This Is the Night

by Jonah C. Sirott

  The swaddling chill felt gigantic. His fingers jingled with the pricks of ten thousand tiny stones, or whatever the hell was driving upward into his hands from the ground below. Still on all fours, Joe had yet to find a good rock to break a window with. He kept crawling, unsure if he was going in circles or not. The cold air stuck to his lungs like a plaster cast. A lump formed in his forehead, an understanding that his own stupidity and hopefulness was the reason he was on the black ground at all.

  The lump pushed itself behind his eye. The picture window along the side of the cabin. That was the one. The lump slid down to his throat. A flash of blue before his eyes, along with the fallen notion that for every person there was a glistening other to alleviate the loneliness of being. His left knee bumped against something promising, and Joe reached back and felt a stone the size of a fist. Gripping it, Joe stood up, dropping the lump down his gullet. A small bubble exited his nose and fell to the ground. His chest felt like he had swallowed a razor.

  A cloud must have moved and allowed the moon to show up, yellow and round, lighting the surface of all the objects around him. Silhouetted trees jumped off the large window of the cabin. Joe looked into the night before him, and from low in his throat, unbidden, his body released a sound.

  A thousand trip-hammers pounding rapidly, a million percussive drills shattering dense rocks into crumbs. The sound from his throat was terrifying, a baleful chorus of all the evil creatures trapped inside him. Where was Benny when he was needed most? The stone in Joe’s hand felt impossibly smooth, carved and chiseled to a fist-sized globe, perfect for his grip. Arm whirling, Joe’s voice raising high, he knew that the trees would swallow his cries.

  Nothing will stop just for me.

  Louder and longer, arm windmilling faster with each revolution, Joe pushed out air, the pitch of his scream growing until he finally heard a tremble in his voice. Joe let up his grip on a downstroke. The rock sailed through the glass of the front window, vanishing the lump in his grand noise that was piercing the blackness around him. The hole wasn’t large enough. He would have to throw a few more rocks. He did, until the space was big enough to crawl through. As he snaked his body into the window, a small shard of glass cut his shoulder and left a long, deep slice in his skin. But Joe didn’t care. He was inside now.

  The cabin was entirely dark and completely still. Joe’s head bumped against a low-hanging lamp. A short-legged table knocked against his shins. He rushed to the tap, desperate to run hot water over his tender hands, but the faucet let out nothing but the slow hiss of a deep sleep. If he was going to miss his induction, he needed to plug the hole he had made in the window. And get food. All by himself. Benny had been swallowed up. The only question was whether he would let himself be swallowed, too.

  For now, he found a cold bedroom and slept.

  His dreams were gruesome. Over an impossible connection, his mother yelled: there’s a plan for you, a destiny! But even in the dream, Joe knew that when unrolled, her insipid shouts were parts of a story she hadn’t thought to read to the end, her own advice ignorant of the fact that the Young Savior had slipped away early, that the carefully plotted diagram of Joe’s life and purpose was stacked in a high pile of papers rotting on an untended desk. At least he wasn’t alone; thousands of other destinies lay below and above, all of them left to languish while He enjoyed His eternal lunch break, a hundred First Tuesdays passing by in the blink of an eye. A little help? Joe shouted into the treetops. No answer, of course; his words fell into a bottomless mass. There was nothing for Joe to soak himself in, not even a drop of His old bathwater.

  In the morning, the cold sun poured through the window onto the bed, warming his legs and feet. A yellow dust coated all the furniture and countertops, the tiny motes making small tornado swirls through the air as if disturbed by Joe’s presence.

  The light of day allowed Joe to make a survey of his new surroundings. The cabin consisted of a kitchen with a bar that bled into a living room, a small bathroom with no tub, and a large, rectangular bedroom. Knotty pine for the walls, oak for the straight-backed chairs, and no personal touches to the place except for a dusty vase with some long-dead flowers on the heavy elm table in the dining room. No generator for blackouts. Mice droppings bordered the edges of the walls. Light jumped off the little pieces of glass from the front window that Joe had shattered the night before. The shards were everywhere, and he made sure to keep his boots on.

  The light on the stove was beyond dead. In the bathroom, as Joe slid open the shower door, a team of roaches burst into life and skittered down the drain. When he turned on the water to drown them out, the liquid oozed from the showerhead mealy and brown. Benny’s uncle had stocked the kitchen well. Joe ran his fingers over the cold metal cans and did a quick survey: boneless turkey, pork chunks, cooked ground beef. The bookshelves were empty except for a massive, ripening stack of old newspapers.

  For the next few minutes, Joe picked up the rocks that were scattered all around the cabin. They had rolled everywhere: under the couch, into the fireplace. He needed to talk out loud; without the sound of his own voice, there was a complete absence of human life. “How’d you get here?” he said to a rock that sat in the bottom of an empty wastebasket.

  Poking around for more wayward stones, he found a crackled pamphlet demanding answers in regard to the aging of Homeland leaders. The anonymous author detailed the lives of a series of cabinet members who had become fathers in their seventies and eighties, all of them allies of the prime minister. Thanks to Fareon, the pamphlet claimed, these jubilant men were thriving well past their expected expiration dates. The pamphlet struck a tone of conquered spirit, of hope burned and flattened. What power, the pamphlet asked, might a few timid antiwar legislators, the so-called Coyotes, have against these men who could live forever?

  After a few minutes, Joe tossed the yellowed booklet aside. He hadn’t heard of these statistics, hadn’t read before about these old men and their babies. But even so, there was no time to think about the wide chasm of life expectancy between the prime minister’s cronies and everyone else, no time to think about why these old men weren’t dying. All the days he had ever lived were rushing toward one: First Tuesday. Joe needed to make a choice.

  Whatever happened in the next stretch, he knew his decision needed to be sharp and unbreakable. Instead, all he had was a dull and gnawing doubt. Young Savior, help me.

  In a closet, he pushed aside more old newspapers until he came upon a toolbox. He decided to cover the smashed window, a reasonable gesture, he thought, whether he stayed or not. From that same closet he grabbed a heavy jacket with mold-stained sleeves, shook it, and went outside. Laid against the back of the house were three large sheets of plywood. There were nails in the toolbox, as well as a short saw with long, sharp teeth. After measuring the size of the window and marking the dimensions on the wood, Joe found two flat stones and laid a plank across them. As a makeshift sawhorse, it would have to do.

  The saw’s teeth bit into the wood. Like anyone else, Joe had seen pictures of Homeland hospitals with rows of torsos, bodies chopped at the waist, humans cut short, their structures flipped open. His sawing was smooth and clean, and the wood didn’t splinter. As he worked, the world above him poured out blue birdsongs he couldn’t understand. But Joe also knew that in this same moment, with each stroke of the saw, coffee was being served piping hot at the Unicorn, wild-haired men were being trimmed and trained and boarded onto buses, and that the solid earth still spun on its axis even with him up here all alone and not witness to any of it. Even though the air was cold, Joe broke out in sweat. He finished sawing, and the wood was cut down to size.

  Picking up the plank, Joe listened as the leaves crunched and rattled beneath his feet. His parents would have liked a call, Joe knew that. First, his mother would ask about church, followed by a fatherly monologue about how the door to a respectable life started and stopped with Joe showing up at the induction center and coughing on command for the Homelan
d. Joe thought back to the religious classes he had faithfully attended each and every Sunday of his youth. The prophets, he knew, when they needed to think on something, to locate the ultimate origin of a problem, would go apart from their towns and live for a time in agony and solitude. So far, so good; he had that part down. But that was it. Ostracism and exile were all he had accomplished. What was the next step?

  The whole forest is chattering, Joe thought, but there’s nothing I can take from it.

  With a final heave, he lifted the plank to the window frame. Immediately he recognized that he had miscalculated. His measurements were off, and the plywood had been cut far too small for the inset of the window.

  It was early; the sun was still plenty high. If he wanted to leave, to surrender himself to the Registry, he had to decide soon. A bird called down from the trees. He checked the measurements of the plank and tried again, lifting the wood against the frame. It still didn’t fit. His sawing, his measurements, something had been off. All alone, Joe thought, in the earthly beauty of the forest, true isolation, just vast swaths of wilderness, a wide and empty landscape, devoid of the one person he wanted to see. Or anyone, really.

  It felt like a prison.

  18.

  Benny knew he was moving before he opened his eyes. A sightless survey of his surroundings: on his shoulder, a damp and unidentified pressure, seeping through the fabric of his coat. Below him, a mechanical hum vibrated the floor. None of it felt right.

  Mostly he was confused. His coat was damp, but the revelation that he was wearing a coat at all was much more of a surprise. Someone had been inspecting this very coat, that much he was sure of, but how and why and how long ago all that had happened, his ragged thoughts could not figure. All he knew was that his shoulder was wet and that, somehow, he was moving.

  Thoughts came in small, heavy slices, and though waves of pain rolled throughout his body, he did not think to open his eyes. Another bang, that was what he needed, just a sniff or snort to clear his thoughts. But the humming floor, the angled dampness on his shoulder, the swinging ache in his jaw. Something was wrong, and so, Benny thought, he would keep out the world, if only for a few minutes more.

  But the world kept coming. Thinking clearly was difficult, as he was sure a small hammerstone was battering the thin bone behind his forehead, an internal pounding that dragged each brief spark of a thought immediately to the guillotine, an endless cycle of quick birth and death. No idea stuck until, finally, one did: Touch a finger, this cognitive survivor told him, to the wetness of your shoulder. Yes, he decided. To find out why his shoulder was wet was important. Just as rapidly, this thought, too, gave way to another: Why am I not able to touch my shoulder? Followed by: Why are my hands tied? And finally: How about I open my eyes?

  Yes, Benny. Open your eyes.

  Instantly, that rare life phenomenon: an immediate answer. The wetness on his shoulder was saliva. A strange man was resting his chin against Benny’s shoulder, the banks of his teeth pouring forth a rushing river of drool. The man’s eyes were closed, his breaths slow. Answer two delivered itself just as rapidly: the vibration beneath him was the slow hum of an engine, and gradually the scene before him took shape: he was on a hard bench, in the back of a truck, a man next to him semiconscious and drooling on his shoulder, his hands tied with some sort of thin cable. All around him were more men in various states of alertness. A softly fermenting smell of sweat coated them all, and Benny found the thick stench that had invaded his nostrils hard to bear.

  “What is this?” Benny asked to no one in particular. His voice hovered over the truck hold. One man was snoring hard, the deep sleep of a Substance-smasher. No one answered. “Where are we?” Benny asked again, his voice pinched and rising.

  “Not so loud!” a man from the far end of the bench yelled, far too loudly.

  Benny understood. Simply speaking those three words had sent waves of pain through his fragile skull. To pull oneself so radically away from a planned day of Substance smashing was to dry out a small plant in desperate need of mere drops of water. From the looks of the men in the truck, they, too, had been snipped from the tree much too early.

  Again he spoke, softer this time. “Does anybody know where we are?”

  The same man answered, offering only the side of his face, as if to turn toward Benny was too much. “The Registry, man. This is the Registry.”

  “What?” slurred Benny.

  The unhappy man seemed to gain strength from Benny’s ignorance. They were, he explained, in the midst of what he had heard was called Operation Lowlife, though he had also heard many other names and doubted that one was any more official than the others. “They raid the drug houses,” the man explained, “pick up whoever they find, hold us till we’re clean, chop our hair off, and toss us into the jungle. Fast track. I didn’t know it was true, I’d only heard stories, but look around. It is true, it must be. They say they pull up at a house, scatter or catch the dealers, and grab the users. Now look. That is just what has happened.”

  “I’m not a user,” said Benny.

  “Right,” the man said.

  “Maybe every now and then,” Benny mumbled.

  The slow hum of the engine disappeared.

  “What’s that?” Benny asked the man, the only one, it seemed, who could talk.

  “That’s the next stop.”

  “The induction center?”

  “Oh no. You don’t go straight there. They hold you in these detox zones, make sure you’re all clean and that the stuff is out of your system.”

  “But tomorrow is First Tuesday. Why take us today?”

  “Was it your turn?” the man asked. “Were you really going to go?”

  “Maybe,” Benny said. “So you think we’re at some detox place?”

  “Nope. Take a listen to those screams. We’re at another drug house. They need as many of us as they can get.”

  And though this made sense to Benny, and though he knew on some level that he was included in their numbers, for a brief and unredeeming moment, he, too, felt worried for the Homeland. What has it come to, he asked himself, if these men surrounding me are the type of men we need to win our fight?

  The man who had been drooling on his shoulder woke up and promptly vomited onto the floor. Benny, who now understood the terms of the world he found himself in, passed out, the Substance still smashing its way through his system.

  A slash of light bored into his eyeballs as the back door of the truck was ripped open. Benny blinked rapidly, snapping his eyes into focus. Through the slant of the door he saw a tree-lined street. Two familiar-looking uniformed men clad in khaki stood by with large rifles slung over their shoulders. Though bothered by the light, Benny could make out the wooden grip on the shorter guard’s rifle, the only part of his long weapon that did not catch the sun. The taller guard was shoving in one man, then another, both of them barely able to walk, the first barefoot, the second with twig arms and legs attached to a skeletal frame. Once shoved through the doors, the barefoot man made the slow effort to crawl toward an empty space on the bench, inching along on his stomach, as his hands, Benny saw, were bound behind him, knotted with a slim spiral of plastic. The other man, no power left, simply closed his eyes and lay on the floor, breaths distant enough from one another that Benny was worried his lungs might simply be forgetting to draw in air.

  “Hospital!” Benny croaked. Speaking was still difficult, yelling even more of a challenge. “Get this man to the hospital.”

  But the doors had already been closed, and with a small shake of life, the truck was once again on the move.

  “Grab onto my ankles,” Benny said to the man on the floor, extending his feet toward him. It took a moment for Benny to remember that just as his own hands were bound behind his back, this man’s were, too. Time for a new tactic. “Slide forward a bit,” Benny told him, “and I’ll hook your armpits with my legs and pull you toward the bench. You don’t want to stay down there.”

 
Indeed, a curling stream of liquid was winding away from the minced heap of vomit piled on the floor, a braided path sliding down the bed of the truck. But the man just looked up at him, smiled, and closed his eyes, placing his cheek flat on the floor.

  “Don’t you even want to try?”

  But the other men, still in their own small worlds, hissed at Benny to be quiet, and the man on the floor lay silent and still. Watching him, Benny could see that it was far too easy to stop living long before you were dead.

  Slowly, a routine began to take shape: the truck would stop, fists would bang on doors, yelping men could be heard scattering, followed by the back doors of the truck swinging open to allow two or three more—always those who had been most overrun by the flood, the ones who could barely walk, the men who had not run because they were not able to do so.

  It became clear that this was a small, poorly funded, and modest operation. From the dim sounds of each stop, Benny gathered that the driver and his assistant did not chase anyone, only grabbing those Substance-smashers who had drifted too far into a melted mix of inner light and shadows. These smashers, the ones who had not moved, were unprepared for the event of being ripped from their pleasant and hallucinatory world and pushed into a very unpleasant arrival in the real one.

  After a few hours, the truck was full. Several of the men were shirtless, or shoeless, or some combination of the two. More hours passed, and Benny heard the motor cut once again, but this time the back door did not open. Instead, they sat, the deep darkness smearing across their thoughts.

  “Where do you think we are?” someone asked.

  “Downtown,” another man answered. “Listen to those sounds.”

  The man was right. Horns, a drill shattering concrete, crashing cityscapes, the earthly sounds of clustered Homeland citizens moving through the afternoon, living their lives.