This Is the Night

by Jonah C. Sirott

  Their faces give away that they don’t.

  “Homeland Indigenous Movement? Woody Gilbert? C’mon, those guys are talking to you! If I were Homeland Indigenous, that’s the kind I’d be. HIM. And really, I am HIM, you know? Not just some wishy-washy solidarity. I’m not just into the cause, I am the cause. I met Woody Gilbert once, shook his hand and talked to him. Course you can’t do that anymore—he’s way underground now.” A new energy climbs onto her face, an excitement that expands her. “But we talked, me and him. He told me he could see how special I was, that he sensed my Homeland Indigenous spirit, and that I should help spread the message to Homeland Indigenous youth: the baldheads can help you escape the Registry, and HIM can free your mind.”

  Neither Alan nor Gad says a word. Alan’s head is whirling; he knows that within this incessant splatter of shit are tiny drops of gold.

  “Look, I’m not just on my own journey,” the Majority Group lady tells them. “HIM is growing, starting to do more actions. Ever since Woody was forced underground, the movement has been getting bigger.” She rummages in her bag and pulls out a ragged bunch of papers knotted in a rubber band. “Take these pamphlets. They’ll let you know all about HIM. This stuff is going to break your heads wide open, guys, I just know it.”

  “Sure,” Gad says.

  “Now don’t show those to anybody,” she says. “HIM just got put on the list.”

  “What list?” Alan asks.

  “It’s all crap. A few bombs went off at induction centers here and there, and now we’re suspects. There’s a bounty on Woody’s head. Membership is outlawed. Hey, how old are you two anyway?”

  “Our final year,” Alan tells her.

  “Listen, just make sure you have something planned for when you get out of here. Don’t get yourself shipped off halfway across the world, you hear me? Remember what I said about the quotas: it’s harder for you guys to escape induction than it is for anyone else in the Homeland. And look at you two. You boys can’t even take care of yourself in a forest, so I sure as hell don’t want to see you in the jungle.”

  Alan turns to Gad. Gad won’t meet his eyes.

  “You must know the Registry is coming for you,” the Majority Group lady says, leaning into them. “So get in front of it, have a plan.” She is almost poking Gad in the chest now. “The Registry changes. It’s smart. And it’s even smarter when it comes to Homeland Indigenous; it arrives faster, harder. There’s other stuff in these pages, stuff that will blow your mind,” the woman tells them. “For you two, the baldheads are probably your only hope of escaping the jungle.”

  “Who are the baldheads?” Alan asks.

  “Just read the pamphlets.”

  Gad takes the papers from her outstretched hands. The moment she is out of sight, Alan snatches them. The Registry isn’t random, screams the front page of one. Your whole life, you’ve been lied to, cries another. Better I should have these pamphlets, Alan thinks. Why waste them on someone who isn’t ready for the truth?

  9.

  On day one, Lorrie had no ideas. Day two, her mind was still blank. At first, Lorrie couldn’t see at all in that place.

  “Here?” she asked her parents. The three of them stood in front of the intake building, a flax-colored structure about as large and clean as a city bus.

  “Here,” they said.

  Atop the building, a sign in hand-painted blue letters against a white background read: “Our Young Savior’s Residential Facility for the Improvement of Life and Spirit.”

  “Quite a mouthful,” noted her mother.

  “Let’s just call it the Facility,” said her father. “Seems more efficient.”

  A short, quick hug from her mother, a squeeze of fingers around her palm from her father. Her parents held each other tightly as they walked away. Lorrie lifted her hand to wave good-bye, and as she did, four of the wingless bugs that had tunneled their way to the surface of her skin fell to the ground. Each of the bugs had a bulbous little belly that glowed reddish-brown in the sunlight along with tiny patches of green dotting the walls of their outer bodies. Their tessellated eyes glittered hot and red. Lorrie almost let out a scream, but reminded herself that though the bugs were real, her parents could not see them.

  She had never felt further from the city.

  Two men in starched uniforms took down Lorrie’s information and marched her through the compound and toward the dining hall. The architecture of the Facility was defensive, with hidden observational turrets disguised as sun decks and balconies, all ringed by deep embankments full of brackish water stocked with fish and plant life and lined with moss-covered rocks. Soothing to look at, but as Lorrie spotted instantly, also designed to pacify and contain. Beyond the Facility walls was nothing but emptiness: unused farmland, disorderly forests. Had she brought enough books? Because out here, she saw, there was nothing.

  In the dining hall, long brown benches were pushed in tight against the rows of tables that lined the room. The floors were tiled, but Lorrie’s eyes went up to the ceiling, which she noticed was painted sky blue, an effect that less replicated the sky and more created the feeling of eating a meal on the bottom of an emptied swimming pool. A long brass light fixture ran across the length of the room, the cool light source smearing the faces of everyone who sat below. The light stayed steady; at least this far into the interior of the Homeland, Lorrie thought, they could still keep the power on.

  The dining hall was full. Most of the women seemed to be around her age; the men, of course, were all much older or younger, with a few shining or hellish exceptions. Even so, there were barely any of them, one for every five women or so, a grand majority of the men wounded vets from well-to-do families. It wasn’t hard to make out why there were so few men around. The Registry, rumor had it, was now taking almost everybody. Twenty-two years into this war and they needed whomever they could get, no matter how feeble their sanity.

  “Sit here,” one of the uniformed men pointed. She slid in between a bewildered-looking woman who was whispering into her watered-down orange juice and a ridiculously tall young man with a poorly stitched together facial wound who immediately turned toward her with an extended hand and introduced himself. She shook it heartily.

  “You have a firm grip for a woman,” he said. His teeth were stained with a bright brown juice that dripped steadily from the bottom of his chin onto his lap. A light piece of bark glinted against the back of his teeth.

  “What’s in your mouth?”

  “Turtle root,” he said. “Keeps me from becoming violent.” He smiled. “Lowers my blood pressure, too.” He had a theatrical tone to his voice, little flourishes and well-placed breaths and pauses that snaked around his words. “You’d want to be violent, too,” he added, “if you had been in the jungle.”

  From the large basket of fruit that sat in front of them, Lorrie grabbed a mottled apple that must have once been red. Even old fruit was a treat, and she wanted the taste. A few day-bugs fell from her hand as she reached out, and she looked to either side, wondering if anyone had noticed. She took a bite of apple; its flavor only vaguely rested against the edge of what fruit could be. No one spoke, though the man with turtle root juice dripping down his throat darted his eyes about crazily. A day-bug circled the bones of Lorrie’s wrist.

  “I believe I’m hallucinating right now, in this very moment,” Lorrie told the man next to her. They didn’t speak for the rest of the meal.

  The plates were paper, the knives were plastic. A few people yelled random accumulations of words, but for the most part there was only the silent sound of hasty chewing. No one was allowed to stand up until everyone else was finished, so Lorrie and her once-useful fellow citizens stared at the walls until the eating period was officially over. Right before the meal was scheduled to end, the bewildered woman next to her who had previously only spoken in low whispers to her orange water threw back her neck and shouted a passionate and incomprehensible prayer to the ceiling before tossing her soggy plate of col
d, tasteless food at the nearest wall in sacrifice. Lorrie watched a saucy piece of frozen cauliflower slide to the floor like a hurried garden snail, a slimy trail of cheese tracing its path. Perhaps her offering was a signal, as the uniformed men began to lift the more sluggish by their armpits and herd them back to their beds. Just as they began to drag people from their chairs, a sharp buzz followed by a connected series of jerky crackles echoed throughout the dining hall. The long brass fixture above clicked off abruptly. Patients walked to their rooms—or had the walking done for them—in complete and utter darkness. I was wrong, Lorrie thought. Even here in the vast rural emptiness, the Homeland still couldn’t keep the lights on.

  “Take these,” a man in a uniform told her. All the patients slept in a large dormitory, a long, drafty room, the walls lined by their narrow and adjustable beds.

  “What are they?” She had already tucked herself in.

  “They’re the pills you’re supposed to take.” The uniformed man held out a low paper cup, a medicinal salad of blue ovals, oblong lime-green tablets, and a bright red pill in the shape of a diamond. One hand extended, he stood over her, arms flexed and veins popped as though in a show of strength. War age, there was no doubt about it; his face had only the slightest presence of frown lines, and Lorrie wondered what was wrong with him. A healthy man under forty, she knew, had very little chance of being able to be in this place. Maybe, just maybe, she thought, this sick job of stuffing pills down young women’s throats was his reward, the treasure received for multiple calls to the Point Line.

  “I need to know what it is you’re trying to give me.” To Lorrie, the only vulnerable aspect about the uniformed man were his rimless glasses, which had slid too far down his longish nose.

  The man glared at her through their lenses and laughed. “Take them,” he said. “Now.”

  A glance to the right to see who her neighbor was, to determine whether this person was witness to the scene, the type of neighbor whose eyes might contain some compound of daring and virtue that would allow Lorrie the power to resist whatever these people wanted to give her.

  The neighbor was snoring.

  “Fine.” Lorrie grabbed the paper cup out of the hand hovering in front of her more viciously than was necessary. The pills slid down her throat and into her stomach. That night, the itches grew worse, and once again night-bugs crawled all over her, in and out of her nostrils, up and down her spine, burrowed below her nail beds, anywhere they wanted to. Night-bugs were the worst kind.

  “Up!” yelled the man in uniform, the same man as the night before.

  After hours of restless scratching with the bugs feasting on her nerves and tendons, she had only just gone to sleep. “Up?” she cried. The reddish light resting on the man’s face told her the sun had yet to fully rise. Before arriving, Lorrie had pictured herself strolling through gardens, becoming reacquainted with the fine old books that she had long neglected, taking up some sort of craft. Now it was barely sunrise, and a man in uniform was nodding his head and yelling in her ear.

  “That’s right, out of bed with the sunrise. Who knows how much power we’ll get today!”

  “But it’s barely light out.”

  “Get up anyway.” Clearly the orderly was not a Registry-runner. People who were underground, Lorrie knew, had compassion. This man’s blood was spiked with additives of rage and sandpaper.

  “What for?”

  “What for?” the man sneered. “For you, that’s what. For you and the Young Savior.”

  The Facility, Lorrie soon found out, was a pious one, overseen by some obscure offshoot of Homeland Religion that had curious and ill-defined ideas regarding shame, redemption, evil, and the true age of the Young Savior. Evil, she soon learned, consisted of Ideology Five, that Foreign doctrine that the prime minister had long claimed would, if left unchecked, threaten the very existence of the Homeland. All the patients in the Facility seemed to feel the institution’s strange devotion to ideals they didn’t understand, whether they knew it or not.

  Lorrie dressed silently and was led to a small room with folding chairs arranged in a circle. After a few minutes, other patients wandered in and took their seats. On the white walls, an old depiction of the prime minister, his face not yet ravaged by the thinning of the skin that accompanies life in its ninth decade; next to the portrait was a pushpinned sign: “Without the Young Savior, we are merely objects filled with shame and disgrace.”

  The distraction of her own judgment annoyed her. Don’t just listen to this stuff and make fun of it, she told herself. Breathe it in. Besides, she would have to learn the values of the place if she was ever going to get out.

  At the center of the circle, a short fat man with no hair and a soft, youthful glow introduced himself as the group leader.

  “Welcome to talk group,” he said. “Seems we have someone new today.” His high and raspy voice pinched her nerves, the sound of someone who needed to clear his throat but couldn’t. The guy can’t even burp himself, she thought. He’s like some sort of grown baby. Though his face was young, a closer look showed that his ears, his hands, and his loose and ragged tongue all behaved like that of a man much older. This man, she saw, was aging completely unsystematically.

  “Let me go over the rules for our newest member,” the baby-leader began. There were punishments for misbehavior, it became clear, but no incentives for sanity and adherence to a standard social contract. Though the guidelines were confusing, Lorrie did her best to turn off the distracting patter of her own judgmental thoughts.

  All sorts had made their way to the talk group: a wounded vet who refused to speak on Wednesdays and Fridays, a middle-aged woman who was already sobbing quietly, and a handsome man with an actor’s face, his clothes all black, the sleeves of his shirt pushed up and exposing an intricate network of silvery cuts and scars that ran from his wrists to his elbows.

  “Let’s talk,” the baby-leader continued, scanning the circle, “about shame. And about the Young Savior. I would like us to talk about the Young Savior and shame, together. Now who’d like to begin?”

  For Lorrie, the Young Savior was a bore, with little to offer. A peaceful life, free of bugs and awful men—now that was a pleasure worth reaching for.

  “I’m convinced the food industry is destroying my brain,” said the wet-faced woman across from her. “And I’m ashamed that the Young Savior has let this happen to me.”

  “What have you been eating?” asked the usually silent vet. “Have you been eating too many oats? Oats are not a good thing to eat.”

  The woman burst into loud, hungry sobs.

  The people in her talk group were crazy, Lorrie decided, twisted-up people trapped in horrid worlds they couldn’t escape. And so she listened, surrounded by the most sapped-out citizens in the Homeland, people she was sure had wasted their entire lives, their minds dazzled by misapprehensions, by all the wrong things. The oatmeal woman had snorted some new Substance derivative and burned her kitchen down; the angular man in black was an artist who had ripped off his skin and tried to stretch it into canvas—a disquieting thought, it seemed, for the Registry as well. Lorrie massaged a temple with an index finger. These people were a mess.

  “How about you, Lorrie?” the baby-leader asked. “What are you ashamed of?”

  “Ashamed?” she said. “I’m not ashamed of anything.”

  “Of course you are,” he said. “You just don’t know it yet.”

  Heads bobbed up and down the circle in agreement.

  “You see,” he began, addressing the group but looking at her, “reducing your levels of shame is the key to liberation, to freedom, to a successful existence in which your actions have purpose and meaning. Some of you”—a hard stare in Lorrie’s direction—“have locked all your shame away. But somehow it always comes out. Shame changes, it squirms, it evolves, and you can’t get rid of it in a sideways manner, no matter how hard you try.”

  What did this baby-leader know? What kind of training had he
had in order to make his evaluation? “I had bugs,” Lorrie told the group leader, “not shame.” Saying she had bugs in the past tense seemed faintly healing. Just then a trail of flat-bodied arthropods scuttled across the knuckles of her left hand, their tiny segmented bodies following one after another, antennae first. Day-bugs. Much more manageable. She closed her eyes, clenched her fists, and did her best not to scream.

  A few people in the circle shook their heads, saddened at her resistance.

  “Wrong,” the baby-leader said. “You had bugs because you were ashamed of something. You shut that life of shame away, locked it up tight in a box, and stuffed it beneath your feathery little mattress.” The baby-leader crossed his legs and then uncrossed them. “Now it comes out as bugs instead.”

  “Exactly,” nodded the crying woman.

  “So true,” said a barely teenaged boy on his fourth suicide attempt.

  “Wild,” said the artist who had skinned himself with a paring knife.

  “How exactly do you mean?” Lorrie asked. She felt an awful tingle below her skin.

  The next morning, the uniformed man with the rimless glasses woke her at first light. Again the two of them began the same routine as the day before.

  “Pills?” he said, pushing the low cup in her face.

  She watched him. This was a test, his attempt to see if a full day and night in the Facility had broken her. “Pills,” Lorrie answered. Let him win today, she decided. Give him the feeling that he’s in control.

  The uniformed man smirked.

  That control he felt, Lorrie knew, was the emptiest of all emotions. She was a wind-torn cloud, and this simple man in uniform would not be able to grasp her.

  Through the window, Lorrie watched a rise of air shake the branches of a small, scaly tree. The Facility was meant to operate on a loop, she realized. The sooner she accepted her place in the wheel, the easier it would be for the people who wanted to turn it. Without resistance, each day would be the same.