This Is the Night

by Jonah C. Sirott

  First, one of them itched. The next day both of them did. They went to a free clinic, waiting for half the day while men with facial wounds and rare fungal diseases received their care. Finally a nurse practitioner hustled them into an exam room, smiled at what were surely her first patients of the day whose damage did not come from combat, and handed them a topical cream.

  Once home, Lance and Lorrie followed the tiny directions on the little tube, even made a game out of it as they applied the cold cream to their ragged skin.

  Two days later, Lorrie still itched.

  “Don’t worry,” Lance said. “Give it a few more days.”

  A few days were followed by a few more, and Lorrie’s itching did not subside.

  She rubbed the cream into her skin. She still itched. She rubbed more cream, mangling the tube into spilling its final few drops.

  “There isn’t anything,” Lance said. “I can’t see a thing.”

  “Please.” The knurled tendons in her neck rose into a ridged surface that pressed against the skin. “Just check one more time.”

  And for her, Lance would move around skin, squint his eyes, and look for the lice that almost certainly weren’t there.

  Lorrie became increasingly distressed and spoke only of contamination, infestation. The lice were on the move, migrating, she claimed, and had now voyaged out from her pubic hair and onto the rest of her body. When Lance protested they were called pubic lice for a reason, warm tears slid from the corners of Lorrie’s eyes onto the sheets below. Her nose, which was long and pointed, was almost always clogged from constant wailing. They didn’t discuss where the lice had come from; that wasn’t a conversation either of them wanted. Lorrie recognized, of course, the aspects of Lance—the slashing eyes? The bone-crushing stare? The glaring absence of men in the city that caused women to gulp and place a soft hand on their rabbit-hearted chests?—but her focus was not on some imagined desertion on Lance’s part, but rather the muffled annoyance that the bugs that had been rubbed out with one topical cream for Lance seemed to have converted in Lorrie to something else entirely.

  “I know they’re there,” she sobbed. “Just look again. Just find something.”

  And so Lorrie continued to scratch. She thumbed through the phone book for laundromats. When she reached them, she would demand to the befuddled voice on the other end of the line that they recite the highest temperatures—no rounding digits, please—that their washing machines could reach. Once, then twice a week, she stuffed their bedding into large cotton bags, pulled them tight with a string, and dragged them over her shoulder and onto the bus in search of a scalding heat that would destroy the invisible colonies she was convinced had taken up residence on her clothes and body.

  Each day she scratched harder. Her fingernails upended her skin, tore apart cyte and cell, transfiguring them into open sores that pocked the surface of her face.

  In some ways, it was ridiculous. You’re doing this to yourself, Lance wanted to tell her. This is a problem of the mind, not the body. His thoughts took violent turns, and in his dreams he lashed out at her, his nighttime self grabbing Lorrie’s arms and shaking her as he spoke, each word slower than the last: Just. Stop. Scratching.

  Lance knew he only had a few hours to act while Lorrie was out. She was an active member of a group that helped organize free breakfasts for crippled veterans. However, the leadership of the small group had fractured as the vice president and her undersecretary had drafted a mission statement calling for an investigation into the flaked and fabled Foreign substance known as Fareon. With a foundational shift in the age and makeup of our government, they wrote, our nonagenarian prime minister in particular, we hereby advocate for a full investigation into our leaders and their association with this material. Or, as Lorrie put it to Lance: Why the hell were just a handful of the Homeland’s leadership growing so old but staying so healthy?

  Proof? There was none, raged the counterargument, not a dab, a splash, nor a splatter, nothing besides the ages of the prime minister and his closest allies, no serious evidence that some obscure mineral deep in the Foreign jungles could make anyone live longer, and even less proof that a small, shadowy cabal of handpicked legislators had this wonder potion at their disposal. Skeptics shook their heads sadly. How can we make these Fareon people see? they asked. There’s no documentation, no evidence. None at all.

  Exactly, came the response. They’re that crafty.

  Last week, the president of the organization to which Lorrie had devoted so much time had called an emergency meeting on the Fareon question. Outside, Registry agents intercepted groups of attendees and questioned them about two recent attacks, one where a bomb exploded, the other where it did not. Men were pulled aside, their papers checked.

  An agent with cloudy cataracts and a limp—afflictions of war Lorrie was well acquainted with—stopped Lorrie on her way in and ran down a list of queries from his clipboard. From the wild cartwheeling of his questions, it was clear the authorities had no leads on anything.

  “You guys think Homeland Indigenous are tossing bombs around?” Lorrie asked a Reggie. “That’s a new one.” She shook her head and headed inside.

  The meeting did not go well. With the Registry having snapped up almost all the male membership, the remaining men made it clear they felt outnumbered and voiceless, though their feelings of estrangement were by no means exclusive. Divisions in the group fell less along the lines of sex and far more across the monstered lake of thoughts and feelings. Shouts and scuffles broke out repeatedly. Believers in the explanatory logic of Fareon as the clear answer to the prime minister’s advanced age were baffled by the accusations of insufficient evidence, each speaker more frustrated than the next that their comrades could not see the hidden forces operating just beneath the surface. On the opposing side, the anti-Fareon contingent sat with arms folded, incredulous that an inability to end the war had now transmogrified into fanciful tales of all-powerful forces operating under shadowy rules that subverted the laws of nature and reason. There’s so much more to actually fight against, things that are real, they argued.

  What could be more real than a substance that won’t let you die? came the retort.

  In a shaky voice, the vice president of the organization read from a speech that one of the few female legislators, a Coyote, had given on the parliament floor. This particular legislator had spent years raging against the war. Members of Lorrie’s group rolled their eyes. None of these people needed a civics lesson; all of them had witnessed the unfolding of what was now their hellish present. Upon completion of his second six-year term, the prime minister had run again, this time as deputy prime minister, second in command. The years that followed saw the timid man supposedly in charge push that fateful word “consecutive” into the Constitution, and soon, the prime minister was eligible to run yet again. Which he did. Repeatedly. As the prime minister’s political structure hardened, antiwar legislators became increasingly rare. Now, after twenty-two years of banging on podiums, the name had stuck. Coyotes they were called. Because they may as well have been howling at the moon.

  Over the jeers and hoots of the audience, the vice president of the organization continued to read the legislator’s speech. Though the group couldn’t even manage to get along well enough to keep serving breakfast to a few hungry vets, Lorrie still hoped to unify the factions.

  “Check me one more time,” Lorrie had said before the meeting. “Just once more.”

  Even though he knew there would be nothing to find, Lance still recognized that this nothing was feasting on the last scraps of the woman he loved. He looked some more.

  Nothing. Lorrie and her scabs left for the meeting. The moment she closed the door, Lance called the exterminators.

  “This really isn’t standard operating procedure,” the first exterminator said. The men in front of him were dressed in dark work overalls and leather utility belts stocked with tools Lance didn’t recognize. Both men were too old for the Registry, had
probably served during the much tamer early years of the current conflict. One of the men had his coveralls zipped all the way to his neck, while the other had allowed his zipper to fall to the middle of his chest, revealing the coffee stains of his white undershirt. Behind them stood a much younger woman, also in dark coveralls, a notepad and pen in her hand.

  “Our intern,” said Unzipped, cricking his neck in her direction. “Not enough fellas like yourself to do the job these days.”

  “But back to this one,” said Zipped-Up. “We don’t do fakes. We’re real. We kill termites. We run your carpet beetles out of the house. We zap your pests, and for a much more reasonable price than our competitors.” The intern wrinkled her forehead and made a few quick scribbles on her notepad.

  “Regular lice, there’s a shampoo for that,” said Unzipped. “You can get it at the drugstore.”

  “I told you guys, there are no lice. You’re not going to really do anything.”

  The intern increased her note taking to a furious pace.

  “Say again?” said Zipped-Up.

  “So there’s no infestation at all?” asked Unzipped.

  Lance sighed. “You’re just going to come in here, poke around with your equipment, and make like you’re getting rid of something. It’s a psychological extermination.”

  “Pyscho-logical,” repeated Zipped-Up. “Make sure you get that down,” he told the intern.

  Though Zipped-Up was slow and dull, the casual way he pursed his lips reminded Lance of his second-oldest brother. He let the silence hang, hoping Zipped-Up might repeat the small movement and bring the slowly fading memory of his brother back to life.

  “I can’t have this kind of thing get out, the idea that we do fake exterminations,” said Unzipped. “If our clients associate us with a fake extermination, it might affect their decision-making process regarding whether they would hire us to do a real one.”

  “And we are certainly not trained in anything psycho-logical,” added Zipped-Up.

  “There’s barely anyone in the building,” Lance told them. “Most of these apartments are empty. Registry-runners, you know?” This wasn’t quite true, but he could sense that the two guys upstairs were making moves. Why not give these exterminators the opportunity to purge a bit of the contempt lying half-rotten in their bellies?

  “It’s just sick,” said Zipped-Up.

  “Disgusting,” added Unzipped. “You should point them.”

  Lance looked to the intern, a woman his age, to see if she agreed. For a brief moment he caught her eye before she looked away.

  “Look,” Lance said, “I’ll give you double just to not do anything.” He had begged, borrowed, and saved, but whatever he might owe didn’t matter.

  The exterminators agreed, but demanded a verbal contract of nondisclosure. The four of them shook hands, the exterminators shrugged their shoulders and huddled with their intern, and though Lance had told them not to, they sprayed as though they were performing an actual fumigation. Lance pushed the crisp Currencies at their confused faces.

  That night in bed, Lance explained to Lorrie that he had killed the lice forever. The smell of insect death hovered in the dense air, drowning out even the odors of Neutral Country P immigrant cooking that slipped beneath their door each evening and lingered till morning. Lorrie seemed to believe him, and for the first time in weeks, they began to undress each other. His fingernails were too long, the short, brittle hairs of his beard were too rough, but they squeezed and arced and twisted and followed each other around the bed. His weight pressed her deep into the mattress. He moved down between her thighs, but she pulled on his ears and brought him back up to her eye level. Nothing was normal anymore. Lance was disgusted by the lice, and with each thrust, he saw himself driving back the enemy. Only it wasn’t working. There was no escape from the scratches and marks on her body, rising off her skin with bright disdain. No, this wasn’t enough. He needed to hurt them, to hurt her. The flat nose and puffy lips of the intern flashed before him, but he pushed her image out. He needed to see Lorrie as she was. The next thing either of them knew, Lance turned her over and muscled his way into her. She let out a scream that was swallowed by the pillow; neither of them had ever done this before. Once it was over, the two of them lay on the bed, caught between the smells of themselves and the poison.

  Even after he had the house smoked, had bombed the whole place with chemicals, Lorrie still felt the lice. Lance stopped sleeping and began to rage against each tiny bug that wasn’t there. After he’d scrounged up enough money and called his Substance Q dealer—a greedy, well-connected vet who also dabbled in fruit—Lance bought what he was sure was the last cantaloupe in Western City North. Lorrie refused to even try a bite, claiming she wasn’t hungry. By the time Lance finally bit into it, the melon was creased and sour. Fruit having failed him, Lance tried to win Lorrie back in places where he had won her the first time.

  “We must go to the beach,” Lance said.

  “The beach? Must?”

  “And not just any beach. We’re going to the good beach. Our beach.” The cool air and scratchy sand, the hot wind uncoiled over twelve shades of blue: surely one of them could stop her free fall.

  The two of them headed south, through the mountains and to the beach they had come to on their very first day on the coast. Lance had tossed some of her books into his duffel bag, the old kind she used to read, all the Foreigns. They drove farther, and the mountains turned dry, their shriveled tops like wrinkled blackheads. On the radio, the prime minister was giving his weekly address, condemning the latest domestic terrorism and offering up yet another warning on the dangers of Ideology Five. Lorrie switched the station, but his speech was on all of them. Since they had last been this way, the roads had slid into further disrepair. Lance took each turn slowly, ready for the rips and gashes in the concrete. From behind the wheel, he looked up and saw what he thought was a migrating bald eagle. Lorrie scratched the whole ride down.

  “I read that the salt air will kill those things,” Lance said. “Not eagles, but lice.”

  “Where’s an eagle?”

  Lance pointed with his left hand, keeping his right on the wheel.

  “Hard to say. I’m not sure an eagle would be around here.”

  “Some wingspan, though. Check out that wingspan.”

  “Where did you read that about the salt air, Lance? A magazine? The newspaper?”

  “Just some research.”

  He hadn’t read a thing.

  They spread out on the sand. The sun was white and low, and the beach was crowded once again with people—mostly women, of course, the men old or damaged—everyone on blankets and lounge chairs. Lance peeled off his pants and shirt and slipped his trunks on. Lorrie stayed in her sundress and her flat, dark shoes, but Lance could still make out the fine hairs that began at the tops of her ankles, just above the scabs where she had scratched away the skin. As they sat, Lance could feel the murmurs of those around him, audible sounds of envy from young widows wishing that they too had a man who was intact and alive and would sit next to them at the beach.

  He watched the breakers; he felt the scrape of each grain of sand as the wind blew them against his skin. Lance had always found paintings of landscapes to be sentimental and ugly, but as he stared at her ratted flesh, a demented gusto swept through him, and he knew that he would one day paint some version of Lorrie’s scabs against the sea.

  Breathing deeply, he looked at Lorrie. She had on a new pair of sunglasses, huge platters that circled above her eyebrows and ended at the bottom of her cheekbones and gave Lance the feeling that she had stepped behind a large tinted window. She pulled out one of the underground newspapers that lay piled around their house (she currently subscribed to twelve different titles) and sighed loudly. Lance glanced at his bag and contemplated offering her one of the Foreign books that rested inside. Did she ever think about any of the big ideas she used to, or had the lice and her radical group’s sectarian split over Fareon p
ushed them all aside?

  “It says here,” Lorrie read, “that a lot of Homeland Indigenous join up to go fight.” She undulated the newspaper with both hands until it made a bubbling sound. “They don’t even wait for the Registry. They just volunteer.”

  “Huh.”

  “I wonder why they would do that.”

  “Maybe they just want to help out.”

  “I wish Terry was here. She’d know. Her mom was actually Homeland Indigenous, you know.”

  “Yeah,” Lance mumbled. “If only Terry were here.” Lance had never met what he considered a real Homeland Indigenous, and he doubted Lorrie had, either. He distinctly remembered Terry telling him it was not her mother who had been Homeland Indigenous but her grandmother. Maybe half.

  “But why now?” Lorrie said. “I mean, look at these numbers.” She pointed to a paragraph near the bottom of the article. “Why would they sign up now, twenty-two years in, with higher casualties than ever before? It really makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

  Lance agreed with her, but all her wondering convinced him that she couldn’t even put her thoughts in the right order anymore. They were, he saw, truly breaking apart. She had invisible bugs—he had seen her sneak three furtive scratches in the last four minutes—and with the afternoon character of the water blue and calm, all she wanted to talk about were Homeland Indigenous. In front of them, the tide pushed lower, leaving a pale white film on the sand. This, Lance knew, was a brush with the worst kind of trouble: Lorrie could wonder at the problems of people she had never met, but she could not look down at the scabs on her arms and the mutilated skin on her ankles to wonder why the marks were there, and then think further and recognize that they shouldn’t be there at all.

  All the Foreign books stayed in Lance’s bag.

  Lorrie checked her watch.

  “What is it?” Lance asked.