This Is the Night (33 page)

33.

Alan and the tall man, alone in a windowless room. Three chairs, a small table with a newspaper, and a vase of purple flowers atop a small box. Does the tall man know anyone from HIM? Alan asks.

“Of course I do,” the man tells him. “We’re all down here together.”

Though they are in a basement, “down here” seems metaphorical. Alan does not press the point. So the man has interacted with some rank-and-file HIM members. But how about Woody Gilbert? Has he met the mastermind himself?

“Saw him last week,” the tall man says.

“I need to meet him,” Alan says. “I need to talk to him.”

“Need is the fuel of life, no?”

“What?”

“You need to meet Woody Gilbert, and I need someone to help me with something.”

“Tell me,” Alan says, “about that something.”

“Wait here,” says the tall man. “I’ve got a Joust to run.”

“A Joust?”

“It’s just a distraction that we use for cover. I’ll be back in a bit. Read the paper. Make yourself comfortable.”

34.

The tall man had to have known it was First Tuesday, had surely heard Benny say today was his day. So whatever he wanted to tell him, Benny thought, at least he understood Benny’s situation. The two of them headed down a staircase and into a long, narrow basement hallway, baldheads darting out of one doorway only to pop into another. Large blue sacks of charcoal rested on the floor, lining the length of the passageway. The overhead lights were dull; the plaster had been painted a somber shade of grey. Gone were the upstairs odors of hard work and joyful cleanliness. Down below was sticky and dark.

Farther, deeper, they headed down the hall.

“What’s the deal with all the charcoal?” Benny asked the tall man’s back.

The tall man kept walking and didn’t turn around. Instead, he simply raised an index finger over his head. No stopping. The two of them wound through the corridors beneath the massive house. Every few steps, the tall man ducked below a naked lightbulb, cradling his coffee gently.

How long was this going to take? The entire Homeland understood the six p.m. deadline. If he owed Joe anything, it was to be there when they took him away. Unless.

Finally the tall man came to a stop. “In here,” he gestured.

So the possibly Indigenous kid from the park hadn’t left after all. He was sitting in a metal folding chair reading a newspaper. The walls were bare. No windows. Three chairs in all, and a small standing table. On the table, a rectangular wooden box, on top of which rested a small vase of bell-shaped flowers, the blues and purples a shock of color in the otherwise bland room. As Benny entered, the possibly Indigenous kid didn’t even look up. On the front page of the kid’s newspaper, the headline:
Another Terrorist Bomb Fails to Detonate.

The tall man took his seat. Finally Benny could look at him. When standing, the guy’s face was so high up it was hard to make out his features. Small swirls of possibility thrummed through Benny’s head. To be able to crap and clean himself in those sparkling bathrooms on a daily basis, what wouldn’t he trade for that? He would move Joe in here, too, save them both from the Registry. And along the way, if he happened to find himself some baldhead lady to keep him warm at night, no big deal, right? Besides, even if these guys were on some crazy kick in which the only way to live was shaving his head and yelling lies around a circle, Benny had to admit that right now was the longest time he’d gone without wanting some Substance as far as he could remember. “I just want to express my interest in—”

“Shut up,” said the tall man. The possibly Indigenous kid smiled into his newspaper.

Benny shut his eyes lightly before opening them again. The bags of charcoal in the hallway, the smirking expression of the tall man, the long silence of the Indigenous kid. Something was very wrong.

“In case you didn’t catch names in the van,” the tall man said, “this is Alan.” He gestured to the kid.

The name didn’t sound very Indigenous, but then again, Benny had never met a Homeland Indigenous person before. “Great to meet you,” Benny said. He could sense he was in some sort of danger, but he couldn’t place it. “But I should be going.” He stood up from his chair.

“Nope,” said the tall man, placing a heavy hand on his shoulder. “We’re not done yet.”

Benny sat back down.

“You asked,” the tall man said slowly, “why we really do this.”

Benny hadn’t asked, but now didn’t seem like the time to object.

“Do you ever watch television?”

A strange question. No one watched television. All the shows were either old men playing twenty years younger, barely believable women in drag, unretired athletes tackling each other gently, or, of course, the news. “Nope,” Benny said. “Do you?”

The tall man smiled and grabbed his mug of coffee from the table beside him. “Of course not. Just like you, or your parents, probably, I used to watch, back in the war’s early years. Back then it was different. The Homeland sold the war as some noble adventure. At that time, watching the news or reading the papers might get you an honest moment about our progress.”

“And now?”

“Well, now, just like everybody, I’ve come to recognize that there aren’t any new facts available. And still, once a week some new newspaper pops up and starts publishing. But it’s all the same: we’re still fighting. Sometimes we’re winning, sometimes we’re not.”

“So instead you get Substance-smashers to yell at each other and charge a fee for participating?”

Reaching toward the small bouquet of purple flowers on the table, the tall man rubbed a flared petal between his fat thumb and slender index finger. “Nah, kid, you’re missing the point. I got clean, dropped all the Substances, and when I did, I saw a little clearer, you know? I came to see some real fundamental things.”

“Oh yeah?” Until now, Benny had been sure that he had long since given up on any hope for real meaning, but now, with a tall man rubbing purple petals and dangling the possibility that Benny could somehow be the master of his own life yet again, he saw how badly he wanted some sort of answer. How
was
he supposed to live amid all this shit around him? “What do you do?” he asked, more passionately than he meant to. His voice was soft. “And why do you do it?”

“That’s right,” the tall man said. “You’re finally asking the right questions.” He leaned in and lowered his voice. “Now you want to know
why
we do what we do? Why we take Substance-smashers and have them yell at each other?”

Enough with the buildup,
Benny thought.
Just skip to telling me whatever the fuck it is that you do.

“You know when I finally started to see what crap the news was?” the tall man said.

Benny stifled a sigh. The tall man took up as many words as he did inches. “When?”

“When I started making it.”

Okay, Benny thought. He would bite. “What kind of news do you guys make?”

“Unfortunately, not the kind we want to. We’ve had some troubles, you see. Equipment-wise.” He cocked his head toward Alan.

Benny looked at Alan, whose expression was still obscured behind the newspaper. He returned his eyes to the tall man. The tall man nodded. Again Benny looked at Alan, whose eyes still refused to meet his. Finally he looked once more at the headline.
Terrorist Bomb Fails to Detonate.

“That’s right,” the man said. “That’s what we do.”

“You guys are bombing the Homeland?”

“Easy there. First off, read the headline. We’re
not
bombing the Homeland.”

“So you’re trying to bomb the Homeland?”

“Not the Homeland. The Registry. We’re certainly not the only ones. Three weeks ago, that attack on an induction center in Western City South? I have it on good authority that it was done by some Fareon folks.”

“And you guys aren’t the Fareon folks.”

“Hah.” The guy gave a fake smile. “Didn’t I just explain it? As far as anyone is concerned, we’re an experimental outfit using unusual methods to heal Substance-smashers.”

“But what about the Fareon people?”

“Don’t believe in that piece of fiction for a second. Ridiculous. The prime minister doesn’t need some mythical drug to keep his blood flowing.”

A hurried look he had taken at an old newspaper headline on the way to some party popped into Benny’s head. “And those attacks on the Strategic National Stockpile? That’s the Fareon people, too?”

“Nope. Those are Foreigns hiding in the Homeland trying to make it look like they’re Fareon folks. Real-deal Ideology Fivers.”

“But you’re trying to kill people. Even if you haven’t done it right.”

“Slow down, kid. That’s not what’s happening here.”

Benny’s mind flashed to the hallway, the large blue sacks piled high against the walls. Hadn’t there been some attack somewhere involving charcoal? If only he had read the papers. “So the charcoal—”

“He’s finally getting warm,” the tall man said to Alan.

“You filled all these Registry trucks with charcoal. In a bunch of places. I heard about that. You didn’t hurt anyone, you just confused everybody. Why charcoal?”

“Well, truth be told, we’ve had some technical problems. According to our research, you mill down charcoal, add some everyday root killer, blenderize with a little sulfur, introduce a solvent or two, and you’ve got your hands on some pretty powerful explosive. Or you’re supposed to.”

“So you
do
want to kill Homeland citizens, but you just need to perfect your methods?”

The tall man laughed. “You make it sound so simple. But what you just saw upstairs, that’s important, that’s part of what we’re trying to do, too.” The tall man smiled, showed his landing-strip teeth. “We’re rewriting the words to the song, Benny. A little street theater—I don’t know if you heard about our little fashion show with stolen Homeland uniforms, but that was us—toss in some fake bombs that are never meant to go off, and, into that mix, some real bombs that
are
meant to go off. Keep people curious, keep things playful, right until they’re not. Phases, understand?”

“All this so you can stop the war?”

“Oh, we don’t want to stop the war. You think the prime minister would listen to us?”

“So you support the Coyotes?”

The man snorted. “Kid, you’re not getting it. The Coyotes, the prime minister. They’re the same thing. Just different systems of control.”

“The Coyotes didn’t start the war.”

“No, but this sick culture did. We don’t want to stop the war. This civilization, it’s too sick to be saved. We need to start over, and we know how to do it. First, you mock the culture. Then you flummox it. And finally, right when things are at their most confusing, when it’s spinning around and dizzy, you kill it. New culture, new world.”

Benny could see from the tall man’s face he was very serious.

“So why am I telling you any of this? First off, just like Alan here, you’re going to help us.”

“Help you what?”

“Second,” the man continued, “your help is not being requested here.”

Benny didn’t understand. Apparently the tall man could sense his confusion.

“What I mean,” the tall man said, “is that your assistance in this project is required. You have no choice but to help us.”

Benny was starting to resent the tall man’s vague mixture of arrogance and assumption. He turned to Alan. “You want to help these crazy mother-rapers kill people?”

“You don’t know me,” Alan said. “You don’t know what we’ve been through.”

“Who the hell is
we
?”

“Don’t talk to him, listen to me,” the tall man said. He was leaning forward now, his face close to Benny’s. “This is phase three. Right now. We’ve got the entrance to the induction center fully rigged. First Tuesday, everybody is going to be there. We have figured out this charcoal shit, and the games are over. When the place opens at six tonight, we’re going to explode it on the first person who walks through that door. We can’t get too near without raising suspicion, so we’re going to need someone to signal us, a kid who looks like he’s got his greetings. That’s you. As soon as the sun sets, it’s going down.”

“And what if I don’t—”

The tall man reached for the purple flowers, lifted up the vase, and opened the small wooden box upon which it rested. A small flash of light reflected off the object, and Benny saw that it was a small gun. The tall man removed it from the box, wrapped a hand around the grip, and pressed the muzzle into Benny’s earhole.
First Tuesdays are the worst days.

35.

“You want to help these crazy mother-rapers kill people?”

The words hover in Alan’s ears, a screaming rage coursing through him. That Benny had labeled him some unthinking murderer showed that the guy not only had no sense of the immorality of the Registry, but also of Alan’s larger purpose. Once again, Alan is in a van, the tinted windows smoothing all colors into elephant grey.

The only reason he is in this van is to meet Woody Gilbert, and the only way he can meet Woody Gilbert is to fulfill the agenda of the baldheads. The tall man had laughed at his piece of Registry bus rubber. If this stunt is the only way to get introduced, so be it. Woody Gilbert
is
change, Alan knows. Woody Gilbert will purify him. Once the tall man presents him to HIM’s mysterious leader, Alan will shackle himself to the man, nibble at his mind, inhale each small puff of wisdom. Together they will make the world free.

But what do any of these Majority Groupers know about freedom? With Woody Gilbert, he will be fighting for more than the small indignity of sitting out the war. In the row behind him, Benny and his privilege occupy the middle seat, a terrified expression smeared across his face. Look, Alan wants to tell him. If you escape the Registry, that’s it. You’re just a Majority Grouper living his life. But whoever heard of a Homeland Indigenous escaping anything? Whether the words belong to the Young Savior or Woody Gilbert, Alan cannot remember. Either way they apply:
A people cannot be free until they are able to determine their destiny
.

Just as he is about to explain this to Benny, the tall man turns to him. In the tall man’s massive grip is a small device, all black save for a red button in the middle and the slim silver of a protruding antenna. “You keep your finger ready,” he says to Alan. Only a truly weak man, Alan thinks, could develop a plan that involved death and not see it through. No matter. All he needs from this baldhead is an introduction. Push a button? So be it.

The whole ride over, Alan practices his first words to Woody Gilbert.
Sir, I greatly admire your work.
Too formal.
Mr. Gilbert, I am Alan, Group F.
No, too pandering, too eager to play the Homeland Indigenous card. Through the window, Alan watches the trees shake in the wind, the light slowly fading. Turning around, he can see the small pistol one of the baldheads has pressed against Benny’s ribs. The tall man drives, quietly explaining to Benny that the baldheads have rigged the doorframe of the main entrance along with a flower box in the first-floor window, ready to blast the first inductee of the day. But even if the bombs work—and the baldheads have yet to explode one successfully, Alan knows—the blast will do small damage at best, maybe knock off a limb of whatever unfortunate mother-raper happens to be first in line. Nothing too major, just another page seven article in a few dozen newspapers. Earlier, when Alan had been alone with the tall man, the modest scale and size of the attack had been made clear. But now in the car the baldheads are claiming the whole place might blow. Alan can see from the drop of Benny’s lip that he is scared, that impalpable sirens are screaming in his ears, that he feels both furious and helpless at the situation he has fallen into. Probably, Alan decides, the baldheads can see this fear too, and are trying to capitalize on it by inflating the bomb’s magnitude. Oh well.

A massive pothole jolts the van. Finally they arrive at the induction center. A baldhead sends Benny out to a bench and tells him to stay seated until he gets the signal.

“One more thing,” the tall man calls to Benny. He whispers in Benny’s ear as he hops down to the street.

“Anything else I should know?” Alan asks.

“Just keep your finger on that button,” the tall man tells him.