at the apex of the greatest experiment in our history, he said, and Rake said, Yeah, that’s what we’re doing. We’re heading into a big national experiment, and then he snapped the radio off and opened up the acceleration, faster and faster — as the acuteness of her attention increased, each word available to hear again and again, the road coming in under the headlights (she could feel it, she could feel the road). And then, hours later, a lonely gas station with long, narrow pumps and haloed lamps overhead.
The car stretched out to the chrome ornament, crosshairs aiming into the night.
Then they were passing through Big Rapids again, unnoticed, tearing down the main drag.
What goes around comes around again, Rake said.
He pushed another pill into her mouth and made her swallow and poked his fingers, probing.
When you’re just about to fall into a dream, you get a sense of it being there.
PSYCH CORPS BUILDING, FLINT
Again behind his desk Klein went through the motions of preparing his pipe, first examining it and running his fingernail around inside, studying the curls of tar on his nail and flicking them onto his desk, and then scraping it out with the tool before filling it up and snapping the match. The tobacco had a sweet, rummy odor. It was packed in a tin that opened with a wonderful hiss when he turned the key.
“You got these folks upstairs wanting to smooth things, talking mission this, mission that, and what they want is what we want, except…” He stopped to relight his pipe and leaned back in his chair and puffed. “Those bleeding hearts see the solution as simply a matter of enfolding these wayward types again, even though, clearly, you get a failed enfold like Rake and he’s not going to give you another chance. The fact that his trauma has been amplified makes a cure impossible. All you’d do by enfolding him again would be to get him back to his original trauma state,” Klein said.
“Yes, sir, sir.” Singleton nodded and did his best to look like he was paying attention. Overhead the light fixture continued buzzing. Outside, the wind blew rain against the window, streaming drops along the glass. He leaned back slightly in the chair, kept his hands on his knees, took on the stiffness that Klein expected, hiding his boredom. Klein expected spot-shined boots and clean, pleated trousers and undivided attention all the time, no matter how boring or duplicitous the briefing might be. He took a breath and let the air seep out. The boredom was pure. He relaxed into it and thought of Wendy, the freckles on her breastbone and the tone of her voice, deep alto, resonate.
“I know we went over it, the material about the girl named Meg, but it might help to go over it again. You might go out there with it into the Internal afternoon and think about it in another context. Who knows. Most of her file is sealed, of course. But let me reiterate what we do know, which is that Meg’s family was set to inherit part of the Upjack fortune, at least they were until the family lost everything. You familiar with Upjack?”
“Drugs,” Singleton told himself to say, and said. “The development of what they called the friable pill, a pill that wouldn’t dissolve until it reached the gut. That led to a patent. The patent led to great wealth. Scalp lotion. Ointments. Vitamins. And the serious antidepressants and, finally, Tripizoid, which was originally a veterinary product for horse sedation, a cure for the hoof-kick, for stable-knock, something like that.”
“Excellent,” Klein said. “It doesn’t seem to matter, unless it matters. If it matters, we’ll only know in retrospect. Her mother and father met on the train from New York to Michigan, somewhere along the water-level route. Most likely they sat near each other in the parlor car, along the Hudson, and conversed. Then, as I imagine it, they went to her sleeper car and had relations while the nighttime towns passed, little hamlets, houses down in dales, snow falling because it was winter, I’m guessing, and then they conceived a baby, and the baby was Meg. How do we know that they were on that train? Because one of the facts that was not redacted from her file was that she has a fear of trains. Is there a connection between Upjack and her trauma? Not likely. You get some strange connection, a link like the Tripizoid, but it has no meaning unless you try to make up the story to fit the facts, and we’re not in that business here. It’s in the Credo. All cures are bogus. Which I take to mean all stories are bogus. It’s impossible to find a causal connection between the end product, a cured patient, and the events that led to the originating trauma. In other words, the trauma seems to stand apart from the initial trauma when you look back in retrospect, after treatment. When you cure, you eliminate the cause. And when you eliminate the cause, you eliminate the sequence of events up to the trauma. The Corps has its own term for everything eliminated — which is?”
“The Causal Events Package. When you enfold the trauma, you must make sure you enfold the entire Causal Events Package,” Singleton said. He put his hands on his knees and leaned forward. Klein’s pipe hung from his clenched teeth. Behind his aviator-style glasses his eyes looked dazed with tedium. They’d been saying basically the same thing to each other for weeks.
“You’re not really paying attention,” Klein said. “You said to me that it was a Causal Events Package, and that wasn’t necessary. Even though I asked, I expected something more. Look, it’s late June and the cops are passing the buck, pinning every little shit-can murder on our target, which is only natural. You get some family scared shitless because they live — or think they live — in something called a Zone of Anarchy, and a Black Flag gang arrives one night revving engines, calling, waiting, until the man of the house comes out — because he has to come out eventually — and tries to sweet-talk his way out of what he knows is coming, or else he’s one of those guys with a lot of ammo but no luck who comes out shooting, and then one of the Black Flag men, fresh from one of those absurd battle reenactments up on Isle Royal, trying to relocate the glory and pissed off because reliving the glory has only made him want more glory, puts a bullet in the man’s head and kicks his skull in and leaves him to the local cops, a bunch of Barney Fifes who have no way to solve the case and don’t want to see it for what it really is — because why would they want to mess with the Black Flags? — so they wait until there are a few more killings. When they imagine a pattern, they pass word of a failed enfold to the liaison, and he comes up to my office with his briefcase and puts the pressure on me because that’s his job, and when I see his information I do a gut check and fail to find a pattern because there isn’t one. That’s how it works, again and again.”