This Is the Night

by Jonah C. Sirott

  25.

  Bitter, flashing cold, the cruel Interior City atmosphere. Lance could feel it before he debused, felt the polar air slice his lips as he and the passengers of the Broken Bus floated down the aisle, groggy from so many hours in motion. A hopping, one-footed man gripped his arm for balance. Eyes drawn to the man’s waist, Lance saw a small protruding pouch that lifted his shirt and gave Lance a clear view of a torn and ruptured stomach.

  “Bomb metal,” the man said. “Passed through my spleen on the left and my liver on the right. Left my intestines alone at least.”

  Too many hours on this bus with the men whose weaponized bodies had doubled as targets for the Foreigns. Men just like his brothers, save for the beat of their hearts and the flow of their blood.

  He led the one-footed vet to a chair in the main terminal of the depot, whereupon the two of them, along with everyone else, were plunged into darkness. No surprise; Lance had arrived in a blackout.

  Through the second-story windows, small stars shone bright above the powerless city, and the thought came to Lance that the small nips in the sky added up to some celestial set of directions, complete with a smiling Lorrie at the endpoint. He zipped up his coat, pushed outside, and looked upward, ready to follow. The bitter air cracking his skin reminded him that although he was far from his hometown of dead brothers, he was now much closer than he preferred to be. But those old versions of who he had been didn’t matter now. Finding Lorrie wasn’t just a task. It was an obligation.

  And yet, where was his courage? Too much fire, he thought, and not enough light. To be so close to her, to be so ready, was nearly unbearable. He needed to calm down, to dull the waving rushes of oncoming delight. He needed a cup of coffee.

  Nothing was familiar. As he walked the strange, blacked-out city, a roaring wind followed him around every corner, hurling itself against his face in cold slaps. Soon a hum and a whirr brought the lights back to life. Finally he could see. And on the corner of the newly lit block, there, shining through the bitter night, were the lights of a coffee shop.

  Lance pushed open the doors and immediately felt at home, then confused, then at home again, though still confused. The owners had clearly studied the coffee shops of Western City North and done their best to replicate the experience here in Interior City. But then something even stranger: there, in the back corner, on an old couch near the entrance to the restroom, reading a book, sipping tea, and biting her fingernails, was Lorrie.

  Her cavernous apartment was fouled and filthy, very un-Lorrie-like. Once Lance had seen the coffee shop girl up close—her Lorrie-like features almost immediately transfigured into some defective substitute—he had nearly turned away, ready to move on. But at the moment of his gloomy recognition that his luck was not what he thought it was, the strange face in front of him had broken into a sad sizzle of a smile. Sure, this woman wasn’t Lorrie. But so what? To regain the love and affection of the real Lorrie would take some work. For now, this shadow Lorrie was as close as he could bear.

  Back at her place, the unspoken agreement became clear: this woman—had she even said her name?—loved a man who had no more life in him, and Lance, well, Lance knew what his problems were and hadn’t felt the need to share them. The two of them recognized the various types of starvation in their hearts, and now, in her grim and cluttered space, they were ready to punish each other for not being who they wanted the other to be. Thank goodness for the many windows of her apartment, Lance thought, because the lights, as usual, were out again. He reached out to hold her, to feel the differences between themselves. Small waist, his hands told him. Large lips.

  They stood in her hallway.

  “Chase me.”

  “What?” he said.

  “You heard me.”

  And she began to run.

  He chased her from living room to bedroom, her clothes falling from her body. He could see this was a game she had played with her dead solider, and he found that being someone else—a someone who was chasing a long-legged, naked stranger—was an effective salve for keeping the world away. Forget the war. Forget the old fuck running the country who was unable to die. Yes, he thought. Yes yes yes. And then he caught her.

  She was not ready, not wet enough, and he knew as he pushed into her that she would feel pain. Not that such dryness felt good for him, either, but at least he was in control. Her upper lip quivered, and her discomfort only made him want to push harder, deeper. And so he did.

  “That’s it?” she said when he had finished.

  Lance nodded and turned over on his back. At some point the lights had come on, and in the terrible moment when he finally looked at her, he could see how little her bulged-out cheeks and rounded nose resembled Lorrie at all. She sat next to him, propped up on one elbow, ready to listen. This posture, at least, Lance appreciated, because he found himself ready.

  “You know why I’m here?” he told her. “I’m not from around here.”

  “Listen, I was thinking, maybe you could—”

  “I just got off a bus, from Western City North.”

  “Great. So listen, I didn’t quite get to—”

  “Three days I was on that bus. That’s a long time. Awhile back I took this same drive, under other circumstances—really different circumstances, you could say—but things were way different this time around. Last trip, I wasn’t looking for anything, and this trip I am.”

  “Aren’t we all.” She ran her fingers over Lance’s chest. “So I’ve got a little proposal.”

  Lance frowned. “I’m trying to tell you a story here.”

  “About who?”

  “About me.” He paused. “My story.”

  She laughed. “How about you skip story time and we move on to something a little more grown up?”

  “This trip, this one I just took to come here, there was so much garbage. Four ovens, I counted, tossed in ditches on the side of the road, and that was just when I was awake. I mean, I left some stuff behind, too. Well, I tried to donate my art. Anyway, I took this run-down bus full of mangled vets and . . .” His own story was jumbled, leaping from his mouth without strand or pattern to hold it in place. He tried again. “What I mean is, I first drove across the Homeland with this woman who was, who is, really important to me. The three of us, her friend Terry was there, too. And we went. I mean, we found . . .”

  What kind of story, Lance thought, was he trying to tell? He couldn’t even properly string a bunch of verbs together.

  The woman reached under the sheets and began to stroke him, tugging just a little too hard in desperation to bring him back to life.

  “Hey, how many anti-Registry centers are here?” Lance asked suddenly.

  “Here where?” Still stroking.

  “Here-here. Interior City.”

  “What, you scared to go?” She laughed. “Real original.” She continued her clawlike stroke. “How about I save the welcome-to-Interior-City tour for later?” she said, her voice dropping down to a soft whisper. “How about you do something for me. I’ll tell you what I like. What I want is for you to take my—”

  “How many?” Lance interrupted, pulling away. He heard his voice grow slower, louder. “How many centers are there in Interior City?”

  She lowered her eyebrows for a moment, but then seemed to think better of it and continued. “You’ll have to spank it out of me.”

  At that moment, Lance sprang up, pushed the woman onto her back, and sat with his legs spread across her torso, flattening her breasts and pressing her into the mattress. Out came his hand, and his four fingers pressed on one side of her throat, his thumb on the other.

  “How about you just answer my question?”

  He could feel the rapid bumps of her heart pressing against the underside of his thigh, the swooshing of the blood in her neck.

  “What are you doing?” she yelped. He squeezed harder, long fingers around tight neck. “Why?” she gasped.

  “How many?” he roared.

  Water
flooded her sclera and drowned her small pupils until two small tears dripped across her cheeks.

  Harder still.

  “I just want to know how many anti-Registry centers are in this city! Is that too much to ask?” More force, a tighter grip. Beneath his fingers he could feel the air struggling to pass.

  She wheezed and stared at him from beneath his hand, silent and still, until she finally gasped out the answer. “One. Just one. Two if you count those Fareon freaks.”

  She offered up an address, and he let go, her throat begging for air on the bed. Enough with this hollow apartment. He was ready to head toward the real version of this woman, leaving behind this sorry imitation who he hoped would cease to exist the moment his feet touched the outside pavement.

  “You’re no good,” the woman said to him, her voice raw, the sheets pulled up to her neck as he slid on his pants. “You know that, right?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I do.”

  26.

  Enough with the shit work. All those weeks of wooing Jane, her ally in reform, and one day Jane was plucked away. Over a breakfast of burnt toast and hard butter, Lorrie considered her tactics. She filed for the Center, she collated for the Center, she took notes on the Center’s meetings, subdividing and cross-referencing to ensure as many access points as possible. But she was not allowed to counsel. She could not sit behind the desk across from the quivering men with a gnawing at their windpipes—men so paralyzed by fear they could not even speak—and help them decide what to do. Jane’s disappearance didn’t scare her, but it did slow her down. Now she would have to go straight to the source. “Put me on the front lines,” Lorrie told Eric. “Let me get out there.”

  The two of them sat in the back room, chairs swiveled across from one another, the power failed, the naked light of the window allowing their shadows to meet. It was morning, just after another one of Eric’s inspirationals, the same room in which Lorrie had repaired a sentence and Susan had splattered a radio.

  Eric’s inspirationals had taken a new turn since the disappearance of his mother. The talks were less practical now, less focused on the progress of the Coyotes or the ineffectiveness of the prime minister’s latest troop surge. Now Eric tended to speak more broadly about the nature of mischief and disobedience, or instead focused on the historical, such as the Homeland’s slaughter of its Indigenous. But as for actual counseling, the advice the Center gave remained exactly the same. When and if his mother did come back, Lorrie could see that Eric wanted her to return to a world exactly like the one she had left behind. But Lorrie could not wait any longer. For the war, she knew, did not wait for anyone.

  Eric’s deep curls were matted down, wilted plants that needed watering. “We seek,” he began, “to save the lives of our brethren—”

  “We’re not in the morning circle,” Lorrie said, her good ear angled toward his graceful mouth. She rose from her chair and walked toward him. “Just say what you want to say to me. Can you do that, please?”

  As Eric nodded, Lorrie saw that she could talk to men like this now. After she had sex with the peeled-skin artist, word had gotten around the Facility. Dozens of disgusting men had wanted to fuck her. They thought that because she had been available for one of them, she should somehow be available for all. Daily shame-reduction exercises had offered the gleaming realization that saying no did not leave her responsible for their feelings. Lorrie wondered if Eric could recognize that same thing in himself that she had finally learned, but doubted it. Some people can’t see themselves in anybody.

  “Do you know the issues, Lorrie? You need to know them inside out in order to counsel.” He stood up. Men, Lorrie knew, don’t like it when a woman towered over them. “Do you read the papers?”

  “Of course I know the issues. And what actual news has there ever been in the papers?” Lorrie read at least ten newspapers a day, but knew he would like this response.

  “Fine, let’s do this. Question one: Should we support the Coyotes?”

  “What good has come from any of our legislators?” Lorrie said, clearing her throat. “By participating, we become accomplices.”

  Eric smiled in just the way she knew he would. “Exactly. Okay, where should we stand on Fareon?” A much more difficult question. Around the Center, Fareon was generally dismissed as some sort of collective pathological response to an extremely stressful situation. Certainly no one in Lorrie’s circles ever took the accusations seriously. Eric, of course, knew this, and the simple nature of his question made her suspicious.

  “Nothing?” smiled Eric. They were faced off like boxers.

  “Shut up for a second and let me think.” Crouched deep inside: the knowledge that Lance would be horrified and proud of her strength.

  “So you don’t have a ready answer on the curious aging of our leaders? On the prime minister’s chief of staff fathering a child at eighty-four? On any of the Fareon rumors?” He untangled his crossed arms, allowing them to dangle by his sides, and Lorrie saw a faint hint of triumph in his actions.

  The question was a ball, burning hot and furious in her hands. As Eric knew quite well, save for the tin bones of the prime minister and his fellow aging ministers, no one had any tangible proof of anything. None of these supposed octogenarian offspring had ever been photographed. Certainly, it was possible that the prime minister and his fellow cabinet members simply took good care of themselves, consuming some perfect amount of fiber and nutrients. After all, if anyone had access to fresh fruit and vegetables, it was these men. But the pictures: the ninety-something secretary of the interior out for a jog, the eighty-two-year-old national security advisor and his beaming thirty-one-year-old wife smiling for the cameras after a night at the theater.

  She needed time, just a few more seconds to think. The prime minister, of course, always justified everything with the need for punishment. First Aggression, he had said, hurt our people, but did not kill our spirit. Even now, he often gave thundering speeches on how there could be no closure without justice, and no justice without the annihilation of the Foreigns, who had committed the ultimate in cruelty. Such a message, Lorrie knew, resonated deeply with huge swaths of the Homeland. Broad zones of Eastern Sector were still uninhabitable, even all these years later. Relocated Homeland citizens didn’t just forget where they had come from.

  “Fareon, Lorrie,” Eric said again.

  She knew that Eric wanted her to drown, that he saw his missing mother every time he looked at her. “Well,” she began slowly, “with Fareon. I mean, the thing is—” Lorrie stuttered, began a new sentence, stopped, and tried to start again. “You see, it’s just . . .”

  A slow conversion ensued, and Eric’s handsome features began their ugly turn toward loftiness. Never the learner; always the learned.

  “How about a clear answer, Lorrie,” he said, sitting back down.

  “I don’t know, Eric. The Fareon question is a complicated one. There’s no proof, and when you tell the Fareon freaks that, they point to it as evidence. Some of them are just crazy. But really, I have no idea.”

  Eric smiled. “So you don’t know. Good, Lorrie. That’s what I was looking for. That’s what this job is about, knowing when you don’t know. And for the most part, I’m with you. Those people are crazy. But every now and then, you have to wonder. I mean, so many of the prime minister’s people, all hearty and hale right into their nineties? You know I don’t go in for that Young Savior stuff, but there’s that one quote of His I’ve never been able to let go of: ‘All truths are double or doubled, or they all have a front and a back.’”

  So the self-righteous little shit didn’t have an answer for everything. She felt a brief sadness at the loss of her image of him as a total prick. “So you’ll let me counsel?”

  “I’ll admit to not having given this much thought. A woman counselor. I’ll think about it, I’ll talk to Jane and Tom, and I’ll open up a dialogue.”

  Both of them paused.

  “I mean Tom,” Eric said. “Just Tom.
”

  “Thank you, Eric.” Lorrie stood. “About your mother. I just wanted to say—”

  “Look,” he said, standing up, “Susan’s gone, and the new girl isn’t here today. And we’re way behind on our filing.” With a wave of his hand, she was dismissed.

  As she filed, she cursed herself for letting Eric once again dominate the conversation. Why had she answered all of his questions when the questions he asked were not the ones that needed answering? Where was the data about the effectiveness of the Center’s tactics, the continuing education for counselors in order to keep up with the latest shifts in Registry policy? Forget Fareon. Men wanted to know the best way not to die. That was it. Anything else was spinning in circles.

  The Center, Lorrie saw, was a frozen field. And Lorrie was sure she knew how to thaw it. With the Homeland more than two decades into the sacking and bundling of boys toward their final acts, the Center was short on volunteers—solely, of course, because the only volunteers allowed to do anything substantial were men. And almost all of them were new, as the ones with experience had been dragged away.

  She needed fresh air. Outside the building, the men in line covered their faces with bandanas, not willing to risk being seen. An older woman drove by in a taxi, screaming at the masked men for their cowardice. A few minutes later, a concrete mixer passed. Slowing down, the driver rolled down her window and shouted at the covered faces that had her husband been alive, he would kill them himself. After that, Lorrie decided the fresh air outside the Center wasn’t worth it. She took a ten-minute walk and then came back.

  Upon her return, she saw Eric talking to Doug, the two of them laughing so hard that Eric felt moved to take his large fist and thump Doug’s back so as to help him breathe normally once again. Both men became silent as she approached, though she could see Doug suppressing a giggle. Lorrie threw her purse on the round table in front of them.

  “Once the filing is done,” Eric said, “I have a few leaflets I’d like you to hand out.”