“I know you’ve done it, but I think I should, too, somehow.”
“She won’t say much to you,” she said.
“Well, maybe not. I’m going to interrogate Hank first anyway. We’re building trust, but we have to consider what he said about his acting abilities — that he enfolded himself and then played the role, his words, of someone who was still in there with the derangement. He might be acting now.”
“Nobody’s acting,” she said. “Can’t you see that, Sing? Can’t you see that you’re the only one who’s acting?”
“I’m not acting. I’m doing my job.”
“See what I mean,” she said, and she got up from the table and went out the back door. When he looked out the window, tight in the frames of light gray, she was alone by the shed looking out toward the woods.
Final action reports contain enemy body count, men cured of trauma, proper enfolds, number of failed enfolds, psychological profiles, guns and ammo seized. They were about horseshoe formations closing in on all sides, always ending with a sharp forward thrust. A good report had a subtext of preordained domination. A twisting of failure into success. He would have to make the initial standoff in the kitchen much tenser. He’d have to stress that he in no way intended the action as a form of self-treatment, or a way to gather information about his own trauma. According to the Credo — and leaving aside Klein’s transgressions — it was an agent’s duty to sustain an enfolded state and relate impersonally with the target (in other words, to become as inhuman as you could, subordinating your impulses to the structure of the Corps). That meant he would have to avoid all mention of his wartime relationship (indeed, if he had had one) with Rake. He’d have to pretend, if he ever went back to Flint, typing it up on the old manual, that his own needs had not played a role in the intuitive decisions he had made. He’d have to pretend that he had not unfolded himself at all.
* * *
To establish — as he’d write in his report, or claim at the adjudication — esprit de corps with Hank he agreed to go out on a recon mission to assess the level of gang activity. The two of them hiked through the brambles and then crawled across a field and into woods, weaving between trees until they could see a house behind which two men were sitting in lawn chairs, smoking and looking out in their direction. They crouched and watched for a few minutes before retreating into the woods. Hank said the two men had been sitting like that for most of the summer. He sniffed the air and led Singleton farther south to a second house, which consisted of multiple mobile homes connected by breezeways to the main house. Choppers were neatly parked in a line out front. A man with a rifle slung over his shoulder sat in a chair under an awning. Hank scoped him and made an ID. “That’s a guy named Duke, he works a big-shot connection down in Pawpaw. He’s been standing guard for about three weeks. There’s a few new choppers, so I’d say they’re arriving from downstate now. Rake had some kind of agreement with those folks, a truce. I’d say they’re waiting for someone to come riding up with a sweet rumor. They’ve sensed a lack of activity.”
They hiked back into the woods and came out in a clearing about a mile inland from the lake. Hank swished through the grass and then, like a dog, turned around and around to clear a spot, motioning for Singleton to sit down, offering up a hand in a gesture that seemed sweetly out of place.
“You’ve got to trust me, Singleton. The way you and Wendy have been acting the last three days shows outward trust. You’ve been acting like you trust us, hanging out, joining me on this mission, and that’s a first step. But there’s still internal doubt and all of that.”
He lit two cigarettes and passed one to Singleton. Then he lay back with his arms crossed behind his head.
“What’d they train you on interrogation? I’ll bet they told you to begin with easy banter, establish trust, and then, when a moment like this comes along, hit hard.”
“That’s about it,” Singleton said. The air was filled with late summer chaff and insects. A breeze sifted through the grass and then died away. Singleton thought about how it must’ve felt to wade through grass with his rifle overhead into a horizon that was brutally open and visible.
“This might be the time,” Hank said, “to tell me something, not too intimate, about your journey that might help me trust you a little more.”
“I can tell you one thing,” Singleton said. “You ever hear of blue pills?”
“The blue pills?”
“Or green. Sometime they’re gray or green or whatever. We’re talking about putting a stress on the ‘the.’”
“A story with a pill,” Hank said. He closed his eyes and let the sun bathe his face. “I’ve heard plenty of stories with pills.”
“A grunt recognizes a grunt who’s been treated and can’t remember a damn thing about the war. There’s a strange moment between them. The guy who’s been treated racks his brain knowing that he should know the other guy. He digs and digs because he can see, in the way the other guy’s looking, a pure connection. All this in a few seconds.”
“The man doing the recognizing puts the onus onto the man being recognized,” Hank says. “I know that feeling, man. I know it all too fucking well.”
Singleton took a deep breath, took a sip from his canteen, and told Hank the story of the blue pills. The Flint streets, the desolation of afternoon, how it felt to leave the Corps building after a briefing session, to pass through the revolving door and bump into Frank. He described the helmet liner. The weird sensation of being recognized by somebody who, presumably, he had once known in battle.
“Folks come out of nowhere, like you and Wendy did the other night, to present themselves as part of your past with no way to prove it,” Hank said. “You have all of these folks drifting around with the pivotal point of their lives buried, not sure if they should be digging around, and from time to time someone comes along. It’s a fucking strange world, man.”
“He came up to me and called me Captain and then said he was going to fulfill a promise he had made to me in Nam, and he handed me a bag of pills and I had to confirm it, had to know for sure before I took them, and when it was confirmed, I mean when I saw that he really was there with my unit, Wendy and I took them.”
“You still have some of those left?” Hank said. He looked out across the grass at the trees, mostly jack pines, against the sky.
“I’ve got exactly four left,” Singleton said.
“One for each of us, is what I’d say,” Hank said.
“Now it’s your turn to tell a story.”
“You already know my story,” Hank said. “It’s a story you know too well. Except instead of getting tagged and put in treatment I partnered with Rake before they could find me. I was so fucked up, I’m guessing, upon getting home that I didn’t have a choice. I told you I treated myself. It’s all enfolded now,” he said, tapping his head. “So you know the deal. I’m making it up based on the backwash I picked up from things Rake told me. He didn’t like to talk about that shit, so basically I just have a vague sense that I came out and met up with him and took to the road and played it all out that way, one killing at a time. Was I a psychopath like Rake? No way, man, and I can attest to that, of course, because I’m not a failed enfold. There was part of me that could be saved, otherwise I wouldn’t have been saved. I like to think it was my love of MomMom that pulled me through it and created a will to self-treatment, but I’ll never know and don’t want to know and if I do start wanting to know — heading to the waterline — you do your best to pull me back, and I’ll do the same for you, man, if you want me to,” he said, and then he lay back down and settled into a silence.