This Is the Night (3 page)

“Oh?” Lance said, and raised his eyebrows.

She loved to read the Foreigns, she told him. Again, more glances from nearby tables. Homeland authors were too provincial, she went on, too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture. “The Foreigns have an awful lot of answers,” she said.

“Isn’t that Ideology Five?” Lance whispered.

“Absolutely not,” Lorrie snapped back. “Haven’t you noticed that the prime minister calls everything he dislikes Ideology Five? When you do the research, the actual ideas behind it—”

“Here’s your soda,” the waitress said, plunking the glass down just a bit too hard. Lance wasn’t certain if the look of disgust on her face was because she had overheard their conversation—both of her brothers, he knew, had been lost in the jungle—or simply because he had always ignored her advances and was now sitting across from a beautiful stranger. Once the waitress walked away, Lance tried to move the conversation toward an area in which he had more to contribute, but Lorrie wouldn’t let him.

“It’s scary, almost,” she said. “Dangerous how much those Foreign books have in them. Sometimes I don’t want to see that deep into people, you know?”

Again, Lance didn’t know. He found himself wondering how flat words on dead paper could ever be dangerous or help anyone see into somebody who was real and alive. Lorrie raised her eyebrows, waiting for him to speak. “Of course,” Lance said. “For sure.” Lance had no idea what he meant, but he knew that she had sucked him into a current of desire against which he didn’t even bother to struggle. When had he last read a book? And one by a Foreign at that? Whatever. For this fantastical goddess in front of him, he realized he would drain his eyeballs dry.
Just point me to a library.

Lance pulled a pen from his pocket, and while Lorrie went on about her favorite Foreign book, he captured the fine lines of her fingers in sticky blue ink on the napkin in front of him.

“Hey,” she said, glancing down at the drawing. “You really know what you’re doing.”

But Lance didn’t hear. He was light and airy and indestructible. He was working.

As Lance and Lorrie were leaving the diner, the lights flickered out. The other patrons groaned and gripped their coffee cups as though they were the very source of life themselves. The day’s first blackout.

Good timing.
Lance and Lorrie smiled at each other.
Good timing.

Wherever they were going, Lance knew it would be better than where he was. “Take me with you,” he said.

When they met back up with Terry, Lorrie pulled her aside and explained Lance’s promise to pay a third of the cost to realign the frame and more than his share of food money. From his vantage point, Lance could see a distinct lack of enthusiasm on Terry’s part, but after a few minutes of Lorrie gesturing, he finally saw Terry shrug and nod. When the two of them looked his way, he could feel a wide smile making its way across his face.

Walking down the block to the bank, Lance withdrew his entire savings. Once that piece of business was taken care of, he headed home and grabbed his three paper bags of clothes. On top of his unmade bed he left a note for his landlord and dropped two postcards in the mail: one to the widow of his second-oldest brother and the other to his mother’s on-again, off-again best friend. By the time the recipients got around to telling his mother, Lance figured he would already be in Western City South or North. The bricked-up buildings and flat-faced residents of his small interior town would be left behind. With only two weeks until his eighteenth birthday, he would sweep himself into someplace entirely different.

In a moment of excitement, Lance told Lorrie they could talk the whole two thousand distance-units to the coast.

She gave him a funny look. “What are you, crazy? We’re driving a Brand Eight. No matter how good a shape we get that car in, it’s going to moan and sputter so loud all the way, you won’t be able to hear a thing. Everybody knows you can’t have a conversation in a Brand Eight.”

“I’ve never been in one,” he said.

“Don’t you read books?”

“Books say that Eights are loud?”

“Some do.”

She was right. The three of them cranked down the car’s sticky windows and shouted to one another over the rattles and clanks as they passed through strange cities and towns. Around them spiky plants popped out of the dry dirt, the perfect light tracing the edges of their hard, dark leaves against the nothingness of everywhere else. Twelve hours after they began their journey, they were pulled over at their first checkpoint.

The next morning, there were three more. Dark and hungry potholes threatened to swallow the entire vehicle, the wide, axle-scraping muddy pits yawning widely in the roads. Often they were forced to drive at what seemed to Lance like no more than a fast trot.

Headed due west, the three of them argued Western City North versus South. The simple fact that Terry had a slight preference for the southern end of the Sector made Lance push for the north even harder. None of them had ever visited either city, though Lorrie had read a good deal about both. Unable to decide, they agreed to split the difference and aim for somewhere in between.

On the last day, they didn’t stop to sleep. All through the night, they kept themselves awake by debating the Homeland’s efforts to control the makeup of the workforce. Sure, there were women cops, women janitors, pretty much women everything. So why wouldn’t the Homeland let them farm?

“Do we even know that’s what’s happening?” Lorrie said. “I read that these crazy jungle bugs are eating all the crops. They hitch rides in the eyebrows of returning soldiers.”

“I hadn’t heard that,” Terry said. “And I read all the papers. There aren’t any bugs. They just won’t let us farm.”

“It’s a morale thing,” said Lance. “If we let women do everything, it’s like we’re going extinct or something. But damn, what I wouldn’t do for an apple.”

As Lorrie cleared her throat and readied her rebuttal, Lance saw the road sign he had been waiting for.

“Take that route!” he shouted.

“But it’s totally out of the way,” said Terry.

Lance pressed his case for taking the coastal corridor toward the edge of everything, the brim of the Homeland. Once there, Lance knew his mind would be calmed by the fact that he couldn’t go any farther. In the end, the two women agreed, if only to quiet him.

After a few distance-units, the mountains parted, and for the first time, Lance saw the ocean. They parked the car and headed down the craggy path to the beach, where Lance realized that not only had he never seen the ocean, he had never seen people like this. The beach was packed. His eyes fell on an enormously fat woman in a ridiculously small suit rubbing cream into her dog’s fur. So even the dogs out here had sunscreen. Next to her lay an oiled-up old man in a stained bathing suit slurping watered-down fruit juice through a straw, the red liquid spilling from his lips and sliding down his cambered chest. Lance watched the two of them adjust their ripstop nylon chairs to maximize their sunlight. He noticed that Lorrie was watching the heaving chest of the man drinking the fruit juice. At first Lance thought that she might have a thing for old guys, but after a moment, he realized she was looking at his drink.

“Let’s grab a spot,” he said. Nearly every speck of sand was taken.

Patterns emerged, the ways of the beach. The young women rotated themselves on schedules, the middle-aged men beside them daring Lance to look. Most of the women seemed unable to help themselves and threw long, possessing glances in Lance’s direction. A few of the more lecherous ones yelled their plans and fantasies at him, but Lance kept on walking. The rotating women were everywhere. None of these beachgoers were casual tanners, poseurs pretending at a lifestyle. Lorrie had described it beforehand: anthropologically, she had said, these people were the beach. She had read several books on Western Sector beach culture, simply, as best Lance could determine, for fun. The white sand and the blue breakers, she explained, this was their natural habitat, like those specialized parasites that can only survive in the ear of a cow. Take it away, and they wouldn’t just be lost or confused. Without the beach, these people would be drained and sapless, close to dead.

Lorrie went around a corner and changed into shorts and a bathing suit top patterned with small birds, and the two of them left Terry to explore, taking off down the shoreline. Lorrie’s shoulders, Lance saw, arched in perfect coexistence, beautifully sloped and delightfully muscular.

They walked on the beach together for a long time. Lance decided that, if anything, he had underestimated the moving production of her beauty.

“I want to ask you so many things,” Lorrie said. “But I don’t want to overwhelm you.”

“Ask away.”

Lorrie looked toward the ocean for a moment before turning back to him. “Are you scared to go to war? Do you think you might have a way out? If you did have a way out, would you feel guilty about it?”

He had never even considered the fact that his own freedom might come at the cost of someone else’s. Though her carefully considered inquiries about his life touched him, he did not dwell on her actual questions, and he didn’t want to think about his impending induction. For it was not what she asked, Lance realized, but how she asked it. There was such an overflow of passion that the intensity of her emotions spilled into him.

Once their legs tired, they sat next to each other on the warm sand and looked out at the shallow sandbar before them, the joyous blasts of hot wind so welcome after long hours glued to the sticky seats of the car. Lance did his best not to gaze for the ten millionth time at the bright fabric birds flying across her breasts. Above Lance and Lorrie, shrieking gulls, dazzling red cliffs, and everywhere beautiful women, though none of them, Lance knew, beamed brighter than the woman next to him. They sat upright, staring out at the sea, doing their best to ignore the jealous glares and wordless grunts of the envious women surrounding them. Why, the women seemed to be asking, should
she
get a healthy one?

A few minutes passed. His stomach making short leaps, his breath shallow, Lance reached over and placed his hand on the smooth spot just above her knee.

“This,” said Lorrie, still looking outward, “is amazing.”

Lance felt her weight shifting, and soon he brought his hand higher up, sliding from knee to thigh. Together they lay flat in the sand, rolling waves in their ears, runs of foam at their feet. Right here, Lance thought, ear to the earth, the world was perfect. The wind turned and began to blow over them, a warm unraveling rushing over their bodies. First her soft, loose lobe, then her neck, then finally his lips touched hers. On his skin, he felt the narrow beams of warmth shining down from above, and he moved his hand onto her breast, his palm smothering the bright birds of her swimsuit. Through his fingers, he could feel the radiant energy of her low breaths, the soft push of her hard nipple. Eyes closed, bodies joined, he could not see anyone, could not hear a single soul, could no longer feel the collective ache of the missing men his age. There was nothing but Lorrie.

But it was all too idyllic, the sheer beauty of it all, Terry complained. Somehow she had found them, despite Lance’s best efforts to lose her. “The heat must shrivel their brains,” Terry added, gesturing at the beachgoers surrounding them. “Up in Western City North, it’s colder, more intellectual.”

Lance and Lorrie shrugged their shoulders and slapped the sand from their feet with their socks. Right then it was decided: the three of them would head up to Western City North.

On their way out, they drove past another beach, this one slightly hidden in a small cove and bordered by ramshackle homes. “Stop the car,” Lorrie said. “I’ve read about this place, too.” Lance pulled over at a graveled lookout point with an expansive view of the sea. The hike down the cliff was steep, but even from their perch on high, the three of them could see that the beach below was different. White sand, blue water, sure, but there were no rotating women, no umbrellas, no nylon chairs. No women at all, just young men, rubbing and blinking, scratching at their bandages, turning their good ears to hear each other, reattaching the cuff straps of their plastic legs around the residual limbs that remained.

No one spoke. Finally, after a dismal pause, Lorrie cleared her throat and told them what they already knew. Veterans Beach, she said, was where men recently returned from the jungle went to sunbathe, partly so no one would have to see them, but mostly so they didn’t have to be seen.

“Let’s get back on the road,” said Terry. “We have plenty of driving left.”

Lance quickly agreed with her, one of the few times he had done so after several days in the car. They drove away quickly, speeding over potholes rather than swerving.

By nightfall, they had arrived in Western City North.

Terry surprised everyone by deciding on her second day that the city was not for her. She sold the old Brand 8 to a man with half a nose who asked her why she didn’t want it anymore. “I’m going rural,” she explained. “Once I get where I’m going, I’ll get a new one. Besides, you can’t really see this country from a car.” Lance and Lorrie saw her off at a bus station. Lance watched a small stripe of tear run down Lorrie’s face as they waved good-bye. He wiped it away for her, but he wasn’t sad to see Terry go.