This Is the Night

by Jonah C. Sirott

  By late morning, all the volunteers had shuffled in and taken seats on the metal folding chairs in the back room, spines erect and shoulders level, all of them ready for an inspirational morning speech. Something to rally the volunteers before a long day of informing desperate men of their slim chances.

  Eric rose and exited the circle, a movement that forced Lorrie and the rest of the group to rotate their heads in order to see him.

  “We do not hope for an overnight revolution,” Eric began. Most of the volunteers closed their eyes or looked at their laps; a few followed Eric’s movements and placed a flat hand over their brows to shield their eyes from the brightness of the sun. His voice was indistinguishable—not an Interior City accent, but not identifiable as originating from some other sector of the Homeland, either. “We are not fools. We cannot be childish enough, naïve enough, to think the war will end tomorrow, that if we just march hard enough, often enough, we have done our work.”

  Don’t mention Fareon, Lorrie thought. Already she liked the place, could imagine herself working here. But one conspiracy theorist was all it took to turn a group on itself.

  Eric went on, walking faster around the outer edges of the circle now, his red gingham shirt leaving trails of leftover morning light as he passed. “A true revolution reaches far,” he was saying, “and is the completion of a course. Our course”—he paused—“is far from over. Our course has only just begun.”

  Susan, the only other woman Lorrie’s age in the room, nodded her head. She wore a bright yellow minidress with a big zipper up the front. Nothing special. But when Susan crossed her legs, Lorrie saw half the volunteers move their eyes over the faultless curve of her thighs. Beneath Lorrie’s long, heavy skirt lay two limbs pocked with fist-sized sores, the dark blotches brought on from her months of obsessive scratching. Susan and her perfect shiny legs made Lorrie feel like some sort of animal.

  “Any questions?” Eric asked.

  Immediately people began to argue.

  Nobody at the Center, it seemed, could ever agree on anything. Even official statutes of the Homeland were often unclear: Were there really any antisodomy laws on the books? What actually happened when you called the Point Line? All could agree that the Homeland obscured the rules, but deciding what to do about those hypothetical rules was much more difficult.

  “We need to vote on our Fareon position,” said one man.

  “I’ve already drafted a manifesto of support,” said another.

  “Of support?” came the cry. “How can you support something that doesn’t exist?”

  As one volunteer stood and spoke in an attempt to cajole the others into the embrace of adopting some stance, another person would immediately disagree. Any plan orbited a set path only for a moment until banged off course by counterproposals, cuts, deletions, and amendments.

  The position paper on Fareon was soon forgotten as others wanted to discuss a legislator from some distant part of the Homeland who had joined the Coyotes and given a timid speech from the parliament floor detailing his hope of drawing down troop levels by as much as a quarter in the next five to seven years.

  “We should send a letter of support!” cried one member.

  “Capitulator!” came the response from across the room.

  Up next, a local elected official, asking the anti-Registry center to officially denounce violent opposition to the war.

  “Just the attacks where people die,” someone said. “We only should condemn those.”

  “Just these new weird attacks,” another argued. “We condemn violence, but we like it when they fill Registry trucks with charcoal and dress up mannequins in Homeland Army miniskirts.”

  “Sellout!”

  “Militant!”

  Words as sharp as the points of diamonds hurled from one volunteer to another, until finally: “That’s Homeland Ideology!”

  The ultimate insult. No one wanted to be accused of dancing anywhere close to the governing principles of the Homeland. All of them, they were sure, had shed that dead skin.

  What the hell was Eric doing? Lorrie thought. This place needed a leader, not just some guy giving vague speeches before crawling into his shell once reality poked its head through. In some ways, though, she understood the challenges of containing such an unruly mob. Clearly, as soon as a volunteer established himself, he would be snapped up and have to go on the run. These men shouting out ideas were probably in their first or second week of attendance. The men of the Center, save Eric, were on a steady rotation. Yet another thing, Lorrie saw, that needed fixing.

  After the talk, Lorrie went up to Susan and introduced herself. Though she just wanted to talk, she felt blazoned, on display, as though her mere presence as a woman in this place was a barely tolerated trespass. And now the only two women were talking? Ridiculous. Women were the only ones who could stick around. Let their teeth clatter, Lorrie thought. Soon there will be more of us.

  Lorrie and Susan faced each other in the small back room as the men filed out to counsel.

  “So, Lorrie. How many words per minute?” Susan’s large eyes were a peculiar shade of grey.

  “Pardon?”

  “How fast can you type?” The large grey eyes were fixed on her. “Eric wants these notes typed up for our leaflet by the end of the day. I can’t do it all alone.”

  “Well—”

  “Look.” Susan gestured around the room. A volunteer named Doug was having trouble twisting the top off a pill bottle; another young man with an old face sat at a small table in the corner attempting to tune the radio. Lorrie could see he had the sort of quivering hands that just might keep him from the Registry, and she noticed his stomach was pouched like that of a small boy. Maybe that counted for something, too. “These guys have things to do,” Susan said. “Doors open in a few minutes. Are you going to help me or not?”

  “You don’t counsel?”

  Susan looked as though she wanted to run the other way. “Counsel? Me?”

  “Have they not trained you yet?”

  “Oh no,” Susan laughed. “Eric and the rest of the committee believe that to truly understand someone’s plight, you have to be able to experience it.”

  “I see,” Lorrie said. An obstacle she had not foreseen. The only question would be determining the most efficient way to remove it.

  “Good. Let’s go work in the back. We just distract them when we’re up front anyway.” Susan laughed a huge laugh, too large for her frame. Lorrie didn’t smile.

  Susan and Lorrie headed to a musty side room around the corner from where the men were counseled on their chances. Every now and then, vague sounds from the sessions consolidated into words in the air around them: Run. Hide. Pay. Mostly the sounds from the counseling room weren’t words at all, just sobs and pale, desolate moans.

  From opposite ends of the small, windowless room the two of them pounded away on their antiquated machines, battery operated so as not to be affected by the blackouts. When the lights finally did go out, they lit candles and kept typing. The buckling springs beneath their keys made for a constant racket, and often Lorrie had to ask Susan to speak up; her bad ear muddied sounds. Susan, she learned, had refused to break off her engagement to her fiancé, who was currently on the run. Her parents were upset, and she hadn’t heard from the fiancé in weeks. When Susan shifted the conversation and asked how long Lorrie had been in Interior City, Lorrie added the time she had spent in the Facility to her answer.

  “I just can’t believe anyone would move here from Western City North,” Susan said.

  “It was actually kind of terrible out there. It’s just so crazy in that place.”

  “But so vibrant, they say,” Susan said, exhaling. “Western City North. Popping and jumping. So wild.”

  “Too wild.”

  Susan laughed her huge laugh once again, and Lorrie turned around and watched her shoulders tremble, as though “wild” was just some inventive wordplay and not a state of mind that was much, much more than anybo
dy should ever have to endure.

  Lorrie decided that she was not willing to put up with this typing shit for much longer.

  But how to get Susan on her side?

  “War is a fiction,” Eric began. The volunteers of the Center were circled around him for another morning inspirational, words to inspire before the counselors counseled and Susan and Lorrie typed and filed. “A false need created by individuals.”

  By now Lorrie could see that the ruddy shore of Eric’s leadership would soon be completely washed to sea. Brash when the situation called for timidity, clear as a ghost when a spokesperson was called for, the man was a disaster. Sure, he was attractive in a generic sort of way. But what the Center needed, Lorrie knew, was a manager who could marry a tacit understanding of the operations the Center already had under way with a vision of how to improve them. Instead, the Center had a guy who liked to listen to himself talk.

  “We expose the system,” Eric was saying, “in order to reveal that the entire structure designed to protect us is actually causing us harm.”

  How much longer was Eric going to drone on? Lorrie massaged her fingers and wondered if she should get a skirt as short as the tight-fitting olive-green one that outlined Susan’s perfectly proportioned hips. No way. Besides, even if she did have the figure to pull off an outfit like that, there were still the scars. Always the scars.

  Eric went on, slipping through the chairs of two volunteers in order to pace behind the circle, hands waving, his unsparing voice hovering above their heads. “Why are people so scared to come here? Yes, we’ve all been harassed by the Registry, had their agents knock on our doors on day one to warn us, day two to cajole, and the day after that to threaten. But what are the results for us when people attack the Homeland? It doesn’t matter whether it’s a serious attack that kills people or one of those weird ones, like filling an unguarded tank full of charcoal. The point is: all this terminal havoc serves to convince people that opposing the war involves some sort of miserable sacrifice.”

  Sure, Eric had some interesting points, but what was he doing to help anybody? A whole lot of nothing. Lorrie directed her gaze to Susan’s skirt. Her legs really were perfect.

  Eric, still speaking, came to a stop directly behind Lorrie, a rise in his voice. Drops of spittle rained down on the crown of her head, and for a moment Eric was the baby-leader and Lorrie was whisked back to the Facility once again. Bugs, shame, and the Young Savior, Eric/baby-leader said. Bugs bugs bugs.

  The lemmings around the circle began to clap.

  “Tom? Jane?” Eric looked to his parents. “Anything to add?”

  Young Savior help me, Lorrie groaned to herself. More talking.

  Both Tom’s and Jane’s faces were pasted with ecstatic grins. She had heard that Eric’s parents often dropped by the Center and that his relationship with them was showy and alluring. All of the other volunteers, Lorrie was sure, wished that their mothers and fathers would use words like “Homeland” and “tyranny” as close together as did Tom and Jane.

  “Tom,” Eric would say, “can you help me out here? How to better articulate that if you just want to be pure of heart and sacrifice yourself to a cause, well, you’re a good martyr, and that’s nice and all, but you’re in it for yourself and not the rest of us. Do you have a way you could help me put that, Tom?”

  Lorrie had never known a person to speak to his or her parents like this. Of course her parents loved her, or so they said, though infrequently. Mostly those words had come upon her break with Lance and a few more times after she was let out of the Facility. Not that having parents who opposed the war changed anything. Tom droned on, repeating much of what his son had just said.

  The mother was different.

  Jane’s face was gentle. She had neat, greying hair and wide, welcoming cheekbones. Unlike her son, Jane spoke from in front of her chair; no need to crane necks or rotate eyeballs to see her. Though she had no official position, Jane was the only woman at the Center with any sort of power.

  “I want to talk today,” Jane began, “about aesthetics. How is it going to look, men, going into Quadrant Four with hair combed so far away from the scalp you have to duck under a doorway? And, ladies, knocking on doors with no brassiere?”

  A group of faces turned toward Susan, who immediately began to tug at the sides of her skirt, her pitiful action completely ineffective against the small amount of stretchy fabric. Jane avoided eye contact and continued. “Think about how you look before you go down to some quadrant where angry out-of-work Majority Groupers who can’t sell their homes are just about to boil. You think they’ll crack a screen door for one of you with your hair greased up and stinking? You think they’ll want to hear what you have to say?”

  Poor Susan crossed her legs, then uncrossed them. Jane seemed not to notice.

  “Now, ladies,” Jane continued. “We’re barely in this. It’s our men who are on the line, who the Registry wants, so we’re lucky to even have a seat at the table. With that in mind, don’t look cheap. Don’t come with wild hair and your flesh showing this way and that.” She clasped her hands together. “I’m not saying it’s wrong or right, I’m not passing judgment, but think about who we’re dealing with. You’ll set the words off in these men’s minds, you’ll hand the insults right over. Look like someone they know, remind them of their mother or sister. Good? Good.”

  More shame, Lorrie thought. This woman was an expert shamer. There had been no mention of the Center’s long wait times, nothing about the marginal benefits the Center actually offered to those who could access its services, and a complete dismissal of the fact that many of the unruly counselors seemed to be poorly trained. Who cared what any of them were wearing when what they were doing was nothing more than chanting silly songs in the rain? Even so, Jane seemed to possess an accessible, ever-ready passion. She was already wound up, Lorrie saw. She would just have to point her in a different direction.

  While Jane talked, Lorrie watched as Tom bit into a peach and her son popped a cherry into his mouth. The First Family of the Center, it seemed, had a line on impossible fruits. No one, Lorrie noticed, was invited to share them. But then again, had anyone ever asked?

  Lorrie made her way over to Jane. An older woman in a predominately male environment, she knew, should be eager to take on a humble apprentice, provided the flattery was subtle and light. But before she could get to Jane, Susan stepped into her path.

  The moment Susan opened her mouth, the lights went out. Even so, the Center was still open for business, ready to offer advice to any of the slope-shouldered men who walked in the door. No power or electricity was necessary; any of the counselors could light a candle and see the sad faces of their clients in the dark.

  “Let’s do this,” Susan said.

  A blue ribbon of rage ran through Lorrie, but she quickly swallowed it. The more people on her side, the better. Take your time, Lorrie.

  “You know, about what Jane said,” Lorrie began. “I really don’t—”

  “Just forget it and help me out, okay?” Susan said. “Didn’t you see those lines outside? We’re slammed.”

  The two of them headed to the side room with notes from Eric’s latest lecture, ready to transfer the handwritten words into printed ones. The typewriters—heavy manual orbs kept around for their ability to ignore the frequent losses of power—came in handy that day. Over the din of their clacks, Lorrie could hear the counselors counsel. Lately it seemed men just came to the Center to cry.

  After each visit, a counselor would come around the corner and hand Susan or Lorrie his notes from the session. The charting was inconsistent and depended on the counselor. There were, Lorrie saw, few quantitative measures in these scribblings. How they could help people on a mass scale by jotting down feelings was beyond her.

  “Here’s my latest.” A man with a sloppy smile and browned teeth handed her a folder. Lorrie struggled to remember his name. Upon opening the folder, it came to her immediately. This was Doug, a cou
nselor so twisted off Substance Q or some harder drug that his notes were made up of strange scribbled labyrinths that blurred Lorrie’s eyes if she looked too hard. Lorrie couldn’t imagine he was helping anybody avoid anything. She thanked him for the notes and returned to her filing.

  Inside the musty room where Lorrie and Susan typed, newspapers were stacked everywhere. Though no one could remember who had come up with the idea, the Center had a subscription to every underground publication that could be found. Each day, the long-suffering mailwoman dropped off several crates that Lorrie stacked against the back wall. But what does it matter? Eric had said when Lorrie asked about the unread papers. If there were any sound theories about how to go about doing things in those papers, Eric said, the Center was probably already practicing them anyway. Ridiculous, Lorrie thought. But Eric, it was clear, did not play the learner, only the learned.

  As a possible ally, Susan was proving disappointing. She kept a large, old-fashioned radio on her desk tuned to loud, instrumental music whenever the power allowed it. For Susan, there seemed to be a power in transcribing the pain of these men. Perhaps, Lorrie thought, she was wishing their souls into safety as she took down a record of their fears. But Lorrie didn’t want to wish. With no one else up to the task, it was clear she would have to change the Center by herself. Not that it would be easy. There were no scripts for this type of takeover.

  Her thoughts were interrupted by the return of electricity. The sudden clamor of a fast song pushed into the room. A woman sang of her last memory: a smudge of makeup on her lover’s cheek as she kissed him good-bye.

  “Here,” said Susan, adjusting the volume of the radio and twisting around to hand her a typed sheet of paper. “Can you give this a once-over?”