“What is this, Lance? What are you doing?” Tim had followed him, protesting his presence in this place where he did not belong. “Is this about the trial? It’s still not too late. You can always—”
Reaching for the knife, Lance pivoted.
“Okay,” Tim said, his hands rising immediately. “Okayokayokayokayokay.”
Lance stood there, knife pointed. With a lift of his eyebrows, he made it clear to Tim that now was the time to start talking.
“But I don’t know where she is!”
With a shake of his head, Lance rotated the blade belly up, gripping the handle hard. In the apartment across the hall, the asthmatic coughed so loud her throat seemed to split in two. After a few loose swipes through the air, Lance rested the sharp tip of the knife against the soft tissue of Tim’s nose. This final act seemed to increase Tim’s desire to talk.
“She wrote me once, okay? You happy? She’s in Interior City. I don’t know where she lives. The return address was some anti-Registry counseling place.”
Lance dropped the knife, its flat spine slapping the floor. Outside, two long blasts from a train whistle, the type of train that no longer took passengers, only conscripts and their weapons. I love you, Lance told the Lorrie in his head. I have loved you always, and I will continue—
“Please,” Tim was saying. “Just go.”
Lance nodded.
“By the way, I leave tomorrow,” Tim said. He was breathing hard. “For the jungle. Shipping out. It’s my last day here in—”
“Not my problem,” Lance told him. Only when the door closed behind him did he realize that he truly meant it. Caring about yet another dead guy was a sensation that had long been lost to him. Time to keep moving.
20.
Across town, Lorrie had heard, another anti-Registry shop had opened. Fareon freaks, people said. A few counselors from the Center had gone there on an undercover mission and returned to report tales of cocky lectures on the impossibility of geriatric health as sharp as the prime minister’s. Desperate, sobbing men were sent away with detailed descriptions of the supply line of Fareon from solar evaporation ponds deep in Foreign jungles right into the bloodstream of the Homeland’s most powerful.
But what about me? these men would ask. What should I do?
Thwart and expose the endeavors of the prime minister, these men were told, and you thwart the war.
Great, the men would say. Another way of saying nothing.
Hearing these stories only assured Lorrie she was on the right track. How sad, she thought, that the Fareon folks and their way of thinking was gaining ground. “Two attacks on the Strategic Stockpile?” smirked a headline in one of their newspapers. “Just you wait.”
On most days, Lorrie’s plans to make the Center more effective felt maddeningly slow. She had no revolution in mind, no usurpation of power. Eric’s leadership was too ensconced for that. Instead, she would influence his influencers. She would use his mother.
In service to the plan, Lorrie had begun offering Eric’s mother, Jane, fresh little confidences, pieces of her life that she knew the older woman would interpret as admiration. Not that there was much competition for female companionship. Susan had not come back since her radio-shattering exit, and though a small handful of other women volunteered, thanks to Lorrie’s stubborn persistence, Jane had recently begun asking her on daily walks. Though Lorrie felt guilty leaving whatever other girl had shown up that day to file and collate, becoming a bright and blooming presence in order to win over Jane and convince her of the need to restructure the Center was the highlight of Lorrie’s day. It turned out that pretending to be interested in someone could actually lead to the real thing.
At first their walks kept to the blocks immediately surrounding the Center, but soon the two of them ventured out farther and deeper. From sprawling neighborhoods of vast and manicured houses to gridded complexes with harsh angles and an abundance of concrete, Lorrie and Jane walked and talked.
“We don’t just save men’s lives, you know,” Jane told her. She wore a thick headband that covered most of her hair. “The Foreign women, doused in those chemicals we’re spraying them with, they’re mothers. By stopping this war, we’re trying to save those women over there, those mothers, too.”
“But do you think that the Center’s operations are as effective as they could be? As efficient?”
Up a narrow street that seemed to be reserved for bicyclists, they strolled through a park shaded with trees, past a group of missing-limbed men shouting and playing speed chess. Lorrie waited for Jane to answer.
“Let me tell you a story.”
Though it was not clear exactly how the anecdote related to the bloated and redundant structures of the Center, Lorrie was nonetheless intrigued. Decades ago, Jane said, she, too, had been in Western City North, fighting against the proposition to allocate no-strings governmental funds to any huckster that wanted to start a newspaper.
Lorrie had not known there had ever been such a battle.
“Well, we weren’t successful,” Jane said, and though her smile was sad, Lorrie could see there had still been some joy in the fight.
Jane, Lorrie was convinced, had lived her life fully. Lines of delighted tension crept across her face with each shared memory. A soft wrinkle appeared as Jane recalled her national campaign to send Mother’s Day cards to Homeland legislators demanding an immediate stop to the war for the sake of mothers everywhere. Sometimes, when Jane was recounting a particularly important moment, she would reach over and give Lorrie’s hand a squeeze. Few people had touched her like that. There is no one else, Lorrie thought, who could become so excited about upending our sick world that she has no choice but to reach out and grab my hand. With each squeeze, Lorrie loved her harder.
Arriving at a small lake, the two of them silently agreed to take the path that ringed the water. Jane went on. In addition to her duties at the Center, she was vice president of the Interior City branch of the Women’s League for Freedom and Justice, she said.
“WLFJ?” Lorrie said, laughing.
Jane blinked and laughed, too, said she knew it rolled odd off the tongue, but told Lorrie that the name was stuck, that WLFJ had been founded many decades ago and was the oldest pacifist women’s organization in the history of the world. “Willfffij,” Lorrie said, giggling.
“I think I can tell you this,” Jane said. “I feel as though you’ll understand me.”
Lorrie nodded.
“The Center, our tactics. We’re not winning.”
Here it was. Lorrie didn’t need to bring Jane to her side. She had gotten there all on her own.
“Our edges are too rough,” Jane went on. “We’ve alienated the mothers, the lawmakers. They associate us with violence, with attacks on the Homeland, with weirdos cutting up their sons’ uniforms and putting them on anorexic mannequins. Ideology Five, our detractors say. Not that any of them have ever bothered to learn any of that system’s most basic principles. But even so, we’re part of the problem. Think about our counselors! They scan a few of the five thousand newspapers we subscribe to, eyes zigging and zagging over the pages for some elusive key idea. Once they think they’ve attained that, they crumple that paper and discard it for the next. But that’s not how knowledge works, right, Lorrie? You know that. A person needs to understand how one concept relates to another. Instead, so pressed for time to stop this war, they’ve taken the easiest parts of a thousand complex ideas and formed them into some new, shallow theory based only on a misconception of other theories. All those Coyotes in parliament, they want to put an end to this thing just like we do.”
“But there’s only, like, five of them.”
“Oh no, don’t believe that for a second. I have it on good authority that quite a few more are in the process of declaring publicly. Each new attack, though. It’s a setback. But these legislators, they can help. We’ve got to change our path.”
“I know!” Lorrie said. “What I’ve really been focused
on is our work flow. Our training. Our organization as a whole.”
“Honey,” Jane said brightly, “I can’t tell you how much I agree. I’ve been meaning to talk to my son about this. But if you have any ideas, I’d love to hear them.”
They paused in front of a large shrub. Lorrie noted the beauty of its slippery shade of green. “What about letting women counsel? We train the men who volunteer, and in two or three weeks, they’re gone. At least with women, we could stick around. Have some continuity.” As she spoke, she reached out absently to feel the leaves in her fingers.
“Don’t touch that one,” Jane said, gripping her wrist. “It’s poison.”
Lorrie drew back her hand.
“I don’t know why it’s here, around a lake in the middle of the city,” Jane said, making a sour face. “Touch just one leaf and you’ll swell up severely. Oozing, crusting, anywhere it makes contact with your skin.”
“I’ll be sure to stay away,” Lorrie said.
In that moment, Lorrie wanted to tell her she knew what it was like to hate your skin, when two men approached them. Both wore snap-brimmed hats, long, drab coats, and brightly polished loafers.
“Ma’am,” one of the agents said. “We need to talk to you. We’re going to need you to come with us.”
And before Lorrie could speak, Jane was being dragged away.
When she was sick of typing and filing, Lorrie sat in the front room and watched the counselors. Without Jane, she felt more alone than ever. Surely she would soon be released, Lorrie told herself. But there was no getting around it: her ally was gone.
The first drop-in was easy. The kid clearly had money, so the counselor sent him to a “Respected Doctor” who was secretly sympathetic to the cause. Not that such beliefs came cheap. For a thousand Currencies, that doctor would write anybody a note for anything. Only Respected Doctors could grant deferments now; hence the deliriously high pricing. Not many Respected Doctors were left.
Two more boys came in, and Lorrie watched them head toward Doug. Poor kids, why did they have to land on Doug? There should have been a warning sign above his desk informing the helpless about the shoddy, ill-informed counseling they were about to be subjected to. Lorrie leaned in close to hear what he had to say.
“Hold on, let’s talk big picture,” Doug was telling them.
“Big picture?” one kid said. “But what should I do?”
“No, no. Big picture first.” Doug turned his head sideways and gazed at something in the distance that Lorrie couldn’t see. “Ending it.”
“Ending the war?”
“No, man. Big picture. Ending the army.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah,” Doug said, his voice rising. “The end of the Homeland Army. You guys ready for that?” He sniffed and squeezed his nostrils with his thumb and forefinger.
The two boys did not look ready for anything.
“How about taxes?”
“Taxes?” The boys looked at each other, confused.
“Yeah, taxes, you paying ’em? You shouldn’t be. Don’t support the machine.”
Doug was completely twisted, she realized, a real Substance-smasher simply trying to endure his time between fixes. As for the two boys seeking help, the kid who asked the most questions kept slumping his shoulders lower and lower. Another minute and he might melt into a globby pool of guts and bones, a small stain of liquid on an old chair ripe for a gnat swarm. Doug looked like he wanted to go to the back and sniff up some more of whatever he was taking. The boys tried to appear casual, but Lorrie could see that they were devastated.
“Thanks,” they mumbled to Doug on their way out.
Two more casualties.
She followed the boys out the door.
“I can help,” Lorrie said.
The three of them stood in the parking lot, the boys with their short, spinning waves of hair neatly trimmed, Lorrie readying herself to hear their story.
“Who are you?” the taller one asked.
Lorrie examined the boy’s face for a fear of death, unclear on which one had problems with the Registry. The tall boy looked blank and thoughtless, but without fear. “I work,” she told them, “for the Center.”
The boys gave each other sideways looks of distress and confusion. “Great,” said the shorter one, softly. He was the one who had done most of the talking.
Lorrie understood his disappointment. How could she not? The man he had put his faith in was probably Substance smashing in the bathroom at this very moment. He had treated their desperate lives as some sort of monumental game. “No, really,” Lorrie told them. “I can help.” She felt frantic to see someone so young and vital accomplish something, even if that something was simply not to die.
The shorter one shifted his weight from one foot to the other and spoke. “Just me,” he said. “My friend is safe. For now.”
“Have you got any Currencies?” Lorrie asked.
“Some.”
“One thousand Currencies, and I can get you a Respected Doctor who will swear you have any disease you want.”
“I don’t have a thousand Currencies.” Across the street, a motor struggled to start.
“Are you close?”
“Not even,” the tall friend replied.
Lorrie thought she saw a smirk. Maybe the friend had already accepted his own early death in the jungle and wanted everyone else to be dragged down with him. Loud ticking, metal grinding on metal, and a high pitch of unpleasant sounds all melded together. Someone’s car was fucked.
“It doesn’t matter anyway,” said the friend. “I read that the prime minister has a secret stash of some crazy Foreign mineral that keeps him healthy. You think he’ll give that up? There’s no stopping this. It’s just a matter of when we go.”
“That’s not true!” said Lorrie. Turning to his friend, she asked, “Do you hear how crazy that sounds?”
“Just because something sounds crazy doesn’t mean it’s not true,” the tall one responded. “Besides, how would you know?”
“Don’t you think if this whole war were predicated on some search for a secret mineral, someone would have spoken up by now? How many people would it take to pull something like that off? How would the supply chain work? Somebody would slip.”
The tall friend shook his head. “Of course they wouldn’t slip. They’re probably paid in small amounts of the stuff themselves. The whole point is that the prime minister is organized, that he has all the power. He created a war; you think he can’t create a cover-up?”
“He may have started the war,” Lorrie said, “but this war has been going on for almost twenty-five years. We elected him. Every time.”
“But back to my induction,” the short kid said. “You said I had options. Is that really true?”
What did she think she was doing, talking to this kid? “I’m sorry,” she told him. “If there are any real options, I don’t know about them. Not yet.” She made sure not to look at his face as she walked away.
21.
The search for Lorrie. Three options, the ticket lady told Lance, three ways to begin: option A, a seat on the first-class luxury special that would deliver him directly to Interior City—one piece of fresh fruit included—option B: a regular ticket accompanied by plenty of stops and transfers. Or, she said, the power draining from her voice, a third option. Option C. Our most reasonably priced option.
Go on, Lance told her.
The ticket lady paused, frowned, and leaned into the glass window between them. “The Broken Bus.”
Though he had never before heard the term, it was easy to decipher. Broken did not refer to the bus itself, but to the people inside it. A bus of vets. And why not? There was, he knew, no better place to hide than right inside the monster’s heart.
“So?” said the ticket lady. She quoted him a price.
The Broken Bus was cheap enough that Lance could now arrive in a strange city with a few extra Currencies in his pocket, expenditures for a new life he would resu
me with Lorrie, a life in which their reunited love would overtake his lack of money, or perhaps make him so happy he would fail to notice the poor state of his finances. The Broken Bus it was.
In he went, deep into the dark belly of the bus depot, down the concrete walkways lined with small kiosks stuffed with racks of newspapers and the catcalling women selling them, through puddles that stank of piss and various alcohols, beneath archway billboards advertising the Point Line, past a young woman with a desperate smile selling hard-boiled eggs and raw browned turnip tops. Finally he arrived at the gate, a lifeless part of the terminal fallen into disuse. There were no other buses besides the run-down vehicle with rusted rub rails and crooked windows that would chug him across the Homeland. No one, it was clear, wanted to see these men.
The bus itself was unmarked. It made sense; after a series of attacks on Registry buses, everyone was being careful. How perfect, Lance heard a vet remark, would it be to make it out of the jungle only to be killed by some Ideology Fiver back on Homeland soil? At the entrance door of the bus, the driver laid a tilted ramp over the small steps. Up the ramp shuffled the monsters: braced and twisted knees, swollen necks, scarred faces, leaky ears, exploded noses, all exposed and naked in the exhausted light. Men like this could have been his brothers, Lance thought, if any of his brothers had been blessed with just slightly more luck.
Lance boarded last. On the way to the bus station, he had taken seriously the warning that undercover agents were following his every move, but after a series of dramatic loops and turns, it was clear no one was watching him. Of course the Homeland couldn’t monitor every single person it didn’t have room for. As he stepped onto the bus, he could feel the break of the invisible chains that had controlled him from afar. Yes, the pleasure of exposure was sweet.
To form a cover story, he had picked out a newspaper at random, turning straight to the news of a recent jungle skirmish. A quick scan and he now had a military unit, a subtle infirmity, and an area of Foreign territory he hoped he could pronounce well enough to have credibly been in battle in. Even this tactic worried him. Perhaps being able to pronounce the name of the place you had fought at was a sure sign of not having fought there.
This Is the Night Page 20