This Is the Night

by Jonah C. Sirott

  On a billboard, a massive portrait of the prime minister welcomed them to the Homeland.

  “Ready?” said Susan.

  “Ready,” said Lorrie and the kid. It didn’t matter which one of them Susan had been talking to; they were in this together. With a flip of the turn signal, Susan cut the wheel and crossed the painted lines, turning back in the direction they had just come from.

  “What now?” said the kid. Lorrie smiled at him and almost laughed. The kid knew even less than she did.

  As Susan killed the engine, Lorrie and the kid stepped out of the car.

  “No,” said Susan. “The fewer people the better.”

  “Sorry,” said Lorrie. “But I came all this way. I’m going to see this through.”

  Susan shrugged, and the three of them headed to the closest guard booth. “Asylum!” yelled Susan. “This man is applying to be landed in N. Leave us be!”

  Where they had expected a fight, they were instead received with shrugs and apathy.

  “Thataway,” one helpful Homeland guard grinned, gesturing toward Allied Country N immigration. “You think this ever works?”

  “Hope you’ve got the Currencies!” called another.

  “We’ll be waiting,” yelled a third. The rest of them laughed.

  The Allied Country N officials seemed to be getting ready to close for the night even though it was barely late afternoon. No one was behind the service counter.

  “Excuse me?” Susan leaned over and threw her voice into the empty row of desks.

  “Yes?” A head poked out from a door.

  “You have the papers?” Lorrie whispered. The kid nodded. “Currencies too?” He nodded again. Lorrie heard Susan speak the much-practiced lines. “This young man wishes to apply for landed immigrant status in Allied Country N.”

  The agent sighed and bent over to dig up some forms. “Don’t bother,” the agent said, “unless you have all three thousand right now, on your person, plus a letter of employment.”

  The kid began counting out the Currencies one by one.

  Lorrie and Susan went out to the car and waited. If the kid was refused, he at least deserved a witness as the Homeland took him away.

  Five hours later, the kid emerged with the first smile they had seen. He coughed out a million thank-yous. Lorrie offered him a handshake, but the kid shook his head slowly and reached out, wrapping her in a sloppy hug. “You saved me,” he said. His voice was soft. “I won’t ever forget you.”

  Susan cut over to the expressway and headed south, back toward Interior City. As the darkness descended, they rushed through rows of white and red pines, spruces, and aspens. These were the same kinds of trees Lorrie had seen on the way to the Facility, the same trees she had seen on the ride up to the border, just in different places now.

  “Well, that’s the end of that,” said Susan. “I’m glad it’s over.”

  Over? Lorrie laughed. Even on the outskirts of everything, she still knew they hadn’t achieved any sort of ending.

  It was too cold to open the window, but Lorrie did it anyway, just a crack.

  “Hey!” said Susan.

  But Lorrie didn’t care. She stuck her fingers through the slit and into the ice-cold night as they hurtled down the expressway to Interior City, back toward her life that was more started-over and begun-again than ever before.

  “You okay?” Susan asked.

  Lorrie was so touched that someone thought to ask that she almost broke down. A single tear fell from her face, and she told Susan that yes, she was pretty sure she was all right.

  “What’s next?” Susan asked.

  “What are you asking me for?” Lorrie almost shouted. But as they drove on, past empty fields and large billboards for the Point Line, Lorrie realized that she did know what was next after all. “Pull over at the next rest stop,” Lorrie said. “I have to make a phone call.”

  Lorrie stepped from the car into the night. Her fingers shook as she dialed. Numbers she knew so well but had never dialed before.

  “Hello?” said the voice on the other end. “Point Line.”

  Lorrie’s voice waddled, catching in her throat.

  “Name of person you would like to report, please.”

  The wind stopped, the grasses around her stood straight and tall, and watching the stillness, Lorrie knew there were periods in her life that would always be with her.

  “Name of person, please.”

  The wind blew harder, the voice asked for a name yet again, and Lorrie cleared her throat, ready to speak the name.

  “Who did you call?” Susan asked her when she returned to the car.

  But Lorrie only smiled and clicked on the radio. The two of them were partners now, that much was clear. But even the closest confidantes must sometimes be steered away from the truth.

  Back on the expressway, a break in the music, an interruption. From some other world, the prime minister’s vibrating vocal folds billowed and fell as he imparted the news: our enemies have struck again. His voice sounded hoarse, pinched even. Terrorists have attacked a military base outside Interior City. Emboldened, the prime minister warned, by our own waffling, encouraged by our own legislators. Ideology Five is the most dangerous system of thought ever known to humanity. At first, the prime minister said, I thought the Coyotes were an awfully bad joke. Now I see how dangerous they truly are.

  Lorrie switched over to music.

  37.

  Someone, Lance knew, had pointed him. Had to have been. There had been too many agents, too much of a firestorm for a regular capture.

  Now there were five of them—all dodgers—in a temporary holding cell meant for two. To stay out of each other’s way they spent the hours in silence. On the third day, a guard told Lance he would be sent to a Homeland penitentiary any day now.

  “When?” asked Lance.

  “Soon,” she said. “There’s no room for you yet.”

  But there was not enough room in the holding cell, either. Two more were added that night.

  A few of his fellow cellmates had visitors, some of whom brought in newspapers from the outside world. With the overworked guards too busy to review the titles, even the smallest, most antiwar publications circulated freely. In his head, he authored his own profile: a crap job in a bookstore that was always empty, painting stuffed birds with cracked eyes, followed by a relocation to Western City North that soon gave way to bugs and tears. And now, of course, all signs pointed to betrayal. Pointed by the woman he loved, he was sure of it. But there was no room for this type of story; in the underground newspapers, men who resisted were nothing but heroes. Even if these men were able to rot away nobly behind bars, no newspaper made it clear that all their prison time meant was that the Registry would find someone else to take their place and die. There was always someone else.

  “Come out here,” a guard said to him. A self-satisfied grin spread across her face.

  “Why?”

  The other men in his cell muttered nervously.

  She didn’t answer, but unlocked the cell door, sliding it open hard. “You’re happy about this shit, aren’t you?” the guard said.

  “Happy about what?” asked Lance.

  “Shut up, you Fiver.”

  Lance was not an Ideology Fiver. Whatever depravities or virtues were in that system of thought, he had no idea.

  “That’s what you are, right?” the guard said. Small pearls of sweat dripped from her puffed face.

  How could Lorrie have pointed him?

  “I don’t like Fivers,” said the guard. She held Lance’s forearm in a tight grip.

  Lance knew this type. She had probably lost two husbands and a boyfriend.

  “Don’t like them at all,” the guard repeated.

  Was it truly Lorrie who had done it? Impossible. Maybe he hadn’t been pointed, just caught. What did it matter? “Well, yes,” Lance said. “I’m a Fiver then.”

  A seething, incandescent rage spread over the guard’s face. She called out, a
nd two more guards appeared at the entrance to his cell, all three of them gripping their clubs tightly. “Say it again,” the first guard said.

  Lance said it again.

  The guard kicked him in the scrotum. As he bent over, she knocked him over the head with her club. Lance curled into a ball as she continued to beat him. He could see that he had so far lived his life entirely off-key, his mind full of misapprehensions, dazzled by all the wrong things. The rare and unmistakable odor of his own blood wafted through his nose. More voices, more guards arriving to join in the beating. A practiced boot connected to his floating ribs. The pain was strong and vivid. Lorrie had put him here, and there was no way to take anything back. Even her ghost refused to visit.

  That night, as his sore body rested on the thin jail mattress, he found himself desperate to talk to someone, to share his misery. His cellmates, terrified that association with Lance might lead to a beating of their own, turned their backs.

  Some hours later, Lance was strip-searched, poked, and inspected, given the clothes he had shown up in, and led outside.

  “Am I getting a new uniform?” he asked.

  “You kidding?” responded a tall guard with fiery eyes. “We’re all out of uniforms. You wear what you came in with.”

  Outside, there was no sun, only a series of thick, layered clouds. Lance, he was told, was off to a Homeland penitentiary, Prison Complex J.

  Two elderly guards floated Lance toward the bus, one at his elbow, the other gripping the crook of his armpit. The only male guards he’d seen since his arrival. Though it was the middle of the day, the sky looked dull and ragged, and the round sun sputtered pale, barely visible through the thick cover of clouds. With each step, his body ached.

  They shoved him onto a bus with what he was sure was extra force. Behind this bus was another bus packed with prisoners, and behind that bus, two or three more. Though he was dressed in his own clothes, they had taken his shoes, replacing them with canvas slippers a half size too tight. Leg irons poked the balls of his ankles. A chain was wrapped around his belly with one cuff on each side, forcing his hands to his waist. He could not have clasped them together if he wanted to.

  The prison bus hurtled down the highway. Small seats, one man per row. The aisles were narrow and the rows close together, and like the rest of the men, Lance found his knees pushed into the slatted metal seat back in front of him. None of the men looked at each other. Three guards sat in front, protected in a special cage of their own. Though he could not make out their conversation, the laughter of the two women and the old man echoed throughout the bus. An extra bar ran across the windows, but by slumping his shoulders, Lance found that he could still see the outside world. Mountain slopes appeared, mostly loose rocks and gravel. Soon the rocks gave way to bushes with long, flowering stalks, their dense leaves whipped around by the wind. Lance thought it might be nice to have that same feeling through his hair.

  The bus drove on. After a while, the view was all spotted scrub and patchy yellow mountainside. Each new pothole shook the men like a rattle of dried-out seeds. Lance closed his eyes and did his best to summon Lorrie, the Western City North Lorrie, the Lorrie who was not brainwashed by her parents or the Center or some new big-dicked boyfriend or whoever it was who had encouraged her to do the pointing. Come back, he whispered. But Ghost Lorrie would not appear.

  After a brief nap, he popped his eyes open and saw what he thought was a migrating bald eagle crossing over the pale, dry mountains. Cheek against the glass, he did his best to follow its flight. He had found that though his arms and legs were constrained, he could rotate from side to side as well as lean forward and backward without much obstruction.

  “I think that’s a bald eagle,” Lance said, half-twisting to address the man seated behind him.

  “I don’t know you,” the man said. From his constrained angle, Lance could only see half the man’s face, enough to tell that he was older, past Registry age, with a fat middle section and a shaved face. A short scar about half the length of his lower lip ran horizontal across his chin, a raised slice that someone had done a poor job of sewing up and as a result was now even fatter and more visible than it had to be.

  “I know,” Lance said. “But I’m pointing out a bald eagle to you.”

  “I don’t give a fuck about some little bird. They said I knocked off a bar in the middle of the day. Who would be dumb enough to do that? I didn’t do that.”

  “I believe you.” Lance ducked and dodged around his chains as best he could, hoping he could still track the flight path of the eagle. The bird was gone.

  “I don’t think that was an eagle you saw.”

  “I thought you didn’t see it.” Lance turned back around as much as the chains allowed.

  “You’ve never done time, have you?” the man said.

  Lance made a sharp twist with his body, cutting the belly chain into his hip, and took a closer look at the man behind him. He was surprised at the agility the chain allowed, though the cold metal driving hard into his already sore oblique was not a pleasant sensation. Perhaps the guards had left his bindings too loose. Lance saw that the man behind him had gulched diagonal lines across his forehead, lines that established hard times and worry.

  “You’ve been here before?”

  The man was disgusted. “Of course I’ve been here. What do you think, I’m some kind of fresh meat? I’ve been here plenty. I’m not like you; I served right after First Aggression. But then I got caught up in some drama. Either way, no one comes here just the once. No one.”

  “Come here,” Lance said. The chain cut into him harder. “You lean in close.”

  “What’s that?” the man said, but he leaned in toward Lance anyway.

  The coarse laughter of the guards up front echoed down the aisle.

  From his twisted position Lance saw how close the man was to him. In one deft movement he lunged over his right shoulder, caught the lobe of the man’s ear, and pulled it into his mouth. He was twisted too much, the belly chain protested, chafing and pulling against him much too tightly, rubbing his skin raw. Lance didn’t care.

  “Listen to me,” Lance said. The man’s lobe was salty and smooth. He spoke in low, deliberate tones, moving his tongue over the flesh of the man’s ear, every word a slur: “You can pull back, you can move back right now,” Lance hummed into the man’s ear. Every part of his abdomen was in pain, cut off from blood and air by the belly chain. “But I’ve got your goddamned earlobe between my teeth, you hear me? And I will rip it off. Because I am here just the once, one time only, understand?” Lance’s words sloshed around the lobe. “Just the once.”

  The other prisoners looked at them, then quickly looked away. Lance guessed that this hands-off approach would set the tone for the next years of his life.

  “Let go of my ear, you crazy mother-raper,” the man said. “Please don’t rip my ear off.”

  Lobe still between his teeth, Lance twisted his body even more, the tautness of the chain around his waist nearly unbearable, a warmth crawling to the surface of his skin. He gasped. The sides of their foreheads touched and Lance could feel the sweat exiting from under the man’s skin and onto his own.

  “Help me, Young Savior,” Lance heard the man whimper.

  Lance circled his tongue around the man’s lobe once more and leaned back, releasing the ear from his mouth and loosening the grip of the chain around his waist. A drop of saliva fell from the man’s ear to his lap. Both of them were breathing heavily.

  “I’m just here now, you got me?”

  The man gave off a series of sad, short pants. His face was damp and flushed. Lance turned around and stared at the panoramic stretch of mountains on either side of the road.

  “Oh, man, you just bought your ticket,” the man told the back of Lance’s head. “You know I’m going to kill you, right? Not right now. But I’ll really kill you.”

  From the outer reaches of his vision, Lance saw a second eagle—which he knew may very well h
ave been the first eagle now farther inland—fly overhead before it disappeared for good beyond the mountains.

  The bus slowed to a stop, and Lance slid down into his seat to get a better view. “Prison Complex J,” painted in large black letters on a high wall. They passed through a heavily armed iron gate, tire spikes clanging down as the wheels of the bus pressed them into the concrete. Lance saw houses, little homes with front yards strewn with children’s toys, all of it passing by as the man behind him pushed out a fiery stream of threats. From his window, he glimpsed a fenced-in piece of lawn packed with tents, several of them with men lying just outside the entrance flaps. “That doesn’t look too bad,” he heard one prisoner say.

  “Stupid mother-raper,” said another. “That’s not the prison. That’s the detox zone. Substance-smashers. Those boys are just here to sober up a bit before shipping out.”

  The bus continued to roll through the complex, and soon the tents and houses faded, replaced by a series of long and flat cement boxes with gun towers on every corner. Razor wire was twice coiled around the fence tops. The thought came to Lance that for the first time in his life, the rifles in those gun towers weren’t for his own protection, but instead were there to keep him away from others, to save and spare Homeland citizens from having to glimpse the face of a man who wouldn’t fight.

  Finally the bus stopped. “Do not stand!” A new guard stepped onto the bus to yell at them. “Remain in your seats.” Like all of the women officers, her hair was pinned closely to her head.

  “Dead,” the salty-eared man behind him whispered. “You’re already dead.”

  “On my count,” the guard screamed, “the first row will begin deboarding.”

  The sensation of tiny little bugs crept over Lance, small creatures running round and round the tubes that led to his heart, biting his insides all along the way.

  “Move it, inmate!” he heard the officer yell.

  The little bugs fell away. Who was he kidding? It was just a sensation. He would never understand what had been inside of Lorrie, he thought, although as the guard pulled him up by his armpit, he realized he would have plenty of time to try.