Department of Veterans Affairs

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) appears less as a single institution with a visible structure than as a force in veterans’ daily lives: it recognizes disability, supplies equipment, and is also judged by the people who see its care as inadequate. Through Burton and Conner, the novel gives that presence two distinct forms—benefits that leave recovery unresolved, and practical technology that enables mobility—while setting both against far more capable systems elsewhere in the story.

Recognition and the Limits of Recovery

Burton is not thought to have post-traumatic stress disorder, but his haptics sometimes glitch, producing sensations associated with the military feedback system he once wore. The system’s tattoos had signaled when to run, remain still, or move in a particular direction and range. He receives disability allowance in connection with this experience, and lives in the old Airstream trailer by the creek. His status gives him some institutional recognition, but it does not settle what recovery would mean or provide a simple route back to ordinary life.

That gap is made explicit by Shaylene, who says the VA is doing nothing to help Burton recover. Her assessment differs from Flynne’s more personal interpretation of his difficulties: Flynne sees his continuing reluctance to ask her out as the symptom Shaylene is most inclined to notice. The disagreement does not establish what treatment Burton has received, but it does show that disability is understood through competing frames—clinical support, romantic concern, and the intimate knowledge of a sister who lives close to him.

Equipment and Everyday Support

Conner, the town’s other Haptic Recon veteran, has extensive war-related disabilities and rides a Tarantula trike. The steering servo rig he uses is paid for by the VA, a concrete form of assistance that makes his chosen mobility possible. The support is consequential without being presented as a cure: Conner continues to live with the effects of his injuries, while the trike and its controls let him travel independently on county roads.

Burton also helps Conner at home sometimes, extending the picture of care beyond formal provision. In these details, the VA supplies a piece of equipment, while day-to-day assistance remains partly familial and informal. The distinction matters: institutional support can make an activity possible without replacing the relationships and adaptations that organize life around disability.

A Wider Landscape of Care

The VA’s presence is set against a range of technologies and medical arrangements in the novel. Flynne’s work for Burton includes using a government hand-sanitizer tube he may have taken from a VA hospital, an incidental object that links public medical facilities to the household’s improvised routines. Elsewhere, a remote-controlled anthropomorphic drone is described as a telepresence avatar, and a surgical drone operated by a team at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center treats Burton after he is shot. These are distinct systems, not evidence that the VA itself provides the later technologies; together, however, they place veterans’ care in a world where equipment can mediate work, movement, and treatment in radically different ways.

The contrast is sharpest between the VA’s limited place in Shaylene’s account of Burton’s recovery and the technical capacity of the surgical unit that attends him at Walter Reed. The novel does not resolve this contrast into a general verdict on the department. Instead, it presents support as uneven and specific: disability recognition and a mobility device matter, but neither guarantees recovery or removes the need for personal care. The VA’s narrative significance lies in that tension between assistance that changes what veterans can do and the unresolved conditions with which they continue to live.