Singleton held the receiver out and looked at it — earholes cracked, the handle smeared grimy with grease. Wendy was in the car, waiting. Nothing wanted to make sense except the sky, milky white, holding the world together.
“Say it, Singleton. Say it and I’ll respond. I can’t say anything until you say it. Say it. Say it.”
“Say what, sir?”
“Say what I said you might say, about your fraternization state.”
“What about it?”
“You know. Admit it to me is all I ask.” Someone else was definitely listening on the line, there was a click and then another click.
“OK, why not?” Singleton said. “I’m with Wendy right now and we’ve been together all summer, fucking each other senseless, and now we’re striking out on our own.”
“There,” Klein said, “I’ll send that statement to Command,” his voice lowered. “I’m going to confirm that you’re officially wayward, that you’ve gone AWOL, but I’ll use the Corps lingo. Now, if you were to say, I mean if you were to draw a conclusion looking back, accessing all of your actions and everything you learned in your training — if you were to look back, the way I taught you to look back, would you remember our talk about the proper way to write an operations report?”
“Yes, sir,” Singleton said. The pop of gunfire came from the distance. A single pop followed by another. Brittle small-arms fire. Another pop — deeper, woody, a different tenor, a rifle — that seemed timed in response. Snap and woof. Another exchange of some kind. Behind that the dry, lonely sizzle of cicadas going about their afternoon business.
“So if you were to write a proper operations report, you might find a pattern…” There was a faint wheezing sound, and Klein coughed. He was lighting his pipe, speaking around the stem. “Again, I can’t say it because it would be a betrayal of a promise I made to Command, but if you were to say something along the lines of, well, along the lines of being suddenly aware that you’re tracking Rake, who from your unfoldings — I’m just speculating that you had a vision of Rake, that you’re aware that he’s in your Causal Events Package, that you might also conclude — and if I were to hear you say it I could confirm or rather, at least, send your understanding to Command — that you are under a form of advanced treatment.” He began to cough the way he did when a bit of tobacco somehow traveled up the length of the pipe and got to his throat. The gunfire was getting close.
“I’m unclear, sir. Are you saying that you want me to say to you that I’m aware that Rake is part of my CEP, part of my past, enfolded in treatment, and that I somehow figured out that I’m under a form of advanced treatment?”
“Did you say it, or are you just asking?” Klein snapped.
“I’m saying it, I guess,” Singleton said. Wendy was beckoning to him. The man in the station had his gun pointed out at the field.
“There you have it. I’ll pass it up to Command. You not only went AWOL, but you also — to put it in the proper lingo — became aware of advanced treatment methods and thereby nullified said treatment. You drew your own conclusions.”
“Got to go, sir,” Singleton said.
“Take care, Singleton.” A paternal urgency had entered his voice. “Shoot and then ask the dead questions. Get to the safe house if you can. Locate Rake. Get up there and terminate him. Don’t ever quote me on that.”
“Got to go, sir,” Singleton said. He left the phone dangling and went to the car.
“Sounds like a firefight,” the gas station attendant said. “You folks better get moving.”
“Who’s fighting?”
“That would be anybody with a gun,” the man said.
“Get in the car,” Wendy said. She had a look of fear on her face that he had never seen before.
Two more pops — closer this time. The attendant aimed at the sky and fired two shots into the air. Then he waited a few seconds and fired another shot. “They won’t bring their firefight into my firefight.”
* * *
Singleton drove with both hands on the wheel.
“What did Klein say?” Wendy said.
“Let me think through what he said and get back to you. I was distracted by the gunfire.”
“You get back to me.” She climbed into the backseat and began taking an inventory, lifting one gun and then another, putting them back. There was a kit bag from the Corps with pills. There was a first-aid kit and her mother’s wedding dress. When he looked in the rearview her face was shrouded by the veil. When he looked again she had it flipped back over her head and was talking about her mother, who had married when she was eighteen, just before her father went into the service. Then she was explaining that she’d never agree to marry a man who kept secrets. She climbed back over the seat, still wearing the veil, and remained quiet.
“Well, he asked me to say and I said that I’m under some kind of advanced form of treatment. Rake was part of my CEP. He was there with me in Nam.”
“An advanced form of treatment,” Wendy said. She took the veil off, folded it, lifted it to her nose, sniffed it, and then put it gently on her lap.
“That’s about it. Some form of treatment.”
“As if he knew we were together in the afternoons, and that was part of the treatment?”
“I’m thinking, if I’m reading him correctly, they took me out of enfolding, put me into Psych Corps, made damn sure I connected with you, and that’s as far as I can go, because it seems virtually impossible. It’s like what he was alluding to was not a treatment structured by the Corps, but some kind of impromptu field operation, a seat-of-the-pants thing of his own devising.”
“You’re saying Klein figured out we were fraternizing together. He saw that and decided it would be good treatment for you?”
“I’m saying he saw that I was breaking the Credo, going off with another agent, and he made note of the reality in the field. That’s the kind of thing he was always talking about, the reality in the field.”
“You’re saying he went renegade. He knows we’re heading up on this mission and it’s against orders and all that but he is sanctioning it on a personal level?”
“It’s one way to figure it,” Singleton said.
* * *
A half hour later, there was nothing along the roadside to indicate they were in the Year of Hate, or that the riots had bled far out from the urban centers. This part of the state had been desolate to begin with, folks eking out a living from bad tillage, land overused, dejected-looking homesteads spaced far about, yards filled with trash. He wanted to tell her about the face in the file, but he was unsure how to proceed because she’d been quiet for miles, not moving, the veil resting in her lap, and he guessed that she was thinking about her mother, or her past history with the Zomboid. I’m the kind of man who doesn’t know how to respond to a woman’s deeper silences, at least in the car, he thought. There’s only so much you can do in a car. A car has its limits. Yes, he felt her emitting sadness when he glanced over, something in the position of her fingers resting on the faded tulle. Finally, he found a quiet, straight stretch of road and pulled over so they could get out and move their legs, get the blood flowing. They stepped out into the lingering smells of a hot day, tar and dust and a hint of something — lavender, bindweed? It was an inland smell, far away from the lake, although they were only ten or fifteen miles from shore. Together they walked a few yards from the car, keeping an eye out for movement, down a slight decline, through a gully, to a clear spot between two trees, hidden in shadow. He turned and gave her a kiss and felt destabilized, as if they might settle down at that spot, slide to the ground, two young pioneers staking a claim on a barren patch of land, full of hope, the wide expanse of emptiness quivering around them on all sides, full of portent and possibility in a land unsettled but waiting eagerly. Then he told her about the photo in the file, the face of the burned man, the termination stamp, and he watched as she turned away from him and took a few steps toward the field. Her body was tense and it seemed to him that at any moment she might bolt. Then she turned around and walked past him, up the verge, to the car. “Let’s get going,” she said.