This Is the Night

by Jonah C. Sirott

  Each minor victory of the parents toppled Lance’s will and sapped his strength to argue against any outcome that was not identical to theirs. The father tuned into hawkish radio stations that Lance had not known existed, the voices from the speakers demanding a surge in troops for the upcoming twenty-third anniversary of war. A day in and it was clear to Lance that they had their differences; a few more and it was plain that the parents had no interest in looking beyond them. They would not stop, he saw, until he was wiped out, erased completely from their daughter’s life.

  Lance smoked Substance Q and plotted. He would not let them win. He took long walks. More letters came from the Registry. We demand, we urge, the letters said. Each was filled with more spite than the one before. No workable plots came to him. No self-defense seemed adequate. Questions asked of him in his own house were mandates poorly disguised.

  “How about you take another walk, dear?” Lorrie’s mother said. “We’d like some time with our daughter.” She was slicing crosswise into a fresh tomato, an item Lance had not seen in stores for months. He wondered where she had gotten it.

  Another letter from the Registry had just arrived, fingers waggling and warning him of high Currency fines he knew he would never earn over a whole lifetime, along with years of imprisonment. Lance was soon to be in violation of many laws with numbers, letters, and decimal points. A walk around the block, he decided, would help him think about those numbers and about ways to get Lorrie’s parents out of his apartment and back to Interior City.

  The departure was executed quickly and efficiently. They must have planned it for days.

  At first, Lance thought Lorrie and her parents might have just headed out on some collective errand. He sat on the couch, smoked a Q cigarette, and listened to the roaring wind batter the old apartment windows. After a while he put on an album, humming along until the songs dissolved into a series of staggered snare beats. Only after several hours on the couch did Lance notice the note, a small piece of paper folded in thirds, resting on the table, his name printed on its middle section.

  DON’T GO TO WAR. DON’T COME FIND ME.

  Lance was driven by everything the letter didn’t say. There was no doubt Lorrie had written it, but what had she actually meant? The first part, Lance recognized, was pure Lorrie. Of course she didn’t want him going off to the jungle. But the second part—he looked to her block letters as partial evidence—was so emptied of emotion that it had clearly been conjured while under a parental spell.

  What complete shit. From his sunken seat on the couch, he remembered where he had hidden two more Q cigarettes. He stood up, pulled them out of their hiding place, and began to smoke. She didn’t mean it. She couldn’t. He picked up the paper, the block letters disembodied, nothing like her familiar script. Crumpling the paper into a tiny ball, he tossed it as hard as he could. The small paper sphere bounced off the wall and onto the floor. Pulling the Q to his lips, Lance took a long, heavy drag.

  He found it impossible to forget that he and Lorrie had lived in paradise, that before the bugs came they had had a near-perfect life of fresh food and steamy bedroom tricks, and now, he thought, some mortal error, some fat sin, had banished him into a sexless, smoky apartment with clean sheets, yellowing stacks of anguished political flyers cratering the floors, and a kitchen of canned beans and hard bread. And then there was the matter of money. Lance did odd jobs, enough to make his half of the rent, but he knew he couldn’t pay the whole thing for any real amount of time.

  Lance looked around, started paying attention, and saw that while the lice had been feeding off of Lorrie, it was he who had returned from a walk to find his entire existence had been chewed away.

  A few more drags of Q, and the veil over his situation withdrew. Nothing was fucked. Lorrie was gone for now, sure. But only by struggling with the present can one control the future. He would set off to find her.

  One day passed, and then another. Clean sheets became dirty ones. Each morning when Lance awoke, he promised himself that today would be the day he would take to the road in search of her. And each evening, as he went to bed alone or with someone else, the sudden violence of her departure unsettled him.

  She did not want to be where she was, that much he knew. Granted, he hadn’t left to find her yet. But, he reminded himself, not having left didn’t mean never leaving.

  Without her, his work changed. Dark, hovering shapes and obscure symbols became bright and clear portrayals with clear and obvious correspondences. In the evenings, he would close his eyes and concentrate on her face, his mind graphing whatever part of her came to him. Each night, he would sketch a new feature, the folds and creases of her lips, the dark shade of the gap between her teeth. Never did he feel the need to combine them. Each page of the notebook contained a different part of her.

  The final letter came. Lance called his friends. Every one of them showed up but Tim, the downstairs neighbor. Though Tim lived with Rebecca one floor below, rumor had it that Rebecca was running around Southwest Sector somewhere on a back-to-the-land Homeland Indigenous kick. Lance didn’t know what that meant, and he didn’t ask. Lorrie could have explained it to him, but of course she wasn’t around to do so.

  Right now he needed food for his guests. Lance stood in front of his pantry, eyes sweeping for possibilities. Two old crackers. A half-eaten jar of pretzels. An empty plastic bag gusted from the shelf and cascaded to his feet, giving Lance the distinct feeling that he was standing at the entrance of a deep and hollow cave.

  “Lorrie’s gone,” Lance told his small gathering. “And I’m up. Just got my greetings. First Tuesdays are the worst Tuesdays and all that.” He waved the paper in the air. “I’ve got a date and everything.”

  “Man,” said Mike.

  “Damn,” said Rick.

  “I hate First Tuesdays,” said Wilson.

  “Actually,” Norman said, reading the letter, “you haven’t been called in on a First Tuesday.”

  “Is that a good thing?” said Mike.

  “Maybe,” said Rick.

  “I had a friend who was inducted on a Sunday,” said Wilson.

  “Either way,” Lance said, “I didn’t ask you here to tell you that news. Because all of you are people I can trust, I also wanted to let you know that I won’t be going.”

  “On what grounds?” asked Mike.

  “I’m just not going to go.”

  Silence. And then:

  “Lawyer up,” said Mike.

  “Lawyer up,” said Rick.

  “You better lawyer up,” said Wilson.

  “They’re everywhere now, you know,” said Rick.

  “Who is?” said Lance. “Lawyers?”

  “Undercovers. Reggies. Agents for the Registry.”

  “No grounds?” asked Mike. “Pretty sure?”

  “I believe some other factors might be in play here,” said Norman.

  Once they saw Lance was serious, the tips and tricks started coming.

  “Don’t shower for a week before induction.”

  “Yeah! Stink like crazy.”

  “I don’t know,” said Wilson. “I hear the Registry is on to that.”

  Into the night, the advice continued, his friends whispering golden information into his ears of amiable Registry boards in blurry rural outposts, diploma-mill seminaries and their inviolable deferrals granted for study of the Young Savior and his teachings. Lance could see that they thought they were saving him, that they saw every new detail as a glowing springboard to leap from, each landing pool a thousand universes of possibility: strange societies of baldheads that helped out runners, where to get fake papers, and what kind of jobs took them and didn’t seem to mind. Lance copied it all down in a tiny notebook with tight springs on the binding, but after a while, he just scribbled small loops while they talked.

  “You guys aren’t getting it.”

  “What do you mean?” they asked.

  “Everything you’re saying, these ideas, they’re all a dodge. I’m
not going to run. That’s not what I’m talking about.”

  “Then what are you talking about?” said Wilson.

  “Lorrie’s been kidnapped.”

  Silence from his friends, like a clamp being tightened on their throats. Norman giggled, Wilson had a coughing fit, and Rick and Mike stared at each other’s toes. Lance attributed this mélange of inappropriate responses to the Substance Q cigarette they had shared just before he had made his announcement.

  “Too many crap movies, Lance,” Norman said. His head was low, his chin locked into his chest. “This is real life, man. Take a listen to yourself.”

  “I have,” Lance told them. “All my thoughts have been put into this. This is not some off-the-head idea. This is a powerful storm of outcomes. This is what I need to do.”

  “But, um, Lance?” Rick, eyeing the others, clearly deciding to speak for them as well. “Think clearly, man. Lorrie wasn’t kidnapped. She left you.”

  8.

  “Time’s up,” a voice says.

  Just like that, Alan is released back to the other boys. Punishment over. Returning to his dormitory, his eyes feel sore, unused to the many shapes and colors around him. Though he has only been gone for two days, it feels as though he has been in the cell for a lifetime.

  Back in the dorm, the other boys crowd around and welcome him back. Everyone is sympathetic to the experience of two nights in solitary. Even the halfies.

  The School has always been intent on pitting them against each other. Halfies versus pures. Everyone understands the two groups don’t mix. Some of those halfies don’t look like Homeland Indigenous at all. With all the Majority Group blood illuminating their features, a few of the half-breeds might as well be illegitimate sons of the nuns and priests. The halfies, they know, get bigger portions, softer sheets, and tufted pillows that their Majority mothers send them in large, glorious care packages. Homeland Indigenous mothers send pillows too, but the priests and nuns swipe them for themselves, they’re sure of it. His fellow pure boys are the ones who show Alan which Dumpsters are worth rummaging through for dented tuna cans and aged milk in the after hours before bed. Only halfies make prefect. Officer training classes—the makeup selected by aptitude and merit, the boys are told—consist only of halfies. There’s not a full-blooded Homeland Indigenous among them. And no one needs to be told of the impossibility of finding an officer on the front lines.

  Four years ago, almost by accident, Alan had flipped a half-breed, brought one of them over to his side. “Roll with a halfie?” his friends had asked. Finally, after some exasperated explanations, Alan had punched one of the louder complainers in the jaw. No one had complained about a halfie in the crew since.

  Still, there are times when Alan resents Gad. Whenever Alan goes to bed hollow and hungry while the halfie in the bunk below burps and gurgles into a floating sleep, he thinks about the world that despises him. These types of memories don’t fade with sunrise. Each morning, as the exclamations of his stomach jolt his eyes open, Alan remembers all over again: some people are just born with fewer burdens.

  But there’s no denying his best friend is a halfie. Though perhaps “friend” isn’t the right word. Gad listens to him, beholds his presence, but Gad, Alan had found, is not your average halfie. Almost anyone would mistake him for being Majority Group. When the two of them first met, Alan didn’t understand what Gad was doing there at all. Sure, Gad had told everyone, his father was Group F, but his language skills are cracked and chippy; when speaking F, he can sound alternately like a stately young lord or a trapped prisoner whose tongue has been jabbed with the sharp tines of a thick fork. The differences don’t stop there. The nuns smile at him too much—even the gassy Sister Ava Azor—praising Gad for every right answer and assigning him smooth, desirable jobs while Alan gets pinned with carpentry or sweeping the colored dust that slides across the walls of the physical plant.

  “Oh, but I wish I was a pure,” Gad tells him.

  Of course he wishes he were full-blooded. Such a thought is exactly what Alan wants him to think. And yet their roles are as firm as a photograph.

  Though Gad often tells Alan he won’t stand for special treatment, that it makes his heart blur around his chest and pump strange, tangled rhythms until he needs to puke, Alan knows that importance lies not in what happens to a person, but how that person reacts when a certain something occurs. Gad, of course, has always failed this test.

  So for work assignments, while Gad chops onions or washes potatoes, it is Alan’s eyes that burn and his stomach that rages. The large stacks of the physical plant tower burp out clotted streams of thick and grinding smoke that smells sweet but feels hot and oily. The job is to crawl up the ladder deep within the stack and scrub the steaming yellow slime that coats the walls, each boy doing his best to make that thick coat thinner. Like the other physical plant boys, Alan rubs cough medicine in the space under his nostrils, a trick that allows the medicated vapors to drown out the anguishing smell of the purple dust that forms in the little cracks of the massive concrete tower. The method works: their sparse lunches remain in their stomachs.

  The mountainous difference in their status is clear. Even so, Alan has made sure to balance the scales.

  “Tomorrow in class,” he tells Gad, “you should make a joke on one of the Sisters.”

  “Me?” squeaks Gad. “But the detergent! I’ll get in trouble.”

  “I can’t do it. I just spent two days in solitary.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do Sister Ava Azor. You think she would ever pour detergent down a halfie’s throat?”

  Gad shrugs.

  “Of course she wouldn’t,” Alan tells him.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You need to do this,” Alan tells him. “Don’t let me down.”

  “One thing to always remember,” Sister Ava Azor tells the class the next morning, “is that all of you have a connection, a bond with nature that I am unable to even comprehend. Your ancestors were primitive, yes, but they understood the land. They understood their surroundings. Though this has its downsides, I imagine it to be quite nice.”

  Alan turns to look at Gad. Now, he wills his eyes to say. Do it now. Gad raises his hand.

  “Yes?”

  “Sister Ava Azor, I understand nature perfectly,” Gad says.

  Alan can hear the shake in his voice.

  “Oh?”

  Gad pulls his shoulders back and steadies his hands. “I think it calls to me extra loud after a big plate of beans.”

  Sister Ava Azor straightens.

  Alan fixes a shapeless glare in Gad’s direction. Finish the job.

  The afternoon sun blares through the window. Gad looks at Alan. Alan nods. Speaking in Group F, his tongue pronouncing the words as Alan has taught him, Gad releases the predetermined fart joke into the world. Though it isn’t that funny, Alan has made sure that it contains the one thing the Sister will understand. Her name.

  As instructed by Alan, every boy who speaks F erupts in wolflike laughter. Some laugh so hard their eyes fill with tears. If only not to be left out, other boys in the class—boys who do not speak one word of F but want to be part of the fun—join in.

  Perfect, Alan thinks. He is referring to both the distinct relish of a plan well executed and the ecstatic shiver that only can come from having a group of people do just what you tell them. He is not sure which one feels better.

  Back in the front of the classroom, Sister Ava Azor, already sensitive to her own flatulence, assumes (rightly) that the words Gad has wrapped around her name—the one sound in his sentence she understands—have formed to make a joke about her gassiness. In a series of rapid movements she leaps from her perch in the front of the classroom, runs through the aisles of desks, and stops short in front of Alan.

  “Detergent!” she screams. “After class.”

  “Why me?” Alan says. “I didn’t say anything!”

  “Do you think I’m stupid?” Sister Ava shrieks.
“He doesn’t speak F well enough to make jokes. If you don’t watch out, I’ll send you right back to solitary.”

  The braver kids snicker. Gad studies his palms. No punishment comes to him. Reality explained.

  Is Gad’s heart blurring around his chest at the unfairness of it all, Alan wonders. Maybe both of them will end the day vomiting. Alan might get the detergent. But, he vows, someone else will pay.

  A silent slide from his bed to the floor, and Alan walks softly down the corridor until he spots Gad’s toes. It’s two hours before Rousing, and low snores come from all angles. As Alan does his best to move soundlessly, the shy and distrustful Hazel, dorm mascot, places her forelimbs on the front of her cage, rustling the hardwood shavings that compose the boundaries of her life. Stopping for a moment, Alan peers through the small wire frame and shakes his head at her. Hazel’s tiny wheekings won’t wake anybody.

  All the clocks are blinking; the power must have gone off some time in the night. The floor is cold against the bottoms of his feet, but Alan can’t yet put on shoes. He comes to the base of Gad’s bed, reaches under his sheet, and gives his big toe a soft wiggle. This is their sign.

  Gad groans but gets up. A few boys in the dorm crack an eye at them, but Gad and Alan are now in their final year of school, and if their sunrise infraction even registers, these younger boys know better than to squeal. Even so, a part of Alan wishes someone would. Alan has silenced squealers before. As he moves past the sleeping underclassmen, he sees nothing but the passive slumber of defeat. These boys, too, are dreaming of the war being over by the time they graduate.

  “C’mon!” He gives Gad a sharp elbow to the rib as they begin their silent departure.

  Once outside, Alan and Gad slip on their shoes. The bushes glow blue in the early morning light. Quick movements are important, so they hurry toward the woods, past the burnt brick of the inner courtyard, around the storage shed piled high with the tightly sealed upright steel barrels of gasoline the janitors pour into the generator when the school goes dark, through the dry turtle pond, away from the airless school, and toward the mouth of the unruly forest.