This Is the Night (15 page)

The next morning, the uniformed man with the rimless glasses shook her awake. After a night free of insects, she could already feel her heart expanding. Lorrie could not take it for granted that she was able to wake up in her own skin.

Readings were assigned for the talk group, and that morning she charged through them, not once feeling the need to itch. No bugs made themselves visible, so she took a victory walk in the garden, strolling triumphantly among the black haws and low bushes. Spotting the artist, she gave him a sign, and the two of them slipped into an empty broom closet.

“Do you understand?” she said to him. “How huge this is? I didn’t itch at all last night.”

“Oh,” he said.

He didn’t seem to get it, she thought, and why should he? Just because the guy had placed blade against skin and pushed down smoothly until he had seen the pink and the blue of his tendons didn’t give him some paranormal ability to understand her.

The artist burst into tears.

Lorrie told the artist good-bye and slinked out of the closet. Stepping into the light, she watched as the jagged wings of a day-bug flapped slowly on her wrist. Quickly she blinked the vile thing away. The yelps of the baby-leader, the readings, her shame acceptance, a night with the artist on the roof—she had thought any and all of it had scared those bugs off for good. Still, there had only been one, she told herself. One was nothing, a mere day-bug. Lorrie left the artist in that closet, crying softly for all of them, alone in the dark.

“Today,” cried the baby-leader, “a special session, with even more focus on shame!”

“Oh boy,” Lorrie murmured, mostly to herself. She would have liked the artist to hear it, but sex with other patients was prohibited, so they sat on opposite sides of the circle to be discreet.

“Did everyone read the passages?” the baby-leader asked.

Heads bobbed up and down as the white sunlight poured across their faces, a fortunate occurrence as the lights had been off all morning.

“I liked the jokes,” said the speechless vet, who was having a speaking day. “I liked that even this book can be funny. I laughed out loud twice.”

“Jokes?” said the baby-leader. “There weren’t any jokes. The Young Savior doesn’t make jokes. You read the words wrong.”

“Oh,” said the vet.

“We’re talking about shame and sin here,” said the baby-leader. “Nothing funny about sin.”

A few of them giggled, because they knew that this statement was completely untrue. As the baby-leader delved into the virtues of shame reduction, Lorrie did her best to ignore him. Even so, the lectures and readings seemed to help the talk group. The pervert said he was less perverted. Prime Minister Four’s great-great-great-granddaughter felt she might slide out from the smothering weight of her ancestor. But for Lorrie, nothing in that book had touched her. She wanted to yell at them that the prime minister would soon be ninety-seven, that the war would soon be twenty-three, along with any other dispiriting numbers she could think of. Just one day without the bugs, she decided, and she was out of here.

Without access to her many newspaper subscriptions, with no television and no radio, the outside world had hardened into an even more polished, shinier version of itself. Were the Foreigns still playing their successful games of cat-and-mouse in the distant jungles? And closer to home, were attacks on the Homeland still occurring with terrifying frequency? Before, she had been obsessed with following the reports on each new piece of violence: Did the latest rounds of domestic hostility emanate from utterly crazy Fareon folks? Or were hidden sleeper cells of Foreigns behind it all? There was plenty of speculation that everyone’s worst nightmare had come true and that youthful Homeland citizens, drawn by the sparkling ideas of Ideology Five, were attacking their fellow citizens in solidarity with the Foreigns. And now, just as Lorrie was put away, the attacks had begun to alternate between the deadly and the absurd. First, the stolen Registry trucks, found abandoned and full of charcoal. On the drive up to the Facility, a radio announcer had reported that the pilfered uniforms had popped up on department store mannequins in several Western Sector cities, the fabric cut and sewn into fashionable skirts, shirts, and dresses. What did any of it mean? No one, it seemed, stopped dying just because Lorrie was in some rural nuthouse. It was time to get out of here.

“I think the bugs are gone,” Lorrie told the baby-leader. “They just up and left.” This was almost true, so it felt fine to say it.

“No,” he said, both hands smoothing his shiny head. “Your bugs are in the same place they’ve always been. The shame. That’s what’s gone.”

Or that’s what she thought he said. She still couldn’t hear well. Ever since Lance had knocked her around, sounds entered her left ear in a pitched and murky way that forced her to angle the right side of her head toward whomever was speaking.

“See, everyone?” the baby-leader said. “The passages have cured her! The teachings of the Young Savior have brought her back. She said so herself.” He rotated his head so the entire group could see the triumphant light in his eyes.

Lorrie turned her good ear away from him, letting his words become mush. She was ready for her second act, her chance to unleash a new downpouring of effective resistance on the Homeland. But she was still here in the Facility, stuck in intermission.

“You folks are here because your toolboxes are weak, empty,” the baby-leader went on. “You’ve got plastic wrenches, aluminum pliers, but our work here is to trade those in for some high-quality Homeland steel. And we’ve got a whole new set of sockets for you, one for every situation you’re going to encounter out there. Because, get this, the future of humanity depends on not just being able to determine what’s wrong and right, what’s good and evil, but the knowledge that this determination is superior to all others. That’s the message. And the Young Savior is the tool, a prophet who has departed our world but has left behind complicated puzzles and hidden messages, all in the service of helping you
figure it out.”

Everyone nodded, but for reasons Lorrie was sure were different than her own.
My tools
are
wrong,
she thought, but so were the ones the Facility wanted to hand over in their place. It had been days since she’d itched. She knew what was wrong, and she knew what was evil. So when could she leave?

Lorrie looked for the artist so she could say good-bye. He was usually in the garden, but now he wasn’t. An orderly said they had seen him hop into a closet. In a utility closet beside the garden, she found stacks of reproduced paintings of the Young Savior. There was no doubt that these were new portraits. The high-quality finish of the frames and the glossy paper made it clear that the piles in front of her were meant to replace the limp and fading vision of the Young Savior that hung in every room of the Facility. Even in the one-bulb light, Lorrie could see that these paintings were different. This new incarnation of the Savior looked sharper, less dreamy—angry, even—but mostly, more than any likeness Lorrie had ever seen, this new Young Savior was much, much younger.

But Lorrie didn’t want the Young Savior. Never had. She wanted the artist, and she kept flinging open doors hoping she’d find him. Outside, leaves were falling in slow circles. The artist wasn’t anywhere. Some stories, it seems, don’t have a clear beginning or end.

Standing in the hall, she happened across the baby-leader.

“It’s hard to leave, I know,” he said, wrapping his elderly arms around her. Standing in his weak embrace, feeling his hot breath and hearing the cool rattle of his ancient lungs, the thought again snapped into Lorrie: this young-looking man was unnaturally old.

Though the simplistic Fareon plots of the antiwar movement had never appealed to her—ridiculous, the idea that the complexities of war could be reduced to some simple scheme in which the prime minister did not want to die—Lorrie found herself unsettled by the indeterminable age of the baby-leader. But no. His wrinkled hands and smooth face were not proof of a sinister plot perpetrated by the highest echelons of government. If anything, simply being exposed to the ridiculous ideas about the prime minister and his need to live forever must have accentuated her thoughts that there was some misalignment with the gentle man wrapping her in his embrace. That must be it. After all, one man aging strangely did not mean that all aging men were strange.

In the holding room, her parents hugged her tightly and filled out the discharge paperwork.

“Western City North made me crazy,” she told them in the car. “Everything will be different now.” A solid respite in a centrally heated facility in the middle of the Homeland had washed the bugs away. She could now see that the people she had known in Western City North had not been the people she thought they were.

“Damn right,” said her father, his eyes on the road.

I have a plan,
she wanted to tell them.
Well, maybe not a plan, but at least a vision.
Just as she was about to do so, her father slammed on the brakes, swerving to avoid a yawning pothole that had seized an entire section of road.

“In the paper the other day,” her mother said, turning around to face her, “they said a new legislator joined up with those Coyotes.”

“So what does that make now, three of them?” her father said.

Her mother giggled.

Lorrie slapped at a day-bug that was biting her neck, but softly, so her parents wouldn’t see a thing.

Back with her parents in Interior City, Lorrie discovered that the hearing loss in her left ear was permanent. A doctor placed a set of headphones over her ears and determined that full, sharp sounds would never return to her left eardrum in the manner they were supposed to. But Lorrie got along fine. She knew that her busted ear was just another reminder that she wouldn’t be going back to where she came from.

The lack of crawlers cleared her head. In that freeing of space, Lorrie began to rediscover what it was she cared about in the first place. There was more work to do than ever.

Lorrie’s parents had never liked Lance, and when she told them he had hit her, they liked him even less.

“I do believe I’ll kill him,” her father said upon hearing the news.