Machine Dreams

anger and sorrow to express.”
    “I know,” I said. “I’ll have to express them somewhere else.”
    I got up and put my coat on and left. An orderly in a white uniform was leaning against the wall just outside the office door. Reinforcements, just in case. He looked me over blankly. “Go fuck yourself,” I said.

    I had to make appointments with several professors to quit college in the last weeks of an English honors program but, like my determined brother before me, I managed. I spent half the summer in Bellington, until I realized I was only making things worse for my parents. Worse for myself, watching them in such constant, low-profile pain.
    My father keeps Billy’s Camaro in Bess’s wooden garage, and he takes good care of it. After I told him I’d decided to go to California, we walked out to look at the car.
    The narrow old garage was just a kind of shed, and the Camaro looked bright and cherished, hidden in a place almost too small for it. Mitch asked if I’d like to drive the car, take it West.
    “No,” I told him, “I think Billy’s car should stay with you.”
    He nodded, leaning on the white hood of the Camaro. “How is your mother doing?”
    “Not good.”
    “Sweet Jesus,” he said, in the pale-lit garage, “we should have gotten him the hell out of the country. I’ll never forgive myself.”
    “Dad, Billy didn’t want to leave the country. He’d already decided.”
    My father looked out the narrow garage window at the alley. “Honey, I hate to see you go so far away.”
    “I’ll come back.”
    Kato was in town that July before I left; she heard I was leaving and phoned me. I went down by the billiard hall to see her. The baby was five months old and she looked like Kato. Blond, blue-eyed, with the same shape face. I think Kato must have been honest with Buck and they’d both accepted whatever possibilities existed. She told me things were better for her now, that a baby made things better and Buck was a good husband. She asked if we’d heard any news about Billy.
    I went to California on the bus and arrived like a refugee, knowing no one. I found an inexpensive apartment in a rundown house on a bay in a northern coastal town. I got a job in an insurance office. All I do there is type letters, pour coffee, post themail. I have no diversions from thinking, and the thinking has stretched out.
    Billy told me, during the summer he worked at the river, that some types of pollution actually clarify the appearance of water. The water grows more and more polluted but becomes clearer and clearer because things that are living in it die.
    Maybe that’s what’s happening. I feel very clear, almost transparent. My next move will come to me.
    The best way to be lucky is to take what comes and not be a coward.
In the beginning, my thoughts were murderous. I fantasized about killing Nixon, someone killing Nixon. I thought about money, trying to get money—how could I get money? Hire some weird mercenary to sink into the morass of Vietnam and find out what happened to Billy, actually bring him back. The North Vietnamese took care of pilots; pilots were officers, political leverage to be exchanged, they possessed information. But the NVA wouldn’t realize Billy had information, so much information.
These guys are the only country I know of, they’re what I’m defending.
I felt betrayed by my government but I’d expected betrayal: I just hadn’t expected betrayal to such a degree. That it would go on so long, that I would have to live with it. If I hated my government, shouldn’t I go and live in some other country? Not use the supermarkets, where there was more harvested, neatly wrapped, germ-free food than they’d ever seen at one time in Lai Khe? But my parents are my country, my divided country. By going to California, I’d made it to the far frontiers, but I’d never leave my country. I never will.
    For weeks one winter on Brush Fork, Billy came to my room after our parents were asleep. They still slept in the same room, so we were young—seven and eight or so. Each night we shoved my bed away from the wall and surveyed the floor with a flashlight, brandishing two stolen dinner knives and a screwdriver. “It’s under there,” Billy said, “I can tell.” We were looking for a secret passage, a trapdoor. Every night we moved the parquet squares already pried loose and went to work on another, exposing a black gummy surface underneath. The squares of flooring were