“He was in a casket and I was in combat,” Singleton said. “I remember when he was killed. In my vision we were fighting in Hue. Obviously, the second siege of Hue. He was calling in for air support and the strike came and it came in too close, and he was at the phone, first calling the coordinates in and then still holding it when the strike came, so it isn’t clear to me if he was calling in a second strike or if my vision compressed time, or if he just liked to hold that phone to his mouth, but then there was the fireball.”
“He had a slight lisp,” Meg said, her voice quivering. “I loved his lisp.”
“I don’t remember that,” Singleton said.
“Now you do,” Meg said.
She reached out and touched his face and he did the same and for a few seconds they held their hands there, as if passing thoughts and memories through their fingers.
“We were dating, me and Billy-T. He took me out to California, I think, and we went to the beach out there.”
“What did he look like?”
“He had curly hair — wavy, and it was sun blond, bleached, and he had this great smile,” she said.
“If I could remember him that’s the way I’d picture him,” Singleton said. “He had a big smile.”
“Yeah, a sweet smile,” she said, and then she went on to explain more, to lay it all out, to describe some of the things he already knew and some that were new to him. Down the beach Wendy and Hank had gone as far as they dared and had turned around, facing in their direction, arms down, looking straight ahead as if to wait for something to resolve.
There was an unnatural attraction between two linked by grief. Wendy’s awareness of that attraction was apparent in the swing of her arms as she ran down the beach. There was a connective name between us, Billy-T, and when the name was spoken, Agent Singleton (I) had a reflexive response. There were rumors that if two enfolds met and exchanged information a natural unfolding would take place, whereupon the two patients would share enough mutual memory material to counteract the Tripizoid in a natural manner, inducing a natural memory outside of the traumatic material.
* * *
“Maybe grief has to work itself out like this or something. If it’s not felt, if it doesn’t happen, it finds a way,” Hank said later that night as they sat at the kitchen table. They had returned from the beach, cooked dinner — chicken, potatoes, green beans — together, working alongside MomMom. She seemed aware of the shift, the change, and when she spoke her voice was lower, calmer.
“I don’t mean to throw even more disrespect on the Corps, but there’s simply no way they knew you coming up here would result in some kind of reunification. If they did know, they’re a hell of a lot more organized than I thought. It’s better if you don’t even consider that as a possibility. Put it aside, man, put it aside,” Hank said.
“No, I can’t. The best way for me to think about it is to believe that Klein knew,” Singleton said. “For my own sense of sanity I’m gonna say that he arranged things, maybe not specific things but the general pattern. He made a point of disregarding the instructions from Command as a way of making damn sure I knew that I had to make decisions in the field, based on the field. The last order he gave me was to interrogate Meg.”
“And he said it was a form of treatment,” Wendy said. “Don’t forget that.”
“He made me say it.”
“And you said it. Now put it aside,” she said, and she pushed her chair back, took Meg by the hand, and they went off into the living room, where they sat talking, their voices coming down the hall and into the kitchen while Hank and Singleton sat in silence, listening.
* * *
That night, in their room, they heard the old lady crying out in her delirium, her words coming down the hall. From the window there was the usual sound of surf breaking and, later, the roar of a gang of bikers coming closer and then receding with the pop of a backfire. Then the wind began to pick up, a long, low hissing through the bramble and trees as each gust approached, blowing the shade up into the room as it struck the house broadside, shaking away into a deep quiet (the buzz was completely gone from his ears) again until the next one arrived. That was how his grief felt. It came welling up out of the connection he had with the young woman, Meg, and then it receded into the logic of his assessment of the situation, his desire, for whatever reason, to somehow remain inside something that resembled an operation, a plan of action, a sense of being on a mission. His desire to find a technical way to describe the afternoon seemed to fade and he tried to focus his mind on Meg, her freckled face, her wide eyes, wondering if he had known her at least through a photograph that Billy had passed around to the guys in their unit, because he had carried a photo, for sure, if he was a normal grunt. Then he thought of the structure of the bridge, the long, beautiful arch of it across those brutal currents, and the two parts of the state, and he thought of Wendy’s father holding out down in Flint as he let his mind zoom into space to look down at the hand shape that was supposedly part of what drew vets in from all over the country, attracted not only to the shape itself but to the peninsular aspect, the fact that there were so many places in which to find an end point, and he thought about the streets of Flint, and the young man in his wheelchair, smoking a cigarette, his gun aimed at the sky, and he quickly let his mind zoom back down to the house he was in — beneath a roof, comfortable in bed with Wendy, who was letting him rest his hand on her belly, sliding it along the band of her underwear, not responding but not pushing him away. When he asked her if she was awake she said she was wide awake.
“I’m disappointed and relieved at the same time. I thought this would make me feel better. I was hoping to get here, find Rake alive, and take him out.”
Another gust of wind gathered in the darkness and the shade sucked back tight against the screen with a snap and the house seemed to grow tense in the rafters. He slipped his fingers along the band of her underwear and lifted it gently.
“I saw the way Meg reached up and touched your face when you were talking on the beach,” Wendy said. “You wanted to touch her back, I mean really touch her, and you stopped yourself by keeping your hand on her cheek. You wanted to go deeper, but consciously you drew a line that you really needed, like my father. You just knew that enough had been spoken, revealed. Now you’re going to leave it alone,” she said.
“What makes you think so?” he said.
“Because I want you to.”
“So I didn’t seem pathetic?” he said.
“Yes,” she said tenderly, pushing against him.
“Yes, I didn’t?”
“Yes, you seemed pathetic,” she said. Another gust gathered, the sudden stillness, a drawing back not only of air but time, too, it seemed, and then after it had gone through, in the stillness, a complete silence. The old lady down the hall had fallen asleep.
It’s impossible for me to think that this entire thing is merely an elaborate form of treatment, he would write in his report. And yet the implausibility of the conspiracy is precisely what makes it plausible. To be AWOL but, in a deeper sense, not AWOL at all … Was the intention that I terminate Rake, or that, by confronting him, I effect the cure that the Corps had failed to effect with him? Or was this only about me? That I was supposed to go to Rake and, before killing him, get filled in on what really happened over there, to learn about my experience in Vietnam from the horse’s mouth? But the horse was dead.
Without a word Wendy reached over and turned on the light and got up and went to the bag on the floor and came to bed with four zip pills, popping two and swallowing them dry before he could stop her and then putting her hand out as if to say: Now you. He popped his and laughed because it was already coming over the edge of his grief, a bright, delusional sense of being able to see anything and everything, and when Wendy turned off the light the room was suffused with phosphorescence, greenish in hue, trickling through the window and around the floor and across the sheets, which roiled and shimmered. She touched his scars and ran her finger down his arm, leaving a trace of green light where the warmth remained on his skin, and he traced his name on the soft curve of her belly and then watched her as she got up, went to the window, pulled the shade up, and called him over to look as beyond the trees, in flashbulb bursts, the lightning flared out the yard, metallic silver — and then she turned to him, offering her mouth, kissing him with the taste of ash and mint, everything accentuated by the pills, sharp and acute, her tongue twisting with his own.