This Is the Night (16 page)

The family sat around their large candlelit dining room table. Blackouts were hitting Interior City with increased regularity, and good candles were in high demand. Lorrie’s parents had used up all their quality candles and were on to the cheap kind that dripped heavily and gave off a disagreeable smell. Her mother stood to clear their finished portions of deviled crab and beef stew.

“Stop it,” Lorrie said.

“No.” Her father stood as well, removing his napkin with two fingers and placing it on the table. “I’m quite serious. That’s the wrong boy for you, and he’s roughed up the wrong man’s daughter.” The smoky yellow light lit up his features.

Lorrie could not determine how much of her father’s anger came from love and how much from simply feeling that he had been a victim of property damage. With her thumb and forefinger, she kneaded the lobe of her bad ear. Her father’s face was pained and twisted, his mouth low and stuck in a frown. He wanted, she saw, to erase that whole part of her life.

“Fine. I’ll call the Point Line. Surely that boy is out of compliance with the Registry.”

A slow and flickering joy crossed her mother’s face.

“No.”

“Why not?” asked her mother.

“You will not call that awful Point Line.” She started up the stairs to her old room. “I’m not kidding,” she called over her shoulder, her body desperate to not convey her fear of speaking to her father in such commanding tones. “Don’t you dare do one little thing.” She shut the door gently. Lorrie wouldn’t be responsible for the sacrifice of another man, even if that man was Lance. Not now, she told the day-bugs, and all but two stayed away.

In her room, she wrote letters.
Please do not to mention Lance or his whereabouts to me
, Lorrie told her friends. He could be anywhere, but she didn’t want to know, couldn’t. Even the slightest slip-up, and her father might call the Point Line. The less information, the better. To her friend Rebecca, who was, she had heard, zooming around Homeland Indigenous Districts, she wrote an apology to the last address she had, telling her she was sorry for everything.
I was not myself,
Lorrie typed.

Borrowing the Currencies from her parents, she restarted her subscriptions to all the important newspapers—at least fifteen of them, she had decided, were essential. No more side issues, she promised herself, no more tangential causes. If vets needed free breakfasts, it was because of the war. If certain professions lacked adequate numbers of women, that too was a result of the war. The war was sucking up all the boys, but she would be the one pulling on their ankles.

Her dreams cursed the geriatric prime minister and remained, for the most part, insect-free. In the coffeehouses around town, Lorrie started asking people whether they knew about any anti-Registry centers in Interior City. Preferably, she added, a place uncorrupted by the infiltration of the Fareon folks.

Imagined scenes from her future life: stacks of dinnerware stripped clean save for a few small hunks of torn bread, Lorrie having offered to cook for the other volunteers, nice people her age, disgusted but not too overwhelmed by the breathtaking machinery of the Homeland, all of them passionate about a world with less war, but all able to fully comprehend the seesawing existence that often called for a nice wine and long, wavy curtains.

“But what should we do about this, Lorrie?” they would ask her. After holding forth, a brave soul might have a follow-up: “But what about that?”

When she talked, they would listen. Clinks of forks on plates would subside, and all eyes would be upon her. Sure, they would make cracks about how neat her place was, how the forks and knives she served them with were probably worth three months’ salary, but none of them would ever decline her coveted invitation.
We would be a new sort of family,
she thought. Now all she had to do was find them.

10.

Keep Benny near. For Joe, the world was not some random accumulation of cause and effect; each action was related to the next. By keeping close to Benny now, he would keep Benny close in the future.

Another turn, and Joe saw that Benny had led them into the theater district. He knew this part of the city. To his left, a wraparound marquee advertised a movie that was three years old, maybe more. Across the street, another theater, this one smaller, with a cracked stucco exterior, advertising an afternoon showing of
Breath Rises!!!!
So sad, but funny, too, in the way that rotten things often were. Joe had seen this film years ago. It was clear that the accompanying punctuation had been added by some anonymous employee in the hopes that a bit of enthusiasm might replace the staleness of the product on offer. Movies, Joe knew, hadn’t always been like this, but then again, neither had war.

Twelve minutes after Joe started following him, Benny stopped walking, pausing in front of the theater with the exclamation points. Joe stopped, too, and leaned against a telephone pole. After a moment, he saw Benny squint and gaze toward him. Quickly Joe jerked to the other side of the telephone pole, the fear of exposure jumping his chest so hard he had to clench his teeth. Had he been spotted? There would be no way to explain himself.

Instead, he saw Benny pay at the ticket booth and head inside. Though he knew Benny’s Currencies were low, he also knew that movies were unpopular enough as to be nearly free these days. So why was Benny headed to a movie when he was supposed to locate a hard-to-find book that would save them from the Registry? Just hours until he had promised to meet Joe at a bus stop and this is how he wanted to spend the time?

A few minutes after Benny entered the theater, Joe walked up to the ticket booth and asked what time the movie let out. The outbreak of unstructured time came as a surprise; following Benny had been hard work. There was time to kill, and he was just a block away, so why the hell not?

He walked around the corner to the apartment he knew well and pressed the buzzer. An unwelcome quote from the Young Savior on the moral breaches of lust pushed its way into his thoughts, but Joe forced himself to focus on his task, not his feelings. Three floors up, a face poked out from a window, registered the familiar top of Joe’s head, and, along with the body attached to it, leapt down two flights of stairs, flinging open the door to greet him. Of course. Ronald was always home and always happy to see him.

Bringing him close with his one arm, Ronald gave Joe as tight a hug as a one-armed man could muster. Inside the apartment, the air, as always, was warm.

“You came,” Ronald panted.

Always so eager. Joe found himself staring yet again at the stainlike scar that extended across Ronald’s neck and below his collar. “I’ve only got a few hours,” he said.

“Excuse me?” Immediately Ronald’s lower lip pushed upward into a sulky pout.

“Look,” Joe said. “I’m up on First Tuesday, I’m not sure what I should do. I’ve got a few hours and was in the area, so I figured
—
”

“You’re up on First Tuesday? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“But, Joe, I thought that we might
—
”

A surge of blood pushed at the edge of Joe’s wrists, and he leaned forward to kiss him. Whatever it took to shut that beautiful face up. As always, with his eyes closed, he could make Ronald into anyone.

After they were finished, the ever-predictable Ronald made his final pitch. Joe sat there, listening, but it was too late. Now that they were done, a fast-growing weed of regret had already sprouted inside him. Ronald and his large round eyes had nothing to offer him but the empty consolation of his unwanted love.

Down the block, Joe waited, one eye on the theater. Though Ronald’s furry thighs and taut chest swam beautifully through his thoughts, Joe understood that the Young Savior would demand the drowning of all such images. No beautiful balls or shimmering shoulders, not if the Young Savior was going to stick around. It was one or the other, plain and simple. Only it wasn’t, as Joe was not willing to let either go.

After a while, Benny emerged from the theater. A slim woman with broad shoulders walking by tried to chat him up, but Joe watched as Benny quickly blew her off. No surprise—Benny was pickier than ever these days. Again Joe stayed half a block behind him. The bus station wasn’t too far from here. But immediately it was clear that Benny was not headed toward the bus station.

Three lefts, and Joe stayed on his tail. He followed as Benny headed down a particularly grimy block. Practically every other car was perched on cinder blocks, the decrepitude on proud, stately display. Probably this was a neighborhood of mangled vets. How awful, Joe thought, to be surrounded by people whose lives had gone in the very direction he was so desperate to avoid.

Using the raggedy bushes, Joe did his best to stay outside the airy edges of Benny’s vision. A shadow spread over the block, and he saw Benny stop and look up. Joe ducked behind a car and looked up, too. As he did, he saw a strange sight: a thick, sludgy cloud had scooted across the sky and blocked the sun completely.

Again Benny was on the move.
I love you,
Joe repeated to himself, to Benny’s back, to the dark cloud above. He was struck by the sense that people could live whole lives and never find another person they cared about so deeply. After the third repetition, the thick sound of Homeland Religion church bells splashed through the air. An instant sign of disapproval from the Young Savior? Ridiculous; of course it wasn’t. But he also knew that old ideas never have the grace to slither away quietly.

Just then he watched as Benny gave an obvious, lustful leer to a girl who couldn’t have been more than fourteen. Even from a distance, he could see the unfortunate girl grip her father’s mangled hand even tighter. Out of instinct, out of jealousy, out of common decency, Joe wanted to rush at Benny with a roar, shake him by the shoulders, and ask him what he thought he was doing. But Benny kept on walking, and Joe allowed the quaint notion of himself as defender of the innocent to die a small, insignificant death.

Finally Benny seemed to choose a house. Joe watched from across the street as Benny knocked. The door swung open, answered by an unshaven man with a strong resemblance to a mountain goat. Too far away to make out any words, Joe watched as Benny and the goat-man had a brief conversation before Benny entered the house, shutting the door behind him. Perhaps these were the people with the book that would save them. The goat-man who answered the door didn’t look so awful. So why had Benny excluded him?

As he was pondering this unfair exile, an armored truck with Registry markings pulled in front of the house. Joe backed away, positioning himself behind a parked car. Two men emerged from the truck, both clad in khaki uniforms, both of them carrying wood-gripped rifles. The moment they banged on the door, the house began to belch up men.

One jumped from a second-story window. Another, his face lost in a memory, burst through the glass of the front room, pausing only briefly to remove some of the toughest shards that had stuck to his skin before he raced down the street, unending streaks of blood marking his path. A third emerged from the side of the house, shimmying down the plumbing pipes, his lips moving softly, probably reciting some long ago memorized prayer to the Young Savior. He landed on two feet in the front yard, looking around for more men in uniform before scurrying away. In the distance, the faint yelping of bothered dogs.

Every few minutes, the two uniformed men would emerge with an unconscious, limp body, open the back of the truck, and toss it in. More men jumped from more windows, a few screaming on their way down. Most escaped easily; clearly, this was not a well-funded operation. But where was Benny? Why hadn’t he jumped? Another motionless man was being carried out, and at first Joe was sure this was Benny, but then he caught another angle. This dangling man had short-clipped hair and looked nothing like Benny at all. Perhaps there was a back route, some other way for Benny to get the slip on the men in uniform. Joe watched from his perch across the street. The tips of his fingers felt as though he was being forced to hold them over an open flame.
Hurry up, Benny,
he whispered.
Get the hell out of there.

The men in uniform tossed another barely stirring body into the back of their truck and returned to the house, looking for more.

11.

The feeling came, and Benny couldn’t help but let it wash over him: little teeny angels sprinted through his poxed leper veins and healed him. So much time had passed since Benny had heard the frequency, he’d forgotten the sound.

A man in an old coat, one of the dealer’s crew whose name Benny hadn’t caught or couldn’t remember, struck a match while another hand held a small spoon of liquid. After studying the setup for a moment, Benny realized that the hand grasping the spoon was his own. He wanted to be stuck. He was ready for the voltage.
My eyes have never been wetter,
he thought. His legs were crossed over themselves on the planked floor; the man with the match was squatting down beside him. The flame raced down the wood of the match and kissed the tips of the man’s fingers before he flicked his wrist.

As the divine odor filled the room, Benny’s closed insides opened. He decided to lay his head on the floor and let his eyelids fall shut. As he did, a little river rushed inside his head from one ear to the other. Milky brain fluids sloshed to parts of his mind that should have been hot and dry. There was enough water in his head for everyone in the world, ten thousand times over. No one would ever go thirsty again. How sad that the people closest to him would never experience such a beautiful chain of eruptions! Joe, of course, would have been too scared, too judgmental to join him. The meek were never free.

Leaving all thoughts of Joe behind, Benny spread out his feathers and traveled to worlds both vile and flawless, all at once. The bus that would take him up to his uncle’s cabin would idle in the station; he could hold it there until he was ready, all with his mind. Muck around the wheels, old gasoline, a puncture in the back tire, Benny created it all. Power piled on power. The bus would wait; there was time for everything.

An angel came to him and asked for his papers, questioning his right to travel around this holy place. Benny stuck a hand into his pocket; his passport was no longer there. This loss was devastating, as he had thought he might stay, but the angel told Benny that everyone in this world to come had to have papers.

Shoes slapping wood, fearful yelps—the sounds seeped slowly into his consciousness. A musky, stale scent floated into the room. Then, a strange burrowing feeling just below the final arch of his lower rib—a shoe, nudging him—and he opened his eyes and saw two men standing over him. Or maybe it was three.

Benny tried to lift his head from the floor. He couldn’t see the men’s faces, maybe because his ears were all wet from the inside and the moisture was mucking up the backs of his eyeballs. The nerves were loose, the sockets must have expanded, and now Benny saw that his eyeballs were too wet, an impossible pressure behind them. Soon the little balls he used to see with would pop from his skull and roll onto the floor, and all that water would spray from his eyeholes like a busted hydrant. Benny thought about his uncle’s cabin, that beautiful rounded lake with a narrow middle, piped by snow-capped mountains. That lake was the right amount of wet.

Again he tried to lift his head, to stand up and greet the two or three figures looming over him. The weight was too much. He would have to contend with studying their loose and floppy features from below. Perhaps these weren’t men at all, but angels. Though he couldn’t make out lips or teeth, Benny still knew that these shadows were smiling. Perhaps this form of faceless communication was how it was with angels: they were just dim amalgams of emotion, and Benny didn’t need cheeks or frowns to know it. One of the angels picked up his coat and held it up next to his own. Benny found himself deeply touched to see both coats side by side, one from the firmaments, the other from the thrift store. He let out a laugh. How to ask them if he could stay in this new place instead of back in that dead land of order he had come from? But the angels were too pretty to complain to. Benny’s mouth opened wide, and he heard a rattle, a happy moan of joy that arose from the back of his throat. “That’s everything that ever moved me,” he croaked up at them. “I have nature in my head and brotherhood right in front of me.”

These angels seemed to have outfitted themselves in matching khaki uniforms. One of them was far taller than the other. A mouthless voice spoke down at him with a commanding spiritual swagger as it pulled a piece of paper from Benny’s pocket. “What you’ve got is a bus ticket for Rural Sector M leaving in about an hour,” the angel said. This angel had the airy voice of a child. The snow in his head sung itself into water. The sound was stunning.

“And twenty Currencies, he’s only got twenty Currencies.”

“Not a lot for a runner.”

Benny hadn’t known angels dealt in such earthly matters. Their voices were whispers from the far end of a long tunnel. One of the angels continued to inspect the pockets of his coat.

“Let’s purge our sewn clothes,” Benny called up to them. “Let’s have an upsurge of wildness.” The trees at his uncle’s cabin were kind trees, trees that helped a person solve problems, trees that showed a visitor a good time and let you be exactly the person you were. There weren’t trees like that around here, not anywhere. Benny tried to tell this to the angels.

“Does he have any idea?” said the first angel.

“Why do we even want him?” said the second.

“I’m worried that we do.”

Benny didn’t like that the angels didn’t like him. “Hey,” he said. He would plead his case, replay this scene, and turn it around. But before he could form the bits in his head into a defense, the angels stopped being angels and turned into faces, converted themselves from messengers into men, both of whom, Benny saw, seemed to have some sort of writing in a patch on their shoulders.

“Hey,” Benny said. “Welcome back to the brotherhood of humanity.”

One of the men twitched his lip, the other frowned, and Benny saw a moment of understanding pass between the two of them. Before he knew what was happening, Benny felt a terrible sting in his jaw, and the men’s faces disappeared into black. Darkness everywhere, and his own face on fire. Benny could feel the world again.

It hurt. Badly.