The City in the Middle of the Night

by Anders, Charlie Jane

  “It was ugly,” Mouth said. “You were lucky.”

  Barney had half sat down, but raised himself up again. He staggered over to the front door of the deli, suddenly moving like a much older, frailer man, and flipped the placard to indicate the place was closed. Then he went behind the counter and dug out a bottle of swamp vodka so dirty, it could have come straight from the swamp.

  “So you were there?” Barney whispered. “You actually saw?”

  Professor Martindale chose this moment to try to reassert his control over the reunion that he had facilitated. “Well, this is all very fascinating, and I think it’s important that everything about this first meeting between two former members of the Citizens be documented for posterity. I’m interested to see the two of you compare notes, as it were.” He pulled out a large stenotype machine, the kind that let you write quickly with one hand.

  Barney and Mouth looked at each other, and then at the professor, and stayed silent.

  The professor tried a couple of times to start the discussion going again, by making an assertion like, “Well, of course, the Citizens are known to have placed a heavy emphasis on direct revelation, via spiritual experiences which would come, for example, as a result of visiting certain dormant volcanoes or other natural formations.” And everyone would nod, and the silence would continue.

  At last Alyssa poured herself some swamp vodka and destroyed the lining of her throat in a single gulp. “What I want to know is”—she panted a little—“what the hell were they even thinking? I mean, sorry, Mouth, but I’ve been on the road more than most people, and the only thing that ever made the road tolerable was knowing we would get off it for a long spell once we reached civilization again. What kind of people decide to just go out and lug all their stuff from town to town forever?”

  Mouth kicked Alyssa under the table so hard she yelped.

  But Barney just laughed and poured more swamp vodka. “That’s a good question. I used to wonder about that all the time. Just like Mouth, I was born into the Citizens, and I lived with them for most of my life. I heard lots of stories of how the Citizens came to be, but they were all contradictory and full of weird holes. But here’s what I think.”

  Mouth had switched from kicking Alyssa to trying to kick Barney before he said something he shouldn’t, but Barney was a nimble old shit and kept moving just out of reach of Mouth’s boot.

  “The operative word in what you said was ‘civilization.’” Barney swigged vodka, and poured more for Professor Martindale, who hesitated and then took a swig. “A lot of what people call civilization is just neglect. Most people on this planet live in the two major cities, because that’s where we have the infrastructure, right? We have the farms and the factories, the power plants and sewers. Although the Argelan sewage system is breaking down, because none of the Nine Families is responsible for it. And the shortages are getting worse and worse, and prices keep going up and up. But anyway, with that many people on top of each other, you don’t know who the people around you are. You might interact with a hundred people in a row without knowing much about any of them. Versus a smaller community, where you’re surrounded by people you’ve known your whole life.”

  “When I used to talk to Yolanda and Daniel, the leaders of the Citizens, they said that walking outdoors for long periods of time was almost like a form of meditation.” Martindale drank a little vodka, to be polite, and gagged. Barney encouraged the professor to wash it down with more vodka. “If you categorize religious activities on a three-dimensional map, with prayer as one fixed origin and meditation as another, you could helpfully classify the Citizens’ travels as a hybrid devotional-transcendental activity.”

  “Yeah.” Barney poured more vodka for everybody, making sure Martindale got plenty. “I mean, so you used to travel from one city to the other with your smuggler crew, right?” Alyssa tossed her head. “So you were out on the road for one trip at a time. Probably felt like it lasted forever, until you were back in a city, and then the road was just a dream you’d had. But when you’re living out there, everything is different. You were born on the road, you lost your baby teeth on the road, you grew old on the road. And just moving forward, with the world stretching as far as you can see, your mind starts to empty out. You get in tune with the subtle changes in the wind, the way the landscape changes as you travel, the way that day and night can seem near or far, depending on the terrain. People did feel like they heard the landscape talking to them. Like they were closer to something real.”

  “I hate to break it to you.” Alyssa pounded her vodka and took some more. “But the changes in the wind are not subtle out on the road. It can get ugly in no time.”

  “Weather’s gotten more violent.” Mouth spoke for the first time in ages. “Since I was with the Citizens, the storms have gotten worse, and more frequent. Used to be easier to travel, even without pirates.”

  Barney shrugged. “We get storms here, too. Toxic rain, even. We just hunker down underground.”

  “They’re worse out there, closer to the ocean and the deadlands.”

  Professor Martindale was swaying, like a losing brawler.

  “Oh, looks like you had a bit too much, man. Better lie down a moment,” said Barney, already supporting the professor out of his chair and helping him over to a little cot behind the counter, near the cookstove. Soon he was out cold.

  “Some people just can’t handle the good stuff.” Alyssa noticed the professor’s vodka cup was still half full, and took possession.

  “He’s a decent fellow.” Barney gestured at the sleeping professor. “Sometimes makes you feel like a bug under glass. But I get the feeling he and Yolanda appreciated each other. They both loved to hear themselves talk about theoretical questions of how many teeth make a bite. Whatever. Still. There are some things you don’t talk about with outsiders.”

  Barney looked at Alyssa as he said that, and Alyssa made a big show of getting up to leave, but Mouth said, “She’s family. She can stay.”

  “Okay.” Barney brought a fried ham out of some cubby behind the counter, and carved a few slabs. “So, they really never gave you a name? That’s cold.”

  “What made you leave? Why would you just abandon us like that?” Mouth did not mean to sound angry or wounded, since after all it was the past now, and Barney couldn’t have made any difference if he’d stayed.

  “What happened to them?” Barney demanded in return.

  “You first,” Mouth said.

  “I left because I got arthritis, and they insisted I could get over it if I just listened harder to the road. I left because we were trying to sell our sacred shit to trendy people here in Argelo, for them to use as conversation pieces in their fancy homes, but meanwhile as Yolanda got older she got more sure that she was right about everything, and she wouldn’t listen to anyone. But also, I … I felt like I got it.”

  “You … got it?” Mouth said.

  “I had reached the goal. I had the clear head, the voices of the Elementals in the back of my mind, the whole concept of being able to look into the night without losing your will, that thing they taught of having evening and morning inside you, so you could reconcile the extremes within yourself. I had it. I was sure. It felt right. It still feels that way.”

  Mouth had been ready for Barney to say he had left because he lost faith, or realized it was all a sham, or anything defiling and dirty. But this was impossible to hear. Mouth felt drunker than the professor for a moment.

  “But if you really had the clearness, the reconciliation, all of that,” said Mouth. “That’s even more reason for you to stay. So you could help teach the rest of us. I mean, shit. If there had been an actual sage, a real day-and-night integrator, living among us, I might have turned out different. Maybe I would have become somebody.”

  “You are somebody,” Barney said. “Look at you. You turned out fine.”

  “I am nobody,” Mouth said. “That’s the lesson they left me with. No name, no myth, no identity.
I never got any of it. And now it’s too late.”

  “Listen.” Barney seemed to pity Mouth, which was the worst insult. “I couldn’t teach anybody. What I learned—if it was even real, it felt real to me, but who knows—what I learned could not be taught, I was pretty sure. And Yolanda didn’t want me around anyway after I told her. The point of religion, for Yolanda, was to keep trying to reach someplace, and the last thing you want is for someone to actually feel like they’ve reached it. I couldn’t stay. But I’m sorry for how they treated you.”

  Mouth had sometimes fantasized about hearing an apology from Yolanda, Cynthia, or one of the other Priors, for the no-name, no-self thing. But this was as close as she’d ever get, and it felt like hot dust.

  “Whatever,” Mouth said. “I was a child. Now I’m an adult. I’ve made plenty of my own mistakes since the other Citizens died out. I mostly wished I had a name and status so there could be someone to mourn them all. If I’d even known how.”

  “You still haven’t told me what happened.” Barney touched Mouth’s hand and poured more booze for everyone. Alyssa was looking at Mouth too, because she had never heard the story either. Nobody had.

  Mouth swallowed some spit, drank some vodka, hesitated, and decided to tell a cleaned-up version. “We stopped in the plains, near Pennance Hollow. I went to this lagoon to get some water for our new cook, who wasn’t as good as you had been.” Barney smiled at this. “I was carrying the water back to the encampment, in that big tub that had all the weird faces on it. And then I heard loud voices coming from the camp.”

  Even remembering that much drained all the life out of Mouth. Like sleep deprivation, or muscle fatigue, but much harder.

  Alyssa rested her face on Mouth’s chest for a moment, then sat up and poured more swamp vodka.

  “At first I thought they were singing, like I had somehow missed a ritual, or a celebration. Then it sounded more like an argument. The idea that they were screaming, that I was hearing their death cries, didn’t even figure. Then I got to the top of the ridge and it was like an ocean had appeared in our campsite.”

  “An ocean?” Barney said, so loud that Professor Martindale stirred.

  Mouth didn’t want to talk about this anymore. Now Alyssa was the one kicking Mouth under the table. Certain words burned. Chest wall encroaching on what it contained, eyes pushed out of focus.

  “An ocean, just, bluer,” Mouth said after a long time. Every word its own stammer. “I didn’t even see the wings at first. So many wings. It was … it was a swarm of blue roaches. They rippled and waved, and then I was running toward them down the slope with the tub in my hands. They broke before I got there. They became a cloud, and then they spread out in the sky. They left nothing but bones. Bones and metal.”

  “They ate through everything?” Barney’s voice was barely audible. “The crystal books? The ceremonial garments? The tents? The carts? All of it?”

  Mouth just nodded.

  Now Barney was weeping too, and so was Alyssa. They were probably all drunk. Mouth made an inarticulate wheezing sound, like an apology for sharing this horrible story, or maybe for having survived. They hunched over with the bottle in the middle, and their three foreheads met, and maybe their spines would never straighten again. Mouth felt lonelier and more unconsoled than before, when that story had been a one-person secret. Alyssa’s hand clutched at the back of Mouth’s neck and head. She was whispering something like I’m sorry it’s okay, and Mouth just breathed into her hair.

  The three of them stayed huddled like that for a long time, until a noise shook them so much they nearly cracked their heads together. Professor Martindale was waking up, groaning, with an almighty headache.

  SOPHIE

  I can’t even move in this ball gown. If I lift my arms more than halfway, I feel the seams strain. Even though red taffeta, tulle, lace, and ribbons have nothing in common with the gloved hands of Xiosphanti police, I still have a suffocating threat reaction to these restraints. But I close my eyes, and give myself patience, like Jeremy taught me. And then I breathe, and smile, because Bianca’s looking at me, beaming, and clapping her hands. “People will lose their minds when they see you.”

  Bianca can’t stop giggling and twirling in her dress, making her skirt billow. Bianca wears another kind of fragrant oil, with hints of cinnamon and marigold, and her face glows, thanks to the bright lines around her eyes and the faint contours accentuating her perfect face bones.

  My starfruit bracelet looks out of place with all the sparkle strung from my neck and arms, but I draped a flowery wristlet over it. I feel the gentle pressure on my wrist all the time, even when I sleep—reminding me that I owe the Gelet much more than just my life. I need to try again soon to find a way past that shantytown, into the night.

  “So how do we even know when this party is starting?” I ask Bianca, who’s studying the golden invitation she scored at Punch Face.

  “There’s this one angel fountain on the edge of the fancy residential area,” Bianca says. “The party starts the next time it starts flowing, and you can predict when that’ll happen if you know about the water levels in the city’s reserve pumps. It’s like a game, sort of.”

  Bianca leads me past the Pit, and we get on a train inside a pneumatic tube, which rushes us to the southernmost part of town, facing away from Xiosphant. Soon we’re in a vast granite courtyard, ringed with a spiked iron fence, facing a ten-garreted mansion made of bricks so white they sting my eyes. We introduce ourselves to a man in a dark purple suit, who checks some list for our names.

  I can’t stop staring at the layers of crimson satin across Bianca’s shoulders, and the delicacy of her every tiny movement. Back when we were roommates, at the Gymnasium, she would start to move like flowing water, and her voice would grow more cultured and precise, right before she went out to one of her galas or banquets. I always sat on my bed-shelf, watched the petals on her dress refract the light as she swayed, and fantasized about going as her escort, only so I could admire this other version of Bianca in her proper setting, among all the lights, perfumed candles, and soaring waltzes. Now, here we are.

  But that thought just makes me wish that we could go back to our dorm after this party, to cradle our teacups and talk about books we’ve read, brand-new ideas we’ve discovered, things that nobody but us realizes are wrong.

  The man in purple leads us to a giant space, full of marble floors that reflect the overhead light in bold streaks, walls made of some dark wood I don’t know the name for, and billowing drapes of velvet. All the men are wearing collages of different-colored fabric strips that create an effect like a million shards of tinted glass, while the women wear costumes that make the red gown I’m wearing look plain: feathers, glowing threads, tight corsets, shimmering strands of beads. Someone hands me a drink, and it has the same effect on my taste buds as all these colors on my eyes. I realize the room is divided into three groups, and each group wears the same insignia, as jewelry or a badge, to mark which family they belong to.

  I stand, frozen, as everyone studies us. I’d much rather be on the edge of the night, receiving the Gelet visions and learning about all the spaces beyond the narrow road, than be stuck trying to impress these people.

  But the next thing I know, Bianca has a small crowd around her, and she’s telling them how she got here, in a melodramatic style, like something from a storybook. Everyone here in Argelo grew up reading glossy romances about palace intrigue in Xiosphant, Ahmad told us, and she plays to this sentiment. “They killed all of my friends and hunted me in the street,” Bianca says. “I fled from my home with only what I could carry, and we faced every kind of death on the Sea of Murder.” Nobody can look away from her eyes. Her crimson gown exposes a teardrop of skin on the small of her back, above where the pleats grow out of her waist like petals, and every time she moves, the entire room forgets to breathe.

  To distract myself from my nerves, I study a giant silver-relief frieze along one wall that depicts one of
the great stories of “Anchor-Banter,” which seems to involve people riding on top of old-fashioned crawling machines and fighting with sticks that light up. And then in the middle of all the scenes of machine-jousting and voyages across the steppes, two silvery people intertwine, half naked, like lovers or maybe like wrestlers. I can’t tell if they’re men or women, or one of each.

  Men and women in purple costumes walk past, offering piles of food and more goblets of expensive liquor, and I can’t help taking some. The most beautiful man I have ever seen strides up to me just as my mouth is full of food, and I chew as fast as I can while he asks my name and says that Xiosphant must be a desolate waste, with its two brightest lights gone.

  I’m still chewing, and the man keeps asking questions. This food is delicious but takes an entire lifetime to reduce to something I can swallow. And after I swallow the food, I still can only stare at this gorgeous person, with his wide face, limpid brown eyes, and square jaw.

  “Forgive my rudeness. My name is Dash.” He gestures around. “This is my house.”

  Bianca notices that I’m stuck, and comes to my side. “I’m Bianca. Thank you for your hospitality. This is the coolest party I’ve ever been to.”

  “Well, you are the best thing that could possibly have happened to my party.” Dash kisses her hand, like a prince in one of those Argelan storybooks.

  “You’ll have to forgive Sophie,” Bianca says, with a stage wave. “She’s been through a lot. It’s a terrible story. She was wrongly accused of a crime and torn away from the rest of us by the Xiosphanti police, who paraded her through the street and humiliated her in front of the whole town. And then they drove her to the mountainside and tried to force her to climb the steep slope, into the night. She nearly died! She was cast out of society and had to hide from everybody. It was really something.”

  I stare at Bianca, and though the food is gone, I still have trouble swallowing.

  * * *

  Afterward, when we step off the train near the Pit, Bianca can’t stop laughing and flouncing in her dress. “That was the biggest rush of my entire life. I forgot how good it feels to sweep into a giant room full of immaculate people, and just dominate all of their attention. This is what I was made for. I haven’t been this happy since…”