“Yes, sir,” Singleton said. There was something in the hang of Klein’s jaw, a new tension. He fiddled with his pipes and then looked up, his eyes steely blue, fixed.
“Have you been fraternizing outside? That’s what I’ve been meaning to ask you.”
“Sir, I’m not fraternizing with another agent,” Singleton said.
“I didn’t think you were,” Klein said.
“Thank you, sir.”
“I was sure you were fraternizing.”
“Well, I’m not, sir.”
“When I was in Korea, I saw a man like me, I mean who I am right here, now, an officer in charge, and thought it was absurd that my life was in his hands. You don’t remember what you used to feel about your command over in Nam but I can assure you that when you saw a man with a West Point ring on his finger, some fresh change of command come walking up the trail in the Mekong with his spit-polished boots and his fresh shave and his baby face, you felt something akin to what you’re feeling about me right now.”
“Yes, sir. I thought you were in the big one, sir.”
“I said the big one, and for me the big one was Korea. It was just part of the Second, as a matter of fact. It was just an extension of the Second.”
“I see, sir,” Singleton said.
“When I start to feel the urge to recite poetry, I know we’re about done for the day. And I feel that urge. In that war you had a superabundance of highly educated men in the trenches carrying a working knowledge of Greek and Latin, reading Hardy and Dickens, filled with a desire to capture in words the way a sunrise or sunset looked from the bottom of the trench, or the way it felt to do a stand-to at dusk or twilight. All we’re getting from this war is the desire to write rock-and-roll lyrics.”
As he continued talking, tamping and lighting a second pipe, the sky in the window behind him seemed to clear (a perfect day to head to the beach with Wendy). Singleton continued doing his best to look like a trainee who still held the purest belief in Kennedy’s original vision of a Corps that would solve the problem of mental illness in general and the vast horde of returning vets in particular; a vision that honored the president’s sister, who sat somewhere alone and quiet with her brain lobotomized; a vision fueled by a man who had been shot in the shoulder and jaw (if a third term was good enough for Roosevelt, it’s good enough for Kennedy, the ads said).
Klein was rambling on about men who dragged Japanese heads on grappling hooks behind a ship, let the sharks clean flesh from bone, and brought them home as trophies. (There’s a photo in Life magazine, if you’d like to see it, he said.)
Singleton kept nodding as his mind drifted, and he imagined what it would be like to go downstairs into the lobby and openly embrace Wendy. She would kick up her heel and throw back her head and open her mouth and, for a moment, they would strike the pose of a sailor and a lover on V-J day in Times Square, dancing (he imagined) on the seal of the Kennedy Psych Corps.
Klein was still talking, something about the photograph, the one with the skulls — was he offering it to him, a kind of gift? — and again Singleton drifted, remembering — what? — remembering how it felt to run with his arms waving in the air, leaving the schoolhouse, out into the freedom of afternoon, wrapped in the sound of kids shouting around him, free for the rest of the day (no, for the rest of the summer) until he got back to the house, back to his old man, home from the mill, shoulders sagging. It was the only memory he had, everything after that moment — leaving school — came up blank and here was Klein, he was still talking, pressing, asking him what he was thinking about, so Singleton said, “The Credo, sir, I was thinking about the Credo,” while in his mind he was running out of the Corps building and Wendy was waiting, arms wide, and then he was on the beach with her, applying lotion as an excuse to touch her back, two fingers pressed together tracing the lovely line of her spine to where the taut band of her bikini bottom stretched over a slight gap that absorbed sunlight like antimatter. The shimmer of sand and water and light were the backdrop for the only thing in the state worth looking at, worth pondering, that bit of darkness showing beneath her bikini’s band — its cavelike perfection leading to the rest of her body — and his own ardor in relation to boredom (maybe the right word was freedom), the two combining in the afternoon light, and the fact that all he wanted — Klein was giving him a cold stare — was for ardor to win.
If I told you what I’m thinking it would make your head explode, you old coot. Fingering your medals as if they meant something when they don’t even mean a thing to you, Singleton thought.
“Go out into the world and let your mind go where it has to go,” Klein said.
“Yes, sir.”
“And you might want to trim those sideburns. They’re not regulation. Clean faces, clean hearts, is what they say. Mental health is our business. Or, rather, mental freedom is our business. Pax Americana, son,” he said, guiding him to the door.
“Sir?”
“Pax Americana begins at home, son.”
* * *
“I’m a million miles from headquarters,” she murmured, lying back in the moss and opening herself, it seemed, to his scrutiny, allowing him to observe that she was beautiful in a tense way. Her legs had a slight knock-kneed bend in just the right place. They were smoking a joint down by the old canal, on a spot across from the towpath. She’d taken off her work clothes in the car, ordering him (in a new voice, brusque) not to look while she slid her skirt off and wiggled into a pair of jean shorts. Now, on the grass, she seemed to be offering him a good, long look. He explained that he was sure — he touched his head — that the madman in his mind had some relation to the madman’s target, something like that, and that he had a running theory that all agents, at least enfolded, treated ones, must be thinking the same thing, because they’re burdened with the facts that they can’t remember and have to reach out to stories and make them their own.
He paused and looked out across the canal. The trees on the other side were deep green, quivering slightly in the breeze, and beyond them the sky was milky with heat. Weedy brambles rose sharply from the dark water — thick as tar — and the line between the two colors looked bluish brown. “We reach out to stories and can’t help but make them our own. I’m thinking that’s what they like about us. We can be used that way. They tap our desire to connect, and of course the desire comes from the fact that if we hit a connection, if we link to someone who’s in our Causal Events Package, we can start tweezing out the truth.”
As she stood, reaching back to band her hair, pulling her elbows up, tilting her head, she again seemed astonishingly beautiful to him in an edgy, new way. The attraction seemed mutual and strong and for a few seconds as he looked into her eyes — blue washed away by sunlight, speculative, searching his face for something — he felt a deep sense of danger. She turned from him suddenly, said something about needing to move, and led him down the towpath, striding quickly, past backyards cluttered with riot wreckage. The burn had reached the far side of the canal, an open vista of ash and char reclaimed, along the edge of the water, by green brush. Eventually, to their left, a neighborhood of spared bungalows appeared, ragged but structurally sound, with yards full of Queen Anne’s lace and, from one house, a faint pulse of music.
Wendy stopped and looked at the house and began to explain that she loved the Stones and hated the Beatles because the Beatles were what you get when you’re enfolded, treated with Trip, a song with just a formation built around old, unknown memories; whereas (she said “whereas”) the Stones are what you get when you allow it all to play out, when you come back fucked up. He resisted the urge to disagree, to say that the lads were slightly boring but seemed to be channeling trauma in their own way, working through the misery of their Liverpool boyhoods, the ration-ticket bleakness of a postwar landscape not that different from this one. It was too early for a petty squabble about rock bands, or anything that might hint at future arguments to come.