On the beach — cold stones, small tendrils of black sand — they sat on a tarp and ate cheese and a loaf of bread. Then they lolled and he pulled off his shirt and she pulled hers up, letting the wind blow across their skin, not too cold but cool, counteracted by the sunlight, which came through the thin, late spring clouds. The blackflies that would pester in June stayed hidden in the crux of rocks, and the waves, barely a foot high, came in and carved themselves into the shoreline and receded in long stretches of foam. Along the horizon, almost out of sight, as if a decorative afterthought, another supertanker gave the lake a deeper, more horrific beauty, because during the last few years, ships were sinking (he explained) at an alarming rate: the Fitzgerald, the Hoover, the Drake, the Sam Johnson.
Last winter the Drake sank, ten hours out of Duluth on a run to Mexico, loaded with copper ore, the bow low, icing up. The hatches weren’t bolted correctly is one theory.
Deadly cold but fucking beautiful, Hank said. He got up and stretched his arms and then sat back down. You had a dream last night, didn’t you?
What makes you say that?
You seem like a girl who had a dream.
You want to hear it, she said.
No, dreams are boring. As soon as they hit the air, they become meaningless. I’d rather hear a lie. I’d rather hear a falsehood than a dream. I’d rather listen to MomMom rant about God.
Then why’d you ask? she said.
Because I wanted to know.
So I’m telling you. Yeah, I had a dream. I was with a boy, and we were at a beach — South Haven, I think it was — one summer afternoon in the dunes, hidden from the crowd, surrounded by grass, a safe place, and the boy’s draft number was up, I remember that, and he said that he was going to war, and the rest, well, the rest you really don’t want to hear because the rest felt like a dream, not a vision, she said. Much more lucid; the taste of his lips on hers, the razor grass making a dry, husky hiss as the wind blew outside the cove; the sensation of being touched gently — with love — and also the desperate falling away, the sensation of seeing him lean against his car, legs out slightly, cocky, posing for her with his arms back and his chest thrust forward; the last day together before he shipped out, somehow knowing that exactly.
Chances keep growing that my old man’ll land on a sinking ship eventually. That’s the truth, he said, abstractedly. That’s what I have to dream about. He works coal burners, and then he works a new oil burner, and then he goes back to a coal like that one way out there, he said, pointing at the ship trailing a thin curl of black smoke along the horizon.
She watched as he pried his shoes off, cuffed his jeans, straightened his jacket, an old army fatigue, and walked down to the shore to dip his toes in, making a loud, joyful hoot. He waded in and hopped around with his arms up. Then he began kicking long, beaded arches of water curling off his toes in her direction.
It was, she thought, one of the most joyous sights she’d ever seen. At least that she could remember seeing, and for a split second, with her head back, exposed to the sunlight, while he continued to kick the water (she could hear the splash), she felt for the first time in what seemed to be an eternity an ability to fully enjoy a particular moment, with only a little breath of fear on the back of her neck.
OLD SCHOOLERS
In mid-July, the Soviets adjusted their nuclear coordinates and Kennedy continued his wave-by tours, visiting South Bend again, and then Lincoln’s birthplace in Springfield, where he gave another long speech justifying the war effort. He had given up providing logical reasoning. The fight was about the fight. National honor was at stake. Photos of him on the front pages in early July showed his hand in the air, his face aged, with Jackie in the car beside him looking frightened but beautiful. War reports: The siege of Hue dragged on as the Marines struggled once again to take what was left of the Citadel. Jason Williamson — a.k.a. the stoned reporter — filed nightly radio reports in a drug-dreary voice that was oddly comforting. His modus operandi, which had won him a Pulitzer, was to be on the ground as stoned as possible and to catch a new perspective, to offer up reports steeped in the language of visions. He was on the so-called wire, or outside the wire, or near the wire, filing from a microphone attached to the lapel of his flak jacket, pausing to let the pop of gunfire punctuate his whispery narrative, which seemed at an odd remove from reality, peppered with phraseology that could only come from tripping, describing the way the tracer fire wrapped long ribbony bands over the Vietcong, a sweep of galloping ghosts.
Singleton listened with his feet up on the sill, looking at the view of the ash piles in the distance. Wendy was sleeping soundly on the bed. Dog days of Flint. Two weeks in a holding pattern of nonsense from Klein, who was using the word modality a lot, talking about a holding modality — and the fact that the Rake killings had stopped, or had stopped being reported. We have to sustain an understanding of the modality, Klein said, going over to the map again and again, touching the pins, returning to his desk to light another pipe.
“You’re going to confess that you’re fraternizing and I’m going to listen to you confess and then I’m going to tell you that in this case, because I think it fits the modality it’s not reportable, because in this case, and I’m trusting my own instincts, such as they are, my own gut, I sense that you might — and I have to go to the lingo again — be caught in some type of retrospective harmonious conversion. So you’re going to admit it to me now, son, and I’m going to listen and let you off the hook.”
“I’m sorry, sir, I won’t admit it,” Singleton said. In the past few weeks Klein had become somewhat disheveled, the knot in his tie was often improperly dimpled, and there was a small stain on his lapel. Today he was wearing his G-man outfit for the second day in a row; he’d been rotating between his old Korea dress uniform and his suit. (I’m both an ex-soldier and an agent, he explained, and I don’t see a problem with splitting the difference between the two, do you?)
“You will admit it, son. I’ve had some reports coming down that put you and another agent together at the beach. A man down in Relations made a report that put you at the canal with another agent. Now, normally, I’d see this as a deep betrayal of the organization because we have our rules, and our rules are there for a reason. For example, if two agents meet secretly there might be some residual sense of needing to unfold each other. Or the two agents start to copulate and in doing so begin to feel at ease, and in that ease, in bed I assume, they might share case information and in sharing it compromise the program dynamic. I don’t need to state the obvious fact that if you reach some kind of unlimited ecstatic state, as in a massive orgasm, you risk unfolding.”