Free Hystopia: A Novel by David Means

leaves in the breeze. From the window, which was open, came the smell of tobacco smoke along with the canned TV laughter and the giggle of the kids. The man lowered his paper and looked at them, tapped his cigar in an ashtray, and then he raised the paper, hiding again.
    Rake was whispering, his voice weirdly gentle. Stay up there and look and I’ll give you something to see.
    She looked out across the yard. The moon was rising and the light frosted the grass.
    When she looked back inside, the man still had his paper up. Rake was in the kitchen by now, she knew. He went into back hallways and kitchens first, and there must’ve been a sound from the kitchen, because the man lowered his paper and tilted his head, and the kids, who were crawl-walking backward toward his knees, giggling again, also turned. For a moment all three of them sat still.
    The cat, the man said. He lifted the paper again.
    The desire to say something, to shout out a warning, to terminate the scene. Fear, fear, fear was something material. Hold still and you’ll live. Move softly and you’ll survive. Take it easy and you’ll make it, the nurse had said. If you feel yourself falling look down into the fall. Something like that.
    The bloodbath that followed seemed distant. She was seeing it and not seeing it. (You saw it all, Rake would say. You might not’ve been looking but you saw it.) Rag dolls acted upon by some distant force. There was an explosion and the two children were dashed to the side, heads opening up while the man’s head snapped with the opening of his chest and the woman, who had been hidden from view, revealed herself in a scream. A moment later there was only the sound of the television set and he was looking up through the window glass, shrugging, and then he went from body to body and did what he had to do—that’s how he put it. I do what I do. You have to know that—making shapes in the carpet with his fingers, leaving messages.
    *   *   *
    He got his bag from the trunk and found what he was looking for and made her take it, pushing the canteen to her mouth and making her sip, probing her mouth with his fingers to make sure it was gone, and then there was Kennedy’s voice on the radio, Boston locutions from his repaired larynx, speaking of the nation’s great vision, outlining another one of his projects, reading out figures that suggested victory’s imminence in Vietnam. Rake was slapping the wheel with his palms and talking alongside the voice while she listened. Both worked into each other—she felt Kennedy’s more, she could catch each of his words and see the way he stood with the damaged shoulder stiffer than the good one and his jaw, repaired, listing as he talked of retreat from the DMZ and a fragmented force left behind in the aftermath of retreat and something about a reckoning at hand (maybe Rake doing an imitation) and the conflagration of battle that would soon collapse into peace as the station bounced in off the higher reaches of the ionosphere and then faded into a preacher’s voice, quoting from the book of Isaiah: evil is the torment in the bloodied skies; shy are the defeated; the weak clutch to the stones—and then the Kennedy signal came back in strongly: We’re at the apex of the greatest experiment in our history, he said, and Rake said, Yeah, that’s what we’re doing. We’re heading into a big national experiment, and then he snapped the radio off and opened up the acceleration, faster and faster—as the acuteness of her attention increased, each word available to hear again and again, the road coming in under the headlights (she could feel it, she could feel the road). And then, hours later, a lonely gas station with long, narrow pumps and haloed lamps overhead.
    The car stretched out to the chrome ornament, crosshairs aiming into the night.
    Then they were passing through Big Rapids again, unnoticed, tearing down the main drag.
    What goes around comes around again, Rake said.
    He