This Is the Night

by Jonah C. Sirott

  23.

  A shake of leaves, a distant howl from some catlike creature. Plenty of sounds, but no one to talk to. By Joe’s second morning in the cabin, the lack of conversation had become a physical pain, a dull ache that stretched from the insides of his ankles right up to his thighs. The longing surprised him. In the city, an accidental brush from a stranger would make him bristle. But now, days into the solitude, he felt desperate to find someone to talk to. Outside, he heard a strange rustling. Against all that he knew, he still hoped for Benny.

  He rushed over to the door and pulled it open. Immediately he felt a quick burst of wind and found himself greeted by a small metal eye, unwinking. The barrel of a rifle. A rapid series of twists and turns twirled through his head. Had the Registry tracked him down? But First Tuesday was tomorrow; he wasn’t even officially delinquent. No, this woman aiming a weapon between his eyes could not represent the Homeland.

  “And you are?” The woman was calm, her breath steady.

  Joe could see that her finger was outside the trigger guard. She hadn’t yet decided whether or not to shoot.

  “I’m a friend,” he stammered. “My friend Benny, he said—”

  “Benny? I don’t know any Benny.” Her right hand pulled back on some sort of lever, the high-pitched noise of a mechanical system locking into place. Slowly her index finger moved until it rested lightly on the trigger.

  “Wait, wait, wait! Sorry. Benny is my friend. His uncle, that’s who owns this place.”

  “Mort.”

  “Right, Mort. Benny is Mort’s cousin—sorry, nephew. And Benny is supposed to meet me here. Mort said we could stay.” Had Mort said they could stay? Joe had no idea.

  “Well, why didn’t you say so?” The woman lowered the rifle. A few more relieving clicks and slips from the gun that Joe hoped were the sounds of disarmament. “I live on the other side of the lake. I watch the place for Mort when he’s not around.”

  Joe wanted to invite her in, to talk to her, to open up about his problems, but to invite her in would be to expose the shattered window and scattered glass, and he did not want to make his story any more complex than it had to be. And yet, he could not let her go.

  “Can I walk you back to your cabin?” he asked.

  “I think I know the way, thanks.”

  “Well, I could use some company.”

  “Young man, I’ve got a lot on my plate. I’ve already wasted half my day coming over here to check on this place.”

  Joe wondered how she could have wasted half her day before he had even had breakfast.

  “I can’t even walk you back to your cabin?”

  “And for what? I don’t like to explain myself to people. I don’t want to do any explaining.”

  “Same here. I hate explaining, too.” Anything to make her stay.

  “Truth be told, I can guess why a young man like yourself might be here, and I don’t much care for it.”

  “No, no,” he protested. “I’m not a runner.” And it was true. He wasn’t. Not yet, at least.

  “I apologize for implying otherwise,” the woman said. “Still, I’ve got to be getting back. Hope I didn’t cause any offense. It’s just, the papers write about these young boys not wanting to do their part when the time comes—”

  “An apple,” Joe said. “I’ll give you an apple if you let me walk you home.” He apologized in advance for bartering away the apple meant for him and Benny, their celebration apple for once the future was clear. The last apple on the dying tree.

  A balmy lust spread over her face. “Now you’re talking. It’s not a far walk, no more than twenty minutes. But once we get there, you’re going to have to leave me alone. I’ve got things to do, you hear?”

  “You’ve got yourself a deal.”

  24.

  Trance is not the right word, neither is daze, spell, or dream. Words, after all, line the books whose pages Alan turns every day, in the jungle, in the library, in the dim glow of his bunk before lights out. Words, he knows, don’t mean what he wants them to, but instead have lives of their own, undulating charges of electricity traversing the world on self-directed terms. Now Alan pushes up against the window of the headmaster’s office. No word, he decides, can ever explain what I’m doing. Or why I’m doing it. But what exactly he is doing is still forming like the clouds of a dream. Make it wild.

  The creak of the window is loud, but the skittering songs from the dance are louder. With two palms flat on the wooden floor, half his body is already inside the forbidden office, the mission now under way. A long pause, the magnet pull of his intentions sliding the rest of his body through the window cleanly, no crash of ankles against glass.

  No one he knows has ever been in the headmaster’s office. In respect of this fact, Alan stands up and looks around. After four years at the School, this office has become mythical, a roped and gated legend that produces a nervous condition in any student threatened with a visit. Even the most troubled miscreants are whipped and yanked elsewhere. In one corner of the room, he spies a large stack of newspapers. Flipping through them, he spots titles not carried by the school library. “Charcoal Attacks Still a Mystery,” screams a bolded headline. “Largest Induction Center in Homeland to Expand,” shouts another, followed by the subhead: “Western City North Reaches Capacity.” A few blinks, and Alan’s eyes move to yet another paper: “Coyotes Gain Ground in Parliament.”

  In the center of the room he sees a large wooden desk, just as they have all been told. Around school, tales of the headmaster’s desk have long been constructed on principles of fear and mystery. “That will do well on my desk,” the headmaster is known to say as he takes the Y-shaped wood some boy has spent months sanding and smoothing into the perfect slingshot. The desk, too, has a reputation of holding not only contraband but also new plans, platforms, and pillars, rumors of untried policies or dreamed-up futuristic punishments. No student has ever seen this desk; they only know that it can churn out directives that harm or help them, depending on its mood. You are weak, the students are told; the desk is powerful.

  Artlessly, crudely, joyfully, Alan spits on the desk. What next? The voice of the Majority Group lady, rising from the wavering world behind his eyes, softly singing in his ear: Make it wild.

  He pulls on the first of four drawers. Top drawer: locked. Middle drawer: a heavy-looking stapler, some old rubber stamps, a pile of pay stubs, a carved pipe with a crusted rim. Third drawer: a bag of bright green apples. Never before has Alan seen so much fresh fruit at once. Their skin is clear: no brown spots, the surface free of oozing mush marks. He takes one and puts it in his bag, then takes another. After a moment’s pause, he lifts the entire netted sack out of the drawer and places it in his bag. The rusty receptors of his brain shoot to life, reminding him of their long-forgotten taste. But no, he reminds himself. Don’t eat the apple, Alan.

  On the back corner of the desk is a thick, bulging envelope with the word VOUCHERS printed on the front. The free tickets for the bus ride home for graduating students to offer their final good-byes before shipping out. Reaching into the envelope, Alan grabs two of them. For a moment, the idea comes to him that he will find the Registry assignments and destroy them. But he knows that this small act will lead to nothing. He can destroy any letters the Registry might have sent, but without hesitation, they will simply send new ones.

  Next to the vouchers, steady and unflinching, sits a small, square box of matches. Alan pauses, stares up for a moment at the coffered ceiling, his eyes racing in circles around the perimeter beams, his ears listening to the rumbling sounds of the dance as they vibrate the office walls. Ricky X-P, were he ever put in this position, deep behind enemy lines, would have a perfect plan. But Ricky X-P, Alan reminds himself, is just the transmutation of some writer’s thoughts into words. He doesn’t need made-up stories anymore; he has a real person to look up to.

  Thank you, Woody, Alan thinks. For he now has a plan. Now he knows. Words from the pamphlets run to and fro in hi
s mind, tagging the wall of his skull before skittering back to the other side. Quotas. The disproportionate numbers of Homeland Indigenous combat deaths. The health of his people, he reminds himself, is holy. And as Woody Gilbert had said, one must do whatever is necessary to keep it that way. He will burn the whole place down.

  Still, the thin sticks in front of him are incapable of lighting anything more substantial than a small cigar. These matches are not matches at all. They are possibility, for it is these weak matches that jump his mind to an image of the bright orange zippered pouch his father gave him so long ago, the small kit with the sturdy survival matches, their phosphoric orange heads just waiting to be struck. As the Young Savior said: Strike the proper chord, and you shall make history. Now those matches, he could work with.

  “Now!” he yells to Gad, pulling his elbow hard. “You need to come with me.”

  “What?”

  Gad can’t hear him; the music is too loud, the stomp of dancing students too strong. Alan’s timing is off as well. Gad is taking a break, greedily sipping the sticky red juice the nuns and priests provide only at the final ship-out dance. Each boy has made sure to have at least three cups. Will they get red sticky juice in between fighting Foreigns in the jungle? All of them know they will not.

  “I’m not kidding!” Alan shakes him with both hands.

  “Why would I leave?”

  “Just trust me.”

  Gad leans in close. “Why are you wearing a backpack?”

  “If you don’t come with me, there’s going to be trouble.” Is he begging or ordering? Alan does not know himself.

  Before Gad can respond, the music stops. A bony nun finger points to the woven wire that covers the gymnasium windows. Alan turns, too, ready to see the light sparkings of the timber-frame storage shed, but when he looks, he sees there is no structure at all. The entire shed has completely vanished, and a roar of spreading flames has circled two dormitories and the dining hall, and is now extending its rage quickly, zigzagging toward them.

  “Run!” yells a tall boy from his Homeland History class.

  Nobody moves.

  “RUN!” yells a nun.

  Everybody moves.

  Gad drops his cup. A small pond of sticky red liquid rolls over the smooth wooden floor.

  Grabbing Gad’s hand, Alan pulls him away from the crowds, away from the school, away from the fire, and down the path of low grasses that leads toward the closest town, which leads to the small bus station, which leads to larger bus stations that in turn connect with the most distant corners of the Homeland. Students scramble, nuns scream, priests bellow, and Alan and Gad slip through the barbed wire and into the night.

  As they run, Alan turns back to Gad to make sure he’s following. And even through all the sharp cries of fear, he is sure he can make out the sounds of one he has forgotten: Hazel the guinea pig, locked in her cage, tiny teeth chomping on the scalding metal bars while the fire consumes her.

  The two of them are breathing hard. In a few minutes, there will be an emergency roll call. In a few minutes, everyone will know they are gone.

  The moon is large and gives off a crinkled, hazy light. Behind them, a dark pillar of smoke. Gad has stopped running, so Alan does, too. Finally, a moment to talk.

  “Wait, what?” Gad says.

  “She came to me, the lady in the pamphlets.”

  “And she told you to set fire to the whole school?”

  “Well, no. She told me to do something big. Wild, actually. I thought of the fire myself. But I didn’t think it would spread that far.”

  “And while you were lighting the fire—”

  “That’s when it came to me! What it’s all been leading up to. This is what the pamphlets have been telling us.”

  A hungry bark in the distance. Would the younger priests bring their nattering sniff-dogs to track them down? Alan crinkles his face at Gad, hoping he’ll realize that there is no time to spare.

  “And what have the pamphlets been telling us?”

  “To get the hell out of here. So here we are, right? We escape, right before they snap us up and send us off. And we go right at them, just like the pamphlets said. We go to their biggest induction center, and we burn it to the ground.”

  Two more barks, closer now.

  “And where is that?”

  “Gad,” he says, trying to sound as confident as possible. “We’ve got to keep moving. We’ve got to get to the bus station in town.”

  Gad does not move. “If we go,” he says, “we’d be—”

  Alan nods slowly. “Dodgers.” Down the long country road, he sees two sets of headlights, coming fast. “Gad,” he says. “You should come with me.”

  Gad does not move. “Come where?” he says.

  The headlights are getting closer.

  “We haven’t even gotten our assignments yet. I might get rejected. Or placed in Intelligence or something.”

  “Everybody is infantry.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  The bright yellow lights will be on them in seconds.

  “If you don’t come with me,” Alan says, “I’ll tell them you lit the fire, too.”

  The lights of the car are upon them. Before Gad can respond, Alan pulls him into the long narrow trench by the side of the road and rapidly begins covering them with the small, prickly brush at hand. “Gad,” he whispers. “You know what’s next, right?” But he’s not sure Gad can hear him, his voice lost beneath the sweeping wind, and so Alan whispers it again, though mostly to himself. “Western City North,” he says.

  A few hours of unclean sleep in the swallowing bushes across the street from the bus station until first light. They are fugitives now; all movement is weighted. After breakfast, solemn nuns and priests will have handed out Registry letters telling each boy what he already knows.

  “You know I was just kidding,” Alan tells him first thing in the morning. “Heat of the moment and all that.”

  Gad nods.

  With his new status as a fugitive, Alan finds that he feels lighter. Each new step he takes is gleeful with secrets. “Once we do this, Woody Gilbert, he’ll find us,” Alan tells him. “You have to do an action before you join HIM. Or find the baldheads and get cleared by them. That’s how they know you’re not a Reggie.”

  “Whatever,” Gad says.

  But Gad always wakes up cranky. Shoulders low and eyes puffed, the two of them walk into the station and up to the ticket window, pilfered vouchers in hand. “I’d like to exchange this,” Alan tells the woman at the ticket window. “We need to go to Western City North.”

  She frowns through the waved layers of glass. Below the window separating them, a steel drawer pops open. The ticket lady motions for Alan to place his voucher in it, and when he does, she slams the door shut, nearly catching his fingers.

  A flat look passes over the ticket lady’s face. “This is a voucher from the school down the road. The kids use these to go home for a week, to say good-bye to their families before they ship out.”

  “Right,” Alan says. He wills himself calm. News of the fire has not yet reached the ticket lady. “That’s us. We got early permission. I’d like to exchange this voucher for a ticket to Western City North.” On the edge of his vision, he sees people lining up behind them. The ticket lady is taking too long. They must get on a bus before word of the fire spreads to the town.