Hystopia: A Novel (2 page)

EDITOR’S NOTE

The manuscript was found in the drawer in Allen’s room by his mother, Mary Ann Allen, who gave it to Byron Riggs, professor of English at the University of Michigan, who in turn passed it on to his good friend, the writer Fran Johnson, who subsequently sent the manuscript to her agent, who, with the permission of the Allen family, submitted it to publishers, who, as they say, went into a frenzied bidding war that had little to do with the so-called marketability of the novel itself because, as most admitted, openly, the book was hardly fit for the fiction market at the time (or any time) but was publishable because of the marketability of the so-called backstory: a twenty-two-year-old Vietnam vet sits at his desk and composes a fictive world that is—as the critic Harold R. Ross stated—“bent double upon itself, as violent and destabilized as our own times, as pregnant and nonsensical.”

Hystopia
was written during the hot summer a year after the Detroit/Flint riots. Allen continued his work on the novel into the fall, devoting all his time to it. The reader might take the liberty of picturing a slender man leaning down over a typewriter in the upstairs window of a house in Kalamazoo, Michigan, trying to concentrate while, downstairs, perhaps, a fight takes place. What is known about the family is somewhat limited; files on Meg Allen are, of course, sealed, but it is generally acknowledged that his sister suffered from adult-onset schizophrenia. (Later her diagnosis—confused by shifting categories—was changed to borderline.) It is also general knowledge that she had relations with a young man named Billy Thompson, who died in Vietnam.

EDITOR’S NOTE

Evidence from Allen’s journals and notes suggests that his fictional Grid zone, a safe, controlled area in which treated patients were released from treatment, was based on the proposed Unleashed Wayward Program of 1969, which was part of the Mental Health Corps Program (Psych Corps), part of the Kennedy administration’s initiative to solve the mental illness “problem” in general and the returning Vietnam vet problem in particular. Certain geographical specifics—the so-called Gleel Glen, where the Saginaw River cuts into Michigan—can be assumed to be products of the author’s imagination.

EDITOR’S NOTE

Below is an edited selection of interviews with friends and relatives of Allen who, upon reading the manuscript of
Hystopia
(rough text, unedited), offered responses.

Stanley Crop

Well, yeah, gangs of marauding motorcycle riders like the Black Flag group, the Summer of Hate, and Kennedy keeping the meat grinder in Vietnam up to full speed … all correct. Don’t accuse the kid of bending history. Accuse history of bending the kid. And the war, the war bent him, too. Like so many, he came back changed.

Markus Decourt

Maybe the treatment process wasn’t called enfolding, but the process I went through was similar to what he describes. As far as I knew, it was top-secret shit, so I suppose he got wind of it from Billy Thompson when he came home on leave, or he heard about it during his tour of duty. All the same, man, he got it right, mostly, and there were reenactment facilities where they messed you up. And the drug called Tripizoid. He gets that right, too, mostly. Little greenies, we called them, no bigger than a saccharine tablet. Pop one of those suckers, go through the reenactment of your original trauma—we’re talking controlled, man, scripted, staged right down to the gestures, the whole show run by these Shakespearian motherfuckers—and you’d come out cured. We were doing scenes from the
Iliad
, Hector and all that, and anyway he got it right and how he got it right in his book is a wonder to me, man, except to say he did.

Gerald McCarthy

You’d think it’s crazy that three buddies would go from Benton Harbor, Michigan, to Nam—all laughing and joking way over there—but it happened all the time and the Buddy Program was the reason. That Rake character is fucking real. I mean really real. You get home and aren’t really home and you’re charged up anyway. That guy was a psychopath to start. I believe him. I see his ghost all over the place.

Norman Joseph

I came home from Nam and went back to school. As a scholar of Vietnam literature I can say, with all frankness, that
Hystopia
is one of the strangest documents to come out of the war years. I can’t say it’s the most honest. A parataxic construct of sorts.

Buddy Anderson

That character named Singleton is a lot like me, man, and I take that as a compliment because I was Eugene’s best friend. Hell, my tour was only two years ago. When I sleep, which isn’t often, I have the same kind of dreams and I wish I’d’ve been treated, enfolded myself. Enfold me, man, I keep thinking, but then I guess a man has to carry what he has to carry. But let me tell you this, all the books I’ve read get it wrong, except for the ones where the main character is KIAed, or goes AWOL, or whatever; but the gung-ho ones are off, each time; too clean, too neat and tidy, even when you get a few killed—you’re stuck knowing that the dude telling the story, the writer, man, lived to tell it, and for me that always makes it unrealistic.

Jason Smith

Look, the guy had more than Stiller’s (or holing-up syndrome). That guy was wacko. I’m sorry he killed himself, but after trying to read this I’d say it was all for the best.

Tanner Bradfield

Reminded me of my great-uncle Lester, at least in the stories my family used to tell. He came home with a bad case of wind-up from the Great War, the story goes, shell-shocked to all hell, and used to sit out in the yard at night. Well, one night there a new car lot was opening and had hired a searchlight to get attention, and, the story goes, when he saw the light up in the clouds he went completely nuts and ran naked through the streets of town and had to be put up there in the state hospital, where Meg Allen was treated for a while.

Reginald (Shaky Jake) Jackson

Detroit burning. He got that right. Only thing he got wrong is that he saved some parts of Flint. The rest of Flint’s gonna be gone in a year. Bet on it.

Stan White

My brother, Drew, knew the guy Billy-T was based on. They were in the same unit together. Drew told me he was one of those sweet, down-home motherfuckers, always high on something, shooting at ghosts, is what he said. If anyone would’ve saw an angel, it would’ve been Billy Thompson, a.k.a. Billy-T. I believe him. He was there.

Kurt Bronson

Yeah, there was the Buddy Program. You’d enlist with a friend or two and they’d assure you that you’d end up in the same unit; same platoon, same squad, usually. Remember all three: Singleton, quiet, had his act together; Billy Thompson, or Beachboy, we called him. Big-eyed and sweet as cherry pie until he saw action and then he got those dark eyes. Not too bad but bad enough. Met him in Saigon early in the war. We were watching some rich chicks having a séance. He was into that supernatural stuff, man, Billy-T was, and he said something, I can’t recall exactly what, but it was along the lines of: I’m gonna have some visions, too, something like that. Maybe that explains something. Maybe not. Rake I don’t want to talk about. He was crazy from the start.

Dr. Brent Walk

Friendship under the pressure of war forms bonds like no other. It’s easy to say that, but it’s hard to really recognize unless you’ve been in the field of battle; strange bonds that would never form in the so-called real world: Jekyll-and-Hyde bonds, I call them. For instance, you’ll have some large black man from pre-riot Detroit paired up with a runty kid from Willard, Ohio; there’s a kind of alchemical connection between them, catalyzed by their shared fear of death. Death is the context in which these bonds form. There is a lot of signification; a lot of language play, a lot of jest. I’d venture to say it’s a form of love as deep as that between any married couple: in both cases, it’s precisely the differences between the two individuals that creates the deep and mysterious attraction.

Lucy Allen

The thing about our city is that it was just big enough and just small enough. Meg was mentally ill, they say. She was sick before she met Billy. Billy didn’t make her crazy. His death put her over the edge, they say, but I know a little better than that.

Richard Allen

[Static. Wooden-sounding fumbling with microphone. Street noise.]

No comment. I’d appreciate if you’d stay away from me. My son is dead.

Margaret Allen

Eugene was a good boy. When he came back from the war he went up there and began writing, and we knew he was writing because we could hear the typewriter, day and night, and the bell at the end of each line. That bell tinkling. He’d come down and sit and have breakfast after writing all night. He went to visit Meg a few times at the hospital and came back and wrote more. I’d rather not say anything else.

Lucy Allen

I was the tagalong, you know, the kid sister who wanted to hang out and was sometimes allowed to go with them. I went to the beach with them a few times. Billy-T smoked a joint, I remember that, back in the dunes. Meg wouldn’t smoke when I was around. [Indecipherable.] Yeah, there’s a lot of denial. All that. After Eugene killed himself, the family balled itself up tighter than ever.

Reverend Dudney Breeze

Thomas Merton said hell is hatred. Murder comes out of hatred. Only through hatred can you murder, at least in theory, so one would, most certainly, say that war is hell, because war is murder. There’s a sermon in there, for certain.

John Frank

They called me Chaplain, man, because I’d pray over the dead, and I meant it when I did it. I’d do it again. I’d pray over every KIAed in the squad. I’d give them a quick version of the last rites, not the full viaticum, of course, but I’d bless them best I could.

Billy Morton

We were at China Beach on a five-day leave, and this guy named Franklin—I think it was—and I were in the water. He was a big believer, all full of God this, God that, and Christ this, Christ that, and he said, You want me to baptize you, and I said, What’s in it for me, and he said, It might tighten your luck, man. You’re a short-timer. You’ve got to do what you can, and I said, OK, and he did it, right there, pushed me under and said whatever you say. Did I feel different? Did my luck get better? I’ll never know.

Stewart Dunbar

History has always had a hard time allying itself to the novel. The young man’s creative effort, disturbed though it might be, is realistic to the extent that it captures the tension of history meeting the present moment. Is it not possible that someone looking back at the past, even the very recent past, and bending it this way and that (e.g., Kennedy in this third term, not his second) might actually rearrange the— No, I can’t express the thought without getting Einsteinian and saying that retelling the past, as the young man does in his novel, might actually change the past. But perhaps that is exactly what I mean.

Randall Allen

Screw Nam. Screw the novel he was writing. Screw white history. Above all, screw Michigan. And screw my cousin. He didn’t know the state at all. He lived in a bubble. He imagined the entire thing. He was freaked out about being drafted. That’s my theory. He just couldn’t handle it.

Jamakie Lowwater

There are too many moose on Isle Royal. It’s impractical to imagine that a group of vets would be able to reenact night battles up there without having moose wandering in and out of their fights; water buffalo stand-ins, perhaps. He didn’t put that in the novel but he told me about it as an idea, a concept.

Gracie Howard

They were a quiet and rather formal family, actually. Did we have an idea that the daughter was troubled? Yes, we did. Did we know that the son was troubled, too? No, I’d say we didn’t. Eugene was a quiet boy. When he died we were stunned, just stunned.

Randall Allen

My cousin was hot. Meg was one hot girl. That much is for sure. I used to go to the lake with her. The whole family would go and she’d be in this bikini and I’d be like, man, why does she have to be my cousin? Of course if she wasn’t my cousin I never would’ve been that close to her, because she was that hot. But she was crazy, too. But that kicked in later.

Janice Allen

Kissing cousins. I saw Randall trying to kiss Meg. She shoved him. We were having a fire on the beach and they were just out of the light, but I could see it clearly. She was going with Billy around then. At least she mentioned his name to me. Then when he came home they took off to California. They say he kidnapped her, but I think she was duplicitous—is that the word?—yeah, she was ready and willing, at least some part of her, to take off with him—not to say he didn’t force her to go, in his own way. When she was gone all we could do was speculate.

Dr. Ralph Stein

Early indications of schizophrenia? I’d say the temporal lobe seizure suffered by the patient [Meg Allen] was an early indication. Hospitalization for that condition, at her age [15] is rare but not unheard of.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

A Compact Primer on the Theory of Enfolding

by Eugene Allen

1

The process of reenacting particulars of the causal/trauma events turns (enfolds) the drama/trauma inward. Confusion is undoubtedly an element of the curative process: a mysterious blurring of the line between what happened and what is reenacted. One folds into the other, and during the period of adjustment the patient typically experiences disjunction and bewilderment. He or she may vehemently reject the curative process, making statements to the effect of “This is pure bullshit. I remember everything. Nothing has been tucked away. I’m the same old screwup. You can’t just yank me in here, make me reenact a bunch of the shit I went through, in a lame-assed way, not even close to what it was really like, and expect me to forget about it.” But in most cases, the patient does forget about it, becoming fully immersed in the reenacted trauma’s nullification of the real trauma. (Editor’s note: The author John Horgan has coined a term—Ironic Science—to define a brand of science that “does not advance hypothesis that can be either confirmed or invalidated empirically.” The enfolding process may be Ironic Science at its worst, or it may be visionary science at its best.)