Free Hystopia: A Novel by David Means Page B

trauma seems to stand apart from the initial trauma when you look back in retrospect, after treatment. When you cure, you eliminate the cause. And when you eliminate the cause, you eliminate the sequence of events up to the trauma. The Corps has its own term for everything eliminated—which is?”
    “The Causal Events Package. When you enfold the trauma, you must make sure you enfold the entire Causal Events Package,” Singleton said. He put his hands on his knees and leaned forward. Klein’s pipe hung from his clenched teeth. Behind his aviator-style glasses his eyes looked dazed with tedium. They’d been saying basically the same thing to each other for weeks.
    “You’re not really paying attention,” Klein said. “You said to me that it was a Causal Events Package, and that wasn’t necessary. Even though I asked, I expected something more. Look, it’s late June and the cops are passing the buck, pinning every little shit-can murder on our target, which is only natural. You get some family scared shitless because they live—or think they live—in something called a Zone of Anarchy, and a Black Flag gang arrives one night revving engines, calling, waiting, until the man of the house comes out—because he has to come out eventually—and tries to sweet-talk his way out of what he knows is coming, or else he’s one of those guys with a lot of ammo but no luck who comes out shooting, and then one of the Black Flag men, fresh from one of those absurd battle reenactments up on Isle Royal, trying to relocate the glory and pissed off because reliving the glory has only made him want more glory, puts a bullet in the man’s head and kicks his skull in and leaves him to the local cops, a bunch of Barney Fifes who have no way to solve the case and don’t want to see it for what it really is—because why would they want to mess with the Black Flags?—so they wait until there are a few more killings. When they imagine a pattern, they pass word of a failed enfold to the liaison, and he comes up to my office with his briefcase and puts the pressure on me because that’s his job, and when I see his information I do a gut check and fail to find a pattern because there isn’t one. That’s how it works, again and again.”
    “Yes, sir,” Singleton said. There was something in the hang of Klein’s jaw, a new tension. He fiddled with his pipes and then looked up, his eyes steely blue, fixed.
    “Have you been fraternizing outside? That’s what I’ve been meaning to ask you.”
    “Sir, I’m not fraternizing with another agent,” Singleton said.
    “I didn’t think you were,” Klein said.
    “Thank you, sir.”
    “I was sure you were fraternizing.”
    “Well, I’m not, sir.”
    “When I was in Korea, I saw a man like me, I mean who I am right here, now, an officer in charge, and thought it was absurd that my life was in his hands. You don’t remember what you used to feel about your command over in Nam but I can assure you that when you saw a man with a West Point ring on his finger, some fresh change of command come walking up the trail in the Mekong with his spit-polished boots and his fresh shave and his baby face, you felt something akin to what you’re feeling about me right now.”
    “Yes, sir. I thought you were in the big one, sir.”
    “I said the big one, and for me the big one was Korea. It was just part of the Second, as a matter of fact. It was just an extension of the Second.”
    “I see, sir,” Singleton said.
    “When I start to feel the urge to recite poetry, I know we’re about done for the day. And I feel that urge. In that war you had a superabundance of highly educated men in the trenches carrying a working knowledge of Greek and Latin, reading Hardy and Dickens, filled with a desire to capture in words the way a sunrise or sunset looked from the bottom of the trench, or the way it felt to do a stand-to at dusk or twilight. All we’re getting from this war is the desire to write