This Is the Night

by Jonah C. Sirott

  Wherever HIM is, Alan knows that from now on, he, too, will need to occupy the hidden spaces of the Homeland. Just like Woody Gilbert did. You had to if you were going to unslave young Indigenous from the Homeland and wage war on its way of thinking. How lucky he feels that he has been exposed to the truth at all.

  Perhaps all it takes is to get behind the curtain. Perhaps everything he needs is backstage. On the radio, commentators rattle on about First Tuesday, the war turning twenty-three, the prime minister’s recent absence from the airwaves. A whole bunch of surface stuff that he doesn’t need to pay attention to. Someone makes a joke he doesn’t hear, and the entire van breaks into mindless laughter. These baldheads are the stagehands, hinging open the trapdoors on the surface and leading him to all that is hidden below. Alan feels a tap on his shoulder. The talkative stinky guy from the park asks him another annoying question.

  32.

  “Out,” said the driver. The van had pulled into the driveway of a massive house. In the front yard, baldheads darted in quick bursts all around them, eyes angled downward. “Follow me,” said the man with gold crowns.

  Outside, two or three of the baldheads were focused on watering the large and healthy plant life in the front garden. Other baldheads scurried about with urgent postures, hustling around frantically and making wild, jerkwater motions with their hands. Inside, the mansion was immaculate. Dark woods, bright rugs, all bejeweled and gleaming.

  The place around Benny seemed charged with a latent rapture that might erupt at any moment. Why these young men should be so happy on a First Tuesday—chances were, some of them had to be up today as well—he didn’t plan on sticking around to find out. Once the promised food came, he would try to slip away before they started their weird little game.

  The baldhead led all the park-dwellers from the van into a large room with a platter of stale sandwiches set out on a lengthy table decorated with ferns and a bowl of grapes. The park-dwellers attacked the spread. Of course the grapes were waxed; real grapes would have cost a fortune. Even so, Benny had to touch them. He didn’t care that the sandwiches were stale. They were stacked high, and he ate five of them before he nearly popped a wax grape in his mouth for dessert; it had been so long since he’d had a real one. Benny watched the possibly Indigenous kid stuff two sandwiches into his mouth without chewing. Each bite was fabulous, joyful to the point of hallucination. An incredibly tall baldhead appeared and pointed to the possibly Indigenous kid.

  “You asked for me?”

  The tall man and the possibly Indigenous kid disappeared down a stairwell.

  Once Benny was done eating, another baldhead walked him to the bathroom and handed him a thick red towel. Fine, first a shower, and then he would make his way out of here. On the way to the bathroom, he passed a group of men with full heads of hair. A good chunk of these visitors to baldhead house seemed war age, and all were well dressed. Blue suits, red ties. He studied them for subtle signs that they, too, were up for First Tuesday this evening, but nothing on these men’s faces indicated anything but excitement. They were dressed up and ready to play. But play what?

  After his shower, a waiting baldhead directed him to a large main room with a group of folding chairs arranged around a central circle in the rug. For the first time in recent memory, Benny’s body felt fresh, light, even, and he sucked in the unfamiliar smells that had materialized on his skin. The other park-dwellers had scrubbed up, too, seemingly in other bathrooms planted in distant corners of this massive home, all of them except the Indigenous kid, who he didn’t see anywhere. Benny felt a stab of jealousy that the Indigenous kid had probably done exactly what he had wanted to: eaten their food and run. Through the window, the high sun suggested it was midafternoon. Plenty of time until sundown. Maybe he would just check out this game for a minute.

  His thoughts were interrupted by the touch of yet another Registry-aged baldhead. “That way,” the man said. “The Joust is over there.”

  The grand room held a mixture of baldheads, young men in suits, and freshly scrubbed park people. The very tall baldhead motioned for them to sit in the folded chairs arranged in a circle.

  “Listen up, losers,” the tall man boomed. “We’ve brought you here to play a game.” The men on either side of him looked like children. “Only it’s not just a game,” the tall man continued. “Of course, it is a game, but if we thought it was just a game, we wouldn’t go around finding you crumbs to come play it with us.”

  A few of the park-dwellers, Benny included, moved their eyes toward each other.

  The tall man noticed the glances. “You don’t like the word crumbs? How about Substance Q-heads? What am I saying, I saw some of you get dropped off this morning. If you were just on Substance Q, that would be the least of your problems.”

  How long would this bullshit take? He’d had the meal, Benny thought, the luscious warm-water shower, and the puffy towel. Now it was time to head to the induction center, find Joe, say sorry, and break the news that the both of them were beyond saving. Maybe he should just stand up and walk out.

  “So what are we going to do?” the tall man went on, his eyes gliding across each person in the circle. “Well, what are we not going to do? We are going to not hold back. This is a Joust, understand? Engaged combat. A Joust isn’t some cocktail party chatter. It’s an attack. You can yell anything, anything that comes into your head.”

  “What are the rules?” asked a park-dweller.

  “Rules?” The tall man smiled broadly and raised an eyebrow. “Three rules. Don’t Joust drunk or high on any Substance, not even Q. No physical threats. And no holding back.”

  Well that sounded interesting. Benny listened as the tall man explained the theory of the Joust: “We attack the lies in your lives, the hypocrisy. We take your poisonous attitudes and cure them. We expose and free your secret fears and guilt,” he said, “thereby reducing the tendency for you to pour your distress into some Substance. No line of thought is out of place. Lies are in the service of truth. None of you are clean. Confess, assholes. Dump your shit, or we will extract it. Like it or not, we are your only alternative to total failure.”

  The guy was clearly an overconfident prick, but Benny couldn’t help but like him. Most of what the tall man had said felt silly or slight, but Benny could see how much the guy was enjoying himself. He liked that; he hadn’t been around such a magnitude of happiness in a long time.

  “And now,” the tall man yelled, “let’s Joust!”

  Benny shrugged and stared up at the ceiling beams, all angled to the center of the room like spokes on a wheel. So this was it: a nice shower, a sandwich or two, and some crazy game, followed by a trip across town and a loss of freedom. Why the hell not?

  Two hours of listening to people vent their rage was more than enough. With their voices now scalded from yelling, the group seemed angrier than before they had started. None of these people seemed to be able to accept the unfairness of life. Before the game had begun, they had all seemed resigned to their unfortunate circumstances. Now they were incensed.

  “You think prime ministers would want to go to war if they Jousted?” the tall man said. “You think if those Coyote weenies in parliament knew how to Joust that they’d still be crouching at podiums, whining and begging ‘oh pretty please stop the war’? The Joust can change the world, folks. Six days a week, right here for members. The more you Joust, the better you feel. Monthly dues only ten Currencies. You can pay on your way out.”

  Ridiculous. The baldheads, Benny saw, were just another group that regulated your life in return for the empty promise of happiness.

  “Bring your friends,” the tall man told them.

  And yet these people lived here. Men, young men, ones who had not shipped off to war. The game was bullshit, but still, these baldheads were on to something. He needed to get back to Joe and bring him here. Somehow these people would hide them. Somehow yelling and screaming at others could be their substitute for war.

  B
enny walked over to the tall man, who was standing alone by the table looking at the waxed grapes longingly. “I want to Joust some more,” he said. “I don’t quite get it. But I like it.”

  “So you want to have another go-round?” The tall man handed Benny a cup of coffee and motioned for him to follow. For a moment Benny paused. There were no clocks anywhere in this place, but if they had started the game at noon and played for three hours, he didn’t have much time to chat before he needed to leave. He had no idea how long it might take to get from this far-off neighborhood to the induction center, but it was best not to play it too close.

  “You coming or what?” the tall man said.

  33.

  Alan and the tall man, alone in a windowless room. Three chairs, a small table with a newspaper, and a vase of purple flowers atop a small box. Does the tall man know anyone from HIM? Alan asks.

  “Of course I do,” the man tells him. “We’re all down here together.”

  Though they are in a basement, “down here” seems metaphorical. Alan does not press the point. So the man has interacted with some rank-and-file HIM members. But how about Woody Gilbert? Has he met the mastermind himself?

  “Saw him last week,” the tall man says.

  “I need to meet him,” Alan says. “I need to talk to him.”

  “Need is the fuel of life, no?”

  “What?”

  “You need to meet Woody Gilbert, and I need someone to help me with something.”

  “Tell me,” Alan says, “about that something.”

  “Wait here,” says the tall man. “I’ve got a Joust to run.”

  “A Joust?”

  “It’s just a distraction that we use for cover. I’ll be back in a bit. Read the paper. Make yourself comfortable.”

  34.

  The tall man had to have known it was First Tuesday, had surely heard Benny say today was his day. So whatever he wanted to tell him, Benny thought, at least he understood Benny’s situation. The two of them headed down a staircase and into a long, narrow basement hallway, baldheads darting out of one doorway only to pop into another. Large blue sacks of charcoal rested on the floor, lining the length of the passageway. The overhead lights were dull; the plaster had been painted a somber shade of grey. Gone were the upstairs odors of hard work and joyful cleanliness. Down below was sticky and dark.

  Farther, deeper, they headed down the hall.

  “What’s the deal with all the charcoal?” Benny asked the tall man’s back.

  The tall man kept walking and didn’t turn around. Instead, he simply raised an index finger over his head. No stopping. The two of them wound through the corridors beneath the massive house. Every few steps, the tall man ducked below a naked lightbulb, cradling his coffee gently.

  How long was this going to take? The entire Homeland understood the six p.m. deadline. If he owed Joe anything, it was to be there when they took him away. Unless.

  Finally the tall man came to a stop. “In here,” he gestured.

  So the possibly Indigenous kid from the park hadn’t left after all. He was sitting in a metal folding chair reading a newspaper. The walls were bare. No windows. Three chairs in all, and a small standing table. On the table, a rectangular wooden box, on top of which rested a small vase of bell-shaped flowers, the blues and purples a shock of color in the otherwise bland room. As Benny entered, the possibly Indigenous kid didn’t even look up. On the front page of the kid’s newspaper, the headline: Another Terrorist Bomb Fails to Detonate.

  The tall man took his seat. Finally Benny could look at him. When standing, the guy’s face was so high up it was hard to make out his features. Small swirls of possibility thrummed through Benny’s head. To be able to crap and clean himself in those sparkling bathrooms on a daily basis, what wouldn’t he trade for that? He would move Joe in here, too, save them both from the Registry. And along the way, if he happened to find himself some baldhead lady to keep him warm at night, no big deal, right? Besides, even if these guys were on some crazy kick in which the only way to live was shaving his head and yelling lies around a circle, Benny had to admit that right now was the longest time he’d gone without wanting some Substance as far as he could remember. “I just want to express my interest in—”

  “Shut up,” said the tall man. The possibly Indigenous kid smiled into his newspaper.

  Benny shut his eyes lightly before opening them again. The bags of charcoal in the hallway, the smirking expression of the tall man, the long silence of the Indigenous kid. Something was very wrong.

  “In case you didn’t catch names in the van,” the tall man said, “this is Alan.” He gestured to the kid.

  The name didn’t sound very Indigenous, but then again, Benny had never met a Homeland Indigenous person before. “Great to meet you,” Benny said. He could sense he was in some sort of danger, but he couldn’t place it. “But I should be going.” He stood up from his chair.

  “Nope,” said the tall man, placing a heavy hand on his shoulder. “We’re not done yet.”

  Benny sat back down.

  “You asked,” the tall man said slowly, “why we really do this.”

  Benny hadn’t asked, but now didn’t seem like the time to object.

  “Do you ever watch television?”

  A strange question. No one watched television. All the shows were either old men playing twenty years younger, barely believable women in drag, unretired athletes tackling each other gently, or, of course, the news. “Nope,” Benny said. “Do you?”

  The tall man smiled and grabbed his mug of coffee from the table beside him. “Of course not. Just like you, or your parents, probably, I used to watch, back in the war’s early years. Back then it was different. The Homeland sold the war as some noble adventure. At that time, watching the news or reading the papers might get you an honest moment about our progress.”

  “And now?”

  “Well, now, just like everybody, I’ve come to recognize that there aren’t any new facts available. And still, once a week some new newspaper pops up and starts publishing. But it’s all the same: we’re still fighting. Sometimes we’re winning, sometimes we’re not.”

  “So instead you get Substance-smashers to yell at each other and charge a fee for participating?”

  Reaching toward the small bouquet of purple flowers on the table, the tall man rubbed a flared petal between his fat thumb and slender index finger. “Nah, kid, you’re missing the point. I got clean, dropped all the Substances, and when I did, I saw a little clearer, you know? I came to see some real fundamental things.”

  “Oh yeah?” Until now, Benny had been sure that he had long since given up on any hope for real meaning, but now, with a tall man rubbing purple petals and dangling the possibility that Benny could somehow be the master of his own life yet again, he saw how badly he wanted some sort of answer. How was he supposed to live amid all this shit around him? “What do you do?” he asked, more passionately than he meant to. His voice was soft. “And why do you do it?”

  “That’s right,” the tall man said. “You’re finally asking the right questions.” He leaned in and lowered his voice. “Now you want to know why we do what we do? Why we take Substance-smashers and have them yell at each other?”

  Enough with the buildup, Benny thought. Just skip to telling me whatever the fuck it is that you do.

  “You know when I finally started to see what crap the news was?” the tall man said.

  Benny stifled a sigh. The tall man took up as many words as he did inches. “When?”

  “When I started making it.”

  Okay, Benny thought. He would bite. “What kind of news do you guys make?”

  “Unfortunately, not the kind we want to. We’ve had some troubles, you see. Equipment-wise.” He cocked his head toward Alan.

  Benny looked at Alan, whose expression was still obscured behind the newspaper. He returned his eyes to the tall man. The tall man nodded. Again Benny looked at Alan, whose eyes still refused to m
eet his. Finally he looked once more at the headline. Terrorist Bomb Fails to Detonate.

  “That’s right,” the man said. “That’s what we do.”

  “You guys are bombing the Homeland?”

  “Easy there. First off, read the headline. We’re not bombing the Homeland.”

  “So you’re trying to bomb the Homeland?”

  “Not the Homeland. The Registry. We’re certainly not the only ones. Three weeks ago, that attack on an induction center in Western City South? I have it on good authority that it was done by some Fareon folks.”

  “And you guys aren’t the Fareon folks.”

  “Hah.” The guy gave a fake smile. “Didn’t I just explain it? As far as anyone is concerned, we’re an experimental outfit using unusual methods to heal Substance-smashers.”

  “But what about the Fareon people?”

  “Don’t believe in that piece of fiction for a second. Ridiculous. The prime minister doesn’t need some mythical drug to keep his blood flowing.”

  A hurried look he had taken at an old newspaper headline on the way to some party popped into Benny’s head. “And those attacks on the Strategic National Stockpile? That’s the Fareon people, too?”

  “Nope. Those are Foreigns hiding in the Homeland trying to make it look like they’re Fareon folks. Real-deal Ideology Fivers.”

  “But you’re trying to kill people. Even if you haven’t done it right.”

  “Slow down, kid. That’s not what’s happening here.”

  Benny’s mind flashed to the hallway, the large blue sacks piled high against the walls. Hadn’t there been some attack somewhere involving charcoal? If only he had read the papers. “So the charcoal—”

  “He’s finally getting warm,” the tall man said to Alan.

  “You filled all these Registry trucks with charcoal. In a bunch of places. I heard about that. You didn’t hurt anyone, you just confused everybody. Why charcoal?”