“No, sir.”
Klein got up from his chair and walked around his desk and put his hands on Singleton’s shoulders. “Now go ahead and admit it.”
“I’m sorry, sir. I can’t do that.”
He and Wendy had then met in the lobby. Standing on the Kennedy Psych Corps seal, under the scrutiny of the guard who had a shit-eating grin and seemed to know what was coming, they’d embraced and struck the poise of the sailor and lover on V-J day in Times Square, holding the kiss, fulfilling the vision he’d had weeks ago. And when Wendy asked, What are we doing? he told her they were letting the Corps know that they didn’t give a shit.
* * *
Out in the street that afternoon Singleton stopped for cigarettes and glanced at the newspapers. Ships were sinking out in the Great Lakes; headlines read SAGANAW SINKS, DEATH SHIP, and KEWANAA TRIANGLE. On the front page of the Detroit Free Press a Chinook hovered in a freak midsummer storm, dangling a net into raging waters. The teardrop shape of the net in relation to the spray and the chopper — fucking Chinook — gave him pause. The exuberance of a few minutes ago, the sense of rebellion, dancing in the lobby and then strutting down the street, leading her away from the building, had disappeared. He went back to the newsstand and took another look at the photograph. There were rumors that intense feelings like the jubilation he’d felt in the lobby could make you susceptible to the reintroduction of memory fragments. Odd bits of hearsay, usually about how treatment might fail, gathered around the hard facts: cold water immersion and orgasmic sex were the only proven methods of unfolding, and even those were often haphazard and might, or might not, actually reintroduce the trauma.
He told her he needed to get to the beach again, to get near water, to get away, and then he watched as she walked ahead. She had a slight pronation to one side that threw her off balance, and it made his groin tingle. If there is a God, he thought, I’ll speak directly to him when the time comes, and if there isn’t a God I’ll have to invent one, and I’ll find a way to thank him for the way I feel when I watch her move.
Then he caught up with her and took her hand, and when she asked what he was thinking he told her he was thinking he’d have to invent God so he could explain to him how he was feeling right now, and then she said, No, you weren’t.
* * *
Lakeport was an old beach town of boarded storefronts and a single beach-ball-and-towel emporium with sorry-looking, half-inflated figures hanging from poles and lifesaving rings deflated and faded to pastel colors. They took the cooler and the towels and went to the shore to examine the water quality. A snake of sludge stretched the entire length of the beach. A few kids tiptoed into the water while their parents looked away. Near the water, a boy, working with secretive intensity, dug into the sludge with a blue plastic shovel, molding the sand into animal shapes, whistling to himself.
Singleton sat on the towel and took out a weathered copy of A Farewell to Arms, opened it, and began to read the neat, clear sentences. The war was around the two main characters and they spoke in a pidgin English, using pet names, in a dialogue that was snappy and efficient and false-sounding in a way that was true-sounding at the same time because it was spoken rapid-fire, without intrusions, and it was spoken in isolation, he thought. Hemingway’s war had produced a certain kind of character, a new way of thinking and speaking that came from what was left out, from the things war had demolished and pushed away forever.
Wendy was putting lotion on her palms and rubbing it into his shoulders and on his legs and face, touching the scar, running her finger along it again, retracing, asking him — at least he imagined she was asking — with her touch instead of her voice, but she knew he didn’t have the answers and would only resort to conjecture. In Vietnam, was all he could say, all he did say when she asked, and then there was a silence full of the wash of waves and the hiss of sand.
* * *
On the drive back to Flint, listening to a broadcast of the Stooges from the Grande Ballroom in Detroit, the sound of the crowd roaring as Iggy sang “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” they discussed the old man they had seen on the beach, walking along the water, dressed in a black suit and an elegant hat, shuffling along out of place and oddly removed from the scene, one of many such men, nicknamed Old Schoolers, who were rumored to be spies for the Corps. That’s how a rumor gets started, Singleton explained. It’s absurd to think that an old man who happens to be walking along the beach in a suit would be a spy of any kind, and yet the desire to fit him into a specific story is stronger than reason, and if you’re going to fit him into something that is absurd, or at least partly absurd, it might as well be a vision President Kennedy happened to have during his recovery from the assassination attempt, with his poor sister as a focal point of his deep meditation. If you’re going to find a story for that man, who maybe just happens to like to walk on the beach dressed to the nines, cold the way old people are always cold, then you’re going to have to find a tool to force fit him into a conspiracy, or at least some complex social system, and that tool is going to be the idea that he’s a spy. And then Wendy took the other side, saying it was highly possible that he really was a spy and just so happened to disguise himself as a rumor, making use of the dynamic you just described (she said), taking advantage of the weird mix of belief and disbelief in the program. Then they both fell into a quiet perplexity while the old mills passed again, on the other side of the car, with a different light — late-day, subdued, smothering the thickets of the pipework in shadow, because they were both thinking, they’d later admit, that the argument was somehow applicable to the concept of God, in that he would be walking in plain sight disguised as a rumor.
* * *
Back at her apartment Wendy came out of the shower rubbing her hair with a towel, smelling fresh and clean, her eyes free of makeup, watching him as he tapped his head and told her he’d been thinking that his CEP had to stretch back a long way, far back, because he couldn’t remember much about being a kid, not much at all. She scrutinized him, up and down with what he was beginning to think of as her nursing gaze, looking for indications of his condition, and then asked, in a sarcastic voice, if they hadn’t informed him that he’d lose everything up to a certain point — blah, blah, blah.
“In cases of close friends with shared history, the war trauma will be enfolded along with other residual memories that are attendant to the loss, so that a man who has lost a good buddy from a small town, for example, will also enfold the small details of his life — playing ball, fishing, hijinks, drag races down forlorn streets, going out on dates together, anything linked to the loss,” Singleton said. “Some say, technically, that all of the memories related to the trauma repress themselves in a kind of sequential reaction, each one falling in relation to the next, so that in the case of grand trauma, the loss not only of a battlefield buddy but also a beloved friend from prewar, the subject — me, for fuck’s sake — will lose, in theory, a great deal of memory from the past.” He reached and took her cigarette.
“That sounds about right. Bullshit, but right.”
“The twin-brother incident.”
“Yes, exactly. What were they called? Pseudonym, I’m sure. The Lawson brothers.”
“Yeah, Kit Lawson lost his twin brother, Drew, in a firefight and so on and so forth…”
“… and after undergoing treatment in the New Mexico facility…”
“… Lawson lost his entire childhood to the enfold…”
“All of it enfolded,” Wendy said. She knotted the towel around her head and stood naked and dry. He remembered the bikini, the oil, the little kid playing in the sand in his field of vision, and he felt his hard-on coming on with force, the blood pulsing in his underwear. They would fuck again and he’d hold that image — the way he’d held the image of her surrounded by Queen Anne’s lace — because otherwise his desire would disappear into the fuzz of his enfolded memories.