Hystopia (eBook)

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:

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: