Hystopia

EDITOR’S NOTE

Certain historical facts have been twisted to fit Eugene Allen’s fictive universe. The fires his text describes did consume most of Detroit and parts of Flint, and raged through the state to the north, but they did not, of course, burn the entire state from top to bottom. Details of the seventh assassination attempt made on John F. Kennedy, now known as the Genuine Assassination, have been changed slightly in Allen’s narrative, which has it taking place on a mid-August afternoon in Galva, Illinois. As we know, Kennedy was killed a month later, on September 17, as he drove through the town of Springfield, Illinois, on one of his intimate wave-by tours, “throwing [his] fate to the whims of the nation,” as he said so often in his later speeches.

That Kennedy deliberately endangered himself in public outings as a way to defy previous attempts made on his life is historical fact, and historians will be debating for years the effectiveness this gesture had in reducing, or increasing, the number of attempts on his life (six), and whether it helped to extend his physical life along with his political life. The great ash heaps — still smoldering as Allen worked on the novel — certainly could be seen from an apartment at 22 Main, in Flint, in which Myron Singleton and Wendy Zapf had their first furtive lovemaking session. But the ash heap didn’t stop — as Allen claims — at Bay City (which burned for three years) but extended all the way up into the thumb region before petering out. Another backdrop of Allen’s narrative, the second great lumber boom, was simply a creation of his vivid imagination. Most of northern Michigan had remained reforested, with the exception of a few areas afflicted with white pine blister rust (even here, in most cases, the rust didn’t kill the trees but damaged branches and reduced lumber value). The great second lumber boom (1975) didn’t begin until shortly after the novel was finished. Certainly there were men like Hank (last name unknown), who stole into the state forests to poach lumber, acting as cruisers, locating the larger trees, and then going in at night (covertly) to cut. It is likely that Allen was inspired by his neighbor Ralph Sutton, a former lumberman who took him under his wing and taught him the intricacies of lumber poaching, even going so far as to take the boy on a few excursions, cutting trees from local parks.

EDITOR’S NOTE

On August 15, 1974, Allen was given a standard postmortem psychological examination, drawing upon the text of his manuscript and interviews with surviving family members, friends, and casual acquaintances. John Maudsley led the investigative team at the Michigan State Mental Facility. An excerpt from his extensive report, already considered a classic of the genre, is worth quoting:

Eugene Allen had a tendency to self-isolate and was prone to bouts of Stiller’s disease, a common condition in the Middle West of the United States. Although the diagnosis is relatively new, still under study, symptoms include a desire to stand in attic windows for long stretches; a desire to wander back lots, abandoned fairgrounds, deserted alleys, and linger in sustained reveries; a propensity for crawling beneath porch structures and into crawl spaces in order to peer up through cracks and other apertures to witness the world from a distance and within secure confines, the reduced field of vision paradoxically effecting a wider view by way of a tightening sensation around the eyeballs and eyelids. Clinical interviewees support that these moments of reverie, sometimes lasting as long as an entire afternoon, often include delusional historical memories. Stiller’s disease in older teens can lead to wayward tendencies, antisocial ideation, and profound spiritual visions leading to a desire for artificially induced visions. Evidence in the case of Allen includes the following: he spent a great deal of time in his grandfather’s vast attic space, most often in the northwestern corner, facing Stewart Avenue (one photograph shows him seated in a Hitchcock chair, knees pressed together, his chin slightly raised, and his eyes subdued). An interview with Harold B. Allen, age ninety, is here quoted in full:

He was a good kid, somewhat quiet, and of course he had to suffer through a great deal of turmoil related to his sister Meg. He was a splendid boy until he reached the age of sixteen and grew somewhat morose. One afternoon I heard footsteps in the attic. Our gardener and handyman, Rodney, was downstairs trimming the hedge. I went into the yard to talk to him, and when I looked up I saw Eugene in the attic window, which wasn’t unusual because he liked to go up there with one of his books — he was reading Dickens that summer. I didn’t think of him again until a few hours later when I returned home and looked again and he was still there. So I went up to the attic and said, What are you doing? And he remained silent. It was baking hot up there. You could hear Rodney downstairs, clipping the lawn, and down the street some kids playing, and so I said something to the effect of You should be out enjoying this beautiful summer day. And Eugene looked up at me and said, in an extremely formal voice, I’d rather not. There was something in his tone that shook me. Something weighty and cold in the way he said it, and I said, Well, you’d better come downstairs anyway and sit in the kitchen while your grandmother cooks supper, or watch the news with me, and he said, I’d rather not, and I said something like, Well, I’m going to have to give you a grandfatherly order and insist you come down, and he stayed quiet for a minute and then said, in the same formal voice, Well, Grandfather, we’re all subjugated to someone, somehow, and I suppose in this instant I’m subjugated to you, and then he stood up, his knees cracking, and wiped the sweat from his eyes, and we walked down to my bedroom and I gave him a fresh shirt, told him to clean up, and then went down to the kitchen, where Ethel and I had a laugh over the vagaries of teenage behavior. In any case, the boy didn’t come down, and I went back to the attic and found him in the chair, already sweating through my shirt, and I said, Come down, son, right now, and I suspect — I wasn’t certain — that his propensity for odd behavior was directly connected with his sister. Don’t get me wrong. I had my suspicions, but I told myself that the boy was enjoying some quiet time alone. The view from the window was splendid, looking out on the street — and I might add that it was and still is a beautiful street, a bit worn around the edges now, and zoned as a historical area (it was protected during the riots, one of the ringed blocks, and it survived the looting and so forth). There’s a large oak out front that survived the blight — at any rate, I didn’t see his behavior as out of the ordinary, at least not the first time. He was always a boy who would wander off on his own. I’d find him between our garage and the neighbor’s, or in the little plot of grass back behind the breezeway, sitting alone. I didn’t see anything unusual in it at the time and I’m still not sure I do.

Maudsley’s report went on to conclude that it was highly probable that a connection existed between the holing-up syndrome (Stiller’s disease) and Allen’s suicide, years later, although the exact factors were indeterminate and open to speculation.

EDITOR’S NOTE

Suicide is an act around which we construct an assortment of potential causal conditions, none of which is provable. In his notebooks, Allen proposed a number of ways to commit the act. Here, below, is a list, transcribed as it appeared in his early notebooks:

• Go to the top of the new parking structure on Howard Street and toss myself off. But first spend some time tightrope-walking along the edge; make birdlike gestures and attract attention from those down below until a crowd gathers. Wave back at them and establish a rapport of some kind until someone yells, Jump, jump.

• Dig deep hole in Sleeping Bear sand dunes and then somehow rig sand slide to bury self if p— [illegible pencil scrawl].

• Get Billy Thompson angry enough to kill me when he comes back — if he comes back … [illegible pencil scrawl].

• Immolation in the style of monk, pour accelerants and ignite self outside the library — or in Bronson Park; make sure it’s done in an off-the-cuff manner and sit still during the raging fire, as stately still as possible.

• Jump straight into an ice fishing hole on King Lake, with feet pointed — during daytime — and then come up under the ice to the side and stare up through ice until blackout and suffocation transpire.

• Locate and join group of Wayward Tendency fuckups — full regalia, Harley cycles and etc. — and get self into some police/wayward battle.

• Start riot fire — anywhere in town, in a circular pattern so that fires converge and eventually entrap me. [Indiscernible scribble] … fire somehow guided by forces back to my body. No gasoline. None of that.

• Hold on to lightning rod wire — along the side of the house out at East Lake — and pray deeply for a bolt to strike, and when it does, hold on tight. Remember that time you were sleeping out there [illegible scrawl] and the cottage was hit; the wire going bright blue and then red and glowing while the ground turned to glass and … [illegible ink scrawl].

• Spontaneous-human-combustion-type fire, self-willed, urging my own cells to fuel themselves into a giant conflagration.

EDITOR’S NOTE

A fragment from Allen’s journals:

We drove over to Ann Arbor last night to hear the Stooges play at the Fifth Forum theater. Billy Thompson drove and we smoked a joint and shot the shit about Meg, mostly. Iggy was fantastic. Woke up in parking lot. Head against parking bumper. Iggy nudging my head with his boot. I woke to Iggy and Iggy seemed to wake to me. He told me to get the fuck up and to shake it off. That’s what he said. Shake it off, man, he said, and then he laughed and walked away before I could get up. Then Billy said the same thing. Shake it off, he said.

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.)

2

General theory: objective cure to a subjective illness. Enfolding rejects etiological description of the specific illness and instead simply objectifies it into itself.

3

Avoid diagnosis. Submit to the fashionableness of the cure. Pure theater above all.

4

Inherent in drama and reenactment is a blurring of the distinction between the originating causal events and the apex events—“the moment.” Creating an artificial apex calls the originating events into question.

5

Replication alone isn’t sufficient to enfold the illness into itself. Asklepios must be invoked by way of communal rants, articulated gesture exercises, and ecstatic submission to pure chance.

6

All cures are bogus.

7

Without the drug Tripizoid the enfolding process doesn’t work and the reenactment of the trauma isn’t properly confused with reality. Tripizoid somehow incites a doubling-back of memory, a mnemonic riptide — the great drawback of water before the tsunami of pure memory arrives, except that it never arrives but is simply conjoined with the withdrawing currents. Conversely, in cases of unfolding, liquid memory returns to its original stasis, although, as has been noted, there may be slight “frustrations” in the form of alterations wrought by older, pre-traumatic memories, which may be discerned in the jumbling of proper nouns and subtle deviations in spoken syntax.

8

Theorists like to cite, by way of illustration, the example of two waves of identical amplitude but opposite phases, which cancel each other out when they coincide.

9

Enfolded memory can be unfolded in two ways:

Immersion in cold water. (Extremely cold.)

Fantastic, beautiful, orgasmic sex.

Original research on the processing of enfolding was funded by Kennedy Grid Project initiation grants at the University of Michigan. It was presumed that a state shaped like a hand capable of holding itself was superior to other states as a venue for enfolding projects. Florida was rejected on account of its unfavorable climate and its lack of clearly defined seasons. Extremely high humidity, it was found, early on, fosters too keen an awareness of the skin/mind division.

Although reenactment was initially tested in New Mexico and at a cavernous Chicago complex, these tests were both top secret. Michigan quickly became known as the Psych Project state. The process of enfolding was perfected in its lower peninsula with funding from Kennedy’s initiative.

EDITOR’S NOTE

Most historians of the curative technique commonly known as enfolding agree that its widely acknowledged bogusness was a necessary correlative of a bureaucratic structure created well in advance of the cure, just as the Eisenhower freeway project created a new cartography of driving needs. Most authorities now agree that the beauty of the enfolding cure lies precisely in the fact that its practitioners, inspired by the vastness of the project and by the excitement of Kennedy’s post-assassination survival, bravely admitted, early on, that the cure was a dreamy and even absurd concept, and that therein lay its wild effectiveness. The paradox was that the cure was actually often effective, so that the claim of its bogus nature was itself partly bogus.

EDITOR’S NOTE

Historians have speculated at great length about the concentration of veterans in the state of Michigan. Most have resorted to a geographical theory, in which its peninsular shape acted as a lure. (The same theory can be applied to other end points, Provincetown, Key West, etc.) Wayward souls find themselves longing for some terminus.

A smaller group of historians has argued that the Black Flag motorcycle gang, originally twenty or so in number, helped spark the mass migration of vets to the state. Others simply argue that a large number of vets, particularly those who served the second big escalation after the first assassination attempt, originally came from the Rust Belt region and were simply returning home. Whatever the reason, a decision was made to establish a transitional Grid stretching from the southeastern shore of Lake Michigan, north to Benton Harbor, east to Kalamazoo, and then straight down highway 131 to the southern border. A year later, the Grid was extended to include Battle Creek and the area west of Route 69. The extension area remained rebellious, with some farmers and townspeople refusing to evacuate.

As the designated Psych State, and with hospitals, reenactment chambers, and a release Grid area in place, Michigan received a vast share of federal Psych Corps funding. Before there was an established cure rate, or true understanding of the nature of enfolding, the great hospital boom was in full swing. Magnificent edifices of mental care sprang up in the countryside in every architectural style, from retro castles to immense geodesic dome structures. Grid signs sprouted in equal numbers. The Grid symbol appeared on handbags, paper dresses, and tattoo parlor walls. The idea appears to have been to systemize the unholdable.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The fires began in two places, the outskirts of Flint and the center of Detroit, before spreading house to house and across fields and uniting near Auburn Hills. All sparked by the raid on the Blind Pig in Detroit that night by the police, who were steeped in the dialectic of revolution and keyed into the idea that a revolt might start at any time. It was on the 266th anniversary of the day that Cadillac stepped ashore on what became known as de trois. The National Guard came in to shoot up at the “snipers” after the police were repelled. Soon the Detroit streets were ringing with the chants of “Motown, if you don’t come around, we are going to burn you down.” An aide to the mayor came up with the idea of burn squads. They would get ahead of the riots with Molotov cocktails and flamethrowers. Let it burn, the governor reportedly said. But the dynamics were simply too intricate to sort out accurately. The big map in police headquarters couldn’t handle the information that was being teletyped in — squad cars akimbo, nobody sure where anybody was, rumors spreading even faster than the fire. The governor had begged Kennedy for federal troops, telling him the whole state was at risk, and the federal troops were mustering along the Ohio border — the rumble of tanks could be heard in Toledo. The rumors had had a head start on the fires, anyway: a revolution was at hand. The Negro was going to avenge three hundred years of slavery. The uncured vets would join in; the vagabonds, the waywards. Already the structure of the Grid area was in negotiation; eminent-domain strictures were being argued in the Supreme Court that summer. Several thousand farmers and home owners were bracing for the order to move. Some had taken the offer and moved down to Indiana, where state law forbade the construction of Grid zones. If the wayward want to be wayward, let them do it in Michigan, Senator Clam of Indiana said. Senator Holly, of Michigan, led the fight for the creation of a Grid zone for Michigan, allowing for a safe place — not wilderness, but not urbane — in which certain patients, after treatment, might go to have a controlled transitional experience before being released into the general society.