What are you saying? she said.
I’m just saying you’re going to be strong enough to resist, Rake. You know it now more than before. It’s going to be a very fine line — the act you’ll have to perform when we get back there.
You’re really weird, she said again.
Maybe I am. But I’m not the first. In India, some folks marry trees. They go through a ceremony and hitch for life. Anyway, you seeing me as weird only means you’re getting better.
If seeing that you’re weird means I’m better, then I’m much better, she said. Then she began to talk about the vision. Her voice was a whisper. She said she’d heard a young man speaking, and as soon as she heard him speaking she saw his face. He’d been in Nam.
He leaned back and waited for her to say more. She spoke now clearly, with assurance and in a voice that was, he thought, much more musical. The guy in her vision was someone she had been in love with — she left that vague — and he had gone to fight. Something had happened and Rake had been involved.
Rake was involved, he repeated.
Rake in my unfolded vision, yes.
So this guy must’ve been with Rake, over in Nam. Maybe Rake knows that so he goes into the Grid and gets you and brings you out. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do with you, but he knows you have a connection with something in his past, with some little residual shred of honor he still feels, or a sense of mission. If he knew exactly what it was he would’ve dunked you in ice, or worse, unless he’s done worse and I don’t know about it. Maybe there’s another factor involved, something else, a promise to somebody he made over there that he has to fulfill. He might not even know because when they tried to treat him they just doubled his trauma and made it so intense.
Rake knows something, she said. The wind was lifting again and, far off, thunder. She was beginning to weep.
The rumor, he thought, was that if you unfold a little bit, the right amount, you could take what you saw and work back from it and very carefully — without all of the trauma coming at once in a rush that would make you sick again — tweeze it out, gently, the way you’d peel an onion, or remove a splinter. If you want to live a life that is stable and decent and good, you maybe go in and let a little bit come and then do it only that once and that’s it.
Don’t say any more, he said gently. He had his arm around her shoulder and felt her easing against him. He would have to resist all he could not to touch her any more than this, he thought.
Later, as they lay in the tent listening to the rain, he explained that they needed storms to cull the dead growth but also to sway them so they’d dig deeper with roots. He explained that nothing was meaningless when it came to trees because they were too smart to play games; they had a resolve that came from a blunt, brutal, natural being. That’s what I am, Meg. You’ll see that more and more as you see more and more, he said, and she put her finger to his lips and whispered shut up and kissed him gently.
I still don’t understand. Why don’t you leave, or do something? she said.
Like I said, I can’t kill him because to kill him I’d risk becoming who I was before. Not that I don’t want to. I mean I have the impulse, believe me, but if I do it it’ll be a betrayal of my new self. I’m biding my time, I’ll admit, partly because MomMom won’t leave the house because the house is her house. It’s the house my father will return to — if he ever returns.
She kissed him again and had a flash — lightning — and saw Billy-T, his face in the sun, the bright shadow-lit beach sun, just a few inches from her own. They were on the beach on Lake Michigan, up in a cove, with the razor grass all around.
In the morning I’ll have a better plan, he said, his voice far-off, sleepy. The storm had passed and the thunder was to the east, bouncing off the copper deposits and the cold stone coves of the lake, and then it was gone and she was drifting against him, and together, amid his beloved pines, they slept.
TERMINATION REPORT
Outside, the streets were tense; small pockets of violence had already broken out in response to the news about Kennedy. Police were posted on corners and powder-blue sawhorse barricades were in place — a shit-storm was coming, it all said — but the Corps, determined to maintain decorum, had called a meeting. So far, official word of the president’s death hadn’t come down. His body had been whisked away to another hospitaclass="underline" the only images afloat were of an ambulance backed into a loading bay, a gurney being removed, men in suits guarding the way. Singleton sat with Klein at the wide conference table on the second floor listening to an agent named Hogarth, an expert on rumor formation, reading from an index card, giving a brief about a rumor that had started in Kentucky.
Hogarth had the demeanor of an FBI agent, a quality of knowing more than he needed to know about things that he’d be better off not knowing. Also at the table was a trainee named Ambrose, who, according to Wendy, had published a book or two before his number came up. He wore Ben Franklin — type glasses and looked too delicate for fighting. Probably a 3A who’d worked as a dental assistant or stared at fuzzy U-2 photos.
The new rumors, Hogarth said, had started in Kentucky and then moved up the Ohio River basin before somehow making a big skip all the way to northern Michigan. He snapped his phrases as if to combat the stultifying buzz of the fluorescent lights. Klein, dressed in full uniform, fiddled with his pencil and nodded. Vets were tripping and dropping double doses and unfolding beyond the fold point — to put it in layman’s terms, Hogarth said. Some of them hadn’t been in combat; some of them were playing out delusional fantasies of traumas they hadn’t experienced.
He packed up his file and left the room.
“Philpot, you’re up,” Klein said. The room tightened in anticipation of another long-winded report, and as if in response a pop of gunfire came in through the window glass. Philpot, with his sweet-sounding Harvard voice, was known as a blowhard with a wide-spanning jargon vocabulary. But there was an uptick of attention as he shuffled his papers. Across the table, the agent named Ambrose yawned, patted his mouth dramatically, caught Singleton’s eyes, and winked.
Philpot said that there had been no further sightings — killings — by the failed enfold Rake (last name: unknown) since the report, dubiously pinned to him, of a mass murder near Alpena. The problem was that the public seemed to need to blame the Corps for these failed status problems, and that many of the untreated renegades out there were leaving clues clearly meant to indicate that the crime had been committed by someone who had been through the treatment.
Philpot went on to explain that not only was the public pinning random acts of violence on failed enfolds, but failed enfolds were figuring out that they could get their own acts of violence — and he admitted that this was pure speculation — pinned on fake failed enfolds, and thereby cast doubt in the minds of the Corps. In other words, it was starting to become impossible, unless you were acutely attuned to the nuances, to identify acts committed by honest failed enfolds.
“Nice work,” Klein said, cutting him off. “Before we go, I’d like to brief you on Rake. These are internal rumors, of course, but some people say a body has been found and that the body was identified as Rake, and that his name, his real name, was Ron Martin, at least according to his dog tag. I want to bring this rumor to your attention because that’s all it is. If there’s a file on it somewhere, I don’t know about it, and if there’s a file I don’t know about, it can’t be a real file but rather one of those generated in order to make sure someone out there maintains enfolded status; in other words, I know we don’t talk about this openly — at least they don’t in Relations, and I’m sure they don’t in other departments — but from time to time we have to fictionalize a background report in order to make sure the patient is never at risk of exposure.