“He lives on the outskirts, though, across that big bridge. He wouldn’t know the first place to start looking.”
She’s right. Her brother is an odd one, Mr. Dorton thinks. He has a small shack in some rural sector a few hours from Western City North, a pitiful little house really, diagonal floors and rusted pipes that he escapes to when the city becomes too much for him.
“Besides,” Sally says, finally giving him a quick glance, “Benjamin would never be anywhere obvious.” She slows down to avoid a dramatic pothole.
Right again. His Benjamin is a boy who understands, no matter how backward that understanding is, that this world could still be one of large possibilities.
Ahead, the expressway is jammed, the shoehorned cars bumper to bumper, more holes in the road ahead, no doubt. “You could,” she says slowly, “ask Craig Camwell whether he’s heard from Joe. Try and put in another request, in case he talks to Joe, for Benjamin to call.”
Even after two decades at the prison complex, Sally, he realizes, still thinks that the place is some sort of gentleman’s club where all the employees share cigars and clap one another on the back and shoulders. “I never see the man,” he tells her. “He’s in food services, for god’s sake. I don’t deal with food services.”
“What about the poker game?”
And yet, Sally knows his life well. Occasionally Craig Camwell subs in at Mr. Dorton’s regular game. The Camwells are religious people, not to say that Mr. Dorton doesn’t go faithfully each Sunday morning, but the Camwells are different. The church Mr. Dorton and his wife attend is a small and classic Homeland Religion–style building with clapboard siding and a tall spire at the end of an empty road. The Camwells do their Offshoot worship in an unadorned storefront near the hardware store on a busy street full of horns and traffic. Neither Sally nor Mr. Dorton has ever been, but there is talk that behind the drawn curtains transpires prostration, breast-beating, and worship of a Savior so young as to be unrecognizable.
“Fine,” Mr. Dorton says. “I’ll see if he shows up at poker.”
“But you did ask him before, right?” says Sally, eyebrows lifted. “To tell Benjamin to call us.”
“Yes.” This is true, though he doubts whether Craig Camwell remembered his request. To be sure, the man has things to talk to his own boy about, and passing messages along for Mr. Dorton is, in its way, humiliating for all parties involved. It pains Mr. Dorton that he is even worse at keeping track of his boy than the breast-beating, baby-worshipping, food-services company man, Craig Camwell.
“At least Daniel seemed better than last time,” Sally says. The two of them sit across from each other in their kitchen. Sally has fixed their regular Sunday lunch: frosted meatloaf with sour cream, though in times past they might have had an orange wedge on the side. The loud, dull sound of faraway thunder crashes around the house, but there is no rain, at least not yet.
“He did seem well,” Mr. Dorton agrees, though in his opinion, the silence and shivers of their morning visit were hardly a cause for happiness and hardly a change from before. Shreds of cheese disappear into Mr. Dorton’s meatloaf, and he pushes it around his plate.
“I wonder if he’s making friends in there,” Sally says.
“Oh, I’m sure of it. That’s just the place for making friends. They sit around, swap stories. They’ve got plenty of tales to go on about, I just know it.” He just better stay away from that Fareon freak with the pamphlets, Mr. Dorton thinks. How many of the recently returned boys actually buy into this stuff? Because he knows he must, Mr. Dorton forces a small square of meat into his mouth. His absent sons guzzle up the flavor from even his favorite dishes.
“I’m sure you’re right.” She smiles, and Mr. Dorton smiles back, a grin so big he thinks he might look insane.
“It’s just us.” He plops another hunk of meat in his mouth and gives a large swallow to push them down his throat. “That’s how boys are with their parents, you know that. I’m sure he’s a regular chatterbox with the other fellows in there. If you ask me, it’s completely understandable. Why be a motormouth with us when he’s been jawing all day to the other boys?”
“Yes.” Sally clanks her fork and knife down, stands, and begins to stack and clear the dishes. “That must be it.”
“Even so,” Mr. Dorton says. He places the thought on a platter and offers it up to his wife. He knows he does not have to articulate the bitter question in both of their hearts: What did he see over there? And why won’t he talk to me?
Mr. Dorton looks for his favorite newspaper. Sally has hidden it from him, he guesses, shredded each page into the upstairs bathroom garbage can. With great care, she would have crumpled the accounts detailing the torrent of tears that their local representative in parliament, a man both of them had voted for, had unleashed at a press conference. From now on, the lawmaker intoned, he would be voting with his conscience. But what does that mean? the gaggle of reporters had shouted. Yes, Dorton’s own man in parliament is now a Coyote. Mr. Dorton subscribes to more papers than his wife is able to destroy.
Why hasn’t Benjamin called? What kind of son is he? Mr. Dorton sits by the phone in his living room and smokes one cigarette and then another, considering with each inhale whether he put too much emphasis on his youngest son being well scrubbed on routine and commitment, on all of the simple truths that he was sure would add up to success and dignity but now seemed to be thrown back at him in disregard by the boy’s disagreeable absence. The phone stays silent. What did Daniel see over there? A third cigarette, and an ache pops into Mr. Dorton’s chest and loops the lining around his heart into sharp little knots. Mr. Dorton unscrews the small plastic bottle he keeps in the front pocket of his cardigan and places a small tablet of aspirin on the edge of his tongue. I wish I knew Benny’s life better, Mr. Dorton thinks, so as to have an idea of where he might go.
“Enough, dear,” says Sally. She sits beside Mr. Dorton, hands folded on her lap.
“He’ll call tonight,” he tells her. Two more hours and a half a pack of cigarettes pass. Outside, the hard thunder hurls itself against the windows. The rain slams itself against the glass, sharp and cold. His silence takes forever.
14.
His time was up. Go, whispered Lorrie. Don’t just run. Tell them why. Make it official.
And now, on the advice of the invisible Lorrie in his head, Lance found himself in this forgotten industrial corner of the city. Rows of men were posted in front of the induction center, hands on their rifles. Each man faced outward, the engagements of their minds dark and shielded.
Lance walked up the steps and presented his papers. Of course security was going to be tight; every nut job in the Homeland wanted to destroy this place. Because it was not a First Tuesday, he had assumed there wouldn’t be much of a crowd. But First Tuesdays, it seemed, were just a media show put on by the Registry, a day when the appetite for men was only slightly stronger. Long lines of them waited to report, the most hard-bitten arriving alone, others accompanied by red-eyed mothers, wives, and sisters.
Once he was cleared, Lance was sent down a long, narrow hallway. At the end was a metal door. Pulling it open, he spotted a pretty, young secretary at a large oak desk. Behind her, a massive portrait of the prime minister with a small brass plate below indicating it had been painted twenty years ago. Funny, Lance thought. He still looked exactly the same.
“I’m here to refuse,” Lance told the secretary. The smug prime minister smiled down at his story.
“Not here,” she said, handing him the number of another room. Lance took a sharp left turn down the long hallway, followed by two rights and another left. Framed photos of the prime minister hung in short intervals along each wall. The hallways were lined with men, some sitting on the brown slate tiles, others standing.
What do you think? How am I doing? he whispered to Lorrie. As the Lorrie of his mind was composed entirely of Lance’s own memories, she had been very supportive as he had left his apartment, hopped on a bus,
transferred, twice made wrong turns on foot, and finally located the building that had been packing men off to war this year, the year before that, and the years before that as well. Of course Lance knew that this cleansed, sanitized, and uncomplaining Lorrie whom he could not touch, whose dry lips he could not see, was not the real Lorrie. But as the real Lorrie had been so completely removed from his life and he so immersed in absolute loneliness, just to sense her, he was sure, was a salve against his own self being ripped apart completely. Besides, once all this was done, he would replace her with the real thing. This whole ordeal was just one more story to share.
Taking in the room in front of him, Lance saw several dozen uncomfortable-looking chairs jammed too close together, the lightly padded seats all occupied by men in a similar age range. One of the men read a magazine. On the cover: “Homeland Indigenous in the Service.” And below, in smaller print: “Group F Does Their Part.”
We talked about that, he whispered to Lorrie. At the beach. She nodded her ghost chin up and down. We sure did, baby, she whispered. Lance appreciated the affirmation but found himself increasingly troubled by how little Ghost-Lorrie sounded like her real-life counterpart.
The line moved slowly, the dejected men crowding the hallway, their heads low, their dreams full of girlfriends or safety, or whatever it was that these men dreamed about. Finally, Lance reached the auditorium.
To the back of the room was a low stage with a podium and thick red curtains. No windows. The overhead lights were sharp and bright; if any building was exempt from the rolling blackouts, surely it was the Western City North Induction Center. Watching the officers, memories of high school pre-army classes flooded into Lance: the tall man standing stage left was a sergeant; the thick man beside him with the raspy engine voice had shoulder insignia that showed him to be a captain; the third official was a second lieutenant who looked like he didn’t want to be there any more than Lance did. On the floor below the stage were eight inductees in two rows of four. Lance chose the second row, not the first. Eight more men were outside the door awaiting the next round. Behind them, eight more, and another eight after that. Lance felt his blood rise to the surface and threaten to burst from beneath his skin and stain the carpet below. This was it.
Hey, he whispered to Lorrie.
Silence.
He looked around the room frantically, at the stage, at the other inductees, at his dark brown shoes. Lorrie, it seemed, could not follow him here, into the bowels of the Registry.
“Each man will repeat his full name,” the sergeant barked, “after which I will follow with the phrase, ‘new inductee of the Homeland Army.’ Understood?”
The men nodded.
“Once I have called your name and spoken the aforementioned phrase, you are to take one step forward. It is this step”—the sergeant paused and stared at each of them before glancing back at his clipboard—“that will officially conscript you in your service to the Homeland.”
The thought came to Lance that it seemed silly to officially refuse, that the symbolism of not putting one foot in front of another was inconsequential to the handful of people in attendance. Why now, he thought, why say no now? He had not said no to Lorrie’s parents, he had not said no to her obsessive need for hot wash; instead, he had gone along with all of it. Every tactic he tried, each word he had said and strung together with another one, all of those words had failed to debug her. None of his words, he realized, had worked. The thought struck Lance that he knew Lorrie didn’t write or call because he had hit her, and he knew he had hit her because his words hadn’t worked.
The sergeant called out a name, and a man in the front row stepped forward.
New inductee of the Homeland Army!
One small step to determine all his possibilities, to narrow them into one. Lance worried that his body might refuse to obey, that his arms or bladder or legs might decide to perform some action that his mind didn’t agree with.
New inductee of the Homeland Army!
They were on his row now.
“New inductee of the Homeland Army!” the sergeant yelled, grasping the hand of the young man who had walked across the stage toward him. More names; another repetition of the six-word phrase. Suddenly the man next to Lance was pronouncing his full name for the sergeant as though it was the first time he had heard the words. One name away.
All Lance had to do was repeat his own name and then step forward. He knew that if he stood in place and didn’t say anything, his life would get even worse than it currently was. The world was closing in on him. But so what? His heart was still open.
“Lance Sheets,” called the sergeant. “Please say your name and step forward.”
Lance’s life struck him as a salt-kissed wound, open and bloody and with no relief in sight. The room was warm; his skin was damp and salty.
“Ahem!” yelled the sergeant, louder than before. “Lance Sheets.” The name bounced off the faded walls around him; his eyeballs showed him nothing but black air and clouds. Each of his fingers was twisted around the other. New inductees of the Homeland Army bent their necks to look at him.
If to step forward was the army and to stand still was prison, neither option contained freedom. But, he reminded himself, there was always a third way.
“Lance Sheets?” the sergeant called again.
He blinked his eyes clear. More heads turned his way. His knees sizzled, bouncing up and down in their sockets. He bit his teeth together to try and force them still.
“You’re sure?” the staff sergeant said to him. “You have to be sure.”
Each limb was soft, gelatinous. He felt near collapse.
“Just step forward,” said the second lieutenant. “It’s that simple.”
The second lieutenant looked at the captain. The captain looked at the sergeant.
The sergeant tapped his foot. The captain sighed. All of them looked at Lance.
“Step forward,” said the captain. “Now.”
“You’re going to have to step forward, son,” said the second lieutenant.
“We don’t have all day,” said the sergeant.
All the days since Lorrie had gone were one long day in which yesterday and last week could just as easily have been tomorrow or a month from now. How exactly he had arrived here seemed an infinitely small series of events, each one impossible to pinpoint.
“What’s that?” the second lieutenant said.
“Speak up, you coward,” the sergeant growled.
“No,” Lance said. “You heard me the first time.”
15.
Back in Western City North, Lorrie’s mind had been full of misapprehensions, dazzled by all the wrong things. Now, in Interior City—that land of traditional, bighearted, and ruggedly individual Homeland citizens—she could finally focus. She would stop the war by blocking its supply.
As it stood, the war showed no signs of ending. Two attacks on the Homeland’s Strategic National Stockpile just within the last two weeks. Leave us alone, scientists on television pleaded, their appeals broadcast on hundreds of channels, their words reprinted in thousands of newspapers. We’re warehousing vaccines, antidotes. This is a place of medicine. That’s it.
Though most major newspapers preferred to refrain from even printing the word, everyone knew what those terrorists were looking for. And now, Lorrie guessed, the prime minister would stomp all over the Coyotes and use the attacks to justify another surge. With so much to do, she was worried about time.
I need, she thought, to live forever.
Asking around, she had discovered an anti-Registry center in the southeast quadrant of the city. A place that counseled men about their options and whether they had any. The official name of the place was the Registry Assistance and Counseling Center (RACC), but after a day it was clear that everyone just called it “the Center.”
Her first day made her nervous. Even going to an anti-Registry center in Interior City was more weighted, more fraught than Western City North, where
opposition to the war had started early and was easily anticipated by anyone paying attention. Interior City, on the other hand, was a small town clothed in big-city trappings.
In other parts of the Homeland, the general wisdom was that the Foreigns perpetrated attacks that maximized casualties, whereas some faction of antiwar Homeland citizens carried out attacks that minimized them. As for the recent round of weird attacks—the Homeland Army uniforms sculpted into skirts and dresses, the armored cars filled with charcoal—no one in any part of the Homeland had any ideas about that. But in Interior City, most found discussion of the so-called “weird” attacks to be an uninteresting distinction. This was not a region that had elected any Coyotes to parliament. In Interior City, an attack on the Homeland was an attack on the Homeland.
That first day, Lorrie wore long sleeves and an ankle-length skirt to cover the scars and scratches imprinted on her limbs. The Center occupied the bottom floor of a decaying four-story building that was home to several families who had escaped from the Foreigns just before the Old War. The building was badly in need of repair, as were most of the two-family bungalows on the block surrounding it. After a late-night assault by pro-war patriots, a window in the back room of the Center had been clumsily boarded up with plywood, a shoddy repair job that sneaked wisps of cold air into every room. But the Center—despite its mysteriously shifting roof leaks and rickety foundation—was the locus of anti-Registry action in Interior City. To be sure, Lorrie heard, there had been other centers. But those others had been harassed by neighbors, raided by the Registry, fallen under the glistening spell of the Fareon folks, or simply lacked the funds to operate. For anyone opposed to the war in Interior City, the Center was all there was.
Eric was the leader, a role Lorrie could spot immediately. His hair was styled and fashionable, he wore motorcycle boots, and his face was arranged in a way that implied that once he reached middle age he would look like the kind of man who had been very handsome in his twenties. She was unclear on why the Registry didn’t yet have him. From across the room she watched as Eric finished a plum and spat out the pit in the garbage. A plum! Nobody had those anymore; the mere fact of possession set him apart from the rest. Lorrie hadn’t seen one in years.
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