This Is the Night (19 page)

Eric went on, slipping through the chairs of two volunteers in order to pace behind the circle, hands waving, his unsparing voice hovering above their heads. “Why are people so scared to come here? Yes, we’ve all been harassed by the Registry, had their agents knock on our doors on day one to warn us, day two to cajole, and the day after that to threaten. But what are the results for us when people attack the Homeland? It doesn’t matter whether it’s a serious attack that kills people or one of those weird ones, like filling an unguarded tank full of charcoal. The point is: all this terminal havoc serves to convince people that opposing the war involves some sort of miserable sacrifice.”

Sure, Eric had some interesting points, but what was he doing to help anybody? A whole lot of nothing. Lorrie directed her gaze to Susan’s skirt. Her legs really were perfect.

Eric, still speaking, came to a stop directly behind Lorrie, a rise in his voice. Drops of spittle rained down on the crown of her head, and for a moment Eric was the baby-leader and Lorrie was whisked back to the Facility once again. Bugs, shame, and the Young Savior, Eric/baby-leader said. Bugs bugs bugs.

The lemmings around the circle began to clap.

“Tom? Jane?” Eric looked to his parents. “Anything to add?”

Young Savior help me,
Lorrie groaned to herself. More talking.

Both Tom’s and Jane’s faces were pasted with ecstatic grins. She had heard that Eric’s parents often dropped by the Center and that his relationship with them was showy and alluring. All of the other volunteers, Lorrie was sure, wished that their mothers and fathers would use words like “Homeland” and “tyranny” as close together as did Tom and Jane.

“Tom,” Eric would say, “can you help me out here? How to better articulate that if you just want to be pure of heart and sacrifice yourself to a cause, well, you’re a good martyr, and that’s nice and all, but you’re in it for yourself and not the rest of us. Do you have a way you could help me put that, Tom?”

Lorrie had never known a person to speak to his or her parents like this. Of course her parents loved her, or so they said, though infrequently. Mostly those words had come upon her break with Lance and a few more times after she was let out of the Facility. Not that having parents who opposed the war changed anything. Tom droned on, repeating much of what his son had just said.

The mother was different.

Jane’s face was gentle. She had neat, greying hair and wide, welcoming cheekbones. Unlike her son, Jane spoke from in front of her chair; no need to crane necks or rotate eyeballs to see her. Though she had no official position, Jane was the only woman at the Center with any sort of power.

“I want to talk today,” Jane began, “about aesthetics. How is it going to look, men, going into Quadrant Four with hair combed so far away from the scalp you have to duck under a doorway? And, ladies, knocking on doors with no brassiere?”

A group of faces turned toward Susan, who immediately began to tug at the sides of her skirt, her pitiful action completely ineffective against the small amount of stretchy fabric. Jane avoided eye contact and continued. “Think about how you look before you go down to some quadrant where angry out-of-work Majority Groupers who can’t sell their homes are just about to boil. You think they’ll crack a screen door for one of you with your hair greased up and stinking? You think they’ll want to hear what you have to say?”

Poor Susan crossed her legs, then uncrossed them. Jane seemed not to notice.

“Now, ladies,” Jane continued. “We’re barely in this. It’s our men who are on the line, who the Registry wants, so we’re lucky to even have a seat at the table. With that in mind, don’t look cheap. Don’t come with wild hair and your flesh showing this way and that.” She clasped her hands together. “I’m not saying it’s wrong or right, I’m not passing judgment, but think about who we’re dealing with. You’ll set the words off in these men’s minds, you’ll hand the insults right over. Look like someone they know, remind them of their mother or sister. Good? Good.”

More shame, Lorrie thought. This woman was an expert shamer. There had been no mention of the Center’s long wait times, nothing about the marginal benefits the Center actually offered to those who could access its services, and a complete dismissal of the fact that many of the unruly counselors seemed to be poorly trained. Who cared what any of them were wearing when what they were doing was nothing more than chanting silly songs in the rain? Even so, Jane seemed to possess an accessible, ever-ready passion. She was already wound up, Lorrie saw. She would just have to point her in a different direction.

While Jane talked, Lorrie watched as Tom bit into a peach and her son popped a cherry into his mouth. The First Family of the Center, it seemed, had a line on impossible fruits. No one, Lorrie noticed, was invited to share them. But then again, had anyone ever asked?

Lorrie made her way over to Jane. An older woman in a predominately male environment, she knew, should be eager to take on a humble apprentice, provided the flattery was subtle and light. But before she could get to Jane, Susan stepped into her path.

The moment Susan opened her mouth, the lights went out. Even so, the Center was still open for business, ready to offer advice to any of the slope-shouldered men who walked in the door. No power or electricity was necessary; any of the counselors could light a candle and see the sad faces of their clients in the dark.

“Let’s do this,” Susan said.

A blue ribbon of rage ran through Lorrie, but she quickly swallowed it. The more people on her side, the better.
Take your time, Lorrie.

“You know, about what Jane said,” Lorrie began. “I really don’t—”

“Just forget it and help me out, okay?” Susan said. “Didn’t you see those lines outside? We’re slammed.”

The two of them headed to the side room with notes from Eric’s latest lecture, ready to transfer the handwritten words into printed ones. The typewriters—heavy manual orbs kept around for their ability to ignore the frequent losses of power—came in handy that day. Over the din of their clacks, Lorrie could hear the counselors counsel. Lately it seemed men just came to the Center to cry.

After each visit, a counselor would come around the corner and hand Susan or Lorrie his notes from the session. The charting was inconsistent and depended on the counselor. There were, Lorrie saw, few quantitative measures in these scribblings. How they could help people on a mass scale by jotting down feelings was beyond her.

“Here’s my latest.” A man with a sloppy smile and browned teeth handed her a folder. Lorrie struggled to remember his name. Upon opening the folder, it came to her immediately. This was Doug, a counselor so twisted off Substance Q or some harder drug that his notes were made up of strange scribbled labyrinths that blurred Lorrie’s eyes if she looked too hard. Lorrie couldn’t imagine he was helping anybody avoid anything. She thanked him for the notes and returned to her filing.

Inside the musty room where Lorrie and Susan typed, newspapers were stacked everywhere. Though no one could remember who had come up with the idea, the Center had a subscription to every underground publication that could be found. Each day, the long-suffering mailwoman dropped off several crates that Lorrie stacked against the back wall. But what does it matter? Eric had said when Lorrie asked about the unread papers. If there were any sound theories about how to go about doing things in those papers, Eric said, the Center was probably already practicing them anyway.
Ridiculous,
Lorrie thought. But Eric, it was clear, did not play the learner, only the learned.

As a possible ally, Susan was proving disappointing. She kept a large, old-fashioned radio on her desk tuned to loud, instrumental music whenever the power allowed it. For Susan, there seemed to be a power in transcribing the pain of these men. Perhaps, Lorrie thought, she was wishing their souls into safety as she took down a record of their fears. But Lorrie didn’t want to wish. With no one else up to the task, it was clear she would have to change the Center by herself. Not that it would be easy. There were no scripts for this type of takeover.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the return of electricity. The sudden clamor of a fast song pushed into the room. A woman sang of her last memory: a smudge of makeup on her lover’s cheek as she kissed him good-bye.

“Here,” said Susan, adjusting the volume of the radio and twisting around to hand her a typed sheet of paper. “Can you give this a once-over?”

The notes were from an Eric lecture a few days ago on whether a government that claimed roots in participatory democracy could even legitimize the concept of the Registry. Basic stuff to their counterparts in Western City North, Lorrie thought, but at least he wasn’t leading them into a cherry-picked world of ill-sourced Fareon facts. Even so, the underground papers—at least the ones Lorrie read—were jammed full of the kind of stuff that Eric was presenting as new and radical. Lorrie knew that resisters throughout the Homeland had tried to make similar arguments in court only to have judges strike down this line of thought en masse. But because the volunteers around her seemed so excited—“someone will
definitely
want to reprint this soon”—Lorrie dutifully did as she was asked and circled a few places that needed commas, made note of a dangling modifier, combined several sentences with participial phrases, cut down on one too many conjunctive adverbs, and changed an “affect” to an “effect.”

“Whoa,” said Susan when she handed the paper back. A frown hung on Susan’s face, and her forehead was puckered.

“What?”

“This isn’t what I was asking, Lorrie.” Susan stared into the paper. “This is a joke, right?”

“What do you mean?”

“Ideas, Lorrie.” She waved the paper over her head. “I wanted to know what you thought about the logic, whether the ideas progressed in a reasonable order. You know how Eric is: introductions at the end, conclusions in the beginning.”

“Oh.” Lorrie reached out her hand. “As a matter of fact, I do have some thoughts in that regard.”

“I don’t know.” Susan made no move to return the sheet. “I really don’t like what you did here. This is not an attitude I like.”

“Grammar?”

“That’s exactly what I’m talking about, Lorrie. You’ve really got to drop all this stuck-up crap.”

Lorrie knew she shouldn’t get drawn in to a battle on this. Intelligible messaging was the least of the Center’s problems. She took a deep breath in. “I’m just trying to understand. You think it’s stuck-up that I repaired a sentence or two?”

“Repaired? Listen to yourself! It’s like you think you have some sort of patent on speech.”

Oh boy. Larger goals be damned, Susan needed a quick refresher in basic communication. “The sentence you’re talking about barely meant anything.” Lorrie wheeled her chair closer to Susan in order to point out one of the more egregious errors. “It was near gibberish.
Listen: ‘After counseling resisters all day, a soft bed seems a welcome sight.’ It’s a dangling participial phrase. It should read—”

“Just stop.” Susan rolled her chair backward, clutching the paper to her chest. She breathed in, pushed out her cheeks, and sucked them in again. “What you’re doing right now, this is Homeland Ideology in action.”

The most hurtful insult one could speak at the Center, and Susan had spoken it to her. A white-hot accusation, a slash to her cheek with a sharp blade. “Communicating clearly is Homeland Ideology? Understanding each other makes me a Homeland representative?”

“The message isn’t in the construction.” Susan had rolled as far away from Lorrie as she could, back toward her desk. She grabbed a blank piece of paper from a stack piled in front of her and began to write rapidly. “Here,” she said, extending the paper toward Lorrie disdainfully.

broun doun renoun toun hewed

“What? I can’t make any sense of this.”

“Fine.” She grabbed the paper back, hunched over, and scribbled again.

Tear tayre tare

“I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me.”

“Don’t you get it?” She peered at Lorrie with wet, frustrated eyes. “Way back when, back before all this, before the Homeland, when someone wanted to write a book, they just took some old sheepskin and printed whatever they wanted in whatever way they felt like. And people understood, you know?”

“So?”

“It’s all just another weapon, these rules of yours, in the name of propaganda and obtusification.”

“That’s not even—”

“Just look at the history,” Susan continued. “Rich people buy up all the land, print up dictionaries, and lo and behold, Homeland Ideology.”

“You don’t even know what you’re talking about.” Lorrie’s fists were clenched and her skin felt hot.

“How dare—”

“Ladies, ladies,” Lorrie heard Eric say. It was lunchtime, and he wore his high boots, pigskin gloves tucked beneath his armpit. “Wow. Look at you two go. Did I interrupt something?”

Immediately more heads poked around the corner. A small semicircle of counselors on break shuffled into the back room to see what the commotion was all about.

“I was just trying—”

“The girls are at it again,” said Doug. His eyes were glazed and messy.

“Caged heat,” said a scratchy-voiced counselor Lorrie had never spoken to.

Susan gave a hard look to a worn square of linoleum beneath her feet.

“Fuck off,” said Lorrie.

“Calm down. I just wanted to ask you girls a question,” said Eric.

“Yes?” Lorrie said.

“Fire away,” said Susan.

“But maybe I need to let you relax first.”

“Ask the fucking question, Eric,” said Lorrie.

“Maybe you two could kiss and make up,” said Doug. “A nice big tongue kiss to tell each other you’re sorry.”

The flock of counselors swayed and tittered.

“Yeah, kiss!” said Scratchy Voice.

“Damn the sodomy laws!” said his friend.

“There are no sodomy laws,” cried another. Laughs all around.

Lorrie could recognize she was in the thick of a singular moment. There was an opening here, an invitation to act in a manner that would enlighten the men around them, de-escalate the situation, and bring her critique of the Center to the forefront. But before she could act, she watched as Susan leaned over and yanked the cord of her massive radio from the wall. Bending her knees and lifting, she wrapped both arms around the heavy machine. “All I was doing was trying to help!” Susan screamed.