This Is the Night (31 page)

29.

I have left Gad,
Alan thinks
,
or he has left me. Either way, we are separated.

One final bus ride away from Western City North, he feels that his life until now has been a series of extended naps. Upon arriving in that city, he will surely be forever awoken. So tomorrow, he can weep for his missing friend. Or maybe find a new one. But right now, he has a ticket to Western City North. Ten minutes till departure.

Through the stained window of the depot, Alan sees an unmarked bus pull into the parking lot. One by one, young men, their heads newly shaven, step down to the concrete. All of them exit with a thicket of nervousness. They are, Alan realizes, being bused off to war. A few circle up in a vacant space near the bus and begin a game of keep-it-up with an old ball. Others pull out cigarettes. Enjoy it while you can, Alan thinks.

Without Gad, there’s no one to inform him of the genius of his plan. No matter. Alan steps outside. As he exits the station, the heavy hiss of idled motors whizzes through his ears. The panel doors of the Registry bus are open; he can see the driver resting up before the next shift. The air is warm and smoky. With a nearly invisible gesture, Alan reaches into his bag and wraps his fingers around the smooth steel handle of his hunting knife. Just a quick check to make sure.

“How long till your bus leaves?” he asks the group of soon-to-be soldiers.

“Half hour,” comes the response.

Wherever HIM is, whenever Alan links up with the group, he will need some sort of lurid souvenir. Now is his chance. Thanking the soldiers, Alan slinks away, turning the corner and walking to the other side of the bus where he cannot be seen.

I don’t know how tires work,
he thinks.
I haven’t learned the proper angle, the most effective way to stab.
Would there be a loud pop, a rush of air? But as Woody Gilbert wrote in the pamphlets: action must divest itself of awareness in order for true skill to occur. Removing the hunting knife from his bag, Alan slides the blade from the sheath and, in one smooth motion, plunges it into the sidewall. The rubber is tougher than he expected. Pushing down, he grinds the serrations of the blade against the tire. Finally he hears the small hiss of air.
Funny
, he thinks,
I thought it would come so much quicker.

On the other side of the bus, he hears the yelps of the future soldiers and their game of keep-it-up. Alongside the deflated tire is another one, parallel, just waiting to experience the same impersonal pain. Looking over his shoulder, Alan sees no one. Lifting his arm high in the air, he feels the crude and shapeless joy of destruction as the point of the blade enters the rubber. Each stab is natural, a reflex. When he finds HIM, when the baldheads make the introduction, he will find people who understand. He will show them this slice of Registry rubber. And they will show him—

He does not know what they will show him. And that is exactly the point.

Alan checks his watch. His ticket will expire if he does not get on the next bus to Western City North. He gets on the bus.

Safely in his seat, Alan allows himself a moment to feel. Whatever was awakened within him by lighting the fire only became more enlivened by slashing the tires of the Registry bus. If only there had been someone to admire his work! But Gad was weak, too convinced by a sense that the Registry was inevitable—that must have been it. Without a model for another way of life, he had simply jumped back to his old one. So sad. That path of his would lead nowhere. A jolt in the road as the bus runs through a pothole, and the thought strikes him: Will Gad allow him a path of his own?

There are a thousand ways in which he is not safe. All of the other passengers on the bus are women. But women might be Reggies just as often as men. He considers the blunt possibility that Gad might have told people, alerted some team of agents in a windowless room that Alan will be arriving in Western City North as a Registry-runner with an intent toward arson, and that all of these innocent-looking women are just waiting for the right moment to spring up from a reclined seat and wrap their hands around his throat.

The roads are now open. Policemen, Registry agents, whoever they send after rogue Homeland Indigenous who burn their schools down and run toward a second taste, anybody could be coming for him. But not because of Gad. How can he think that? Gad, he decides, would not betray him. And even if he did, so what? He had not been caught for the fire, had not been spotted as he let the air out of the tires of the Registry bus. In the pale light of the rising sun, it comes to Alan that he might actually be good at something.

Unclear on when he last slept, Alan’s tiredness forces a protective clarity he has never known. His dried-out eyeballs make high-pitched clinks every time he blinks.
I’m not sorry for anything I’ve done,
he thinks,
only that my best friend might have told someone I’ve done it.

“Last stop,” the driver announces.
“Downtown. Western City North.”

Alan reaches into his bag, pushing aside his beloved hunting knife, gliding over his one pair of socks, before finally coming to rest on the zippered pouch from his father. The industrial matches are still there. With grace and tenderness he slides his fingers over them. It’s time to burn down the induction center.

Downtown Western City North: people everywhere. Older men in suits rushing to get to wherever they have to go, women with high-heeled shoes clicking across the street. Even the air seems different—Alan can feel the salt and smell the water. No agents or policemen greet him; either Gad has not snitched or the authorities are unable to find him. Both scenarios are entirely possible.

The ocean wraps around this place—he’s seen the map—but now he truly understands what it means to be a peninsular city. Wet air slurs around Alan’s face. His stride is a breaststroke that breaks apart the little wet particles floating all around him. The buildings are taller than any he has ever seen.

How to begin, where to start? Briefly, he wishes he had made a pitch for Terry to join him. She had said she knew the city. But would she have supported his cause? Like Gad, she was not full-on Homeland Indigenous. And like Gad, she is not here with him.

He comforts himself with future accolades. Once he has committed his magnificent act, he will find the baldheads and get an introduction to HIM. Perhaps he will even be fast-tracked to a leadership position. Obviously he will have to strike during nighttime; that is a given. And of course he’ll have to find the place first, watch the security comings and goings. Surely there will be other necessary reconnaissance, from determining the induction center’s primary materials (the best burns can never be one size fits all) to more basic concerns such as escape routes and getaway plans. A young woman standing on the sidewalk hands him a free newspaper. First Tuesday, the paper tells him, is this evening, the biggest induction day of the month. Alan wonders whether he can fast-track his plan.

Still, there are other, more pressing needs. First food, then sleep. He has not eaten since sharing a loaf of bread with Gad the night before.

Peeking through the tall buildings, he sees the ocean. Finally he has reached the edge. No more civilization until some alien country thousands of distance-units away. A strange shoulder collides into him.

“Watch where you’re going!” the shoulder yells. It’s true; he can’t look at the expanse of water and the people in front of him at the same time.

Yellow sodium lamps are lit up even though it’s daytime. It could be that Western City North is immune from blackouts, he thinks, and that in this magical city the lights stay on every hour of the day. Trolleys and buses roll down the street, shiny black antennas sticking up from their backsides, crackling and dragging on overhead wires. Does a grid of wires web the entire city? And what about the blackouts? Do these wires somehow circumvent the lack of electricity in the Homeland? But no matter, an instinct of food propels him forward, directs each turn he makes. The overhead wires follow him everywhere he goes. Maybe he judged Gad too harshly; they had somehow just gotten separated, and amid the chaos they will run into each other on the streets of Western City North and embrace like old friends.

Down the street, a police officer with a wide gap between her two front teeth smiles and heads toward him.
I am her prey,
Alan thinks. This officer has spotted him, exiled and alone in her exotic world, and she is laughing with the knowledge that her brutal coworkers will soon hop from behind corners to cuff and detain him. For kids soaked in evil, for uppity Homeland Indigenous who burn down the precious facilities we provide for them, the cop’s face says. At any moment, she will signal the others. But she doesn’t, instead passing Alan with a bouncing-ball step.
Calm down,
Alan tells himself.
Relax.

At the end of the block is a gleaming bronze statue, a glowing beacon that pulls Alan in, mothlike, toward its shining metal plates. The statue is a mess, a tangle of metal men pulling hard on a humongous punch press, each sinewy man wrestling with the lever. Even working together it seems doubtful they could operate the thing, and Alan wonders why this strange city wants to memorialize their failure. Even so, it’s a beautiful statue, larger and shinier than any he has seen before. A man in a ragged vest sits on the plinth of the statue, directly below the bronzed action. He has one arm, small bruises around his eyes, and has surrounded himself with large piles of newspapers.

“I am much unappreciated,” he tells Alan. The man smiles, and Alan can see he only has a handful of teeth.

“Sorry,” Alan says, meaning it. “Do you know where I can get something to eat?”

He does, but first, he says, allow me a quick story. From under the punch press statue, the man explains that he has waited his entire life for the Young Savior to take notice of him and help him out. But the Young Savior, it seems, is distracted, preoccupied, tied up in handling His other affairs. Food? he says. Of course he can tell Alan where to get food, he snorts. That’s not the point. It’s bigger than food. A request, the man says. He sees that Alan is young, and could he please wait his turn for the Young Savior’s help, as he himself has been waiting, he explains, a long, long time, a situation in which it is only fair that he should get to go first. Not to eat—Alan doesn’t have to wait for that, the man is quick to say—but for the bigger stuff, the true favors from on high. “The things I saw in the jungle,” the man says before trailing off. “If you have any manners at all, you won’t cut me in line.”

“But where’s that food?” Alan asks again. The man points him toward a church.

The church is clearly an offshoot, its congregants and clergy not adherents of Homeland Religion proper, but whatever denomination it is, Alan doesn’t pay attention and heads straight toward the line of pensive-looking men awaiting their peanut butter and white bread sandwiches. Most of the men are vets, but a few of them are healthy. Snatches of their conversation float through. “My last day of freedom,” one says.
First Tuesdays are the worst days.

Alan considers asking any of these men whether the quotas are real, a second opinion on whether all Homeland Indigenous men really do have to serve, but save for a couple of Minority Group Cs, this hungry knot of men around him are all Majority Group. Though they might have an answer, Alan knows that to most Majority Groupers, the problems of Homeland Indigenous are nearly invisible.

Instead, he asks a morose man with a severe gash between his eyebrows where he might find a safe place to take a nap and whether he knows who the baldheads are. The man tells him about a park a few blocks away with plenty of benches and minimal harassment. “Don’t know what you want with those baldheads,” the man says. “They just play games. They’re not going to help you.”

Alan thanks the man and moves on. It’s been too long since he’s slept, and his feet drag against the pavement. It seems impossible that happiness has ever bothered to come his way, so he tries to remind himself that he has lived a life in which good things have come to him and that he is on a journey, a quest to do something important. Even so, his lack of sleep colors everything.