This Is the Night (18 page)

14.

His time was up.
Go
, whispered Lorrie.
Don’t just run. Tell them why. Make it official
.

And now, on the advice of the invisible Lorrie in his head, Lance found himself in this forgotten industrial corner of the city. Rows of men were posted in front of the induction center, hands on their rifles. Each man faced outward, the engagements of their minds dark and shielded.

Lance walked up the steps and presented his papers. Of course security was going to be tight; every nut job in the Homeland wanted to destroy this place. Because it was not a First Tuesday, he had assumed there wouldn’t be much of a crowd. But First Tuesdays, it seemed, were just a media show put on by the Registry, a day when the appetite for men was only slightly stronger. Long lines of them waited to report, the most hard-bitten arriving alone, others accompanied by red-eyed mothers, wives, and sisters.

Once he was cleared, Lance was sent down a long, narrow hallway. At the end was a metal door. Pulling it open, he spotted a pretty, young secretary at a large oak desk. Behind her, a massive portrait of the prime minister with a small brass plate below indicating it had been painted twenty years ago. Funny, Lance thought. He still looked exactly the same.

“I’m here to refuse,” Lance told the secretary. The smug prime minister smiled down at his story.

“Not here,” she said, handing him the number of another room. Lance took a sharp left turn down the long hallway, followed by two rights and another left. Framed photos of the prime minister hung in short intervals along each wall. The hallways were lined with men, some sitting on the brown slate tiles, others standing.

What do you think? How am I doing?
he whispered to Lorrie. As the Lorrie of his mind was composed entirely of Lance’s own memories, she had been very supportive as he had left his apartment, hopped on a bus, transferred, twice made wrong turns on foot, and finally located the building that had been packing men off to war this year, the year before that, and the years before that as well. Of course Lance knew that this cleansed, sanitized, and uncomplaining Lorrie whom he could not touch, whose dry lips he could not see, was not the real Lorrie. But as the real Lorrie had been so completely removed from his life and he so immersed in absolute loneliness, just to sense her, he was sure, was a salve against his own self being ripped apart completely. Besides, once all this was done, he would replace her with the real thing. This whole ordeal was just one more story to share.

Taking in the room in front of him, Lance saw several dozen uncomfortable-looking chairs jammed too close together, the lightly padded seats all occupied by men in a similar age range. One of the men read a magazine. On the cover: “Homeland Indigenous in the Service.” And below, in smaller print: “Group F Does Their Part.”

We talked about that,
he whispered to Lorrie.
At the beach.
She nodded her ghost chin up and down.
We sure did, baby,
she whispered. Lance appreciated the affirmation but found himself increasingly troubled by how little Ghost-Lorrie sounded like her real-life counterpart.

The line moved slowly, the dejected men crowding the hallway, their heads low, their dreams full of girlfriends or safety, or whatever it was that these men dreamed about. Finally, Lance reached the auditorium.

To the back of the room was a low stage with a podium and thick red curtains. No windows. The overhead lights were sharp and bright; if any building was exempt from the rolling blackouts, surely it was the Western City North Induction Center. Watching the officers, memories of high school pre-army classes flooded into Lance: the tall man standing stage left was a sergeant; the thick man beside him with the raspy engine voice had shoulder insignia that showed him to be a captain; the third official was a second lieutenant who looked like he didn’t want to be there any more than Lance did. On the floor below the stage were eight inductees in two rows of four. Lance chose the second row, not the first. Eight more men were outside the door awaiting the next round. Behind them, eight more, and another eight after that. Lance felt his blood rise to the surface and threaten to burst from beneath his skin and stain the carpet below. This was it.

Hey,
he whispered to Lorrie.

Silence.

He looked around the room frantically, at the stage, at the other inductees, at his dark brown shoes. Lorrie, it seemed, could not follow him here, into the bowels of the Registry.

“Each man will repeat his full name,” the sergeant barked, “after which I will follow with the phrase,
‘new inductee of the Homeland Army.’ Understood?”

The men nodded.

“Once I have called your name and spoken the aforementioned phrase, you are to take one step forward. It is this step”—the sergeant paused and stared at each of them before glancing back at his clipboard—“that will officially conscript you in your service to the Homeland.”

The thought came to Lance that it seemed silly to officially refuse, that the symbolism of not putting one foot in front of another was inconsequential to the handful of people in attendance. Why now, he thought, why say no now? He had not said no to Lorrie’s parents, he had not said no to her obsessive need for hot wash; instead, he had gone along with all of it. Every tactic he tried, each word he had said and strung together with another one, all of those words had failed to debug her. None of his words, he realized, had worked. The thought struck Lance that he knew Lorrie didn’t write or call because he had hit her, and he knew he had hit her because his words hadn’t worked.

The sergeant called out a name, and a man in the front row stepped forward.

New inductee of the Homeland Army!

One small step to determine all his possibilities, to narrow them into one. Lance worried that his body might refuse to obey, that his arms or bladder or legs might decide to perform some action that his mind didn’t agree with.

New inductee of the Homeland Army!

They were on his row now.

“New inductee of the Homeland Army!” the sergeant yelled, grasping the hand of the young man who had walked across the stage toward him. More names; another repetition of the six-word phrase. Suddenly the man next to Lance was pronouncing his full name for the sergeant as though it was the first time he had heard the words. One name away.

All Lance had to do was repeat his own name and then step forward. He knew that if he stood in place and didn’t say anything, his life would get even worse than it currently was. The world was closing in on him. But so what? His heart was still open.

“Lance Sheets,” called the sergeant. “Please say your name and step forward.”

Lance’s life struck him as a salt-kissed wound, open and bloody and with no relief in sight. The room was warm; his skin was damp and salty.

“Ahem!” yelled the sergeant, louder than before. “Lance Sheets.” The name bounced off the faded walls around him; his eyeballs showed him nothing but black air and clouds. Each of his fingers was twisted around the other. New inductees of the Homeland Army bent their necks to look at him.

If to step forward was the army and to stand still was prison, neither option contained freedom. But, he reminded himself, there was always a third way.

“Lance Sheets?” the sergeant called again.

He blinked his eyes clear. More heads turned his way. His knees sizzled, bouncing up and down in their sockets. He bit his teeth together to try and force them still.

“You’re sure?” the staff sergeant said to him. “You have to be sure.”

Each limb was soft, gelatinous. He felt near collapse.

“Just step forward,” said the second lieutenant. “It’s that simple.”

The second lieutenant looked at the captain. The captain looked at the sergeant.

The sergeant tapped his foot. The captain sighed. All of them looked at Lance.

“Step forward,” said the captain. “Now.”

“You’re going to have to step forward, son,” said the second lieutenant.

“We don’t have all day,” said the sergeant.

All the days since Lorrie had gone were one long day in which yesterday and last week could just as easily have been tomorrow or a month from now. How exactly he had arrived here seemed an infinitely small series of events, each one impossible to pinpoint.

“What’s that?” the second lieutenant said.

“Speak up, you coward,” the sergeant growled.

“No,” Lance said. “You heard me the first time.”

15.

Back in Western City North, Lorrie’s mind had been full of misapprehensions, dazzled by all the wrong things. Now, in Interior City—that land of traditional, bighearted, and ruggedly individual Homeland citizens—she could finally focus. She would stop the war by blocking its supply.

As it stood, the war showed no signs of ending. Two attacks on the Homeland’s Strategic National Stockpile just within the last two weeks.
Leave us alone,
scientists on television pleaded, their appeals broadcast on hundreds of channels, their words reprinted in thousands of newspapers.
We’re warehousing vaccines, antidotes. This is a place of medicine. That’s it
.

Though most major newspapers preferred to refrain from even printing the word, everyone knew what those terrorists were looking for. And now, Lorrie guessed, the prime minister would stomp all over the Coyotes and use the attacks to justify another surge. With so much to do, she was worried about time.

I need
, she thought,
to live forever.

Asking around, she had discovered an anti-Registry center in the southeast quadrant of the city. A place that counseled men about their options and whether they had any. The official name of the place was the Registry Assistance and Counseling Center (RACC), but after a day it was clear that everyone just called it “the Center.”

Her first day made her nervous. Even going to an anti-Registry center in Interior City was more weighted, more fraught than Western City North, where opposition to the war had started early and was easily anticipated by anyone paying attention. Interior City, on the other hand, was a small town clothed in big-city trappings.

In other parts of the Homeland, the general wisdom was that the Foreigns perpetrated attacks that maximized casualties, whereas some faction of antiwar Homeland citizens carried out attacks that minimized them. As for the recent round of weird attacks—the Homeland Army uniforms sculpted into skirts and dresses, the armored cars filled with charcoal—no one in any part of the Homeland had any ideas about that. But in Interior City, most found discussion of the so-called “weird” attacks to be an uninteresting distinction. This was not a region that had elected any Coyotes to parliament. In Interior City, an attack on the Homeland was an attack on the Homeland.

That first day, Lorrie wore long sleeves and an ankle-length skirt to cover the scars and scratches imprinted on her limbs. The Center occupied the bottom floor of a decaying four-story building that was home to several families who had escaped from the Foreigns just before the Old War. The building was badly in need of repair, as were most of the two-family bungalows on the block surrounding it. After a late-night assault by pro-war patriots, a window in the back room of the Center had been clumsily boarded up with plywood, a shoddy repair job that sneaked wisps of cold air into every room. But the Center—despite its mysteriously shifting roof leaks and rickety foundation—was the locus of anti-Registry action in Interior City. To be sure, Lorrie heard, there had been other centers. But those others had been harassed by neighbors, raided by the Registry, fallen under the glistening spell of the Fareon folks, or simply lacked the funds to operate. For anyone opposed to the war in Interior City, the Center was all there was.

Eric was the leader, a role Lorrie could spot immediately. His hair was styled and fashionable, he wore motorcycle boots, and his face was arranged in a way that implied that once he reached middle age he would look like the kind of man who had been very handsome in his twenties. She was unclear on why the Registry didn’t yet have him. From across the room she watched as Eric finished a plum and spat out the pit in the garbage. A plum! Nobody had those anymore; the mere fact of possession set him apart from the rest. Lorrie hadn’t seen one in years.

By late morning, all the volunteers had shuffled in and taken seats on the metal folding chairs in the back room, spines erect and shoulders level, all of them ready for an inspirational morning speech. Something to rally the volunteers before a long day of informing desperate men of their slim chances.

Eric rose and exited the circle, a movement that forced Lorrie and the rest of the group to rotate their heads in order to see him.

“We do not hope for an overnight revolution,” Eric began. Most of the volunteers closed their eyes or looked at their laps; a few followed Eric’s movements and placed a flat hand over their brows to shield their eyes from the brightness of the sun. His voice was indistinguishable—not an Interior City accent, but not identifiable as originating from some other sector of the Homeland, either. “We are not fools. We cannot be childish enough, naïve enough, to think the war will end tomorrow, that if we just march hard enough, often enough, we have done our work.”

Don’t mention Fareon,
Lorrie thought. Already she liked the place, could imagine herself working here. But one conspiracy theorist was all it took to turn a group on itself.

Eric went on, walking faster around the outer edges of the circle now, his red gingham shirt leaving trails of leftover morning light as he passed. “A true revolution reaches far,” he was saying, “and is the completion of a course. Our course”—he paused—“is far from over. Our course has only just begun.”

Susan, the only other woman Lorrie’s age in the room, nodded her head. She wore a bright yellow minidress with a big zipper up the front. Nothing special. But when Susan crossed her legs, Lorrie saw half the volunteers move their eyes over the faultless curve of her thighs. Beneath Lorrie’s long, heavy skirt lay two limbs pocked with fist-sized sores, the dark blotches brought on from her months of obsessive scratching. Susan and her perfect shiny legs made Lorrie feel like some sort of animal.

“Any questions?” Eric asked.

Immediately people began to argue.

Nobody at the Center, it seemed, could ever agree on anything. Even official statutes of the Homeland were often unclear: Were there really any antisodomy laws on the books? What actually happened when you called the Point Line? All could agree that the Homeland obscured the rules, but deciding what to do about those hypothetical rules was much more difficult.

“We need to vote on our Fareon position,” said one man.

“I’ve already drafted a manifesto of support,” said another.

“Of support?” came the cry. “How can you support something that doesn’t exist?”

As one volunteer stood and spoke in an attempt to cajole the others into the embrace of adopting some stance, another person would immediately disagree. Any plan orbited a set path only for a moment until banged off course by counterproposals, cuts, deletions, and amendments.

The position paper on Fareon was soon forgotten as others wanted to discuss a legislator from some distant part of the Homeland who had joined the Coyotes and given a timid speech from the parliament floor detailing his hope of drawing down troop levels by as much as a quarter in the next five to seven years.

“We should send a letter of support!” cried one member.

“Capitulator!” came the response from across the room.

Up next, a local elected official, asking the anti-Registry center to officially denounce violent opposition to the war.

“Just the attacks where people die,” someone said. “We only should condemn those.”

“Just these new weird attacks,” another argued. “We condemn violence, but we like it when they fill Registry trucks with charcoal and dress up mannequins in Homeland Army miniskirts.”

“Sellout!”

“Militant!”

Words as sharp as the points of diamonds hurled from one volunteer to another, until finally: “That’s Homeland Ideology!”

The ultimate insult. No one wanted to be accused of dancing anywhere close to the governing principles of the Homeland. All of them, they were sure, had shed that dead skin.

What the hell was Eric doing? Lorrie thought. This place needed a leader, not just some guy giving vague speeches before crawling into his shell once reality poked its head through. In some ways, though, she understood the challenges of containing such an unruly mob. Clearly, as soon as a volunteer established himself, he would be snapped up and have to go on the run. These men shouting out ideas were probably in their first or second week of attendance. The men of the Center, save Eric, were on a steady rotation. Yet another thing, Lorrie saw, that needed fixing.

After the talk, Lorrie went up to Susan and introduced herself. Though she just wanted to talk, she felt blazoned, on display, as though her mere presence as a woman in this place was a barely tolerated trespass. And now the only two women were talking? Ridiculous. Women were the only ones who could stick around.
Let their teeth clatter,
Lorrie thought.
Soon there will be more of us.

Lorrie and Susan faced each other in the small back room as the men filed out to counsel.

“So, Lorrie. How many words per minute?” Susan’s large eyes were a peculiar shade of grey.

“Pardon?”

“How fast can you type?” The large grey eyes were fixed on her. “Eric wants these notes typed up for our leaflet by the end of the day. I can’t do it all alone.”

“Well—”

“Look.” Susan gestured around the room. A volunteer named Doug was having trouble twisting the top off a pill bottle; another young man with an old face sat at a small table in the corner attempting to tune the radio. Lorrie could see he had the sort of quivering hands that just might keep him from the Registry, and she noticed his stomach was pouched like that of a small boy. Maybe that counted for something, too. “These guys have things to do,” Susan said. “Doors open in a few minutes. Are you going to help me or not?”

“You don’t counsel?”

Susan looked as though she wanted to run the other way. “Counsel? Me?”

“Have they not trained you yet?”

“Oh no,” Susan laughed. “Eric and the rest of the committee believe that to truly understand someone’s plight, you have to be able to experience it.”

“I see,” Lorrie said. An obstacle she had not foreseen. The only question would be determining the most efficient way to remove it.

“Good. Let’s go work in the back. We just distract them when we’re up front anyway.” Susan laughed a huge laugh, too large for her frame. Lorrie didn’t smile.

Susan and Lorrie headed to a musty side room around the corner from where the men were counseled on their chances. Every now and then, vague sounds from the sessions consolidated into words in the air around them:
Run. Hide. Pay
. Mostly the sounds from the counseling room weren’t words at all, just sobs and pale, desolate moans.

From opposite ends of the small, windowless room the two of them pounded away on their antiquated machines, battery operated so as not to be affected by the blackouts. When the lights finally did go out, they lit candles and kept typing. The buckling springs beneath their keys made for a constant racket, and often Lorrie had to ask Susan to speak up; her bad ear muddied sounds. Susan, she learned, had refused to break off her engagement to her fiancé, who was currently on the run. Her parents were upset, and she hadn’t heard from the fiancé in weeks. When Susan shifted the conversation and asked how long Lorrie had been in Interior City, Lorrie added the time she had spent in the Facility to her answer.

“I just can’t believe anyone would move here from Western City North,” Susan said.

“It was actually kind of terrible out there. It’s just so crazy in that place.”

“But so vibrant, they say,” Susan said, exhaling. “Western City North. Popping and jumping. So wild.”

“Too wild.”

Susan laughed her huge laugh once again, and Lorrie turned around and watched her shoulders tremble, as though “wild” was just some inventive wordplay and not a state of mind that was much, much more than anybody should ever have to endure.

Lorrie decided that she was not willing to put up with this typing shit for much longer.

But how to get Susan on her side?

“War is a fiction,” Eric began. The volunteers of the Center were circled around him for another morning inspirational, words to inspire before the counselors counseled and Susan and Lorrie typed and filed. “A false need created by individuals.”

By now Lorrie could see that the ruddy shore of Eric’s leadership would soon be completely washed to sea. Brash when the situation called for timidity, clear as a ghost when a spokesperson was called for, the man was a disaster. Sure, he was attractive in a generic sort of way. But what the Center needed, Lorrie knew, was a manager who could marry a tacit understanding of the operations the Center already had under way with a vision of how to improve them. Instead, the Center had a guy who liked to listen to himself talk.

“We expose the system,” Eric was saying, “in order to reveal that the entire structure designed to protect us is actually causing us harm.”

How much longer was Eric going to drone on? Lorrie massaged her fingers and wondered if she should get a skirt as short as the tight-fitting olive-green one that outlined Susan’s perfectly proportioned hips. No way. Besides, even if she did have the figure to pull off an outfit like that, there were still the scars. Always the scars.