This Is the Night (29 page)

A strong rush of wind swept the small tears from resting in the corners of her eyes to the ground below. Her cheeks were hot, and she tripped over a rise in the cement where a sidewalk slab had been upended, mutilated by an extensive system of twisted roots. It all seemed so random. Once inside the Center, no matter who counseled them, it would be someone who could not recount the absolute truth: twenty-two years into the war and the Center no longer had any real ideas on how to save them.

With each step, her darting cat eyes swiveled the streets for anyone the least bit Lance-like. The air felt empty, and the wind blew dark and heavy against her skin. Good people died, and Lance lived. Of course Lorrie knew that was how the world worked: the wrong hearts were always beating.

I already gave up my body to that man,
she thought. That would be all. Her new life was hers. No one else’s.

Down the street, a woman walked toward her, both hands waving wildly. The woman’s upturned palms juddered closer, shuddering with intensity. Quick glints of light broke through open holes in the clouds and caught the rings on the woman’s fingers, the tinsel of her hands painting streaks across the avenue. Who was she? A fellow reformed crazy from the Facility Lorrie now failed to recognize? The arms continued the two-handed wave, moving closer.

Lorrie considered whether or not to cross the street. There was no one behind her, no one else the woman could possibly be gesturing to. As the wild-palmed woman closed more distance, the velocity of her finger wiggles increased with each step. The shadows lifted from her face, and Lorrie saw that it was her old antigrammarian acquaintance, the radio-shattering Susan.

How much time had gone by since Lorrie had last thought about her? Susan had stopped coming to the Center, and in that absence Lorrie could see she had lived dozens of lives. She had no makeup on. Gone was her short, fanciful dress; now she wore brown corduroy jeans, work boots, and a light blouse with long sleeves that fell over her wrists. Oversized aviator sunglasses with a hint of yellow covered most of her face. Next to Susan, Lorrie felt gigantically small.
She must think I’m so uptight,
Lorrie thought. How much, she wondered, did Susan hate her?

“So glad to see you!” Susan squealed.

Or maybe not.

Hugging one another on the sidewalk, they exchanged where-have-you-beens and what-are-you-doings.

“You’re still at the Center, right?”

Lorrie nodded, though after today, it was quite clear she wasn’t. Neither brought up dangling modifiers or predicate nominatives, and both avoided all talk of the smashed radio. While Susan asked about mutual friends—a few volunteers had already been shipped over and quickly shipped back, some alive, others barely—it came to Lorrie that the two of them hadn’t known each other at all. From Susan’s perspective, she was as an overly corrective envelope stuffer, a filer. Susan knew nothing of her bugs, her angry ex-boyfriend with the wild temper—possibly watching from around the corner or up some tall tree this very moment—the Facility, all the things that everyone else seemed to think added up to who she was.

And it went both ways, Lorrie knew. All her Susan thoughts were formed by the unfortunate day she had chosen to wear a revealing skirt and her strong aversion to the rules governing syntax. Their lives had danced around each other, but never really touched.

“Eric still running things?” Susan asked. They were stopped under a large tree.

Lorrie wanted to mention Eric’s hateful outburst, but found that she could not. “Yes,” Lorrie said.

“And his wolf of a mother?” Susan smiled. “Is she still there?”

“Jane?”

“Yeah, Jane.” Susan snorted as the name left her lips.

“You didn’t hear about Jane? We were walking in the park, and two agents just came and took her.”

“What’s she charged with?”

“That’s the thing. No one can find her. She’s just vanished.”

Susan shrugged. “I don’t know what they would want
her
for
.
”

The tough new Susan in front of her made Lorrie shy, but what Jane had done to Susan besides embarrass her for that short skirt awhile back, Lorrie couldn’t imagine. This new Susan didn’t seem like she would hold such a fragile grudge.

What she wanted, Lorrie realized, were Susan’s secrets, an explanation of the way her posture made it seem as though she might grab a flowerpot and smash it over someone’s head. In a flash, Lorrie saw how timid she had been, how she had let her ideas leak out in tiny, polite drips and drops rather than speaking her mind with the loud and bold voice in her head. But could Susan see that, too? Susan had gutted whatever house she had been living in, that much was clear.

Talking to Susan on the street, Lorrie felt far too exposed. “How about we grab a cup of coffee?” she suggested. At the entrance to the coffee shop, Lorrie paused and looked in. There wasn’t an inch of free space along the walls. The owners—probably three-digit university boys whose daddies helped get them Respected Doctor notes for asthma and pigeon toes—had clearly studied the coffee shops of Western City North and done their best to replicate the experience here in Interior City. And it was working; the café was packed with women and vets. This was, she thought, just the kind of place Lance used to piss away his days in. Still, Lance didn’t know his way around Interior City. Wherever he was, there was little chance he would be here.

Feet still street-side, Lorrie’s mind traveled back to the slightest hesitation she had felt before entering a photo studio/bookstore to chat with a nice-looking rural boy while Terry fixed the car; the doorway of her Western City North apartment that smelled of old cigarettes and new foods; the entrance to each and every closet in which she had pushed up against the peeled-skin artist; every threshold she had crossed before her started-over life in Interior City back when bright-eyed bugs still distorted her life and decayed her veins. She had exited all of it: the up-country entryway of the Facility, the double-glass doors of the Center that failed to stop men from going to war. Most of all, she had left Lance, whose boiling-water temper was more unstable than an industrial reactant. From her place on the sidewalk, the odor of the sugar maples rolled through her nostrils and mixed with the roasted beans of the café. Immediately Lorrie knew that the swirling aroma was the air of her started-over life. She was not with a man in Western City North who beat her. She was not in a Young Savior–obsessed crazy-person clinic near the border of Allied Country N. Those doors were gone. Now she was outside a coffee shop with a woman in strong clothes who had almost smashed her toenails with a radio and had no idea about any of her other doorways.

“You all right?” said Susan.

“Perfect,” Lorrie said. “Just perfect.”

They walked inside and twisted themselves through the makeshift aisles and narrow spaces toward the back of the café. One man sobbed softly in the far corner, another held his oversized mug in front of his face, ashamed to be seen. One of his ears was scabbed and tattered, the other seemed to have been blasted off completely.

“How about over there?” Lorrie pointed to a battered couch on the other side of the room with deep depressions in each of its cushions.

“What? Oh, no. Not that. Just a friendly little reminder, Lorrie: never sit on the couches here, even if they just zapped them.” She paused. “They’re filled with bugs.”

Lorrie shuddered.

Susan seemed to pick up on her discomfort. “How about my place instead?” she asked. “This coffee shop looks like they’re scheduled for a blackout anyway.”

Susan’s smile was greedy, and Lorrie could see that she, too, was ready to flee the empty human lives that were all over the café. Again she looked at Susan’s impressive new swagger. If Lorrie could plug the right ideas in, she decided, then Susan was the right one to deliver them.

“Just come,” Susan said.

“There is a lot of stuff that needs to be done at the Center,” said Lorrie.

Susan raised an eyebrow.

For a moment Lorrie had forgotten the loud music of her departure. No, she would not be going back to the Center. Doug, the worst counselor ever, could continue shooting Substance in the bathroom before returning to his desk to scribble divergent loops while men across from him cried. Though the Center might be slowed down by the lack of a woman to file their intelligible notes, their problems were much more severe than that.

Susan lived on the tenth floor of a condemned building. Interior City simply had yet to bulldoze the place, she explained, and so Susan and a few hardy neighbors on floors two, three, and five stuck it out, occupying the large, airy rooms with the knowledge that on any day a crew of old men and newly trained women in hard hats might bang a warning on their doors that today was the day the building was to be reduced to rubble. In the lobby, they walked past the elevator bank and straight to the stairs. Even if the elevators had been working, in this time of constant blackouts neither of them was foolish enough to ride one.

Once in the apartment, Susan pulled out a fifth of rum from beneath a cushion, and the two of them sat on her couch and took short slugs right from the bottle. Looking around the apartment, Lorrie saw no newspapers or magazines. In Lorrie’s circle, such a lack of media was unheard of. To be informed, to be up to date with as many publications as possible, was to show you cared about stopping the war. “No newspapers?” asked Lorrie. She was curious; she couldn’t help it.

Susan looked at her with a stretched smile that almost bordered on pity. “The way to understand the war,” Susan said, “isn’t to read about it in the papers. All that so-called news is just noise. And the more noise there is, the harder it is to hear what’s really going on.” Susan leaned toward her. “Now have some more.” The rum was sour and burnt her insides.

The echo of Susan tugging at her tiny skirt in the circle of the Center, of Susan bragging about her excellent filing skills, of Susan being anything other than the woman in corduroys taking deep swigs from the bottle in front of them, those old Susans were gone. This Susan had been exposed, dazzled, and Lorrie knew that she would have to soak herself in whatever world Susan was living in until it coated all of her, right down to the last column of her spine.

“Can I ask you a question?” Lorrie heard herself say. “Why did you stop coming to the Center?” She took another gulp from the bottle of rum in front of them.

“Why? Because their tactics were stale. I wanted to really do something.”

“Jane used to talk about that.”

Susan snorted. “Forget about Jane, Lorrie. Don’t you see she’s dust? None of them can counsel us. They’ve got nothing. Especially not some old broad like Jane.”

“So what, she’s old? What have you got against Jane? She had a lot of influence around that place. I was working her, getting her to get Eric to let women counsel? She was into it, too. But she’s probably suffering right now in some secret prison.”

“Sure, that sucks for Jane the individual. But don’t forget what Jane was all about. ‘War is not a healthy thing for children.’ Mother’s Day cards to Homeland officials. ‘Girls Say Yes to Boys Who Say No.’” Her voice had a low, mocking tone. “She was just being nice to you. She would have never been in favor of women counselors.”

She passed Lorrie the rum. Lorrie turned the bottle upside down and opened her mouth wide. Nothing came out. Susan had finished it. “Jane thinks—thought—we should be more sympathetic to the Coyotes. They hate the war, too.”

Susan ignored this. “You got a kid?”

“No.”

“Me neither. But it’s like we shouldn’t say anything unless we’re talking about how it affects our babies. Jane’s whole authority came from motherhood. She would go on and on about ‘mothers this, mothers that.’” Her hands performed wild gestures she seemed to associate with mothers. Susan lowered her voice. “I don’t give a fuck about babies, Lorrie. I care about stopping this war.”

Lorrie’s eyes cut downward.

“And if you want to stop this war, you’ll quit talking about Coyotes, at least until they can triple, no, quintuple their membership. What are they now, like, five percent of parliament? This war is about to turn twenty-three years old! I don’t know what Jane’s agenda was, but I know it’s irrelevant. I mean, don’t get me started on that ‘girls say yes’ shit.” Susan stood up and went to the kitchen.

“But she doesn’t mean—”

“Really, Lorrie? Do we have to talk about what we do and don’t get to do at the Center?” Susan pulled another bottle from a cabinet, twisted the cap, and handed it to Lorrie.

“True.”

“Exactly. Now let me hit you with something real. No more typing Eric’s bullshit notes. I’m on a new grind, a hustle that actually stops the Registry.”

Lorrie tilted the bottle up and pursed her lips around the opening. The river of rum pricked at the walls of her throat as she gulped it down.

Susan went on. She knew, she said, a way that could help the men ensnared.

“Gay?” Lorrie guessed.

“Oh, gay is out. They’re giving them full rights and then snapping them up the moment they peek their heads out. Besides, the gay angle is pretty unethical, if you ask me. That whole ruse the Center runs about pretending to hate gays so they’ll think you’re gay?”