This Is the Night (21 page)

It felt like a prison.

18.

Benny knew he was moving before he opened his eyes. A sightless survey of his surroundings: on his shoulder, a damp and unidentified pressure, seeping through the fabric of his coat. Below him, a mechanical hum vibrated the floor. None of it felt right.

Mostly he was confused. His coat was damp, but the revelation that he was wearing a coat at all was much more of a surprise. Someone had been inspecting this very coat, that much he was sure of, but how and why and how long ago all that had happened, his ragged thoughts could not figure. All he knew was that his shoulder was wet and that, somehow, he was moving.

Thoughts came in small, heavy slices, and though waves of pain rolled throughout his body, he did not think to open his eyes. Another bang, that was what he needed, just a sniff or snort to clear his thoughts. But the humming floor, the angled dampness on his shoulder, the swinging ache in his jaw. Something was wrong, and so, Benny thought, he would keep out the world, if only for a few minutes more.

But the world kept coming. Thinking clearly was difficult, as he was sure a small hammerstone was battering the thin bone behind his forehead, an internal pounding that dragged each brief spark of a thought immediately to the guillotine, an endless cycle of quick birth and death. No idea stuck until, finally, one did: Touch a finger, this cognitive survivor told him, to the wetness of your shoulder. Yes, he decided. To find out why his shoulder was wet was important. Just as rapidly, this thought, too, gave way to another: Why am I not able to touch my shoulder? Followed by: Why are my hands tied? And finally: How about I open my eyes?

Yes, Benny. Open your eyes.

Instantly, that rare life phenomenon: an immediate answer. The wetness on his shoulder was saliva. A strange man was resting his chin against Benny’s shoulder, the banks of his teeth pouring forth a rushing river of drool. The man’s eyes were closed, his breaths slow. Answer two delivered itself just as rapidly: the vibration beneath him was the slow hum of an engine, and gradually the scene before him took shape: he was on a hard bench, in the back of a truck, a man next to him semiconscious and drooling on his shoulder, his hands tied with some sort of thin cable. All around him were more men in various states of alertness. A softly fermenting smell of sweat coated them all, and Benny found the thick stench that had invaded his nostrils hard to bear.

“What is this?” Benny asked to no one in particular. His voice hovered over the truck hold. One man was snoring hard, the deep sleep of a Substance-smasher. No one answered. “Where are we?” Benny asked again, his voice pinched and rising.

“Not so loud!” a man from the far end of the bench yelled, far too loudly.

Benny understood. Simply speaking those three words had sent waves of pain through his fragile skull. To pull oneself so radically away from a planned day of Substance smashing was to dry out a small plant in desperate need of mere drops of water. From the looks of the men in the truck, they, too, had been snipped from the tree much too early.

Again he spoke, softer this time. “Does anybody know where we are?”

The same man answered, offering only the side of his face, as if to turn toward Benny was too much. “The Registry, man. This is the Registry.”

“What?” slurred Benny.

The unhappy man seemed to gain strength from Benny’s ignorance. They were, he explained, in the midst of what he had heard was called Operation Lowlife, though he had also heard many other names and doubted that one was any more official than the others. “They raid the drug houses,” the man explained, “pick up whoever they find, hold us till we’re clean, chop our hair off, and toss us into the jungle. Fast track. I didn’t know it was true, I’d only heard stories, but look around. It is true, it must be. They say they pull up at a house, scatter or catch the dealers, and grab the users. Now look. That is just what has happened.”

“I’m not a user,” said Benny.

“Right,” the man said.

“Maybe every now and then,” Benny mumbled.

The slow hum of the engine disappeared.

“What’s that?” Benny asked the man, the only one, it seemed, who could talk.

“That’s the next stop.”

“The induction center?”

“Oh no. You don’t go straight there. They hold you in these detox zones, make sure you’re all clean and that the stuff is out of your system.”

“But tomorrow is First Tuesday. Why take us today?”

“Was it your turn?” the man asked. “Were you really going to go?”

“Maybe,” Benny said. “So you think we’re at some detox place?”

“Nope. Take a listen to those screams. We’re at another drug house. They need as many of us as they can get.”

And though this made sense to Benny, and though he knew on some level that he was included in their numbers, for a brief and unredeeming moment, he, too, felt worried for the Homeland.
What has it come to
, he asked himself,
if these men surrounding me are the type of men we need to win our fight?

The man who had been drooling on his shoulder woke up and promptly vomited onto the floor. Benny, who now understood the terms of the world he found himself in, passed out, the Substance still smashing its way through his system.

A slash of light bored into his eyeballs as the back door of the truck was ripped open. Benny blinked rapidly, snapping his eyes into focus. Through the slant of the door he saw a tree-lined street. Two familiar-looking uniformed men clad in khaki stood by with large rifles slung over their shoulders. Though bothered by the light, Benny could make out the wooden grip on the shorter guard’s rifle, the only part of his long weapon that did not catch the sun. The taller guard was shoving in one man, then another, both of them barely able to walk, the first barefoot, the second with twig arms and legs attached to a skeletal frame. Once shoved through the doors, the barefoot man made the slow effort to crawl toward an empty space on the bench, inching along on his stomach, as his hands, Benny saw, were bound behind him, knotted with a slim spiral of plastic. The other man, no power left, simply closed his eyes and lay on the floor, breaths distant enough from one another that Benny was worried his lungs might simply be forgetting to draw in air.

“Hospital!” Benny croaked. Speaking was still difficult, yelling even more of a challenge. “Get this man to the hospital.”

But the doors had already been closed, and with a small shake of life, the truck was once again on the move.

“Grab onto my ankles,” Benny said to the man on the floor, extending his feet toward him. It took a moment for Benny to remember that just as his own hands were bound behind his back, this man’s were, too. Time for a new tactic. “Slide forward a bit,” Benny told him, “and I’ll hook your armpits with my legs and pull you toward the bench. You don’t want to stay down there.”

Indeed, a curling stream of liquid was winding away from the minced heap of vomit piled on the floor, a braided path sliding down the bed of the truck. But the man just looked up at him, smiled, and closed his eyes, placing his cheek flat on the floor.

“Don’t you even want to try?”

But the other men, still in their own small worlds, hissed at Benny to be quiet, and the man on the floor lay silent and still. Watching him, Benny could see that it was far too easy to stop living long before you were dead.

Slowly, a routine began to take shape: the truck would stop, fists would bang on doors, yelping men could be heard scattering, followed by the back doors of the truck swinging open to allow two or three more—always those who had been most overrun by the flood, the ones who could barely walk, the men who had not run because they were not able to do so.

It became clear that this was a small, poorly funded, and modest operation. From the dim sounds of each stop, Benny gathered that the driver and his assistant did not chase anyone, only grabbing those Substance-smashers who had drifted too far into a melted mix of inner light and shadows. These smashers, the ones who had not moved, were unprepared for the event of being ripped from their pleasant and hallucinatory world and pushed into a very unpleasant arrival in the real one.

After a few hours, the truck was full. Several of the men were shirtless, or shoeless, or some combination of the two. More hours passed, and Benny heard the motor cut once again, but this time the back door did not open. Instead, they sat, the deep darkness smearing across their thoughts.

“Where do you think we are?” someone asked.

“Downtown,” another man answered. “Listen to those sounds.”

The man was right. Horns, a drill shattering concrete, crashing cityscapes, the earthly sounds of clustered Homeland citizens moving through the afternoon, living their lives.

And then the muffled voices of what could only be the driver and his assistant arguing, raised speech loud enough to be heard through the metal walls of the cargo hold but stripped of style and meaning. A few of the more alert men pressed their ears against the wall.

“Something about a kid’s birthday,” the man reported back to them.

But the others shook their heads, accused him of still being in the obscured state of withdrawal. Kids? Birthdays? That’s not what these men with inkblots on their hearts talked about. The eavesdropper shrugged, and before long the truck began to move again.

After a while, the loud city sounds died away. A few of the men told stories of the detox zones. Some said they were far from the urban areas so no one had to hear the screams of the unwillingly sober. Others claimed these detox zones were simply short stays in established prisons, the Substance users thrown in cells with the worst the Homeland had to offer. Everyone in the truck, it seemed, had a story, but none of them had the truth.

An hour later—was it really an hour? Benny could not tell—the truck again stopped. Almost all the men were awake now, returning to consciousness and slowly inching like earthworms onto the long rows of seats or benches. Even so, there was not room for everyone, and the latest arrivals were forced to occupy the floor.

With sudden force, the hinged doors swung open. Though the light was bright, it was not hard to make out their location at the entrance to some sort of detention center, watchtowers and heavy gates slathered in barbed wire the only view. Benny noticed they were not inside this prison, but rather parked out front.

“One of you,” the guard said. “That’s all they’ve got room for.”

Benny looked away, twisting his ear into his shoulder. Eye contact, he knew, could only hurt him. The other men did the same. But burrowing into himself like a frightened ground mole was not, he decided, in his nature. One must act, he told himself, in order to live. “Him,” he told the guard, pointing to the barefoot man who had been unable to summon his own strength to move from the floor. “He’ll go.”

The tall guard nodded and began to pull the man by his ankles. Awakened by the movement, he opened his mouth and moved his lips rapidly. When he realized that no sounds were emerging, he narrowed his eyes, locking them on Benny as he was dragged away. In the subtle language of silence, he put forth the question:
How could you?

The men looked at Benny, some grateful, others thick with resentment at his brief entanglement with the enemy. But that barefoot man was being dragged to some unfriendly detox zone of a prison and he, Benny reasoned, was not. The stares of the other men slid off him easily. Was not freedom the only dimension of life that made it worth living? He shrugged at a man glaring at him from across the hold. Staying free meant staying ready.

As the door behind them closed, they heard the tall guard say to the shorter one, “Where the hell are we going to take the rest of these guys?”

“Anybody catch where we are?” Benny asked the group.

“I saw a sign,” came the answer. “Prison Complex J.”

“That wasn’t a J. That was a T!” came another voice.

The two men argued, and the truck drove on. Such a cruel joke, Benny thought, that this harsh, stinking cage had carried him past his childhood home. The depth of his own fall was stupefying.

More hours, more driving. Again a stop, and again the muffled sound of an argument coming through the truck walls.