This Is the Night

by Jonah C. Sirott

  Swinging her legs over the bed, she pressed the undersides of her feet against the cool grey-green tile. A small red bug made quick slaloms between the crevices of her toes. But one little day-bug was nothing. And why should it be? Every day would be what this day was: more pills, more bugs, more shame, and more of the Young Savior.

  Only, today was different. The baby-leader directed the group away from shame, away from the Young Savior, and toward, he said, the few things in their lives worth feeling good about. Lorrie studied him, eager to make sense of his mismatched jumble of parts.

  “What do you care about?” he asked the circle. “What do you do, what can you do, that when you do it you feel as though you could have been doing it all your life?”

  Lorrie leaned over to itch her elbow. So much doing, she thought. What she needed to do was get the hell out of this haunted countryside and back to civilization. The war was still raging, right now, in this very moment. Didn’t these people understand?

  “Lorrie?” the baby-leader asked. “How about you?”

  “The fight for justice!” she yelled. “Answers from our leaders! Freedom!”

  Standing up, the baby-leader hobbled toward her, raising his voice. “Those are just words, and those particular words don’t mean anything here. Freedom, how? Justice, why?” The baby-leader loomed over her, waiting for a response.

  Every skin-grazing bug on her body froze as though under a spell. Perhaps they, too, wanted to listen.

  “So tell me, what are you talking about, Lorrie?” the baby-leader yelled down to her. Spittle poured from his mouth and drilled against the top of her head. “Say something real! What do you mean?”

  A silence fell over the room. The day-bugs paused from engaging in their frantic scratches; the speechless vet pressed his slender fingers together and rested his nose on his fleshy fists. The crying oatmeal lady cupped both hands over her heart. The peeled-skin artist pushed his tongue against his cheek, thoughtful. The baby-leader was waiting, the talk group was waiting, the bugs were waiting, and most of all, Lorrie was waiting, too.

  Closing her eyes, she felt the broken people of the talk group shoot the breath of life right into her. The shock of realization was instantaneous. How long, she wondered, had her focus been so diffuse? Years of work, and all of it for nothing. The answer entered her, bouncing around her insides. Of course. She could not stop the war. No more sniffing aimlessly around its edges; it was too big, too powerful. But she could, at least on a small scale, stop the suffering. And so it was clear. Forget the war. Find a way to save the men, one by one by one.

  “Anything?” the baby-leader asked.

  “Nope,” she said. Not all truths are for sharing.

  Even so, everyone in her circle was a witness. Even so, they still scared her, the members of the talk group. When they smiled, their grins looked hideous, the muscles deeply rusted and out of practice. Only the artist with the peeled skin, the man in black, had features that approached a level of balance and normalcy. He appeared by her bed that night after curfew. They sneaked off to the roof.

  The tar and gravel cut into Lorrie’s back uncomfortably. Though Lorrie knew the artist was marked, had scarred himself, in the darkness she could only see the outlines of his body, none of the details. The artist was a blur, and she lay back and watched as he put a leg on either side of her. His bottom rested on the lower part of her belly. After a moment, he stood up.

  The artist seemed nervous. His thin chest heaved and shook, and he began to undress her as though he were following the steps of a manual. Shoes first. Left sock, then the other, the zipper of her pants, followed by the button, both hands pulling down slowly, methodically. He was not Lance, and she pushed out all thoughts of the pure, sloppy joy the two of them had once shared. Where was Lance now? Had the Registry gotten to him? A lone night-bug emerged from the underpart of her thigh and shuffled aimlessly into the night as the artist tossed her jeans aside. There was no urgency to the way the artist removed her clothes. Maybe, she thought, his passion had been all used up when he skinned himself.

  “Take off your shirt,” Lorrie called up to him.

  He paused.

  “Now,” she said.

  The artist gripped his collar with both hands and lifted his shirt over his head in a single, smooth movement. The light was dim, but she reached her hands up and placed them on his belly, on his chest. Small, prickly bumps of raised tissue met the tips of her fingers. Long vertical lines like tiny corduroy wales ran from the base of his collarbone to the bottom of his ribs. His chest was hairless, but her fingers could feel everything: he had not left one part of his torso unpeeled.

  “Please,” breathed the artist, his neck arced. Wisps of steam rose from his nostrils and circled in the air: a fragrant mix of fear and pain and other ingredients she couldn’t identify.

  Her fingers ran over the vertical ridges of his chest. “You did this for art?” she asked him in a whisper.

  “Yes.” He opened his eyes and looked down at her.

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “For art?”

  He was quiet.

  “Not for the war? Not to escape it?”

  He placed both hands in a triangle in front of his nose. “Yes,” he said.

  Clouds blocked most of the moon, though a thin strip of grey light cut through to shine on the artist’s face. He leaned forward, the creases in his belly folding over one another to make long, horizontal lines that ran from one hip to the other. Lorrie poked a finger inside one of the folds. There, in that small, warm space where skin doubled over skin, she found a pristine patch of smoothness, the one part of his body he had left untouched.

  Clouds moved, bright dots of light made slow arcs across the sky, and Lorrie let her head fall back. The artist leaned forward, his legs froglike, splayed to the side and fully covering her. Each of his breaths was hot and labored, and he burrowed his face into her neck. They did not kiss. Lorrie waited, not knowing quite what she was waiting for. The artist lay there, softly crushing her. Suddenly, without warning, he lifted his head, stretched back his neck, and from deep within, the artist released a sad, strange howl of wordless words, less-than-human babbles that sailed up to the highest points of the dark sky above.

  After a few minutes, he sat up, still on top of her. The artist studied her face. Perhaps he thought that his howl showed evidence of some deep hell overcome. Maybe, Lorrie thought, he was just looking to see whether she’d still have sex with him.

  The artist shifted down her body, placed his hands on her hips, gripped the fabric of her underwear in two tight fists, and tugged downward. Before Lorrie knew what was happening, the artist had buried his face between her thighs. A loud pop leapt into her brain, and she stretched her eyes wide open in the half darkness as the questions piled up: What am I doing? Who is this man? She had not prepared for this, had not tamed, shaped, showered, and groomed in the ways she wanted, and now a strange man with shaved skin and a beaked nose had his parted lips on her, in her, all over her, spreading her as though she were in an exam room, panting and slurping and lapping in her general direction with a stretched tongue as though he were some starved hunter-gatherer who had just had his first kill in days. The artist licked her in all the wrong places, he was off-key, too ravenous; he plunged, dived, and explored erratically when all she wanted was a slow sense of rhythm. Lorrie wondered if his tongue was staggering away from her in some sort of subtle protest. But no. Two showers, she told herself, she had taken two showers that day, one early in the morning, another after the difficult talk group in the late afternoon. The hot water had left her during the second shower; war years, Lorrie knew, meant that any warmth in the water at all was a lucky break. The problem, she saw, wasn’t with her at all.

  “Wait,” she told him.

  The artist looked up, cheeks glistening, and under the big night moon, Lorrie saw his tiny eyes.

  “Go slow,” she said. “Much slower.”

 
As she watched the scarred man in the blue light do his best to let her feel something, Lorrie told herself that these were certainly war years. Her eyelids shut, the artist slowed down. She had hoped that the artist might help her escape, if only for a moment, from the rhythm of her thoughts and the drab, inner scolding of her mind. Insects that were not in her head buzzed around her ears, and Lorrie allowed herself to surrender into his touch.

  His touch was nothing special.

  All his intensity had been howled out, she saw, maybe by his failed art, maybe by his fear of war. Whatever it was, it had eaten up all he had. The artist had been emptied. There was no way this hollow man could empty her, not even for a moment.

  Even so, it had been too long since she’d been touched, and though the artist was mechanical, he was warm, he was a person, he was the first contact with her skin that was not from a bug but an actual human being. Her first caress after a million years spent alone.

  With both hands Lorrie reached down, grabbed his ears, and pulled him up. Once the artist was inside her, she laid her head back and looked at the stars. A deep breath, a gaze at the moon, at the small points of light that dotted the sky, the grunts of the artist in her ear. A real person, she thought, a good, though damaged person, was touching her. The artist placed a hand on her face that blocked her view, so she gave a sharp bite to his finger, and once again, Lorrie could see the stars. The slowly turning sounds of night swept across her eardrums while bright red spots laced and twisted themselves in front of her eyes. Lorrie felt sure these small, moonlit moments were the gateway to a less poisonous season of life that lay ahead. Finally, as the artist continued to unroll himself into her, a welcome emptiness took over. A perfect nothingness. But then, he was finished. She kissed him good-bye and tiptoed down to bed. That night was her first without bugs, her only invasion-free sleep in months. Her dreams were empty, and she loved it. The day had not been the same after all.

  The next morning, the uniformed man with the rimless glasses shook her awake. After a night free of insects, she could already feel her heart expanding. Lorrie could not take it for granted that she was able to wake up in her own skin.

  Readings were assigned for the talk group, and that morning she charged through them, not once feeling the need to itch. No bugs made themselves visible, so she took a victory walk in the garden, strolling triumphantly among the black haws and low bushes. Spotting the artist, she gave him a sign, and the two of them slipped into an empty broom closet.

  “Do you understand?” she said to him. “How huge this is? I didn’t itch at all last night.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  He didn’t seem to get it, she thought, and why should he? Just because the guy had placed blade against skin and pushed down smoothly until he had seen the pink and the blue of his tendons didn’t give him some paranormal ability to understand her.

  The artist burst into tears.

  Lorrie told the artist good-bye and slinked out of the closet. Stepping into the light, she watched as the jagged wings of a day-bug flapped slowly on her wrist. Quickly she blinked the vile thing away. The yelps of the baby-leader, the readings, her shame acceptance, a night with the artist on the roof—she had thought any and all of it had scared those bugs off for good. Still, there had only been one, she told herself. One was nothing, a mere day-bug. Lorrie left the artist in that closet, crying softly for all of them, alone in the dark.

  “Today,” cried the baby-leader, “a special session, with even more focus on shame!”

  “Oh boy,” Lorrie murmured, mostly to herself. She would have liked the artist to hear it, but sex with other patients was prohibited, so they sat on opposite sides of the circle to be discreet.

  “Did everyone read the passages?” the baby-leader asked.

  Heads bobbed up and down as the white sunlight poured across their faces, a fortunate occurrence as the lights had been off all morning.

  “I liked the jokes,” said the speechless vet, who was having a speaking day. “I liked that even this book can be funny. I laughed out loud twice.”

  “Jokes?” said the baby-leader. “There weren’t any jokes. The Young Savior doesn’t make jokes. You read the words wrong.”

  “Oh,” said the vet.

  “We’re talking about shame and sin here,” said the baby-leader. “Nothing funny about sin.”

  A few of them giggled, because they knew that this statement was completely untrue. As the baby-leader delved into the virtues of shame reduction, Lorrie did her best to ignore him. Even so, the lectures and readings seemed to help the talk group. The pervert said he was less perverted. Prime Minister Four’s great-great-great-granddaughter felt she might slide out from the smothering weight of her ancestor. But for Lorrie, nothing in that book had touched her. She wanted to yell at them that the prime minister would soon be ninety-seven, that the war would soon be twenty-three, along with any other dispiriting numbers she could think of. Just one day without the bugs, she decided, and she was out of here.

  Without access to her many newspaper subscriptions, with no television and no radio, the outside world had hardened into an even more polished, shinier version of itself. Were the Foreigns still playing their successful games of cat-and-mouse in the distant jungles? And closer to home, were attacks on the Homeland still occurring with terrifying frequency? Before, she had been obsessed with following the reports on each new piece of violence: Did the latest rounds of domestic hostility emanate from utterly crazy Fareon folks? Or were hidden sleeper cells of Foreigns behind it all? There was plenty of speculation that everyone’s worst nightmare had come true and that youthful Homeland citizens, drawn by the sparkling ideas of Ideology Five, were attacking their fellow citizens in solidarity with the Foreigns. And now, just as Lorrie was put away, the attacks had begun to alternate between the deadly and the absurd. First, the stolen Registry trucks, found abandoned and full of charcoal. On the drive up to the Facility, a radio announcer had reported that the pilfered uniforms had popped up on department store mannequins in several Western Sector cities, the fabric cut and sewn into fashionable skirts, shirts, and dresses. What did any of it mean? No one, it seemed, stopped dying just because Lorrie was in some rural nuthouse. It was time to get out of here.

  “I think the bugs are gone,” Lorrie told the baby-leader. “They just up and left.” This was almost true, so it felt fine to say it.

  “No,” he said, both hands smoothing his shiny head. “Your bugs are in the same place they’ve always been. The shame. That’s what’s gone.”

  Or that’s what she thought he said. She still couldn’t hear well. Ever since Lance had knocked her around, sounds entered her left ear in a pitched and murky way that forced her to angle the right side of her head toward whomever was speaking.

  “See, everyone?” the baby-leader said. “The passages have cured her! The teachings of the Young Savior have brought her back. She said so herself.” He rotated his head so the entire group could see the triumphant light in his eyes.

  Lorrie turned her good ear away from him, letting his words become mush. She was ready for her second act, her chance to unleash a new downpouring of effective resistance on the Homeland. But she was still here in the Facility, stuck in intermission.

  “You folks are here because your toolboxes are weak, empty,” the baby-leader went on. “You’ve got plastic wrenches, aluminum pliers, but our work here is to trade those in for some high-quality Homeland steel. And we’ve got a whole new set of sockets for you, one for every situation you’re going to encounter out there. Because, get this, the future of humanity depends on not just being able to determine what’s wrong and right, what’s good and evil, but the knowledge that this determination is superior to all others. That’s the message. And the Young Savior is the tool, a prophet who has departed our world but has left behind complicated puzzles and hidden messages, all in the service of helping you figure it out.”

  Everyone nodded, but for reasons Lorrie was sure were differe
nt than her own. My tools are wrong, she thought, but so were the ones the Facility wanted to hand over in their place. It had been days since she’d itched. She knew what was wrong, and she knew what was evil. So when could she leave?

  Lorrie looked for the artist so she could say good-bye. He was usually in the garden, but now he wasn’t. An orderly said they had seen him hop into a closet. In a utility closet beside the garden, she found stacks of reproduced paintings of the Young Savior. There was no doubt that these were new portraits. The high-quality finish of the frames and the glossy paper made it clear that the piles in front of her were meant to replace the limp and fading vision of the Young Savior that hung in every room of the Facility. Even in the one-bulb light, Lorrie could see that these paintings were different. This new incarnation of the Savior looked sharper, less dreamy—angry, even—but mostly, more than any likeness Lorrie had ever seen, this new Young Savior was much, much younger.

  But Lorrie didn’t want the Young Savior. Never had. She wanted the artist, and she kept flinging open doors hoping she’d find him. Outside, leaves were falling in slow circles. The artist wasn’t anywhere. Some stories, it seems, don’t have a clear beginning or end.

  Standing in the hall, she happened across the baby-leader.

  “It’s hard to leave, I know,” he said, wrapping his elderly arms around her. Standing in his weak embrace, feeling his hot breath and hearing the cool rattle of his ancient lungs, the thought again snapped into Lorrie: this young-looking man was unnaturally old.

  Though the simplistic Fareon plots of the antiwar movement had never appealed to her—ridiculous, the idea that the complexities of war could be reduced to some simple scheme in which the prime minister did not want to die—Lorrie found herself unsettled by the indeterminable age of the baby-leader. But no. His wrinkled hands and smooth face were not proof of a sinister plot perpetrated by the highest echelons of government. If anything, simply being exposed to the ridiculous ideas about the prime minister and his need to live forever must have accentuated her thoughts that there was some misalignment with the gentle man wrapping her in his embrace. That must be it. After all, one man aging strangely did not mean that all aging men were strange.